Resplendent

CADRE SIBLINGS

AD 5301

Before she was called into Gemo Cana’s office for her awkward new assignment, Luru Parz had never thought of her work as destructive.

Cana stood before the window, a portal whose natural light betrayed her high status in the Extirpation Directorate. Red-gold sunset light glimmered from the data slates fixed to the walls of the office. Beyond the pharaoh’s round shoulders Luru could see the glistening blown-silicate domes of the Conurbation’s residential areas, laced by the blue-green of canals.

And on the misty horizon a Qax ship, a Spline, cruised above occupied Earth, swivelling like a vast eyeball. Where it passed there rose a churning wave of soil and grass and splintered trees.

‘Never,’ Cana murmured. ‘You never thought of it that way, as destructive. Really? But we are destroying data here, Luru. That is what “Extirpation” means. Obliteration. Eradication. A rooting out. Have you never thought about that?’

Luru, impatient to get back to work, didn’t know how to reply. If this was some new method of assessment it was obscure, Cana’s strategy non-obvious. In fact she resented having to endure this obscure philosophising from Cana, who most people regarded as a musty relic cluttering up the smooth running of the Directorate. Among Luru’s friends and pushy rivals, even to report to a pharaoh was seen as a career impediment. ‘I’m not sure what you’re getting at.’

‘Then consider the library you are working on, beneath Solled Laik City. It is said that the library contains an ancestral tree for every man, woman and child on the planet, right up to the moment of the Occupation. You or I could trace our personal history back thousands of years. Think of that. And your job is to destroy it. Doesn’t that make you feel at least’ – Cana’s small hands opened, expressive – ‘ambiguous, morally?’

Cana was short, stocky, her scalp covered by silver-white fuzz. Luru, her own head shaven, knew nobody else with hair, a side-effect of AntiSenescence treatment, of course. Cana had once told Luru she was so old she remembered a time before the Occupation itself, two centuries back. To Luru, aged twenty-two, it was a chilling idea.

She thought over what Cana had said. ‘I don’t even know where “Solled Laik City” is – or was. What does it matter? Data is just data. Work is just work.’

Cana barked laughter. ‘With a moral void like that you’ll go far, Luru Parz. But not everybody is as – flexible – in their outlook as you. Not everybody is a fan of the Extirpation. Outside the Conurbation you will encounter hostility. You see a satisfying intellectual exercise in the cleansing; they see only destruction. They call us jasofts, you know. I remember an older term. Quislings.’

Luru was baffled. Why was she talking about outside? Outside was a place for ragamuffins and bandits. ‘Who calls us jasofts?’

Cana smiled. ‘Poor little Luru, such a sheltered life. You don’t even remember the Rebellion, do you? The Friends of Wigner—’

‘The Rebellion was defeated five years before I was born. What has it to do with me?’

‘I have a new assignment for you,’ Cana said briskly. ‘Do you know Symat Suvan?’

Luru frowned. ‘We were cadre siblings, a couple of dissolutions ago.’ And, briefly, lovers.

Cana eyed her; Luru sensed she knew everything about her relationship. ‘Suvan left the Conurbation a year ago.’

‘He became a ragamuffin?’ Luru wasn’t particularly shocked; Symat, for all his charm, had always been petulant, difficult, incompliant.

‘I want you to go and talk to him, about his research into superheavy elements … No, not that. None of that matters. I want you to talk to him about minimising pain, and death, for himself and others. He has got himself in the way, you see.’

Luru said stiffly, ‘I don’t think this assignment is appropriate for me. My relationship with Symat is in the past.’

Cana smiled. ‘A past you’d rather forget, a little Extirpation of your own? But because of that past he might listen to you. Don’t worry; this will not damage your glittering career. And I know that bonds between cadre siblings are not strong. They are not intended to be. But you might persuade this boy to save his life.

‘I know you judge me harshly, Luru, me and the other pharaohs. Just remember that our goal is always to minimise distress. That is the reason I work in this place. It is my job, and yours, to mediate the regime of the Qax. Humanity’s relations with its conquerors deteriorated after the Friends’ Rebellion. Without us things would be much worse still. Which is why,’ she said slowly, ‘I regret asking this of you – especially you, Luru.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Cana sighed. ‘Of course you don’t. Child, Jasoft Parz, the exemplar after whom our traitorous class is named, was your grandfather.’

Luru sat in the flitter’s small cabin, nervous, irritated, as the land peeled away beneath her.

From the air the spread of buildings, bubbles blown from scraped-bare bedrock, was glistening, almost organic. She could see the starbreaker-cut canals, arteries that imported desalinated water and food from the huge offshore algae farms and exported waste to the sink of the ocean. Down one canal bodies drifted in an orderly procession, glinting in plastic wrap; they were the night’s dead, expended carcases returning to the sea.

Conurbation 5204 had been constructed when Luru was ten years old. She remembered the day well; the construction had taken just minutes, a spectacular sight for a little girl. There was talk now that the Extirpation Directorate might soon be moved to a new location in the continental interior, in which case Conurbation 5204 would be razed flat in even less time, leaving no trace. That was how the Qax did things: deliberate, fast, brutal, clean, allowing not the slightest space for human sentiment.

It was a relatively short flitter hop to Symat Suvan’s research facility – short, but nevertheless longer than any journey Luru had taken before. And she was going to have to spend more time outside than she ever had before.

She didn’t want to do this at all.

Luru’s brief career, at the Extirpation Directorate in Conurbation 5204, had been pleasingly successful. She was working on a tailored data-cleanse package. The cleanser was to be sent into huge genealogical libraries recently discovered in a hardened shelter under the site known as Solled Laik City, evidently a pre-Occupation human city. The cleanser was a combination of intelligent interpretive agents, targeted virus packages and focused electromagnetic-pulse bursts, capable of eradication of the ancient data banks at the physical, logical and philosophical levels. The cleanser itself was of conventional design; the project’s challenge was in the scale, complexity and encryption of the millennia-old data to be deleted.

The work was stretching, competitive, deeply satisfying to Luru, and a major progression along her career path within the Extirpation Directorate. In fact she had been promoted to cadre leader for this new project, at twenty-two her first taste of real responsibility. And she resented being dragged away from her work like this, flung halfway across the continent, all for the benefit of a misfit like Symat Suvan.

She tried to distract herself with her notes on superheavy elements, Symat’s apparent obsession.

There was a natural limit to the size of the nucleus of an atom, it seemed. A nucleus was a cluster of protons whose positive electrical charges tended to drive them apart. The protons were held together by a comforting swarm of neutrons – neutral particles. Larger nuclei needed many neutrons to hold them together; lead-208, for example, contained eighty-two protons and a hundred and twenty-six neutrons.

The gluing abilities of the neutrons were limited. It was once believed that no nucleus could exist with more than a hundred or so protons. But some theorists had predicted that there could be much larger nuclear configurations, with certain special geometries – and these were eventually discovered. The lightest of the superheavy nuclei had a hundred and fourteen protons and a hundred and eighty-four neutrons; the most common appeared to be an isotope called marsdenium- 440, with a hundred and eighty-four protons and a crowd of two hundred and fifty-six neutrons. But there were much heavier nuclei still, with many hundreds of protons and neutrons. These strange nuclei were deformed, squashed into ellipsoids or even hollowed out…

She put down her data slate. She found it hard to concentrate on such useless abstractions as this corner of physics – and she didn’t understand how this could have absorbed Symat so much. She did wonder absently why ‘marsdenium’ had that particular name: perhaps ‘Marsden’ or ‘Marsdeni’ was the name of its discoverer. Such historical details were long lost, of course.

As the flitter neared the top of its suborbital hop the curving Earth opened up around her, a rust-red land that glimmered with glassy scars – said to be the marks of humanity’s last war against the Qax, but perhaps they were merely the sites of deleted Conurbations. A Spline craft toiled far beneath her, a great blister of flesh and metal ploughing open a swathe of land, making its own patient, devastating contribution to the Extirpation.

Her flitter drifted to the ground, a few hundred metres from Symat Suvan’s exotic matter plant. She emerged, blinking, beneath a tall sky. Far from the rounded chambers of the Conurbation, she felt small, frail, exposed.

This was a place called Mell Born. It had been spared the starbreaker ploughs so far, but even so nothing remained of the land’s pre-Occupation human usage save a faint rectangular gridwork of foundations and rubble. The place was dominated by a single structure, a giant blue-glowing torus: a facility built and abandoned by the Qax. Now it was occupied by a handful of ragamuffins who called themselves scientists – there were no scientists in the Conurbations. The humans had even built themselves a shanty town, an odd encrustation around the huge Qax facility.

Symat Suvan was here to meet her. He was tall, gaunt, looming, agitated, his eyes hollow; his bare scalp was tanned a pale pink by the unfiltered sun. ‘Lethe,’ he snapped. ‘You.’

She was dismayed by his hostility. ‘Symat, I’m here to help you.’

He eyed her mockingly. ‘You’re here to destroy me. I always knew you would finish up like this. You actually liked running the mazes the Qax built for us – the tests, the meaningless career paths, the competitions between the cadres. Even the Extirpation is just another pleasing intellectual puzzle to you, isn’t it, in a lifetime of puzzles? Oh, the Qax are smart rulers; they are exploiting your talents very effectively. But you don’t have any idea what your work means, do you? … Come with me.’ He grabbed her hand, and pulled her towards the curved electric blue wall of the facility.

She shivered at the remembered warmth of his touch. But he was no longer her cadre brother; he had become a ragamuffin, one of the dwindling tribes of humans who refused to remain in the Qax Conurbations, and his face was a mask of set planes and pursed lips, and his determined anger was intimidating.

To get to the Qax facility they had to walk through the shanty community. It was a pit of rough, improvised dwellings, some little more than heaps of sheeting and rubble. But it was a functioning town, she realised slowly, with a food dispensing plant and a clinic and a water supply, even what looked like a rudimentary sewage system. She saw a small, dishevelled chapel, devoted to some no-doubt illegal religion, whose gods would one day free humanity from the rule of the Qax. All of this was laid over a mighty grid of rubble. There were still fragments of the old buildings, bits of wall and pipe poking like bones from the general wash of debris, some scarred by fire. Where vegetation had broken through the concrete, the remnant walls had become low hummocks coated with thick green blankets.

There was a stink of smoke and sour humanity, and the air was full of dust which clung to her skin and clothes. It was hard to believe that any cadre sibling of hers would choose to live here. Yet here he was.

Symat was talking rapidly about superheavy elements. ‘It used to be thought that marsdenium and its more exotic sisters could only exist as technological artefacts, manufactured in giant facilities like this Qax factory. But now we know that such elements can be born out of the great pressures of a supernova, the explosive death of a giant star.’

She tried to focus. ‘An exploding star? Then why are you looking for heavy elements here on Earth?’

He smiled. ‘Because the Earth coalesced from a cloud of primordial gas and dust, a cloud whose collapse was triggered by the shock wave from a nearby supernova. You see? The primordial supernova laced the young Earth with superheavy matter. So the heavy elements have deep significance, for Earth and all that live on it or in it.’

On a heap of shattered stones a small child was sitting on the lap of an older girl, playing with a bit of melted glass. The girl was the infant’s cadre sister, Luru supposed. They both had hair, thick dark thatches of it. The little one looked up, coughing, as they passed.

‘This isn’t a healthy place,’ Luru observed.

‘What did you expect? But I keep forgetting. You expect nothing; you know nothing. Luru, people die young in places like this. How else do you think I became so senior here so quickly? And yet they still come. I came.’

‘Perhaps you were seduced by the closeness of the cadres here.’ A healthy dissolution might restore the social balance here, she thought.

