˄17843 proved to have stretches of open ground within the fern forests. But even these low-lying “meadows” were overgrown with pulpy green, so that everywhere our feet sunk onto squishy vegetation and stagnant water. The green was unrelieved by any color of fruit or flower. In the sky the gas giant loomed oppressively, blocking the sun. The only sound was a low, unceasing hum from insect-analogues, monotonous and dulling. I hated the place.
At midday, which seemed to come very quickly on this small world, we reached the top of a fern-crested hill, and suddenly before us, down a steeper slope, was the welcome blue of the sea.
“Wait,” I said, when Bej would have rushed down the hill toward huts built on the seashore.
“Wait for what? Haradil’s down there!”
I pulled her back into the thick fronds. Seliku and Camy, dirty and sweaty, watched us. “Bej, listen to me. These people have been sent here by the Mori for crimes. Some of them may have only violated some idiotic Mori custom, but some might be truly dangerous. They may have destroyed or killed.”
As Haradil had.
Seliku said, “Alo is right.” She drew her ceramic knife and looked at us.
Camy stared back in disbelief. “The knives are for work, not… you can’t expect me to… Sel, I don’t want to!”
“None of us want to,” I said. I shared Camy’s distaste, shared Seliku’s reluctant foresight, shared Bej’s eagerness to see Haradil. These were my sister-selves. After a moment, Camy, Bej, and I drew our knives.
Together, with me in the lead, we started toward the settlement.
As we got closer, details emerged, all of them sickening. The flimsy huts, which looked as if a good wind would blow them over, were built of woody fern trunks topped with broad fronds. Among them burned two or three open fires ringed with stones and topped with leaf cauldrons. People, including some children, skittered around frantically as soon as they glimpsed us.
We halted halfway down the hill, smiling painfully, and waited.
Eventually two prisoners started toward us. Seliku glanced at me, and I gestured helplessly. I had guessed as well as I could without data. Still, I’d gotten the bodies wrong.
The two coming toward us were even smaller and lighter than we, which on reflection made sense: less mass to support with food gathering. Fragile, tailless, thickly furred to conserve heat and discourage insect bites, they walked on two legs but had only two thick tentacles, which ended in clumsy opposable digits. But the faces were human. One of the prisoners had been infected with some sort of local fungus that covered its head and part of its back. I saw Camy gaze at it in horror. The other had a scar along the left side of its face. I don’t think I’d ever seen uglier sentients, or more pathetic ones.
Silently, simultaneously, we put our knives back into our toolbelts. Any one of us could have smashed both of these sad people into jelly.
Then came the worst.
Seliku said, “Hello. We are looking for our sister-self, Jiuinip Haradil Sister-Self 7664-3. Is she here?”
Both creatures stared at us. Then one chattered incomprehensibly. Bej gasped. “They don’t have translation capability!”
Of course not. Translations went through QUENTIAM by implant, so simultaneously that hardly anyone noticed it happening. These poor beings had no implants. And neither did we. So they lived here, unable to talk even to the other pathetic prisoners, deprived even of the solace of words to share the unendurable. It seemed the worst cruelty yet. Wouldn’t death have been better than this?
Camy took a step backward and brought up her tentacles to cover her face. Seliku pressed on, her voice quavering slightly, in several other languages; I hadn’t realized she’d learned so many. No response.
Finally I said, very slowly and with a variety of pitches and inflections, “Haradil? Har… a… dil? HARadil? HaraDIL? HarAdil? Haarrrraaadddiiilll? Haradil? Haradil?”
One of them worked. The prisoner with fungus made a quick snapping gesture with his digits, a gesture I didn’t understand, as he repeated “Haradil” in a guttural tone with a rising inflection. The other prisoner watched dully. I nodded and smiled, and the first man pointed toward the forest we’d just left. I made helpless gestures and he rose to his full stunted height, scowled fiercely, and gestured for us to follow. The four of us trailed behind him laterally along the edge of the forest until, about half a blinu from the settlement, he turned into the ferns.
We seemed to walk a long way into the forest. Finally, in a small hacked-out clearing, in front of the flimsiest hut yet, crouched another of the ugly creatures. As we approached, it raised its eyes to us and they were filled with despair and anguish and, then, recognition.
Haradil.
Bej burst into tears. But Camy rushed forward and with all the strength of her superior body, slammed a fisted tentacle into Haradil’s weeping face. “How could you, Hari? How could you do it, to all of us?”
I understood Camy’s fury, Bej’s sorrow, Seliku’s distaste. I shared all three. But I was the biologist. After Seliku had pulled Camy off of Haradil, I knelt beside her to examine her wounds. Our prisoner guide had oozed back into the forest. The light bones of Haradil’s face didn’t seem broken, but she was obviously in pain, and my anger turned from her to Camy.
“You could have killed her! This body is really fragile!”
“I’m sorry,” Camy choked out. She didn’t cry. We were not easy criers.
Haradil said nothing, and that was at first oddly reassuring because it was the way she’d been ever since her merger with QUENTIAM, was at least a token of the Haradil we’d known.
“Haradil,” I said as calmly as I could manage, “I’m going to give you nanomeds.”
She shrank back under my hands. Seliku said, too harshly, “Hari, the Mori won’t know, nor QUENTIAM. It has no sensors here. No one will know what we do in this place.”
“No nanomeds!” Haradil cried, and somehow her voice was still her own, horrifying in that awful body.
“Why not?” I said, but I already knew. Holding her delicate, filthy face between my hands, I saw the start of the same fungal infection that the other prisoner had, and I shuddered.
“Nanomeds will keep me alive!”
“And you want to die,” Seliku said, still in that same harsh voice. “Burn that, Haradil. You live. You owe us that, and a lot more.”
“No!” Haradil cried, and then she was gone, squirming out from under my gentle clasp. Bej caught her with a flying tackle that might, all by itself, have broken bones. Haradil screamed and flailed ineffectually.
Horrified, furious, and determined, we set on her. Bej and Camy held her legs and the one set of arms. Seliku unwound a long superfine rope from her toolbelt and we tied Haradil. The others looked at me; I was the biologist. I drew my knife, sliced into Haradil’s arm and then my own, and pressed them firmly together. Nanomeds flowed from me to her. Haradil began a low, keening sound, like a trapped animal.
It took a long time for enough nanomeds to replicate within Haradil to achieve sedation. Until nightfall we had to listen to that terrible sound. Finally she fell asleep, and we carried her into the forest and lay down under our blankets.
We didn’t need much sleep, but there wasn’t anything else to do. I had never known such blackness. No starlight penetrated the overhang of fronds. My infrared vision was, except for my sister-selves, a uniform and low-key haze of plant and insect life. We didn’t build a fire for the same reason we’d left Haradil’s hut. Not all the prisoners on ˄17843 might be as scowlingly cooperative as the one that had brought us to Haradil. Some of these people had killed.