When I woke, an unknowable time later, the download was complete. I climbed out of my vat simultaneously with my sisters. It was a hard climb; we were now engineered for a gravity one-third less than Calyx’s. But that wasn’t the reason that we gazed at each other in dismay.
“Are… are you all right?”
“Yes,” Seliku said. “Are you?”
“Yes, but…”
But I’d had to ask. Looking at Seliku, Camy, Bej as we stood in our new dull fur, our new flat faces, I hadn’t automatically known that, yes, they were all right because otherwise QUENTIAM would have told me. I’d had to look, to question. Camy put her hand to her head and I knew what she was thinking: QUENTIAM was gone. We were without implants. We were on our own, not even able to image each other in real-time if one of us stepped into the next room.
“It feels very strange,” Bej said softly. “How will we…”
“We will,” Seliku said. “Because we must.”
I felt myself nodding. We would, because we must.
QUENTIAM said, “The shuttle can take you up to the orbital now, and your t-hole shuttle is ready there.”
“Not yet,” I said, not without pleasure. It’s hard to surprise QUENTIAM, but I guessed that we were doing it now. ‘There’s more things I want to prepare.”
“More things?” Definitely offended. I saw Bej grin slightly at Camy.
“Yes,” I said, savoring the moment. “We’ll be ready to go soon.”
The four of us waddled laboriously—curse this gravity—to my lab. I had set it up days ago in a room grown near the vat room. Ostensibly the lab’s purpose was to study the microbiology of the flowers Bej and Camy had designed and QUENTIAM had created for Calyx, just as if they were biologicals or cyborgs that had naturally evolved from seedings. And I had done some of that work, storing the data in QUENTIAM, carefully packing and storing both specimens and experimental materials in opaque canisters for any future biologists who might want them. But that was not all I had done.
*QUENTIAM, give me—*
Give me nothing. It couldn’t hear me. I had no implant.
The eeriest sensation came over me then: I am dead. It was a thousand-fold-stronger version of what I had felt moments before, in the vat room. I was detached, unconnected, alone, in the supreme isolation of death.
But of course I was not. My sister-selves were there, and I clutched Bej’s hand. She seemed to understand. We were not alone, not cut off, not dead. We had each other.
This must be what Haradil felt. And she did not have the rest of us.
For a brief moment I hated QUENTIAM. It had done this, It and Its parameters for permissible human behavior. QUENTIAM had gone along with this brutal Morit “justice,” and now Haradil…
Camy said quietly, “It must be even worse for her. Because… you know.”
We all knew.
There are five possible states for a human being. Without implants, as we were now. Implanted, which is the normal state. A machine body, which is really just a much heightened version of implants plus a virtually indestructible body. Upload, which is bodiless but still a separate subprogram within QUENTIAM, with its own boundaries. And merged, in which individual identity is temporarily lost in the larger membrane-self of QUENTIAM. Few humans merge, and most never return. Those that do are never really the same.
Haradil, three bond-times ago, had merged with QUENTIAM.
It had been after a bad love affair. We all took those hard; I thought of Camy and Bej’s ravaged looks when I’d landed on Calyx. We were all intemperate, single-minded in romance as in all else. But Haradil, who had never really chosen a field of work, had been the one who tried to handle the emotional pain by merging with QUENTIAM. And she had come back calmer but almost totally silent, unwilling to tell us what it had been like. “Not unwilling,” she’d finally said. “Unable. It’s an experience you can’t put into words.” It had been the longest speech she’d made since returning.
I’d been afraid for her then. We’d all been afraid. But she had continued calm, silent, remote during the next two bond-times. With us and not with us. Neither happy nor unhappy, but somehow beyond both.
“Not human,” Bej had finally said, and we’d turned on her in anger, because we’d all thought it ourselves.
But not destructive, either. In fact, the opposite. Gradually we’d come to sense optimism of some kind under Haradil’s silence, and our anxiety had been at least partially allayed, and then Haradil had blown up a star system containing sentient life.
Now Seliku said, “Let’s get to work.”
We had the nanomachinery create a cart. The cart loaded onto itself the canisters I indicated. Seliku, Bej, and Camy hadn’t been able to make their lesser preparations until after they were without implants, and there were things I wanted to add to the cart as well, so we dragged around in the monstrous gravity for another day. QUENTIAM observed everything, of course, but It had no reason to stop us. And it asked no questions about anything we had the nanos manufacture.
There were many moments when I started to ask It something: *QUENTIAM, is the—* and then I remembered. But there were no more moments like the terrible, deathlike one in the lab. All day my sister-selves and I worked beside each other, tentacles reaching out to touch and pat, and at night we slept in a heap, tails and legs tangled together in the too-warm, fragrant air of Calyx.
“I hope I never see another flower again,” Seliku said when we were finally aboard QUENTIAM’s shuttle on our way upstairs. And then, “Oh, sorry, Bej and Camy, I didn’t mean—”
“I don’t want to see flowers, either,” they said in unison, and then laughed unhappily. Below us the planet dwindled to a soft blue-and-white bauble.
We would see no flowers on ˄17843.
The gravity on our orbital-grown shuttle was a relief; it matched ˄17843’s. “QUENTIAM,” Seliku said, “take us through the t-hole to ˄17843.”
I thought It might speak to us for the first time since we’d left the vat room, but It didn’t. The shuttle moved away from the orbital toward nothing, apparently went through nothing, and emerged into a different sky.
A huge gas giant, ringless and hazy, filled half the sky. Ugly—the pale planet looked as ugly as the fuzzy tumors of a seeding biology gone very wrong. As I watched, a large moon emerged from behind the planet. Clouds, oceans, but none of the beauty of Calyx. To my present state of mind, those feature, too, looked like primitive biological deformities, the clouds crawling like parasites across a landscape diseased with what did not belong there.
The shuttle was equipped with full orbital sensors. I imaged the continent with flora as it turned repeatedly below us. Large animal activity showed up on half a dozen different readings. And there was only one large animal on ˄17843. I gave Seliku the right coordinates.
Seliku said calmly, “QUENTIAM, take this shuttle as low as is safe.”
“This is as low as is safe. You are within the upper atmosphere.”
“All right. Sister-selves?”
“Yes,” Camy said, speaking for all of us.
And so it began.
We unpacked the canisters we’d brought with us. Each of us tied on cloth belts containing non-metallic tools, blankets, rope, concentrated food pellets, collapsible ceramic cups, the rest of our prepared items. Then we pushed the remaining four opaque canisters toward the airlock.
“What are you doing?” QUENTIAM said. “It is not permitted to descend to Paletej.”
Seliku said, “It is not permitted for you to take us through a t-hole to the surface. It is permitted for us to leave the shuttle to go into space.”