He stared at her. ‘There are no cadres here. The cadres, dissolved every couple of years, are another Qax social invention, imposed on humans after the Rebellion for the purposes of control. Didn’t you even know that? Luru, these are families.’

He had to explain what that meant. And that the girl who nursed the child was not the little one’s cadre sibling, but her mother.

They reached a door that had been crudely cut in the wall of the Qax facility. They passed through into an immense curving chamber where vast engines crouched. Hovering light globes cast long, complex shadows, and human technicians talked softly, dwarfed to insignificance. There was a smell of burned lubricant, of ozone.

Luru was overwhelmed.

Symat said, ‘This place was thrown up by the Qax after the Rebellion. It was one of hundreds around the planet. We think it was a factory for making exotic matter – that is, matter with a negative energy density. They abandoned the place; we don’t know why. Since it was built with human wealth and labour I suppose it means nothing to them. We refurbished the machinery, rebuilt much of it. Now we use it to make our own superheavy nuclei, by bombarding lumps of plutonium with high-energy calcium ions.’

That puzzled her. He’d said his goal was the detection of superheavy elements in Earth’s crust. So why was he manufacturing them?

‘Why were the Qax making exotic matter?’

‘None of us knows for sure,’ he said. ‘There is a rumour that the Qax were trying to build a tunnel to the future. It’s even said that the Qax Governor itself is an immigrant from the future, where humanity is triumphant. And that is why the Qax work so hard to control us. Because they are frightened of us.’

‘That’s just a legend.’

‘Is it? Perhaps with time all history becomes legend.’

‘This is nonsense, Symat!’

‘How do you know, Luru?’

‘There are witnesses to the past. The pharaohs.’

‘Like Gemo Cana?’ Symat laughed. ‘Luru, there are no survivors from before the Occupation. The Qax withdrew AntiSenescence treatment for two centuries after the Occupation. All the old pharaohs died, before the Qax began to provide their own longevity treatments. These modern undead, like Gemo Cana, have been bought by the Qax, bought by the promise of long life.’ He leaned towards her. ‘As they are buying you, Luru Parz.’

They emerged from the clean blue calm of the facility, back into the grimy mire of the town.

Disturbed, disoriented, she said evenly, ‘Symat, the starbreaker beams are coming here. Once the Qax tolerated activities like this, indigenous cultural and scientific endeavours. Not any more, not since the Friends of Wigner betrayed the Qax’s cultural generosity towards indigenous ambitions.’ The Friends had used a cultural site to mask seditious activities. ‘If you don’t move out you will be killed.’

He clambered on a low wall and spread his arms, his long robe flapping in the thin dusty breeze. ‘Ah. Indigenous. I love that word.’

‘Symat, come home. There’s nothing here. The data cleansers were sent through this place long ago.’

‘Nothing? Look around you, Luru. Look at the scale of these old foundations. Once there was a host of immense buildings here, taller than the sky. And this roadway, where now we mine the old sewers for water, must have swarmed with traffic. Millions of people must have lived and worked here. It was a great city. And it was human, Luru. The data might have gone; we might never even know the true name of this place. But as long as these ruins are here we can imagine how it must once have been. If these last traces are destroyed the past can never be retrieved. And that’s what the Qax intend.

‘The Extirpation isn’t always a matter of clinical data deletion, you know. Sometimes the jasofts come here with their robots, and they simply burn and smash: books, paintings, artefacts. Perhaps if you saw that, you would understand. The Qax want to sever our roots – to obliterate our identity.’

She felt angry, threatened; she tried to strike back at him. ‘And is that what you’re seeking here? An identity from unravelling this piece of obscure physics?’

‘Oh, there is much more here than physics.’ He said softly, ‘Have you ever heard of Michael Poole? He was one of the first explorers of Sol system – long before the Occupation. And he found life, everywhere he looked.’

‘Life?’

‘Luru, that primordial supernova did more than spray superheavy atoms through the crust of the young Earth. There were complex structures in there, exotic chemistries. Life. Some of us believe they may be survivors of a planet of the primordial supernova – or perhaps they were born in the cauldron of the supernova itself, their substance fizzing out of that torrent of energy. Perhaps they breed that way, seeds flung from supernova to supernova, bugs projected by the mighty sneezes of stars!

‘There is much we don’t understand: their biochemistry, the deeper ecology that supports them, their lifecycle – even what they look like. And yet we know there is a forest down there, Luru, a chthonic forest locked into the substance of the ground, inhabited by creatures as old as the Earth itself. You see, even in these unimaginably difficult times, we are finding new life – just like Michael Poole.’

Wonder flooded her, unwelcome. Bombarded by strangeness, she felt as if some internal barrier were breaking down, as if Symat’s bizarre superheavy creatures were swimming through her mind.

He peered into her eyes, seeking understanding. ‘Now do you see why I’m prepared to fight for this place? Humans aren’t meant to be drones, for the Qax or anybody else. This is what we live for. Exploration, and beauty, and truth.’

She returned to Conurbation 5204, without Symat. She filed a report for Gemo Cana. Her duty fulfilled, she tried to get back to work, to immerse herself once more. As always, there was much to do.

But the work was oddly unsatisfying.

She was distracted by doubt. Could it really be true, as Symat had said, that her career trajectory, with its pleasing succession of tasks and promotions, was just a Qax social construct, a series of meaningless challenges meant to keep bright, proactive people like herself contented and contained and usefully occupied – useful for the Qax, that is?

Meanwhile it was a busy time in the Conurbation. The cramped corridors were crowded with people, all of them spindly tall, bald, pale – just as Luru was herself – all save the pharaohs, of course; they, having been born into richer times, were more disparate, tall and short, thin and squat, bald and hairy. The cadres were undergoing their biennial dissolution, and everybody was on the move, seeking new quarters, new friends, eager for the recreation festival to follow, the days of storytelling and sport and sex.

Luru had always enjoyed the friendly chaos of the dissolutions, the challenge of forming new relationships. But this time she found it difficult to focus her attention on her new cadre siblings.

At the age of twenty-two Luru was already done with childbirth. She had donated to a birthing tank; it was a routine service performed by all healthy women before they left their late teens, and she had thought nothing of it. Now, thinking of the families of Mell Born, she looked at the swarms of youngsters scrambling to their new cadres, excited, all their bare scalps shining like bubbles on a river, and wondered if any of these noisy children could be hers.

Gemo Cana said, ‘I read your report. You’re right to question why Suvan needs to manufacture his strange elements. He’s obviously planning something, some kind of rebellious gesture.’ She looked up from her data slate, as if seeing Luru for the first time. ‘Ah. But you aren’t interested in Symat Suvan and his grubbing in the dirt, are you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Cana put down the slate. ‘It got to you. The outside. I can see it in you. I knew it would, of course. The only question is what difference it’s going to make. Whether you will still be useful.’ She nodded. ‘You have questions, Luru Parz. Ask them.’

Luru felt cold. ‘Symat Suvan told me that the Qax’s ultimate intention—’

‘Is to cauterise the past. I suppose he talked about our identity being dissolved, and so forth? Well, he’s right.’ Cana sounded tired. ‘Of course he is. Think about what you’ve done. What did you think was the purpose of it all? The Extirpation is an erasing of mankind’s past. A bonfire of identity. That is the truth.’

‘But—’

‘There are further plans, you know,’ Cana said, ignoring her. ‘For example: the Spline starbreakers penetrate only the first few tens of metres of the ground, to obliterate shelters, archives and other traces. But the Qax intend to perform a deeper ploughing-up. They have a nanotech replicator dust, which – Well. You see, with such tools, even the fossils will be destroyed, even the geology of the Earth itself: never to be retrieved, the wisdom they contain never to be deciphered.

‘Another example. The Qax intend to force mass migrations of people, a mixing, a vast melting pot.’ She touched her chest. ‘Then even this will be lost, you see, in a few generations – the differences between us, the history embedded in our bodies, our genes, our blood types. All mixed up, the data lost for ever. There is a simpler proposal to replace our human names with some form of catalogue numbers. So even the bits of history lodged in our names will be lost. It will only take two or three generations before we forget…’

Luru was shocked at the thought of such cultural vandalism.

Cana evidently read her expression. ‘So at last we’ve dug far enough into Luru Parz to find a conscience. At last we’ve found something that shocks you. And you’re wondering why any human being would cooperate with such monstrosity. I’ll tell you why. The alternative is worse. The alternative is the destruction of the species – an option the Qax have considered, believe me. That is why we are here, we who collaborate. That is what we must work ceaselessly to avoid.’

She stood, restless, and picked a slate off the wall. ‘Look at this. It is data on the deletion of data: a recursive register of destruction. And when all the primary information is gone, of course, we will have to delete this too. We must even forget that we forgot. And then forget that in turn. It will go on, Luru, a hierarchy of deletion and destruction, until – on one last data slate in an anonymous office like this – there will remain a single datum, the final trace of the huge historic exercise. If it falls to me I will erase that last record, gladly. And then there will be no trace left at all – except in my heart. And,’ she added softly, ‘yours.’

Luru, half understanding, was filled with fear and longing.

Cana eyed her. ‘I think you’re ready. You face a choice, Luru Parz.’ She reached into her desk and produced a translucent tablet the size of a thumbnail. ‘This comes from the Qax themselves. They are able to manipulate biochemical structures at the molecular level – did you know that? It was their, um, competitive edge when they first moved off their home planet. And this is the fruit of their study of mankind. Do you know what it is?’

Luru knew. The tablet was the removal of death.

Cana set the tablet on the desk. ‘Take it.’

Luru said, ‘So it is true. You have been bought with life.’

Cana sat, her face crumpling into sadness; for an instant Luru had the impression of very great age indeed. ‘Suddenly you have grown a moral sense. Suddenly you believe you can judge me. Do you imagine I want this? Should I have followed the others to Callisto, and hidden there?’

Luru frowned. ‘Where? Jupiter’s moon?’

Cana regained the control she had momentarily lost. ‘You judge, but you still don’t understand, do you? There is a purpose to what we do, Luru. With endless life comes endless remembering.

‘We cannot save the Earth from the Qax, Luru. They will complete this project, this Extirpation, whatever we do, we jasofts. And so we must work with them, accept their ambiguous gift of life; we must continue to implement the Qax’s project, knowing what it means. For then – when everything else is gone, when even the fossils have been dug out of the ground – we will still remember. We are the true resistance, you see, not noisy fools like Symat Suvan, we who are closest of all to the conquerors.’

Luru tried to comprehend all of this, the layers of ambiguity, the compromise, the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Why me?’

‘You are the best and brightest. The Qax are pleased with your progress, and wish to recruit you.’ She smiled thinly. ‘And, for exactly the same reasons, I need you. So much moral complexity, wrapped up in a single tiny tablet!’

Luru stood. ‘You told me you remembered how it was, before the Qax. But Symat said all the old pharaohs died during the Occupation. That nobody remembers.’

Cana’s face was expressionless. ‘If Suvan said that, it must be true.’

Luru hesitated. Then she closed her hand around the tablet and put it in a pocket of her tunic, her decision still unmade.

When she returned to Mell Born she found it immersed in shadow, for a Spline ship loomed above the ruins. The Spline rolled ponderously, weapon emplacements glinting. There was a sense of huge energies gathering.

Her flitter skimmed beneath the Spline’s belly, seeking a place to land.

The crude shanty town was being broken up. She could see a line of Directorate staff – no, of jasofts – moving through the ramshackle dwellings, driving a line of people before them, men, women and children. Beetle-like transports followed the line of the displaced, bearing a few hastily grabbed belongings. The jasofts were dressed in skinsuits, their faces hidden behind translucent masks; the raw surface of Earth was not a place where inhabitants of the great Conurbations walked unprotected.

