What is It, or Them, like? Do they guess what effects their experiments have on us?
None of this speculation reaches the Arlbenists, who still blithely seed worlds in the egocentric belief that only humans can create life. I, however, no longer correct and adjust Arlbenist seedings on other worlds. I won’t risk the vat rooms necessary for that. And I have my own work here, now, both in aiding Seliku in her all-important fight and in caring for her. Her nanomeds keep her healthy, but her body is not meant for this planet and is not doing well here. It doesn’t, surprisingly, bother me that I never leave Calyx. This is, finally, home, here with my new work and my sister-self. I am learning to grow a garden of edible plants, without nanos and without QUENTIAM, just in case. In a weird way, I’m not uncontent.
Not that Calyx looks the same, either. A new artist received the design privilege when Bej and Camy’s franchise ended. His name is Kiibceroti, and he has made of Calyx a serene, spare city. Gone are the gorgeous lush flowers, replaced by gentle curves of sand in soft pastels, with perhaps one dark rock placed precisely at the edge of the curve and a single tall fern. I don’t much like the ferns, or the overall design. But I admit that it’s beautiful in its own way. There is something melancholy about it, something of grief. Someone told me that Kiibceroti lost a brother-self in the Mori Core, but I don’t know if that’s true. I could ask QUENTIAM, but I ask QUENTIAM very little these days.
One good thing about Kiibceroti’s city: All that low-key tranquility is good for dreaming. I dream now, nearly every night. Last night I dreamed of Bej and Camy.
I dreamed they had joined the settlement of prisoners on ˄17843, somehow making peace with them, finding companionship and working together to create whatever good exists on that pulpy moon. Bej and Camy cut their arms and shared the nanomeds from their bodies, and the fungi disappeared from everyone’s heads and feet. None of them would die.
Then I saw Bej and Camy walking on a seashore with their friends, all approaching some large object in the distance. In the dream, I walked with them. As we neared the object, I saw that it was a great boulder thrown up by the sea millennia ago. Camy and Bej had painstakingly chipped away at it over vast amounts of time, using other sharp stones and their own artistic talent. They had polished the stone with sand and the statue shone in the sunlight with bits of mica and quartz. It was Haradil, smiling and happy, solid by the blue sea for as long as the waves permitted the sculpture to last.
“Alo?” Seliku said sleepily beside me.
I laid my tentacles protectively across her body and moved slightly to nestle closer to her. “I’m here, sister-self. Go back to sleep. We’re still here.”