I did recognize that my disproportionate fury was not solely due to the stupidity of faith that refused facts. More than enough, I’d said of my life… but was it? I made adjustments to life planted millennia ago by Arlbenists. I added genes to improve species, altered ecosystems for better balance, nudged along developing sentients. Then I left, usually to never see the results of my tinkering. Was my work actually helping anything at all?
The doubt was an old ache. I turned to the new one.
*QUENTIAM, the life on the planet that Haradil destroyed—what was its seeding number?*
QUENTIAM, of course, answers everything instantly. But it seemed to me that a long moment went by before he answered. In that moment all the rumors I’d ever heard blasted into my mind, like lethal radiation. Life that humanity had not seeded, life borne in on the winds of space from who-knew-where, life hated or denied by the followers of Arlbeni and the Great Mission… But, no, Haradil couldn’t have committed genocide for that reason. Even if she’d become an Arlbenist, she couldn’t have eliminated a star system just to destroy evidence of panspermia…
*Life on the planet destroyed by Haradil was Seeding ˄5387 of the Great Mission.*
I breathed again.
But I was still left with the great Why, as empty of answers as the galaxy that Arlbeni had thought he had all figured out.
“Five minivals until t-hole passage,” the shuttle said in its pleasant voice. I looked out my window, but of course there was nothing to see except the cold steady stars. The station was still only a few hundred meters away, but it was on the other side of the shuttle and I would not turn my head toward the missionary beside me.
“You are the least flexible of all of us,” Bej had teased at our last bond-time, and she was probably right. Seliku’s cosmology, Bej and Camy’s art, seemed too soft to me, too formless, without rigorous standards. Artists could create without limits. QUENTIAM could fold the fabric of spacetime to create t-holes and information transfer; It could control endless nanomachinery operating at countless locations throughout the galaxy; It could be directed to manipulate matter and energy right up to the physical constants of the universe. Biology was not so flexible. Life needed what it needed: the nutrients and atmosphere and protection of its current form, and if it did not get those things, it died. Not even QUENTIAM could change death, once it had happened. Life/death was a binary state.
Yet there had been a time, when my sister-selves and I had been young, when I had played at art and studied Arlbeni and considered cosmological history. The seeds for all these pursuits had been in me. I had chosen another path, for good or not, but it was precisely because I knew myself capable of religious thought that the missionaries angered me so much now. I had looked past that easy meaning to something more uncompromising—why couldn’t they?
“One minival to t-hole passage… t-hole passage completed.”
No sensation, no elapsed time. But the stars now had different configurations, and a planet turned below our orbit. Blue and white, it was a lovely thing, as was the yellow star that nourished it. The single continent in all that ocean of blue drifted into view, still lit with the densely clustered lights of the night city. QUENTIAM, of course, is everywhere, and so humanity has no real center. But Calyx, by sheer numbers of inhabitants, comes closest. Slowly it had accreted people who wanted to be with other people already there, each new addition changing the shape of the city, like the lovely shell reefs I had seen on in my fish work on ˄563.
The other missionary, the one not sitting beside me, screamed.
I whipped my head around. The machine body had fallen across the missionary, nearly crushing him. His head protruded from under the heavy metal body, the face distorted by pain, and one arm flailed wildly. The machine body lay completely inert, stiff as a dead biological.
“QUENTIAM! What’s happening?” I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud until my yell mingled with the rest in the small cabin.
“I don’t know!” QUENTIAM said, and silence descended abruptly as a knife.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
There are many things QUENTIAM does not know—It is not a magician, as It enjoys telling me—but the status of a machine body is not one of them. The machine state—I have inhabited it myself, for environments where no biological will suit—is the next closest thing to an upload. A person in machine state was connected to QUENTIAM not by a single soft-brain implant but by shared flows of energy and information. Everything the machine sensors picked up, at all wave lengths, was processed through QUENTIAM and back to the machine body’s computer brain. It wasn’t possible for QUENTIAM to not know what had just happened.
The machine body moved and sat up. “What…”
No one but me said anything. “You fainted,” I said, the word so absurd in this context that I felt blood warm my face. Then came a sudden rush of sound and activity. The fallen-upon missionary was examined for damage, found to be bruised but not hurt, his nanomeds already active. The shuttle docked at the orbital which, apparently, was the destination of both missionaries and of the machine body, and they all disembarked. A few minivals later the four-legged body and the woman in the helmet left after the shuttle had taken us through a second t-hole to a second orbital. Only I was left aboard.
*QUENTIAM—what happened to the machine body?*
*I don’t know.*
The shuttle descended to Calyx.
The city had changed completely in the half-year since our last bond-time. It was no less lovely, just different. Then the entire continent had soared with high, curving shapes, undulating buildings connected with sinuous bridges, the whole a city in the clouds done entirely in subtle shades of white. Shortly after that Bej and Camy, working together for the first time, had gotten the art contract. Apparently it was decided by some sort of vote, although I didn’t know of whom.
My sister-selves had made Calyx the opposite of what I’d seen. The nanos had been reprogrammed to replace shimmer and purity with a riot of living foliage, so that it was difficult to see the buildings under the flora. Maybe the buildings were flora. Low flowering plants overgrew everything, even the moving walks. The dominant colors were dark, the purple of the photosynthetic bacteria plus dark reds and blues, but the effect was not somber. It was sexual. I stepped from the shuttle into a tumult of inflamed pollination.
Camy and Bej stood waiting amid the flowers. We hugged and I said, “So you’re in love.”
Bej laughed unhappily. “I told you she’d know immediately,” she said to Camy, who neither laughed nor answered. The horror of Haradil’s act lay in her eyes, plus perhaps something else.
I said, “It’s beautiful, sisters.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you heard any more about…”
“A little. Come with us.”
They led me to a moving walk, which took us a short distance to the beach and a low structure covered with long, sinuous vines wild with magenta flowers. The city represented the intemperance we were all capable of, all my sister-selves. We did nothing by halves. Of course Camy and Bej, if they were in love, would create this sort of unrestrained living art. Just as I, working on a seeding on some planet long unvisited by the Great Mission, would stubbornly work for uninterrupted days and nights and days again on some adjustment to a species. Seliku had showed the same extravagance in cerebral form. Her theory of the origin of the universe was once so far beyond the usual thinking that all five of us had been ridiculed for at least two centuries. Now the Seliku Cosmology was widely accepted. And Haradil—