A small group lingered near the electric blue walls of the Qax facility, robes flapping, their stubborn defiance apparent in their stance. One of them was Symat, of course. She ran to him.

‘I didn’t think you would return.’ He waved at the toiling, fleeing people. ‘Are you proud of what is being done to us?’

She said, ‘You are manufacturing superheavy elements, here in this facility. What is the real reason? Have you lied to me, Symat?’

‘Only a little,’ he said gently. ‘We do understand something of the creatures of the rocky forest that has flourished beneath our feet.’

‘Yes?’

‘We know what they eat. We have tried to provide them with food, to get their attention—’

Without warning a thread of ruby-red light snaked down from the hide of the Spline. Where the starbreaker touched, buildings disintegrated, panels and beams flying high into the air. From the heart of the old Qax facility came a scream of tortured air, a soft concussion, a powerful, blood-red glow. The ground shuddered beneath their feet.

‘It has begun.’ She grabbed Symat and tried to pull him towards her flitter. ‘Symat, please. You were my cadre sibling; I don’t want to see you die. This isn’t worth a life.’

A blankness came into his eyes, and he pulled away from her. ‘Ah. Not your life, a pharaoh’s life, perhaps.’

‘I am not yet a pharaoh—’

He wasn’t listening. ‘You see what a dreadful, clever gift this is? A long life makes you malleable. But my pitiful life – a few decades at best – what is the use of such a life save to make a single, defiant gesture?’ He stepped away from her deliberately. He closed his eyes, and raised his arms into the air, robe flapping. ‘As for you – you must make your choice, Luru Parz.’

And from beneath Symat’s feet a bolt of dazzling light punched upwards, scattering debris and rock, and lancing into the heart of the Spline. There was a stink of meat, of corruption.

A shock wave billowed over her, peppering her with hot dust. Luru fell back in the rubble, stunned. Symat was gone, gone in an instant.

And the roof of flesh above her seemed to tip. The Spline sank with heavy gentleness towards the ground.

And she was going to be crushed beneath its monstrous belly. She turned and ran to her ship.

The flitter, saving itself, squirted towards the narrowing gap of daylight beneath that descending lid of flesh. Luru, bloody, bruised, filthy, cowered in her seat as immense pocks and warts fled above her head. A dark, steaming fluid gushed from the Spline’s tremendous wound; it splashed over the ground, a lake of blood brought from another star.

Suddenly she burst into daylight. From the air she could see how the raking starbreaker beam had left a gouge in the earth like an immense fingernail scratching a tabletop. But the gouge was terminated by the dying Spline, a deflating ball, already grounded.

The flitter, in utter silence, tipped back and lifted her up towards the edge of space.

The sky deepened to violet, and her racing heart slowed.

She tried to work out what had happened. There must have been a cache of the strange, ancient supernova creatures, she decided, drawn there by Symat’s superheavy-element bait. Perhaps the eruption had been purely a matter of physics, a response to the sudden release of pressure when the upper levels of the crust were stripped away. Or perhaps that great blow against the Spline had been deliberate, a conscious lashing out, a manifestation of the rage of those ancient creatures at this disturbing of their aeons-long slumber.

And now, all around the sky, she could see more Spline entering the atmosphere: four, five, six of them, great misty moons descending to Earth. A fine dust pulsed from them in thin, silvery clouds, almost beautiful. The dust spread through the air, settling quickly. Where the glittering rain touched, the land began to soften, the valleys to subside, the hills to erode. It was shockingly fast.

This was the wrath of the Qax. The overlords had learned not to hesitate in the face of human defiance. And this nanotechnological drenching would leave the planet a featureless beach of silicate dust.

She took the translucent tablet from a pocket of her skinsuit. The scrap of Qax technology gleamed, warm. She thought of the wizened, anguished face of Gemo Cana, of Symat’s vibrant, passionate sacrifice. You must make your choice, Luru Parz.

I am too young, she thought. I have nothing to remember. Nothing but what was done today.

As the mountains of Earth crumbled, she swallowed the tablet.

We endured another century of the Qax.

When their reign ended it happened quickly, the result of an event far from Earth, the actions of a single human, a man called Bolder.

For all our conspiring, I think we never really believed the Qax would leave.

And we certainly never imagined we would miss them when they were gone.

CONURBATION 2473

AD 5407

Rala knew there was something wrong.

For days, all around Conurbation 2473 there had been muttered rumours. A cell of counter-Extirpationists had been found hoarding illegal data. Or a group of cultists were planning an uprising, like the failed Rebellion decades ago. Rala just wanted to get on with her work. But everybody got a little agitated.

It all came to a head one morning.

The room lights came on as usual to wake them up, But when their supervising jasoft didn’t come to collect them for work, Rala quickly got uneasy.

Rala shared her tiny room with Ingre, a cadre sibling. The room was just a bubble blown in nano-engineered rock by Qax technology. There was nothing inside but a couple of bunk beds, a space to store clothes, waste systems, water spigots, a food hole.

Ingre was a little younger than Rala, thin, anxious. She went to the door – which had snapped open at the allotted time, as it always did – and peered up and down the corridor. ‘Luru Parz is never late.’

‘We’ll just wait,’ Rala said firmly. ‘We’re safe here.’

But now there was a tread, steadily approaching along the corridor. It was too heavy for Luru Parz, their controlling jasoft, who was a slight woman. Some instinct prompted Rala to take Ingre’s hand and hold it tight.

A man stood in the doorway. His skin seemed oddly reddened, as if burned. He wore a skinsuit of what looked like gold foil. And there was a thick thatch of black hair on his head. Nobody in the Conurbation, workers or jasofts alike, wore hair.

He wasn’t Luru Parz. He wasn’t from the Conurbation at all.

The man stepped into the room and glanced around. ‘All these cells are the same. I can’t believe you drones live like this.’ His accent was strange. Rala thought his gaze lingered on her body, and she looked away. She had never heard the word ‘drone’ before. He pointed at the panel in the wall. ‘Your food hole.’

‘Yes—’

He smashed the transparent panel with a gloved fist. Ingre and Rala cowered back. Bits of plastic flew everywhere, and a silvery dust trickled to the floor. To Rala this was literally an unthinkable crime.

Ingre said, ‘The jasofts will punish you for that.’

‘You know what this was? Qax shit. Replicator technology.’

‘But now it’s broken.’

‘Yes, now it’s broken.’ He pointed to his chest. ‘And you must come to us for your food.’

‘Food is power,’ Rala said.

He looked at her more closely. ‘You are a fast learner. Report to the roof in one hour. You will be processed there.’ He turned and walked out. Where he had passed Rala thought she could smell burning, like hot metal.

Rala and Ingre sat on their bunk for almost the whole hour, barely speaking. Nobody came to fix the smashed hole. Before they left, Rala scooped up a little of the silver dust and put it in a pocket of her robe.

From the roof the Conurbation domes were a complex of vast, glistening blisters. Rala had been up here only a handful of times in her life. She tried not to flinch from the open sky.

Today this dome roof was full of people. The Conurbation inhabitants, with their shaven heads and long robes, had been gathered into queues that snaked everywhere. Each queue led to a table, behind which sat an exotic-looking individual in a gold skinsuit.

Ingre whispered, ‘Which line shall we join?’

Rala glanced around. ‘That one. Look who’s behind the table.’ It was the man who had come to their cell.

‘He frightened me.’

‘But at least we know him. Come on.’

They queued in silence. Rala felt calmer. Living in a Conurbation, you did a lot of queuing; this felt normal.

Around the Conurbation the land was a plain that shone silver-grey, like a geometric abstraction. Canals snaked away to the horizon, full of glistening blue water. Human bodies drifted down the canals, away from the Conurbation to the sea. That wasn’t unusual, just routine waste management. But there did seem to be many bodies today.

At last Rala reached the front of the queue.

The stranger probably wasn’t much older than she was, she realised, no more than thirty. ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘The drone who understands the nature of power.’

She bristled. ‘I am not a drone.’

‘You are what I say you are.’ He had a data slate before him, obviously purloined from a Conurbation workstation. He worked it slowly, as if unfamiliar with the technology. ‘Tell me your name.’

‘Rala.’

‘Rala, my name is Pash. From now on you report to me.’

She didn’t understand. ‘Are you a jasoft?’ The jasofts were human servants of the Qax who, it was said, were granted freedom from death in return for their service.

He said, ‘The jasofts are gone.’

‘The Qax—’

‘Are gone too.’ He glanced upwards. ‘At night you can see their mighty Spline ships, peeling out of orbit. Where they are going, I don’t know. But we will go after them one day.’

Could it be true – could the centuries-old Occupation be over, could Luru Parz and the other jasofts really have melted away, could the framework of her whole world have vanished? Rala felt like a lost child, separated from her cadre. She tried not to let this show in her face.

‘What was your sin?’ It turned out he was asking what job she did.

She had spent her working life in vocabulary deletion. The goal had been to replace the old human tongues with a fully artificial language. It would have taken a few more generations, but at last a great cornerstone of the Extirpation, the Qax’s methodical elimination of the human past, would have been completed. It was intellectually fascinating.

He nodded. ‘Your complicity with the great crime committed against humanity—’

‘I committed no crime,’ she snapped.

‘You could have refused your assignments.’

‘I would have been punished.’

‘Punished? Many will die before we are free.’

The word shocked her. It was hard to believe this was happening. ‘Are you going to punish me now?’

‘No,’ he said, tiredly. ‘Listen to me, Rala. It’s obvious you are smart, you have a high degree of literacy. We were the crew of a starship. A trading vessel, called Port Sol. While you toiled in this bubble-town, I hid up there.’ He glanced at the sky.

‘You are bandits.’

He laughed. ‘No. But we are not bureaucrats either. We need people like you to help run this place.’

‘Why should I work for you?’

‘You know why.’

‘Because food is power.’

‘Very good.’

The traders tried to rule their new empire by lists. They kept lists of ‘drones’, and of their ‘sins’, and tables of things that needed to be done to keep the Conurbation functioning, like food distribution and waste removal.

For Rala it wasn’t so bad. It was just work. But compared to the sophisticated linguistic analysis she had been asked to perform under the Occupation, this simple clerical stuff was dull, routine.

Once she suggested a better way to devise a task allocation. She was punished, by the docking of her food ration. That was how it went. If you cooperated you were fed. If not, not.

Her food was the same pale yellow tablets she had grown up with, the tablets produced by the food holes, though less of them. They came from a sector at the heart of the Conurbation where the food holes had been left intact – the only such place, in fact. It was guarded around the clock.

After the first month or so, the battles started in the sky. You would see glowing lights on the horizon, or sometimes flashing shapes in the night, threads and bursts of light. All utterly silent. All these ships and weapons were human. The oppression of the Qax had been lifted, only for humans to fall on each other.

Actually there was a lot of information to be had from the traders’ lists, if you knew how to read them. Rala saw how few the traders really were. She sensed their insecurity, despite the gaudy weapons they wielded: so few of us, so many of them. And now there were challenges from the sky. The traders’ rule was fragile.

But though people muttered about the good old days under the Qax, nobody did anything about it. It wouldn’t even occur to most drones to raise a fist. Besides there was no place else to go, nothing else to eat. Beyond the city there was only the endless nano-chewed dirt on which nothing grew.

There was never enough to eat, though.

In a corner of her cell, away from prying eyes, Rala examined the silvery Qax replicator dust. This stuff had made food before; why wouldn’t it now? But the dust just lay in its bowl, offering nothing.

Of course the food hadn’t come from nothing. A slurry of seawater and waste had been fed to the dust through pipes in the wall. Somehow the silver dust had turned that muck into food. But in the pipes now there was only a sticky, greenish sludge that stank like urine. She scraped a little of this paste over the dust, but still, treacherously, it sat inert. She hid it all away again.

