Well, not all. Apparently the Mori have, in the last thousand years, worked out some sort of expanding kinship structure to match their expanding empire. But it seems to be maintained partly through force, which is repugnant to most people. Anyway, a thousand years—QUENTIAM’s mysterious “years”—isn’t long enough to prove the viability of anything. I’m half that old myself.
Of course, the Great Mission also considers itself a “kinship structure.” But they’re not only repugnant but also deluded.
QUENTIAM said, “Your shuttle has docked.”
“How many others are going on it?”
“Five. Three more new downloads and two transients.”
“Transients? What are transients doing on this station?” It was small and dull, existing solely as a convenient node for up/downloading near the t-hole.
“They’re missionaries, Seliku. I’ll keep them away from you as long as I can.”
“Yes. Do,” I said acidly, even as I wondered what QUENTIAM was saying at that same moment to the missionaries. “Seliku isn’t going to be easy for you to talk to, but your best chance is to approach her through her work”?
Probably. QUENTIAM, of course, gives all people the information they want to hear. But It would do as It said and keep the missionaries away from me. I was not in the mood for proselytizing.
The wall opened and nano-machinery spat out my traveling bag onto the floor. I opened it and checked that everything was there, even though no other possibility existed. S-suit, food synthesizer, my favorite cosmetics, a blanket—sometimes other people had strange notions of comfortable temperature—music cube… I strapped the bag around my very thick waist, stepped toward the door, and hit my head on the ceiling. “Ooohhhhh!”
“Are you injured?” QUENTIAM asked.
“Only my dignity.”
“Your body is designed for 1.6 standard gravities,” It intoned, “whereas your previous assignment featured a planet with only—”
“O, burn it, QUENTIAM.” I rubbed my head, which this time around appeared to have a thick skull case. “What is a ‘standard gravity,’ anyway?”
“I don’t know. Possibly that information has been lost.”
“I don’t really care.” Carefully I reached the door, which slid open, leading directly to the shuttle bay.
The other five passengers waited beside the shuttle. Two of the three recent downloads, easy to pick out, echoed my own awkwardness with their new bodies. We stepped gingerly, took a second too long to focus vision, gave off that air of concentration on motions that should be automatic.
The person in the four-legged body of a celwi was, incongruously, the most graceful. He must have used that configuration before. Celwi bodies are popular for their speed; it’s a lovely sensation to gallop full-tilt across a grassy plain. The two-legged woman wore a clear helmet in preparation for some alien atmospheric mixture. She and I exchanged rueful glances and tried not to bump into each other.
The third download moved easily in a genderless machine body equipped with very impressive cutting tools and, I suspected, a full range of imaging equipment. It had my admiration; I had only inhabited a machine once and had found the state subtly unpleasant. But some people like it.
That left the two missionaries, both close to what my sister-selves called “human standard,” but much smaller. Each stood no higher than a meter. So they were going Out, as far beyond a t-hole as a real ship could get them, to carry out the Great Mission. Mass mattered on such trips. I didn’t make eye contact.
“Please board now for the t-hole,” the shuttle said pleasantly. It was, of course, one of QUENTIAM’s many voices, this one light and musical. The machine body raised its head quickly as if it had received more information than the rest of us, which it probably had.
The shuttle seats were arranged in four rows of two, so everybody got a window view. I hung back, trying to get a seat beside the woman in the helmet or, failing that, alone, but I hung back too long. When I climbed in, last, the four-legged celwi had taken up two seats and the machine body’s cutting tools were extended across one whole seat in an unfriendly manner: I don’t want company. The missionaries had split up, the better to bother other passengers. I settled in beside one of them, felt the seat configure around me, and closed my eyes.
That didn’t stop her. “All the good of Arlbeni save you, sister.”
“Hhhmmmfff,” I said. I was not her sister. I kept my eyes closed.
“I’m Flotyllinip cagrut Pinlinindhar 16,” she said cordially, and I groaned inwardly. I had been on Flotyll. No place in the galaxy had so embraced the Great Mission.
Not to answer her would have been the grossest discourtesy. I said shortly, “Akilo Sister-Self 7664-3,” omitting my home planet, Jiu. None of us had remained on Jiu past childhood; it wasn’t really home. We’ve never understood people who form an attachment to their birth planet, but the Flotylii are famous for it. It’s a pretty planet, yes, but the galaxy is full of pretty planets. Home is one’s sister-selves.
Haradil…
I transmitted to QUENTIAM through my implant: *I thought you were going to keep the missionaries away from me.*
*You sat next to her.*
“We’re going to seed another world, my friend and I,” Pinhead 16 said. “Praise Arlbeni and the emptiness of the universe.”
“Mmmhhhfffff,” I mumbled. But no mumbling stops missionaries.
“Before I joined the Great Mission, I was nothing. We all were. Are you a student of history, sister?”
“No.”
A mistake. Her face lit up. I could feel it even with my eyes closed, a stretching of the air that probably registered on the machine body’s sensors as elevations in everything from thermals to gamma rays. But if I’d said yes, I was indeed a student of history, she probably would have replied, “Then perhaps you are aware…”
She said, “Then perhaps you aren’t aware just how Disciple Arlbeni saved us all, thousands of years ago but still fresh as ever. We had everything due to nano and QUENTIAM and to have everything is to have nothing. From evolution to sentience, from sentience to nano. From nano to the decay of sentience due to boredom and purposeless. Humanity was destroying itself! And then Arlbeni had his Vision: Against all physical laws, the universe was empty of any life but human life, and so to fill it must be our purpose. The universe was Divinely left empty because—”
I had to cut this off. I opened my eyes and looked directly at her. “Maybe not as empty as Arlbeni thought.”
I watched her expression freeze, then constrict.
“There have been reports,” I went on, apparently artlessly, “of newly discovered planets that bear life which we didn’t put there. Non-DNA-based life. Not our seedings. Native life of some sort, maybe blown in from space, seeded by panspermia on worlds far from the t-holes.”
“Lies,” she said. Her eyes had narrowed to two cold slits.
“Have you checked personally?”
“I don’t need to.”
“I see,” I said, with import, and looked away.
But she was more tenacious than she looked. “Have you checked personally on such reports?”
“No,” I said. “But, then, I don’t care if the galaxy holds other life besides our seedings.”
“And your life—what gives it purpose?”
“Observing and caring for the life that’s here, no matter how it got here. I’m an adjustment biologist.”
“And that’s enough? Just life, with no plan behind it, no Divine purpose, no—”
“It’s more than enough,” I said and turned away from her with such discourtesy that even she, the Arlbeni-blinded, left me alone.