Before she could ask about this small but unexplained detail, another figure suddenly appeared from out of nowhere at the center of the gathering.
"I am so sorry I could wait no longer," Hideki Kunohara said to Sellars. Renie was not the only one to gasp in surprise, Kunohara wore a formal black kimono and a slightly loopy smile. "I was listening in on your discussion, trying to be patient until my turn came, but I feared I might miss this spectacular event."
"But . . . you're dead!" a shocked Florimel pointed out. "Your house collapsed."
"They are not the same thing at all," Kunohara said cheerfully, and winked at Martine. "And the loss of my house served your purpose, did it not? You and your friends made your escape, didn't you? So perhaps something more like gratitude is in order." He paused, then made a swift little bow to Florimel. "Forgive me. I do not mean to be insulting. I am pleased to see you survived. It is just that time is short." He turned to survey the rows of lights, his expression exalted, almost feverish. "Wonderful! Any biologist in the world would trade ten years of his or her life to be present for this!" He paused, suddenly angry. "Take a vote about whether to let it happen or not? Madness." He looked critically at Sellars. "Would you really agree to such a stupid exercise?"
Sellars gave a disconsolate shrug. "I see no other way. No one person has the right to decide such a thing, and we do not have time for a more measured approach."
Kunohara made a disgusted noise. "So a committee of weary, uninformed amateurs should decide the fate of an entirely new form of life?"
"Just a minute," said Orlando. "If we're really going to vote on this, who gets to vote? Just the grown-ups?"
"We will certainly consider you and Sam part of the group," Sellars said quickly. "You have proved yourselves beyond doubt."
"Wanna vote!" screamed several of the Wicked Tribe. "Vote! We vote go home, no more talk talk talk!"
"You little ones get down right now," snapped Mrs. Simpkins. "Don't think I can't catch you!"
"And these are our only choices?" Renie turned to !Xabbu, who was silent but clearly troubled by all he had heard. "Is that what we're supposed to decide?" She wanted to hear what his unique perspective made of all this. "Right this second we have to choose between . . . killing them and letting them go? Between something like genocide and the risk that our own species will be wiped out?"
"There are no such decisions," !Xabbu said slowly. "This I know—those are the boxes that people make so that they will not be frightened by complicated choices. The world has many paths."
"That might be true if we had more time." Sellars was beginning to sound weary again, and more than a little frustrated. "Please! We do not know how long until they . . ."
"Stop!" The startlingly loud voice echoed through the cavern even after everyone had fallen silent—the not-quite-human voice of Nemesis. "I . . . we . . . I do not understand all your words." The thing in Ricardo Klement's body still could not make the face express emotion, but Renie thought there was something increasingly human in its voice. "I do not understand, but I can sense that you are upset and fearful about those who are coming. About the next."
"The next what?" Sam whispered loudly to Orlando.
"You must hear . . . they must talk. Then some understanding will be. Perhaps." Nemesis was reaching for words. Renie found it chilling, but in some weird way, exciting as well. It really did want to communicate. It was only a piece of code, albeit a complicated one, but it seemed to be doing something for which it could not have been programmed,
So it's not just the creatures that Sellars and the Other made, Renie thought. The lines between people and not-people are definitely going to get more blurry, no matter what. Like T4b, she felt like her brain was about to blow up. Jesus Mercy, does that mean we're going to have to consider every piece of accounting gear and office equipment a citizen?
"We cannot talk to them." Sellars sounded sad, but angry, too. "They are information life. The very idea is pointless—even if they were able to speak words we could hear, they would be beyond our understanding, as we are beyond theirs. They are more different from us than we are from plants."
"No." Nemesis lifted a hand in a strange, unreadable gesture, then pointed at the helpless blue thing cradled in its other arm. "We heard these processes from . . . from far away. We split ourselves."
"Who is we?" Sellars demanded.
Kunohara was smiling broadly, "This is fascinating!"
"I . . . I am Nemesis—but I am not all of Nemesis. I was created as a tracking procedure, but I could not perform my original function. The network was too large and diverse, and the anomaly in this place, this secured portion of the operating system, was too strong. I was . . . we were . . . very confused. So I . . . we . . . split into three subversions so that we might cope with the network's unexpected complexity and still have a chance of completing our original task."
The thing sounded quite natural now, Renie thought. She'd had mathematics lecturers who sounded less human.
"I am only one part of the original," it said. "I am Nemesis Two." It lifted the Blue Baby, which made a strange, mewling sound. "Here is a . . . representation of Nemesis One, which was . . . made nonfunctional by a logic problem. I was able to protect myself against that problem, and my function was not disrupted as I pursued my own investigations. I found Nemesis One here, broken and discarded within the operating system code.
"But there is also another part of me . . . of us. . . ." The blank Klement stare looked from face to face, but the eye contact only emphasized how inhuman it still was. "Nemesis Three pierced the anomaly and found these processes," it explained, "—the growing of these next ones. It has been with them for many cycles. Now we will all be together. We will speak. We will speak together."
"What is this supposed to mean to us?" Sellars sounded worried, even fearful, which made Renie's pulse beat faster—how much time did they have? "Yes, you can speak to us," Sellars said, "but you are human-created code. These . . . creatures . . . are not even remotely human."
Nemesis nodded awkwardly. "Yes, we will speak together."
"Together. . . ?" Sellars asked, puzzled, but even as he spoke the lights in the walls began to flicker. Renie had to raise her hands before her eyes to keep from being sickened by the eerie strobing effect.
Something was forming next to one of the walls, a vertical agglomeration of light. It was not the blankness of empty virtual space that Renie had seen Sellars use to disguise himself and the boy Cho-Cho, but a rippling, pulsing overlap of types and textures of light, a thickening of light, almost, which swiftly took on a faceless, mostly human shape.
Everyone stared at the apparition in anxious silence.
"Is that one of the things we gotta six?" T4b finally asked weakly. Renie thought he did not sound like he planned on trying. In fact, he sounded like he wanted to be somewhere else. She sympathized strongly.
"No," said Nemesis. "That is our other . . . self. The last part. Nemesis Three. It has been with the anomaly and its processes for many cycles, just as I have been with you human arrangements for many cycles. We will combine our knowledge. We will speak together." Nemesis Two lifted the Blue Baby. Renie gasped as the ugly little thing suddenly flowed out of its hands like something poured horizontally and was absorbed by the shape made of light, which began to gleam with additional azure tones. Then, as they all stared in numbed surprise, the Klement form stepped toward the light-being and flowed into it as well. When the absorption was finished, the shining thing looked a little more human.