She had been aware of Pash’s interest in her from the first moment they had met.

She built on that tentative relationship. She talked to him about her work, and drew him out with questions about his background. He told her unlikely tales of worlds beyond the Moon, where humans had once built cities that orbited through rings of ice. Perhaps she was developing an instinct for survival; Pash’s interest was something she could exploit.

Eventually he began to invite her to his room. The room, once owned by a jasoft, was set beneath the Conurbation’s outer wall. It had a view of the sky, where silent battles flared.

‘I don’t know what you want here,’ she said to him one evening. ‘You traders. Why do you want a Conurbation? You aren’t very good at running it.’

‘There are worse than us out there.’

‘It isn’t wealth you want, is it?’ She had struggled to understand that trader word, long expunged from her language; for better or worse the Qax had for centuries imposed a crude communism on mankind. ‘There’s no wealth to be had here.’

‘No. There are only people.’

‘Yes. And where there are people, there is power to be wielded. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

He fell silent, and she wondered if she had pushed him too far. She sighed. ‘Tell me about Sat-urn again—’

The door slammed open. Somebody was standing there, silhouetted by bright light.

Instinctively Rala stepped forward, spreading her arms to hide Pash. A light shone in her face.

The intruder said, ‘I represent the Interim Coalition of Governance. The illegal seizure of this Conurbation by the bandits of the GUTship Port Sol is over.’

‘We are both drones.’ She rattled off details of her identity and work assignment.

‘You must stay in your cell. In the morning you will be summoned for new details. If you encounter the Port Sol crew—’

‘I will report them.’

There was shouting in the corridor; the Coalition trooper, distracted, hurried away.

Pash murmured, ‘Lethe. Look.’

Beyond the window, in the reddening sky, a Spline ship was hovering, a great meaty ball pocked with weapons emplacements. But this was no Qax vessel; a green tetrahedral sigil, a human symbol, had been crudely carved in its flank.

‘Things have changed,’ Rala said dryly.

Pash asked, ‘Why did you shelter me?’

‘Because I have had enough of rulers,’ she snapped. ‘We must be ready. You will have to shave your head. Perhaps one of my robes will fit you.’

The Coalition had its own, different theory about how to run a Conurbation.

They were all evicted from the city. The people stood in sullen ranks – mostly Conurbation drones, but with at least one trader, Pash, camouflaged among the rest. They had been given tools, simple hoes and spades. The walls of the Conurbation loomed above them all, scorched by fire.

The sun was hot, the air dry, and insects buzzed. These were city folk; they didn’t like being out here. There were even children; the new rulers of the Conurbation had closed down the schools, which even the traders had kept running.

A woman stood on a platform before them. She wore a green uniform, clean but shabby, and she had the green sigil tattooed on her forehead – the symbol, as Rala had now learned, of free humanity. At her side were soldiers, not in uniform, though they all wore green armbands, and had the sigil marked on their faces.

‘My name is Cilo Mora,’ said the woman. ‘The Green Army has restored order to the Earth, overthrowing the bandit traders. But the Qax may return – or if not them, another foe. We must always be prepared. You are the advance troops of a moral revolution. The work you will begin today will fortify your will and clarify your vision. But remember – now you are all free!’

One man near the front raised his hoe dubiously. ‘Free to scrape at the dirt?’

One of the green-armbands clubbed him to the ground.

Nobody else moved. Cilo Mora smiled, as if the unpleasantness had never happened. The man in the dirt lay where he had fallen, unattended.

Fields were marked out using rubble from fallen Conurbation domes. Seeds were supplied, from precious stores preserved off-world. All around the city people toiled in the dirt, but there were machines too, hastily adapted and improvised.

For many, it went hard. There hadn’t been farmers on Earth for centuries, and the people of the Conurbation had all been office workers. Some fell ill, some died. But as the survivors’ hands hardened, so did their spirit, it seemed to Rala.

The crops began to grow. But the vegetables were sparse and thin. Rala thought she understood why – the poisoning of the soil was a legacy of the Qax – but nobody seemed to have any idea what to do about it.

The staple food continued to be the pale yellow ration tablets from the food holes. But just as under the old regime there was never enough to eat.

In the rest times they would gather, swapping bits of information.

Pash said, ‘The Coalition’s Green Army really does seem to be putting down the warlords.’ He seemed fascinated by developments, apparently forgetting he was one of those ‘warlords’ himself. ‘Of course having a Spline ship is a big help. But those clowns who follow Cilo around aren’t Army but another agency called the Green Guard. Amateurs, with a mission to cement the revolution.’

Rala whispered, ‘What this “revolution” comes down to is scratching at the dirt for food.’

‘We can’t use Qax technology any more,’ Ingre said. ‘It would be counter-progressive.’ Ingre was always mouthing phrases like this. She seemed to welcome the latest ideology. Rala wondered if she had been through too many shocks to be able to resist.

‘It’s not going to work,’ Rala said softly. ‘The Extirpation was pretty thorough. The Qax planted replicators in the soil, to make it lifeless.’ Their ultimate goal had been to wipe off the native ecology, to make the Earth uninhabited save for humans and the blue-green algae of the oceans, which would become great tanks of nutrient to feed their living Spline ships. ‘No amount of scraping with hoes is going to make the dirt green in a hurry.’

‘We have to support the Coalition,’ said Ingre. ‘It’s the way forward for mankind.’

Pash wasn’t listening to either of them. He said, ‘You’d never get in the Army, but those Green Guards are the gang to join. Most of them are pretty dumb; you can see that. A smart operator could rise pretty fast.’

They spoke like this only in brief snatches. There was always a collaborator about, always a spy ready to sell a story to the Guards for a bit of food.

The cuts began.

It was as if the Coalition believed that starvation would motivate the new shock troops of its uninterrupted revolution. Or perhaps they simply weren’t managing the food stocks competently. Soon the first signs of malnutrition appeared, swollen bellies among the children.

Rala had always kept her handful of replicator dust, from her old cell in the Conurbation. Now she found a hidden corner by the Conurbation walls, where she dug out the earth and sprinkled in a little of her dust. Still nothing happened.

One day Pash caught her doing experiments like this. By now he had fulfilled his ambition to become a Green Guard. The former trader had donned the green armband of his enemies with shameless ease.

She said, ‘Will you turn me in?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because I’m trying to use Qax technology. This action is doctrinally invalid.’

He shrugged. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘it’s not working.’

He frowned and poked at the dirt. ‘Do you know anything about this kind of technology? We used a human version in the Port Sol’s life support – cruder than this, of course. Nanotech manipulates matter at the molecular or atomic levels.’

‘It turns waste into food.’

‘Yes. But people seem to think it’s a magic dust, that you just throw at a heap of garbage to turn it into diamonds and steak.’

‘Diamonds? Steak?’

‘Never mind. There is nothing magic about this stuff. Nanotech is like biology. To “grow”, a nanotech product needs nutrients, and energy. On Sol we used a nutrient bath. This Qax stuff is more robust, and can draw what it needs from the environment, if it gets a chance.’

She thought about that. ‘You mean I have to feed it, like a plant.’

‘There is a lot of chemical energy stored in the environment. You can tap it slowly but efficiently, like plants or bacteria, or burn it rapidly but inefficiently, like a fire. This Qax technology is smart stuff; it releases energy more swiftly than biological cells but more efficiently than a fire. In principle a nano-sown field ought to do better than a biologically planted crop…’

She failed to understand many of the words he was using. Though she pressed him to explain further, to help her, he was too busy.

Meanwhile Ingre, Rala’s cadre sibling, became a problem.

Despite her ideological earnestness she was weak and ineffectual, and hated the work in the fields. A drone supervisor, a collaborator, one of her own people, punished Ingre more efficiently than any Guard would have done. And when that didn’t work in motivating Ingre to work better, she cut off Ingre’s food ration.

After that Ingre just lay on her bunk. At first she complained, or railed, or cried. But she grew weaker, and lay silent. Rala tried to share her own food. But there wasn’t enough; she was going hungry herself.

Rala grew desperate. She realised that the Guards, in their brutal incompetence, were actually going to allow Ingre to die, as they had many others. She could think of only one way of getting more food.

She wasn’t sexually inexperienced; even the Qax hadn’t been able to extirpate that. Pash was easy to seduce.

The sex wasn’t unpleasant, and Pash did nothing to hurt her. The oddest thing was the spacegoer’s exoskeleton he wore, even during sex; it was a web of silvery thread that lay over his skin. But she felt no affection for him, or – she suspected – he for her. Unspoken, they both knew that it was his power over her that excited him, not her body.

Still, she waited for several nights before she asked him for the extra food she needed to keep Ingre alive.

Meanwhile, in the Conurbation, things got worse. Despite the maintenance rotas the stairwells and corridors became filthy. The air circulation broke down. The inner cells became uninhabitable, and crowding increased. Then there was the violence. Rumours spread of food thefts, even a rape. Rala learned to hide her food when she walked the darker corridors, scuttling past walls marked with bright green tetrahedral sigils, the most common graffito.

The Conurbation was dying, Rala realised with slow amazement. It was as if the sky itself was falling. People spoke even more longingly of the Qax Occupation, and the security it had brought.

One day Pash came to her, excited. ‘Listen. There’s trouble. Factional infighting among the Green Guards.’

She closed her eyes. ‘You’re leaving, aren’t you?’

‘There’s a battle at a Conurbation a couple of days from here. There are great opportunities out there, kid.’

Rala felt sick; the world briefly swam. They had never discussed the child growing inside her, but Pash knew it existed, of course. It was a mistake; it hadn’t even occurred to her that the contraceptive chemistry which had circulated with the Conurbation’s water supply might have failed.

She hated herself for begging. ‘Don’t leave.’

He kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll come back.’

Of course he never did.

The brief factional war was won by a group of Green Guards called the Million Heroes. They wore a different kind of armband, had a different ranking system, and so forth. But day to day, under their third set of bosses since the Qax, little changed for the drones of Conurbation 2473; one set of rulers, it was turning out, was much the same as another.

By now most of the Conurbation’s systems had ceased functioning, and its inner core was dark and uninhabitable. Everybody worked in the fields, and some were even putting up crude shelters closer to where they worked, scavenging rock from the Conurbation’s walls.

Still Rala went hungry, and she increasingly worried about the child, and how she would cope with the work later in her pregnancy.

She remembered how Pash had said, or hinted, that the nano dust was like a plant. So she dug it up again and planted it away from the shade of the wall, in the sunlight.

Still, for days, nothing happened. But then she started to noticed pale yellow specks, embedded in the dirt. If you washed a handful of soil you could pick out particles of food. They tasted just as if they had come from a food hole. She improvised a sieve from a bit of cloth, to make the extraction more efficient.

That was when Ingre, for whose life Rala had prostituted herself, turned her in to the new authority.

Ingre, standing with one of the Million Heroes over the nano patch, seemed on the point of tears. ‘I had to do it,’ she said.

‘It’s all right,’ said Rala tiredly.

‘At least I can put an end to this irregularity.’ The Hero raised his weapon at the nano patch. He was perhaps seventeen years old.

Rala forced herself to stand before the weapon’s ugly snout. ‘Don’t destroy it.’

‘It’s anti-doctrinal.’

‘We can’t eat doctrine.’

‘That’s not the point,’ snapped the Hero.

Rala spread her hands. ‘Look around you. The Qax did a good job of making our world uninhabitable. They even levelled mountains. But this bit of Qax technology is reversing the process. Look at it this way. Perhaps we can use their own weapons against the Qax. Or is that against your doctrine?’

‘I don’t know. I’d have to ask my political officer.’ The Hero let the weapon drop. ‘I’m not changing my decision. I’m just postponing its implementation.’

Rala nodded sagely.

