“You will die,” QUENTIAM said. Did I hear regret in Its voice, or anger?
Seliku merely repeated, “It is permitted for us to leave the shuttle. We have nothing that can be destroyed by the metal-eating spores in the atmosphere. And we have nothing with us that connects us to you, QUENTIAM, or anything else forbidden on the surface of a quiet planet.”
“Your bodies contain nanomeds.”
“They are not forbidden to visitors to quiet planets.”
“This quiet planet never has visitors.”
“Until now.”
“You will die outside the shuttle. We are well within the gravity well. You will fall to your deaths.”
Seliku opened her canister, laid the lid on the floor, and stepped inside. “You will open the shuttle door over these coordinates, as soon as feasible after seventy-five millivals.”
“But—”
“You will open the door.”
“Yes,” QUENTIAM said. It had no real choice. A human being may destroy herself, although not others, if she so chooses.
Bej, Camy, and I opened our canisters, laid the lids on the floor, and stepped inside. Our gazes all met. “I love you,” Camy said, for all of us, as the membranes in the canister began to grow around us.
Biological membranes, not the spacetime that is QUENTIAM.
I had found them on ˄22763, a planet seeded back in the very beginnings of the Great Mission, when humans had been willing to subject living things to a far greater range of environments than they did later on. So many of those hapless seedings died, and so many suffered. ˄22763 had been lucky, winning the blind lottery of evolutionary mutation. They were light, air-filled creatures, non-sentient, floating through a world with no sustenance except sunlight, in temperatures just high enough to keep their atmosphere from freezing. All my data on them had of course been stored in QUENTIAM, but I had memorized it, too, because it had been so interesting.
On Calyx, with the help of programmable nanos, I had recreated the floaters and stored them as spores in opaque canisters. The mature floaters, biologicals, were not forbidden on ˄17843, although they would die there. But first, unless I had misremembered data, they would get us down to the surface. If I had misremembered, we would die along with the creatures.
The membrane sealed around me just before the shuttle door opened.
When did QUENTIAM realize what we were doing? It’s possible It knew from the very beginning. It may have had no choice but to permit this because of its “parameters,” or because preservation is the first law, or even because of “love.” Who can understand the mind of QUENTIAM? It moves in mysterious ways.
As the air left the shuttle, the four floaters were blown into space. The shuttle orbited as low as possible without encountering the metal-consuming nanos. The floaters, which had fed voraciously on the light inside the shuttle, now fed on the abundant reflected light from the gas giant. They swelled with the breathable gases that were its carefully re-engineered waste products. I had held my breath for too long; now I breathed.
In the clear living bubbles, which were already dying, my sister-selves and I began the long float down to the surface of the transformed moon.
Pain. Fear. A rushing in my head like rapids, water that would sweep me away, kill me…
The rushing receded, although the pain did not. There was no water. I hung at a steep incline, head lower than my legs, in the fronds of a giant, prickly fern. The rushing became the voices of Bej and Camy somewhere below me in the eddies of green.
“Akilo! Akilo, answer us!”
“I’m… here. I’m all right,” I said, although clearly I was not. As sensation clarified, the pain localized to my head and one leg.
“You’re only three or four meters above the ground,” Bej called. “Drop and we’ll catch you.”
I did, they did, and the world blackened for a moment, then returned. I lay on a forest floor, a bed of thick, damp, pulpy plants as unpleasant to lie on as a dung heap. Not that any of my sister-selves had ever seen a dung heap. I was the biologist, and a fine job I’d done of adapting the floaters that had died and disintegrated before we’d actually reached ground.
“I’m sorry,” I croaked up at Bej and Camy. “Seliku?”
“I’m here,” she said, striding into my circle of sight. “You’re the only one hurt, Akilo. But it’s all right; we can stay here quietly until your nanomeds fix you.”
I closed my eyes. The nanomeds were already releasing painkillers, and the hurting receded. Sedatives took me. My last thought was gratitude that ˄17843 had no predators. No, that was my second-last thought. The last was a memory, confused and frightened, from the moment before I crashed: a flash of light bright enough to temporarily blind me, light as silent and deadly as a distant nova.
Then I slept.
“You’re back,” Bej said. “Akilo, you’re back.”
A campfire burned beside me. My body, wrapped in two of the superthin blankets from our toolbelts, was warm on the fire side, slightly chilled on the other. A strange odor floated from the fire. I sat up.
“How long have I—”
“Three days,” Bej said. “We’ve made quite a little camp. Here, drink this.”
She held out to me a cup of the odd-smelling liquid. It tasted worse than it smelled, and I made a face.
“At least it’s not poisonous,” Bej said cheerfully. “Local flora. We’re trying to conserve the food pellets as long as we can. How do you feel?”
“All right.” I flexed my leg; it was fine. Thanks to the nanomeds that Haradil had to do without.
“Seliku and Camy are out gathering more food. We had to do something while you were out, so we gathered leaves, tested them with our nanomeds for biocompatibility, and boiled them down to make that drink.”
“Boiled them in what?” I finished the drink and stood, working my muscles. Without the blankets, the air was cold.
“That,” Bej said, pointing at a rickety arrangement of bent wood and huge leaves. “It’s remarkably effective, but ready to fall apart, so it’s a good thing you’re ready to travel. You can eat those same leaves raw, too, but they taste even worse that way.”
“Travel to where?” I said. Bej seemed too cheerful. Didn’t she realize that we might all die here? Of course she did. Her cheerfulness was a kind of bravery, sparing me not only her fear but also her share of the intense shame we all felt over Haradil’s crime.
“We haven’t seen any prisoners yet,” Bej said, “but Seliku came across a campsite—old ashes, that sort of thing. The scent is long gone but Camy thinks we can track them. Do you think we can?”
“Bej,” I said irritably, “I’m an adjustment biologist. Of course I can track, probably much better than Camy can.”
“That’s good, because she said you’re going to do it. Jump around a bit. It gets much warmer here when the star is higher.”
In the dim filtered green of dense forest, I hadn’t realized it was early morning.
Seliku and Camy returned. Seen together, I became aware of the changes that three “days” (how long was each?) had made in my sister-selves. Their dung-colored fur was matted and dirty, especially Camy’s, who didn’t smile at me as she walked into camp. For the first time, she and comparatively cheerful Bej, standing side by side, did not look alike. It was unsettling.
They packed up our few bits of equipment: blankets, boiled-down food wrapped in more leaves, ceramic knives. Seliku lead me to the abandoned camp. Following the trail from there was easy compared to the seedings I had tracked on other worlds. These prisoners had nothing to hide and no predators to confuse, and they’d left a blindingly obvious trail of broken ferns, missing edible leaves, and old shit. A child could have found the settlement.