And for him everything that he thought he believed had been transformed in one moment of violence.
What now? Now, Nortekku thought, it is up to us to finish the job.
Thalarne moved close up beside him. He slipped one arm around her and they stood that way in silence.
“You said you’d file a report with the governments of Yissou and Dawinno, and let them decide what to do with the Sea-Lords,” he said, after a long time had passed. “But you know who has the last word in what those governments decide: Prince Til-Menimat, and Prince Samnibolon, and maybe Prince Vuldimin, and Prince This-and-That, all the rest of them who paid for this expedition so they could add Sea-Lord artifacts to their collections. Do you know what they’ll do, when they find out that the first try at bringing some live Sea-Lords back has failed? They’ll organize another expedition right away.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what they’ll do.”
“We have to get there first, don’t we?” He looked at her. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll speak to the captain, and ask him if his ship is available for making a voyage right back to where we just came from.”
She nodded. She understood. “Yes. We should go back there.”
“And we will,” he said. “We have to. Because now we have to show the rest of those Sea-Lords how to die.”
Mirror Image
by Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-’70s and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths and Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light; the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain; a sequel, Beggars and Choosers; and a popular recent sequence of novels, Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent books are two new novels, Crossfire and Nothing Human. Upcoming is a new novel, Crucible. She has also won Nebula Awards for her stories, “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.”
Many far-future stories show the inhabitants of the future continuing to live much the same sort of day-to-day life, on a basic human level, that we do now, in spite of all the hundreds of thousands of years that supposedly have gone by—some far-future stories even have a retro tinge, so that people are shown as getting around on horseback, drinking in torch-lit taverns, staying on straw mats in half-timbered roadside inns, cooking their meals over open campfires, and so forth, much as they might have in the Middle Ages of our own society’s past.
Nancy Kress is too smart for this, though, and the intricate pavane of identity and loss that follows clearly demonstrates that the people of the far future will lead lives that are nothing whatsoever like our own—except, perhaps, for a few simple things such as betrayal, conspiracy, redemption, and love.
When the message from Seliku reached me, I was dreaming in QUENTIAM. No, not dreaming, that can’t be right—the upload state doesn’t permit dreaming. For that you need a biological, soft tissue of one sort or another, and I had no biology until my next body was done. I had qubits moving at c, combining and recombining with themselves and, to the extent It will permit, with QUENTIAM. I should not have been dreaming.
Still, the subprogram felt like a biological dream. Something menacing and ill-defined chased me through a shifting landscape, something unknowably vast, coming closer and closer, its terrifying breath on my back, its—
*Message from Seliku, magnitude one,* QUENTIAM “said” to me and the dream vanished. The non-dream.
*From Seliku? Now?*
*Yes.*
*It’s not time for Seliku.* And certainly not at a magnitude one.
QUENTIAM didn’t answer. It gave me an image of Seliku gazing at an image of me from out of a mirror, a piece of rococo drollery I was all at once too apprehensive to appreciate. It was nowhere near time for me to hear from Seliku, or from any of my sister-selves.
“Akilo,” she said in agitation. Her image had the faint halo of real-time transmission. Seliku wore the body we all used for our bond-times, a female all-human with pale brown skin, head hair in a dark green crest, black eyes. Four coiled superflexible tentacles were each a meter long, the digits slim and graceful. It was the body of the woman we would have become had our creation occurred on a quiet planet—not that we could have been created on a quiet planet. We called the body “human standard,” to QUENTIAM’s great amusement. We didn’t understand that amusement, and It had declined to explain.
For my image, QUENTIAM had used my last body, grown for my fish work on ˄563, just before this upload. Four arms, tail, gills. I’d never liked the body and now I tweaked its image to a duplicate of Seliku’s. We gazed at each other within my usual upload sim, a forested bedroom copied from ˄894, where I’d once adjusted a particularly appealing species of seedings. It had been some of my best work. I’d been happy there.
Seliku said, “Akilo, you must come to Calyx. Now. Immediately.”
“What has happened?” She was scaring me.
“I don’t know what happened. I mean yes, I do, we do, it’s Haradil—you must come!”
I recognized fear in her jerky, elliptical blurtings—we all spoke that way when genuinely terrified. “Bej—”
“Bej and Camy are here.”
“Where is Haradil? Seliku, tell me!”
“I… sorry, I’m sorry, I thought I… Haradil is at the Mori Core. Or she was there. They arrested and tried her already—”
“Tried her? For what?”
“The Mori First One called me. The First One himself. He said that Haradil destroyed a star system.”
Stunned, I tried to assimilate this. A star system—an entire star system. How? Why?
“Why?”
Seliku was more coherent now, calmed a bit by sharing the disaster. That, too, I recognized. She said, “The First One wouldn’t tell me except in person. You know how they are. Akilo, the star system was inhabited. There was life there.”
“Sentient?”
“Yes, although primitive. And Haradil… they’ve exiled her to a quiet planet for life.”
For life. For taking life. “I—”
“Come now, Akilo. We’re waiting for you. Please come now.”
“I’m in upload, my new body isn’t done—”
“I know you’re in upload! Come when the body’s done!” Anger, our habitual response to helplessness. Seliku’s image vanished without waiting for agreement; she knew that of course I would come.
I turned my share of our anger on QUENTIAM. *Why didn’t you tell me about Haradil when it happened?*