After that, as the weeks passed, she saw that the patch she had cultivated was spreading, a stain of a richer dark seeping through the ground. Her replicators were now turning soil and sunlight not just into food but into copies of themselves, and so spreading further, slowly, doggedly. The food she got from the ground became handfuls a day, almost enough to stave off the hunger that nagged at her constantly.

Ingre said to her, ‘You have a child. I knew they wouldn’t hurt you because of that.’

‘It’s OK, Ingre.’

‘Although betraying you was doctrinally the correct thing to do.’

‘I said it’s OK.’

‘The children are the future.’

Yes, thought Rala. But what future? We are insane, she thought, an insane species. As soon as the Qax get out of the way we start to rip each other apart. We rule each other with armbands, bits of rag. And now the Million Heroes are prepared to starve us all – they might still do it – for the sake of an abstract doctrine. Maybe we really were better off under the Qax.

But Ingre seemed eager for forgiveness. She worked in the dirt beside her cadre sibling, gazing earnestly at her.

So Rala forced a smile. ‘Yes,’ she said, and patted her belly. ‘Yes, the children are the future. Now here, help me with this sieve.’

Under their fingers, the alien nano seeds spread through the dirt of Earth.

During the churning of the post-Qax era, we undying, our actions during the Occupation misunderstood, were forced to flee.

The Interim Coalition of Governance consolidated its power, as such agencies do, and proved itself to be rather less than interim.

But from the ranks of the Coalition’s stultifying bureaucracy emerged one man whose strange genius would shape human history for twenty thousand years.

REALITY DUST

AD 5408

An explosion of light: the moment of her birth.

She cried out.

A sense of self flooded through her body. She had arms, legs; her limbs were flailing. She was falling, and glaring light wheeled about her.

... But she remembered another place: a black sky, a world – no, a moon – a face before her, smiling gently. This won’t hurt. Close your eyes.

A name. Callisto.

But the memories were dissipating. ‘No!’

She landed hard, face down, and was suffused by sudden pain. Her face was pressed into dust, rough, gritty particles, each as big as a moon to her staring eyes.

The flitter rose from liberated Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl. The little cylindrical craft tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling, and Hama Druz marvelled at the beauty of the mist-laden, subtly curved landscape swimming around him, drenched as it was in clear bright sunlight.

The scars of the Occupation were still visible. Away from the great Conurbations, much of the land glistened silver-grey where starbreaker beams and Qax nanoreplicators had chewed up the surface of the Earth, life and rocks and all, turning it into a featureless silicate dust.

‘But already,’ he pointed out eagerly, ‘life’s green is returning. Look, Nomi, there, and there…’

His companion, Nomi Ferrer, grunted sceptically. ‘But that greenery has nothing to do with edicts from your Interim Coalition of Governance, or all your philosophies. That’s the worms, Hama, turning Qax dust back into soil. Just the worms, that’s all.’

Hama would not be put off. Nomi, once a ragamuffin, was an officer in the Green Army, the most significant military force yet assembled in the wake of the departing Qax. She was forty years old, her body a solid slab of muscle, with burn marks disfiguring one cheek. And, in Hama’s judgement, she was much too sunk in cynicism.

He slapped her on the shoulder. ‘Quite right. And that’s how we must be, Nomi: like humble worms, content to toil in the darkness, to turn a few scraps of our land back the way they should be. That should be enough for any life.’

Nomi just snorted.

Already the two-seat flitter was beginning its descent, towards a Conurbation. Still known by its Qax registration of 11729, the Conurbation was a broad, glistening sprawl of bubble-dwellings blown from the bedrock, and linked by the green-blue of umbilical canals. Hama saw that many of the dome-shaped buildings had been scarred by fire, some even cracked open. But the blue-green tetrahedral sigil of free Earth had been daubed on every surface.

A shadow passed over the Conurbation’s glistening rooftops. Hama shielded his eyes and squinted upwards. A fleshy cloud briefly eclipsed the sun. It was a Spline ship: a living starship kilometres across, its hardened epidermis pocked with monitor and weapon emplacements. He suppressed a shudder. For generations the Spline had been the symbol of Qax dominance. But now the Qax had gone, and this abandoned Spline was in the hands of human engineers, who sought to comprehend its strange biological workings.

On the outskirts of the Conurbation there was a broad pit scooped out of the ground, its crudely scraped walls denoting its origin as post-Occupation: human, not Qax. In this pit rested a number of silvery, insectile forms, and as the flitter fell further through the sunlit air, Hama could see people moving around the gleaming shapes, talking, working. The pit was a shipyard, operated by and for humans, who were slowly rediscovering yet another lost art; for no human engineer had built a spacecraft on Earth for three hundred years.

Hama pressed his face to the window – like a child, he knew, reinforcing Nomi’s preconception of him – but to Lethe with self-consciousness. ‘One of those ships is going to take us to Callisto. Imagine it, Nomi – a moon of Jupiter!’

But Nomi scowled. ‘Just remember why we’re going there: to hunt out jasofts – criminals and collaborators. It will be a grim business, Hama, no matter how pretty the scenery.’

The flitter slid easily through the final phases of its descent, and the domes of the Conurbation loomed around them.

There was a voice, talking fast, almost babbling.

‘There is no time. There is no space. We live in a universe of static shapes. Do you see? Imagine a grain of dust that represents all the particles in our universe, frozen in time. Imagine a stupendous number of such dust grains, representing all the possible shapes the particles can take. This is reality dust, a dust of the Nows. And each grain is an instant, in a possible history of the universe.’ A snapping of fingers. ‘There. There. There. Each moment, each juggling of the particles, a new grain. The reality dust contains all the arrangements of matter there could ever be. Reality dust is an image of eternity…’

She lay there, face pressed into the dirt, wishing none of this was happening.

Hands grabbed her, by shoulder and hip. She was dragged, flipped over on her back. The sky above was dazzling bright.

A face loomed, silhouetted. She saw a hairless scalp, no eyebrows or lashes. The face itself was rounded, smoothed over, as if unformed. But she had a strong impression of great age.

‘This won’t hurt,’ she whispered, terrified. ‘Close your eyes.’

The face loomed closer. ‘Nothing here is real.’ The voice was harsh, without inflection. A man? ‘Not even the dust.’

‘Reality dust,’ she murmured.

‘Yes. Yes! It is reality dust. If you live, remember that.’

The face receded, turning away.

She tried to sit up. She pressed her hands into the loose dust, crushing low, crumbling structures, like the tunnels of worms. She glimpsed a flat horizon, a black, oily sea, forest-covered hills. She was on a beach of silvery, dusty sand. The sky was a glowing dome. The air was full of mist; she couldn’t see far in any direction, as if she were trapped in a glowing bubble.

Her companion was mid-sized, his body shapeless and sexless. He was dressed in a coverall of a nondescript colour. He cast no shadow in the bright diffuse light.

She glanced down at herself. She was wearing a similar coverall. She fingered its smooth fabric, baffled.

The man was walking slowly, limping, as though exhausted. Walking away, leaving her alone.

‘Please,’ she said.

Without stopping, he called back, ‘If you stay there you’ll die.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Pharaoh. That is all the name I have left, at any rate.’

She thought hard. Those sharp birth memories had fled, but still … ‘Callisto, My name is Callisto.’

Pharaoh laughed. ‘Of course it is.’

Without warning, pain swamped her right hand. She snatched it to her chest. The skin felt as if it had been drenched in acid.

The sea had risen, she saw, and the black, lapping fluid had covered her hand. Where the fluid had touched, the flesh was flaking away, turning to chaotic dust, exposing sketchy bones that crumbled and fell in thin slivers.

She screamed. She had only been here a moment, and already such a terrible thing had happened.

Pharaoh limped back to her. ‘Think beyond the pain.’

‘I can’t—’

‘Think. There is no pain.’

And, as he said it, she realised it was true. Her hand was gone, her arm terminating in a smooth, rounded stump. But it didn’t hurt. How could that be?

‘What do you feel?’

‘Diminished,’ she said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’re learning. There is no pain here. Only forgetting.’

The black, sticky fluid was lapping near her legs. She scrambled away. But when she tried to use her missing right hand she stumbled, falling flat.

Pharaoh locked his hand under her arm and hauled her to her feet. The brief exertion seemed to exhaust him; his face smoothed further, as if blurring. ‘Go,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Away from the sea.’ And he pushed her, feebly, away from the ocean.

She looked that way doubtfully. The beach sloped upward sharply; it would be a difficult climb. Above the beach there was what looked like a forest, tall shapes like trees, a carpet of something like grass. She saw people moving in the darkness between the trees. But the forest was dense, a place of colourless, flat shadows, made grey by the mist.

She looked back. Pharaoh was standing where she had left him, a pale, smoothed-over figure just a few paces from the lapping, encroaching sea, already dimmed by the thick white mist.

She called, ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘Go.’

‘I’m afraid.’

‘Asgard. Help her.’

Callisto turned.

There was a woman, not far away, crawling over the beach. She seemed to be plucking stray grass blades from the dust, cramming them into her mouth. Her face was a mask of wrinkles, complex, textured – a stark contrast to Pharaoh’s smoothed-over countenance. Querulous, the woman snapped, ‘Why should I?’

‘Because I once helped you.’

The woman got to her feet, growling.

Callisto quailed from her. But Asgard took her good hand and began to haul her up the beach.

Callisto looked back once more. The oil-black sea lapped thickly over a flat, empty beach. Pharaoh had gone.

As they made their way to Hama’s assigned office, Nomi drew closer to Hama’s side, keeping her weapons obvious.

The narrow corridors of Conurbation 11729 were grievously damaged by fire and weaponry – scars inflicted not by Qax, but by humans. In some places there was even a smell of burning.

And the corridors were crowded: not just with former inhabitants of the Qax-built city, but with others Hama couldn’t help but think of as outsiders.

There were ragamuffins – like Nomi herself – the product of generations who had waited out the Occupation in the ruins of ancient human cities, and other corners of wilderness Earth. And there were returned refugees, the descendants of people who had fled to the outer moons and even beyond Sol system to escape the Qax’s powerful, if inefficient, grasp. Some of these returned space travellers were exotic indeed, with skin darkened by the light of other stars, and frames made spindly or squat by other gravities – even eyes replaced by Eyes, mechanical supplements. And most of them had hair: hair sprouting wildly from their heads and even their faces, in colours of varying degrees of outrage. They made the Conurbation’s Occupation-era inhabitants, with their drab robes and shaven heads, look like characterless drones.

The various factions eyed each other with suspicion, even hostility; Hama saw no signs of unity among liberated mankind.

Hama’s office turned out to be a spacious room, the walls lined with data slates. It even had a natural-light window, overlooking a swathe of the Conurbation and the lands beyond. This prestigious room had once, of course, been assigned to a jasoft – a human collaborator administering Earth on behalf of the Qax – and Hama felt a deep reluctance to enter it.

For Hama, up to now, the liberation had been painless, a time of opportunity and freedom, like a wonderful game. But that, he knew, was about to change. Hama Druz, twenty-five years old, had been assigned to the Commission for Historical Truth, the tribunal appointed to investigate and try collaboration crimes. His job was to hunt out jasofts.

Some of these collaborators were said to be pharaohs, kept alive by Qax technology, perhaps for centuries … Some, it was said, were even survivors of the pre-Occupation period, when human science had advanced enough to beat back death. If the jasofts were hated, the pharaohs had been despised most of all; for the longer they had lived, the more loyalty they owed to the Qax, and the more effectively they administered the Qax regime. And that regime had become especially brutal after a flawed human rebellion more than a century earlier.

