As she had.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” I heard Camy whisper in the dark to Haradil’s sedated form, and I knew that Camy both was and was not sorry.
But the strangest thing in that dark night was the absence of QUENTIAM. I hadn’t expected to feel so completely bereft. My sister-selves lay so close to me that their breathing was mine, the scent of their bodies filled my mouth, their tentacles clutched patches of my fur. Yet it was QUENTIAM I missed. That voice in my head, always there, knowing what I was doing without being told, knowing what I wanted next. Support and companion and fellow biologist. I missed It so fiercely that my throat closed and my body shuddered.
“Are you cold, Alo?” Seliku whispered. In the dark she pushed more of her own blanket onto me. But it brought no warmth, brought no comfort, was not—shockingly, horrifyingly—what I needed, not at all.
Haradil slept for days, during which we did nothing except move farther inland, gather leaves, and consume them to supplement and conserve our pellets of concentrated food. It was an exhausting, endless, boring process. The bodies I had asked for were too big for the available nourishment, with too little storage capacity. We all lost weight, and each time it was my turn to carry the sedated Haradil, she seemed heavier on my back. Despite our efforts, we had to use some of the food pellets, and our supply diminished steadily.
The farther we moved away from the other prisoners, the more I could see why they’d camped on the shore. There may have been some edibles, plankton or small marine worms, in the sea; that would be compatible with Level-4 fauna. More important, on the beach it would have been possible to see the sky, hear the waves. Under the fern cover we saw nothing but pulpy green in half-light, alien and silent. The only sound was the high-pitched drone of insects that stung constantly. Occasionally, when the wind was right, a stench of rotting plants blew toward us, fetid and overpowering. I had been on many ugly worlds, but none I hated as much as this one.
On the sixth day, we camped just past noon in a small, relatively dry clearing. We were so tired, and even the huge blob of the gas giant overhead was better than yet more oppressive green. Bej and Seliku made a fire, despite the risk of smoke rising above the ferns and giving away our positions. We sat around it and ate, by unspoken agreement, twice our usual ration of food pellets, washed down with water from a muddy stream.
“What’s that?” Seliku asked Camy.
Camy held up a particularly thick section of woody fern trunk, which she was carving with her ceramic knife. She’d sculpted a pattern of beads along its length, smooth ovals gracefully separated in the CeeHee intervals, loveliest of proportions in both art and mathematics. Even here, Camy had to be an artist.
The sight inexplicably cheered me. “Camy—” I began, and the sky exploded.
Some of us screamed. There was no noise, but the sky opposite to the gas giant grew bright, then even brighter. Bej threw herself across Camy, I did the same with Haradil, and Seliku fell to the ground. In a moment it was over. Seliku gazed upward.
“What… what was that?” Camy, but it might have been any of us.
“I don’t know,” Seliku said, and her voice held even more strain than Camy’s. “But I think the station just blew up.”
“The station?” Bej said. “The Mori station? QUENTIAM’s station?” All the stations were, in one sense, QUENTIAM’s. It created and maintained and ran them. “How could that be?”
“I don’t know,” Seliku said. “It can’t be. Unless QUENTIAM did it.”
“Why?”
“I said I don’t know!”
“Sel,” I said, “I saw something like that when we landed, just before I fell into that giant fern, only not as bright. A flash of light. Could that have been the shuttle blowing up, too? No, I know you don’t know, but did you see a flash then as well?”
“No. But we all landed before you, and we were below the fronds—that first flash wasn’t as bright as this?”
“No, not as bright. But I saw it.”
Seliku said, with a reluctance I didn’t understand, “If that big flash was the station, then I suppose what you saw could have been the shuttle. But there’s no reason for QUENTIAM to blow up either of them.”
“Maybe It didn’t,” Camy said.
We all looked at Haradil, still deeply sedated. If there were answers, they must come from her. But if the shuttle and station really had blown up—
“I think,” Camy began, “that we better—” Men burst from the dense pulpy foliage.
Twelve prisoners, all armed with longer, thicker, sharper versions of Camy’s carved wood. Spears—my mouth tasted the archaic, slimy word. So the exiles had known all along where we were. They had experience in tracking, just as I had, and they’d stayed upwind of us.
I said quietly, “Draw your knives and make a circle facing outward around Haradil.”
We did, four comparatively large women against a dozen frail pygmies. Only then did I see that the tip of the spear closest to me was sticky with something thick and green.
These people had had years of exile to learn about the flora here, as well as to develop warfare unrestrained by QUENTIAM’s parameters. The spear could easily be tipped with some local poison. Our nanos could handle it, but while the nanos worked we would probably be automatically sedated, completely vulnerable.
A sense of reality swept over me. I stood here—I, Jiuinip Akilo Sister-Self 7664-3, who had adjusted sentient seedings not dissimilar to these on scores of worlds—facing an enemy armed with spears, while I myself held only a ceramic knife. And the most unreal part was that these people, too, at least the ones not born here, had come from my same universe of nano, of abundance, of peace. Of QUENTIAM, who would never have permitted this.
Seliku said in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Do… do any of you speak Standard?”
To my surprise, the closest prisoner answered, in a strange whining accent. “You do this! You and your magic! You destroy clouds and now we never have no rain!”
Magic. Five little girls, playing at “magic” and “death” and “nova.” Knowing, secure in QUENTIAM, that for us such things did not exist.
I said to the pygmy, who must be third- or fourth-generation to be so ignorant, “The clouds will return. But we did not destroy them. We are not destroyers.”
He waved his spear at Haradil. “She is. She say it.”
Oh, what had Haradil said? That she was a destroyer, perhaps that she wanted to die. She might have been trying to make them kill her. Suicide by fellow outcast.
Camy said, “But you did not kill her. You knew that if you killed her, all her bad magic would come to you.”
I saw on his face, on all their diseased and debased faces, that it was true. They feared Haradil’s powers of destruction too much to kill her. So what were they doing here now?
I said, “You want us to go far away.”
“Yes! Go!”
That was why Haradil had lived apart from what could have been the comfort of shared misery. But, of course, she hadn’t wanted comfort. She wanted death and suffering, as atonement for what she’d done.
Seliku said, “It could be a trick, to make us put down our knives.”
I looked again at the pathetic creatures before us. Two, I saw now, had legs actually shivering with fear. I said quietly, “It’s not a trick. Bej, carry Haradil. We’ll move even farther inland. Move slowly but purposefully… now.”
The prisoners watched us go. In just a few moments the sight of them was blocked by the everlasting spongy green.