Hama, accompanied by Nomi, would spend a few days here, acquainting himself with the issues around the collaborators. But to complete his assignment he would have to travel far beyond the Earth: to Jupiter’s moon, Callisto, in fact. There – according to records kept during the Occupation by the jasofts themselves – a number of pharaohs had fled to a science station maintained by one of their number, a man named Reth Cana.

For the next few days Hama worked through the data slates assembled for him, and received visitors, petitions, claimants. He quickly learned that there were many issues here beyond the crimes of the collaborator class.

The Conurbation itself faced endless problems day to day. The Conurbations had been deliberately designed by the Qax as temporary cities. It was all part of the grand strategy of the latter Occupation; the Qax’s human subjects were not allowed ties of family, of home, of loyalty to anybody or anything – except perhaps the Occupation itself. A Conurbation wasn’t a home; sooner or later you would be moved on.

The practical result was that the hastily constructed Conurbation was quickly running down. Hama read gloomily through report after report of silting-up canals and failing heating or lighting and crumbling dwelling places. People were sickening of diseases long thought vanished from the planet – even hunger had returned.

And then there were the wars.

The aftermath of the Qax’s withdrawal – the overnight removal of the government of Earth after three centuries – had been extremely turbulent. In less than a month humans had begun fighting humans once more. It had taken a chaotic half-year before the Coalition had coalesced, and even now, around the planet, brushfire battles still raged against warlords armed with Qax weaponry.

It had been the jasofts, of course, who had been the focus of the worst conflicts. In many places jasofts, including pharaohs, had been summarily executed. Elsewhere the jasofts had gone into hiding, or fled off-world, or had even fought back. The Coalition had quelled the bloodshed by promising that the collaborators would be brought to justice before its new Commission for Historical Truth.

But Hama – alone in his office, poring over his data slates – knew that justice was easier promised than delivered. How were short-lived humans – dismissively called mayflies by the pharaohs – to try crimes that might date back centuries? There were no witnesses save the pharaohs themselves; no formal records save those maintained under the Occupation; no testimony save a handful of legends preserved through the endless dissolutions of the Conurbations; not even any physical evidence since the Qax’s great Extirpation had wiped the Earth clean of its past.

What made it even more difficult, Hama was slowly discovering, was that the jasofts were useful.

It was a matter of compromise, of practical politics. The jasofts knew how the world worked, on the mundane level of keeping people alive, for they had administered the planet for centuries. So some jasofts – offered amnesties for cooperating – were discreetly running parts of Earth’s new, slowly coalescing administration under the Coalition, just as they had under the Qax.

And meanwhile, children were going hungry.

Hama had, subtly, protested against his new assignment. He felt his strength lay in philosophy, in abstraction. He longed to rejoin the debates going on in great constitutional conventions all over the planet, as the human race, newly liberated from the Qax, sought a new way to govern itself.

But his appeal against reassignment had been turned down. There was simply too much to do now, too great a mess to clear up, and too few able and trustworthy people available to do it.

As he witnessed the clamour of the crowds around the failing food dispensers, Hama felt a deep determination that things should be fixed, that such a situation as this should not recur. And yet, to his shame, he looked forward to escaping from all this complexity to the cool open spaces of the Jovian system.

It was while he was in this uncertain mood that the pharaoh sought him out.

Asgard led her to the fringe of the forest. There, ignoring Callisto, she hunkered down and began to pull at strands of grass, ripping them from the ground and pushing them into her mouth.

Callisto watched doubtfully. ‘What should I do?’

Asgard shrugged. ‘Eat.’

Reluctantly Callisto got to her knees. Favouring her truncated arm, it was difficult to keep her balance. With her left hand she pulled a few blades of the grass stuff from the dust. She crammed the grass into her mouth and chewed. It was moist, tasteless, slippery. She found that the grass blades weren’t connected to roots. Rather they seemed to blend back into the dust, to the tube-like structures there.

People moved through the shadows of the forest, digging at the roots with their bare hands, pushing fragments of food into their faces.

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Callisto.’

Asgard grunted. ‘Your dream-name.’

‘I remembered it.’

‘No, you dreamed.’

‘What is this place?’

‘It isn’t a place.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘It has no name.’ Asgard held up a blade of grass. ‘What colour is this?’

‘Green,’ Callisto said immediately. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t green. What colour, then? She realised she couldn’t say.

Asgard laughed, and shoved the blade in her mouth.

Callisto looked down the beach. ‘What happened to Pharaoh?’

Asgard shrugged. ‘He might be dead by now. Washed away by the sea.’

‘Why doesn’t he come up here, where it’s safe?’

‘Because he’s weak. Weak and mad.’

‘He saved me from the sea.’

‘He helps all the newborns.’

‘Why?’

‘How should I know? But it’s futile. The ocean rises and falls. Every time it comes a little closer, higher up the beach. Soon it will lap right up here, to the forest itself.’

‘We’ll have to go into the forest.’

‘Try that and Night will kill you.’

Night? Callisto looked into the forest’s darkness, and shuddered.

Asgard eyed Callisto with curiosity, no sympathy. ‘You really are a newborn, aren’t you?’ She dug her hand into the dust, shook it until a few grains were left on her palm. ‘You know what the first thing Pharaoh said to me was? “Nothing is real.”’

‘Yes—’

‘“Not even the dust. Because every grain is a whole world.”’ She looked up at Callisto, calculating.

Callisto gazed at the sparkling grains, wondering, baffled, frightened. Too much strangeness.

I want to go home, she thought desperately. But where, and what, is home?

Two women walked into Hama’s office: one short, squat, her face a hard mask, and the other apparently younger, taller, willowy. They both wore bland, rather scuffed Occupation-era robes – as he did – and their heads were shaven bare.

The older woman met his gaze steadily. ‘My name is Gemo Cana. This is my daughter. She is called Sarfi.’

Hama eyed them with brief curiosity. The daughter, Sarfi, averted her eyes. She looked very young, and her face was thin, her skin sallow.

This was a routine appointment. Gemo Cana was, supposedly, a representative of a citizens’ group concerned about details of the testimony being heard by the preliminary hearings of the Truth Commission. The archaic words of family – daughter, mother – were still strange to Hama, but they were becoming increasingly more common, as the era of the Qax cadres faded from memory.

He welcomed them with his standard opening remarks. ‘My name is Hama Druz. I am an adviser to the Interim Coalition and specifically to the Commission for Historical Truth. I will listen to whatever you wish to tell me and will help you any way I can; but you must understand that my role here is not formal, and—’

‘You’re tired,’ Gemo Cana said.

‘What?’

She stepped forward and studied him, her gaze direct, disconcerting. ‘It’s harder than you thought, isn’t it? Running an office, a city – a world. Especially as you must work by persuasion, consent.’ She walked around the room, ran a finger over the data slates fixed on the walls, and paused before the window, gazing out at the glistening rooftops of the Conurbation, the muddy blue-green of the canals. Hama could see the Spline ship rolling in the sky, a wrinkled moon. She said, ‘It was difficult enough in the era of the Qax, whose authority, backed by Spline gunships, was unquestionable.’

‘And,’ asked Hama, ‘how exactly do you know that?’

‘This used to be one of my offices.’

Hama reached immediately for his desktop.

‘Please.’ The girl, Sarfi, reached out towards him, then seemed to think better of it. ‘Don’t call your guards. Hear us out.’

He stood. ‘You’re a jasoft. Aren’t you, Gemo Cana?’

‘Oh, worse than that,’ Gemo murmured. ‘I’m a pharaoh … You know, I have missed this view. The Qax knew what they were doing when they gave us jasofts the sunlight.’

She was the first pharaoh Hama had encountered face to face. Before her easy authority, her sense of dusty age, Hama felt young, foolish, his precious philosophies half-formed. And he found himself staring at the girl; he hadn’t even known pharaohs could have children.

Deliberately he looked away, seeking a way to regain control of the situation. ‘You’ve been in hiding.’

Gemo inclined her head. ‘I spent a long time working in offices like this one, Hama Druz. Longer than you can imagine. I always knew the day would come when the Qax would leave us exposed, us pharaohs.’

‘So you prepared.’

‘Wouldn’t you? I was doing my duty. I didn’t want to die for it.’

‘Your duty to Qax occupiers?’

‘No,’ she said, a note of weariness in her voice. ‘You seem more intelligent than the rest; I had hoped you might understand that much. It was a duty to mankind, of course. It always was.’

He tapped a data slate on his desk. ‘Gemo Cana. I should have recognised the name. You are one of the most hunted jasofts. Your testimony before the Commission—’

She snapped, ‘I’m not here to surrender, Hama Druz, but to ask for your help.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I know about your mission to Callisto. To the enclave there. Reth has been running a science station since before the Occupation. Now you are going out there to close him down.’

He said grimly, ‘These last few years have not been a time for science.’

She nodded. ‘So you believe science is a luxury, a plaything for easier times. But science is a thread in the tapestry of our humanity – a thread Reth has maintained. Do you even know what he is doing out there?’

‘Something to do with life forms in the ice—’

‘Oh, much more than that. Reth has been exploring the nature of reality – seeking a way to abolish time itself.’ She smiled coolly. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. But it has been a fitting goal, in an era when the Qax have sought to obliterate human history – to abolish the passage of time from human consciousness…’

He frowned. Abolishing time? Such notions were strange to him, meaningless. He said, ‘We have evidence that the science performed on Callisto was only a cover – that many pharaohs fled there during the chaotic period following the Qax withdrawal.’

‘Only a handful. There only ever was a handful of us, you know. And now that some have achieved a more fundamental escape, into death, there are fewer than ever.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to take us there.’

‘To Callisto?’

‘We will remain in your custody, you and your guards. You may restrain us as you like. We will not try anything – heroic. All we want is sanctuary. They will kill us, you see.’

‘The Commission is not a mob.’

She ignored that. ‘I am not concerned for myself, but for my daughter. Sarfi has nothing to do with this; she is no jasoft.’

‘Then she will not be harmed.’

Gemo just laughed.

‘You are evading justice, Gemo Cana.’

She leaned forward, resting her hands on the desk nonchalantly; this really had once been her office, he realised. ‘There is no justice here,’ she hissed. ‘How can there be? I am asking you to spare my daughter’s life. Later, I will gladly return to face whatever inquisition you choose to set up.’

‘Why would this Reth help you?’

‘His name is Reth Cana,’ she said. ‘He is my brother. Do you understand? Not my cadre sibling. My brother.’

Gemo Cana; Reth Cana; Sarfi Cana. In the Qax world, families had been a thing for ragamuffins and refugees, and human names had become arbitrary labels; the coincidence of names had meant nothing to Hama. But to these ancient survivors, a shared name was a badge of kinship. He glanced at Gemo and Sarfi, uneasy in the presence of these close primitive ties, of mother and brother and daughter.

Abruptly the door opened. Nomi Ferrer walked in, reading from a data slate. ‘Hama, your ship is ready to go. But I think we have to—’ She looked up, and took in the scene at a glance. In an instant she was at Gemo’s side, with a laser pistol pressed against the pharaoh’s throat. ‘Gemo Cana,’ she hissed. ‘How did you get in here?’

Sarfi stepped towards Nomi, hands fluttering like birds.

Hama held up his hand. ‘Nomi, wait.’

Nomi was angered. ‘Wait for what? Standing orders, Hama. This is a Category One jasoft who hasn’t presented herself to the Commission. I should already have killed her.’

Gemo smiled thinly. ‘It isn’t so easy, is it, Hama Druz? You can theorise all you want about justice and retribution. But here, in this office, you must confront the reality of a mother and her child.’

Sarfi said to Hama, ‘If your guard kills my mother, she kills me too.’

‘No,’ said Hama. ‘We aren’t barbarians. You have nothing to fear—’

Sarfi reached out and swept her arm down at the desk – no, Hama saw, startled; her arm passed through the desk, briefly breaking up into a cloud of pixels, boxes of glowing colour.

‘You’re a Virtual,’ he whispered.

‘Yes. And do you want to know where I live?’ She stepped up to her mother and pushed her hand into Gemo’s skull.

Gemo observed his lack of comprehension. ‘You don’t know much about us, do you, even though you presume to judge us? Hama, pharaohs rarely breed true.’

‘Your daughter was mortal?’

‘The Qax’s gift was ambiguous. We watched our children grow old and die. That was our reward for serving the Qax; perhaps your Commission will accept that historical truth. And when she died—’

‘When she died, you downloaded her into your head?’

‘Nowhere else was safe,’ Gemo said. ‘And I was glad to, um, make room for her. I have lived a long time; there were memories I was happy to shed.’

Nomi said harshly, ‘But she isn’t your daughter. She’s a copy.’

Gemo closed her eyes. ‘But she’s all I have left.’

Hama felt moved, and repelled, by this act of obsessive love.

Sarfi looked away, as if ashamed.

There was a low concussion. The floor shuddered. Hama could hear running footsteps, cries.

Nomi Ferrer understood immediately. ‘Lethe. That was an explosion.’

The light dropped, as if some immense shadow were passing over the sky. Hama ran to the window.

All around the Conurbation, ships were lifting, hauled into the sky by silent technology, an eerie rising. But they entered a sky that was already crowded, darkened by the rolling, meaty bulk of a Spline craft, from whose flanks fire spat.

Hama cringed from the brute physical reality of the erupting conflict. And he knew who to blame. ‘It’s the jasofts,’ he said. ‘The ones taken to orbit to help with the salvaging of the Spline. They took it over. And now they’ve come here, to rescue their colleagues.’

Gemo Cana smiled, squinting up at the sky. ‘Sadly, stupidity is not the sole prerogative of mayflies. This counter-coup cannot succeed. And then, when this Spline no longer darkens the sky, your vengeance will not be moderated by show trials and bleats about justice and truth. You must save us, Hama Druz. Now!’

Sarfi pressed her hands to her face.

Hama stared at Gemo. ‘You knew. You knew this was about to happen. You timed your visit to force me to act.’

‘It’s all very complicated, Hama Druz,’ Gemo said softly, manipulating. ‘Don’t you think so? Get us out of here – all of us – and sort it out later.’

Nomi pulled back the pharaoh’s head. ‘You know what I think? I think you’re a monster, pharaoh. I think you killed your daughter, long ago, and stuck her in your head. An insurance against a day like today.’

Gemo, her face twisted by Nomi’s strong fingers, forced a smile. ‘Even if that were true, what difference would it make?’ And she gazed at Hama, waiting for his decision.

Obeying Nomi’s stern voice commands, the ship rose sharply. Hama felt no sense of acceleration as shadows slipped over his lap.

This small craft was little more than a translucent hemisphere. In fact it would serve as a lifedome, part of a greater structure waiting in Earth orbit to propel him across Sol system. The three of them, plus Sarfi, were jammed into a cabin made for two. The Virtual girl was forced to share the space already occupied by Hama and Gemo. Where her projection intersected their bodies it dimmed and broke up, and she averted her face; Hama was embarrassed by this brutal indignity.

The ship emerged from its pit and rushed directly beneath the looming belly of the attacking Spline; Hama had a brief, ugly glimpse of fleeing, crumpled flesh, oozing scars metres long, glistening weapon emplacements like stab wounds.

The ship reached clear sky. The air was crowded. Ships of all sizes cruised above Conurbation 11729, seeking to engage the rogue Spline. Hama saw, with a sinking heart, that one of the ancient, half-salvaged ships had already crashed back to Earth. It had made a broad crater, a wound in the ground circled by burning blown-silicate buildings. Already people had died today, irreplaceable lives lost for ever.

The ship soared upward. Earth quickly folded over into a glowing blue abstraction, pointlessly beautiful, hiding the gruesome scenes on its surface; the air thinned, the sky dimming through violet, to black. The ship began to seek out the orbiting angular structure that would carry it to the outer planets.

Hama began to relax, for the first time since Gemo had revealed herself. Despite everything that had happened he was relieved to leave behind the complications of the Conurbation; perhaps in the thin light of Jupiter the dilemmas he would have to face would be simpler.

Gemo Cana said carefully, ‘Hama Druz, tell me something. Now that we all know who and what we are—’

‘Yes?’

‘In your searching, has your inquisition turned up a pharaoh called Luru Parz?’

‘She’s on the list but I don’t believe she’s been found,’ Hama said. ‘Why? Did you know her?’

‘In a way. You could say I created her, in fact. She was always the best of us, I thought, the best and brightest, once she had clarified her conscience. I thought of her as a daughter.’

The Virtual copy of her real daughter, Sarfi, turned away, expressionless.

Nomi cursed.

A vast winged shape sailed over the blue hide of Earth, silent, like a predator.

Hama’s heart sank at the sight of this new, unexpected intruder. What now?

Nomi said softly, ‘Those wings must be hundreds of kilometres across.’

‘Ah,’ said Gemo. ‘Just like the old stories. The ship is like a sycamore seed … But none of you remembers sycamore trees, do you? Perhaps you need us, and our memories, after all.’

Nomi said, anger erupting, ‘People are dying down there because of your kind, Gemo—’

Hama placed a hand on Nomi’s arm. ‘Tell us, pharaoh. Is it Qax?’

‘Not Qax,’ she said. ‘Xeelee.’ It was the first time Hama had heard the name. ‘That is a Xeelee nightfighter,’ said Gemo. ‘The question is – what does it want here?’

There was a soft warning chime.

The ship shot away from Earth. The planet dwindled, becoming a sparking blue bauble over which a black-winged insect crawled.

Callisto joined the community of foragers.

Dwelling where the forest met the beach, the people ate the grass, and sometimes leaves from the lower branches, even loose flaps of bark. The people were wary, solitary. She didn’t learn their names – if they had any – nor gained a clear impression of their faces, their sexes. She wasn’t even sure how many of them there were here. Not many, she thought.

Callisto found herself eating incessantly. With every mouthful she took she felt herself grow, subtly, in some invisible direction – the opposite to the diminution she had suffered when she lost her hand to the burning power of the sea. There was nothing to drink – no fluid save the oily black ink of the ocean, and she wasn’t tempted to try that. But it didn’t seem to matter.

Callisto was not without curiosity. She explored, fitfully.

The beach curved away, in either direction. Perhaps this was an island, poking out of the looming black ocean. There was no bedrock, not as far as she could dig. Only the drifting, uniform dust.

Tiring of Asgard’s cold company, she plucked up her courage and walked away from the beach, towards the forest.

There were structures in the dust: crude tubes and trails, like the markings of worms or crabs. The grass emerged, somehow, coalescing from looser dust formations. The grass grew sparsely on the open beach, but at the fringe of the forest it gathered in dense clumps.

Deeper inside the forest’s gathering darkness the grass grew longer yet, plaiting itself into ropy vine-like plants. And deeper still she saw things like trees looming tall, plaited in turn out of the vines. Thus the trees weren’t really ‘trees’ but tangles of ropy vines. And everything was connected to everything else.

She pushed deeper into the forest. Away from the lapping of the sea and the wordless rustle of the foraging people at the forest fringe, it grew dark, quiet. Grass ropes wrapped around her legs, tugging, yielding with reluctance as she passed. This was a drab, still, lifeless place, she thought. In a forest like this there ought to be texture: movement, noise, scent. So, anyhow, her flawed memories dimly protested.

She came to a particularly immense tree. It was a tangle of grassy ropes, melding above her head into a more substantial whole that rose above the surrounding vegetative mass and into the light of the sky. But a low mist lay heavily, obscuring her view of the tree’s upper branches.

She felt curiosity spark. What could she see if she climbed above the mist?

She placed her hand on the knotted-up lower trunk, then one foot, and then the other. The stuff of the tree was hard and cold.

At first the climbing was easy, the components of the ‘trunk’ loosely separated. She found a way to lodge her bad arm in gaps in the trunk so she could release her left hand briefly, and grab for a new handhold before she fell back. But as she climbed higher the ropy sub-trunks grew ever more tangled.

High above her the trunk soared upwards, daunting, disappearing into the mist. When she looked down, she saw how the ‘roots’ of this great structure dispersed over the forest floor, branching into narrower trees and vine-thin creepers and at last clumps of grass, melting into the underlying dust. She felt unexpectedly exhilarated by this small adventure—

There was a snarl, of greed and anger. It came from just above her head. She quailed, slipped. She finished up dangling by her one hand.

She looked up.

It was human. Or, it might once have been human. It must have been four, five times her size. It was naked, and it clung to the tree above her, upside down, so that a broad face leered, predator’s eyes fixed on her. Its limbs were cylinders of muscle, its chest and bulging belly massive, weighty. And it was male: an erection poked crudely between its legs. She hadn’t been able to see it for the mist, until she had almost climbed into it.

It thrust its mouth at her, hissing. She could smell blood on its breath.

She screamed and lost her grip.

She fell, sliding down the trunk. She scrabbled for purchase with her feet and her one good hand. She slammed repeatedly against the trunk, and when she hit the ground the wind was knocked out of her.

Above her, the beast receded, still staring into her eyes.

Ignoring the aches of battered body and torn feet, she blundered away, running until she reached the openness of the beach. For an unmeasured time she lay there, drawing comfort from the graininess of the dust.

The craft was called a GUTship.

As finally assembled, it looked something like a parasol of iron and ice. The canopy of the parasol was the surface ferry, now serving as a habitable lifedome, and the ‘handle’ was the GUTdrive unit itself, embedded in a block of asteroid ice which served as reaction mass. The shaft of the parasol, separating the lifedome from the drive unit, was a kilometre-long spine of metal bristling with antennae and sensors.

In a hundred subtle ways the ship showed its age. Every surface in the lifedome was scuffed and polished from use, the soft coverings of chairs and bunks were extensively patched, and many of the major systems bore the scars of rebuilding. The design was centuries old. The ship itself had been built long before the Occupation, and lovingly maintained by a colony of refugees who had seen out the Qax era huddled in the asteroid belt.

GUT, it seemed, was an acronym for Grand Unified Theory. Once, Gemo whispered, unified-theory energy had fuelled the expansion of the universe. In the heart of each GUT engine asteroid ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity – the Big Bang. There, the fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single unified superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel asteroid matter as a vapour rocket.

Remarkable, exotic, strange. This might be a primitive ship compared to a mighty Spline vessel, but Hama had never dreamed that mere humans had once mastered such technologies.

But when they were underway, with the lifedome opaqued over and all the strangeness shut out, none of that mattered. To Hama it was like being back in the Conurbations, in the enclosed, claustrophobic days before the Occupation was lifted. A deep part of his mind seemed to believe that what lay beyond these walls – occupied Earth, or endless universe – did not matter, so long as he was safe and warm. He felt comfortable in his mobile prison, and was guilty to feel that way.

All that changed when they reached Callisto.

The sun was shrunk to the tiniest of discs by Jupiter’s remoteness, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Hama held up his hand it cast sharp, straight shadows, the shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth.

And through this rectilinear, reduced light, Callisto swam.

They entered a wide, slow orbit around the ice moon. The satellite was like a dark, misty twin of Earth’s Moon. Its surface was crowded with craters – even more so than the Moon’s, for there were none of the giant lava-flood seas that smoothed over much lunar terrain. The largest craters were complex structures, plains of pale ice surrounded by multiple arcs of folded and cracked land, like ripples frozen into shattered ice and rock. Some of these features were the size of continents, large enough to stretch around this lonely moon’s curved horizon, evidently the results of immense, terrifying impacts.

But these great geological sculptures were oddly smoothed out, the cracks and ripples reduced to shallow ridges. Unlike Earth’s rocky Moon, Callisto was made of rock and water ice. Over billions of years the ice had suffered viscous relaxation; it flowed and slumped. The most ancient craters had simply subsided, like geological sighs, leaving these spectacular palimpsests.

‘The largest impact structure is called Valhalla,’ Gemo was saying. ‘Once there were human settlements all along the northern faces of the circular ridges. All dark now, of course – save where Reth has made his base.’

Nomi grunted, uninterested in tourism. ‘Then that’s where we land.’

Hama gazed out. ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘I never imagined—’

Gemo said caustically, ‘You are a drone of the Occupation. You never imagined a universe beyond the walls of your Conurbation, you never even saw the sunlight, you have never lived. You have no memory. And yet you presume to judge. Do you even know why Callisto is so-called? It is an ancient myth. Callisto was a nymph, beloved of Zeus and hated by jealous Hera, who metamorphosed her into a bear…’ She seemed to sense Hama’s bafflement. ‘Ah, but you don’t even remember the Gree-chs, do you?’

Nomi confronted her. ‘You administered the Extirpation, pharaoh. Your arrogance over the memories you took from us is—’

‘Ill-mannered,’ Hama said smoothly, and he touched Nomi’s shoulder, seeking to calm the situation. ‘A lack of grace that invalidates her assumption of superiority over us. Don’t concern yourself, Nomi. She condemns herself and her kind every time she speaks.’

Gemo glared at him, full of contempt.

But now Jupiter rose.

The four of them crowded to see. They bobbed in the air like balloons, thrust into weightlessness now the drive was shut down.

The largest of planets was a dish of muddy light, of cloudy bands, pink and purple and brown. Where the bands met, Hama could see fine lines of turbulence, swoops and swirls like a lunatic water-colour. But a single vast storm disfigured those smooth bands, twisting and stirring them right across the southern hemisphere of the planet, as if the whole of Jupiter were being sucked into some central maw.

As perhaps it was. There was a legend that, a century before, human rebels called the Friends of Wigner had climaxed their revolt by escaping back through time, across thousands of years, and had hurled a black hole into the heart of Jupiter. The knot of compressed spacetime was already distorting Jupiter’s immense, dreamy structure, and perhaps in time would destroy the great world altogether. It was a fantastic story, probably no more than a tale spun for comfort during the darkest hours of Occupation. Still, it was clear that something was wrong with Jupiter. Nobody knew the truth – except perhaps the pharaohs, and they would say nothing.

Hama saw how Sarfi, entranced, tried to rest her hand against the lifedome’s smooth transparency. But her hand sank into the surface, crumbling, and she snatched it away quickly. Such incidents seemed to cause Sarfi deep distress – as if she had been programmed with deep taboos about violating the physical laws governing ‘real’ humans. Perhaps it even hurt her when such breaches occurred.

Gemo Cana did not appear to notice her daughter’s pain.

The lifedome neatly detached itself from the ship’s drive section and swept smoothly down from orbit. Hama watched the moon’s folded-over, crater-starred landscape flatten out, the great circular ramparts of Valhalla marching over the close horizon.

The lifedome settled to the ice with the gentlest of crunches. A walkway extended from a darkened building block and nuzzled hesitantly against the ship. A hatch sighed open.

Hama stood in the hatchway. The walkway was a transparent, shimmering tube before him, concealing little of the silver-black morphology of the collapsed landscape beyond. The main feature was the big Valhalla ridge, of course. Seen this close it was merely a rise in the land, a scarp that marched to either horizon: it would have been impossible to tell from the ground that this was in fact part of a circular rampart surrounding a continent-sized impact scar, and Hama felt insignificant, dwarfed.

He forced himself to take the first step along the walkway.

To walk through Callisto’s crystal stillness was enchanting; he floated between footsteps in great bounds. The gravity here was about an eighth of Earth’s, comparable to the Moon’s.

Gemo mocked his pleasure. ‘You are like Armm-stron and Alldinn on the Moon.’

Nomi growled, ‘More Gree-chs, pharaoh?’

Reth Cana was waiting to meet them at the end of the walkway. He was short, squat, with a scalp of crisp white hair, and he wore a practical-looking coverall of some papery fabric. He was scowling at them, his face a round wrinkled mask. Beyond him, Hama glimpsed extensive chambers, dug into the ice, dimly lit by a handful of floating globe lamps – extensive, but deserted.

Hama’s gaze was drawn back to Reth. He looks like Gemo.

Gemo stepped forward now, and she and Reth faced each other, brother and sister separated for centuries. They were like copies of each other, subtly morphed. Stiffly, they embraced. Sarfi hung back, watching, hands folded before her.

Hama felt excluded, almost envious of this piece of complex humanity. How must it be to be bound to another person by such strong ties – for life?

Reth stepped away from his sister and inspected Sarfi. Without warning he swept his clenched fist through the girl’s belly. He made a trail of disrupted pixels, like a fleshy comet. Sarfi crumpled over, crying out. The sudden brutality shocked Hama.

Reth laughed. ‘A Virtual? I didn’t suspect you were so sentimental, Gemo.’

Gemo stepped forward, her mouth working. ‘But I remember your cruelty.’

Now Reth faced Hama. ‘And this is the one sent by Earth’s new junta of children.’

Hama shrank before Reth’s arrogance and authority. His accent was exotic – antique, perhaps; there was a rustle of history about this man. Hama tried to keep his voice steady. ‘I have a specific assignment here, sir—’

Reth snorted. ‘My work, a project of centuries, deals with the essence of reality itself. It is an achievement of which you have no understanding. If you had a glimmer of sensitivity you would leave now. Just as, if you and your mayfly friends had any true notion of duty, you would abandon your petty attempts at governing and leave it to us.’

Nomi growled, ‘You think we got rid of the Qax just to hand over our lives to the likes of you?’

Reth glared at her. ‘And can you really believe that we would have administered the withdrawal of the Qax with more death and destruction than you have inflicted?’

Hama stood straight. ‘I’m not here to discuss hypotheticals with you, Reth Cana. We are pragmatic. If your work is in the interest of the species—’

Reth laughed out loud; Hama saw how his teeth were discoloured, greenish. ‘The interest of the species.’ He stalked about the echoing cavern, posturing. ‘Gemo, I give you the future. If this young man has his way, science will be no more than a weapon! … And if I refuse to cooperate with his pragmatism?’

Nomi said smoothly, ‘Those who follow us will be a lot tougher. Believe it, jasoft.’

Gemo listened, stony-faced. ‘They mean it, Reth.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Reth said to Hama. ‘Twelve hours from now. I will demonstrate my work, my results. But I will not justify it to the likes of you; make of it what you will.’ And he swept away into shadows beyond the fitful glow of the hovering globe lamps.

Nomi said quietly to Hama, ‘Reth is a man who has spent too long alone.’

‘We can deal with him,’ Hama said, with more confidence than he felt.

‘Perhaps. But why is he alone? Hama, we know that at least a dozen pharaohs came to this settlement before the Occupation was ended, and probably more during the collapse. Where are they?’

Hama frowned. ‘Find out.’

Nomi nodded briskly.

The oily sea lapped even closer now. The beach was reduced to a thin strip, trapped between forest and sea.

Callisto walked far along the beach. There was nothing different, just the same dense forest, the oily sea. Here and there the sea had already covered the beach, encroaching into the forest, and she had to push into the vegetation to make further progress. Everywhere she found the tangle of roots and vine-like growths. Where the rising liquid had touched, the grasses and vines and trees crumbled and died, leaving bare, scattered dust.

The beach curved around on itself.

So she was on an island. At least she had learned that much. Eventually, she supposed, that dark sea would rise so high it would cover everything. And they would all die.

There was no night. When she was tired, she rested on the beach, eyes closed.

There was no time here – not in the way she seemed to remember, on some deep level of herself: no days, no nights, no change. There was only the beach, the forest, that black oily sea, lapping ever closer, all of it under a shadowless grey-white sky.

She looked inward, seeking herself. She found only fragments of memory: an ice moon, a black sky – a face, a girl’s perhaps, delicate, troubled, but the face broke up into blocks of light. She didn’t like to think about the face. It made her feel lonely. Guilty.

She asked Asgard about time.

Asgard, gnawing absently on a handful of bark chips, ran a casual finger through the reality dust, from grain to grain. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Time passing. From one moment to the next.

For we, you see, are above time.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Of course you don’t. A row of dust grains is a shard of story. A blade of grass is a narrative. Where the grass knits itself into vines and trees, that story deepens. And if I eat a grass blade I absorb its tiny story, and it becomes mine. So Pharaoh said. And I don’t know who told him. Do you see?’

‘No,’ said Callisto frankly.

Asgard just looked at her, apathetic, contemptuous.

There was a thin cry, from the ocean. Callisto, shading her eyes, looked that way.

It had been a newborn, thrust arbitrarily into the air, just as Callisto had been. But this newborn had fallen, not to the comparative safety of the dust, but direct into the sea. She – or he – made barely a ripple on that placid black surface. Callisto saw a hand raised briefly above the sluggish meniscus, the flesh already dissolving, white bones curling. And then it was gone, the newborn lost.

Callisto felt a deep horror. It might have happened to her.

Now, as she looked along the beach, she saw dark masses – a mound of flesh, the grisly articulation of fingers – fragments of the suddenly dead, washed up on this desolate beach. This had happened before, she realised. Over and over.

She said, ‘We can’t stay here.’

‘No,’ Asgard agreed reluctantly. ‘No, we can’t.’

Hama, with Reth and Gemo, rode a platform of metal deep into the rocky heart of Callisto.

The walls of the pressurised shaft, sliding slowly upwards, were lined with slick transparent sheets, barring them from the ice. Hama reached out with a fingertip. The wall surface was cold and slippery, lubricated by a thin sheet of condensation from the chill air. There were no signs of structure, of strata in the ice; here and there small bores had been dug away from the shaft, perhaps as samples.

Callisto was a ball of dirty water ice. Save for surface impacts, nothing had happened to this moon since it accreted from the greater cloud that had formed the Jupiter system. The inner moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede – were heated, to one degree or another, by tidal pumping from Jupiter. So Europa, under a crust of ice, had a liquid ocean; and Io was driven by that perennial squeezing to spectacular volcanism. But Callisto had been born too far from her huge parent for any of that gravitational succour. Here, the only heat was a relic of primordial radioactivity; here there had been no geology, no volcanism, no hidden ocean.

Nevertheless, it seemed, Reth Cana had found life here. And, as the platform descended, Reth’s cold excitement seemed to mount.

Nomi Ferrer was pursuing her own researches, in the settlement and out on the surface. But she had insisted that Hama be escorted by a squat, heavily armed drone robot. Both Reth and Gemo ignored this silent companion, as if it were somehow impolite of Hama to have brought it along.

Nor did either of them mention Sarfi, who hadn’t accompanied them. To Hama it did not seem human to disregard one’s daughter, Virtual or otherwise. But then, what was ‘human’ about a near-immortal traitor to the race? What was human about Reth, this man who had buried himself alone in the ice of Callisto, obsessively pursuing his obscure project, for decade after decade?

Even though the platform was small and cramped, Hama felt cold and alone; he suppressed a shiver.

The platform slowed, creaking, to a halt. He faced a chamber dug into the ice.

Reth said, ‘You are a kilometre beneath the surface. Go ahead. Take a look.’

Hama saw that the seal between the lip of the circular platform and the roughly cut ice was not perfect. He felt a renewed dread at his reliance on ancient, patched-up technology. But, suppressing hesitation, he stepped off the platform and into the ice chamber. With a whirr of aged bearings, the drone robot followed him.

Hama stood in a rough cube perhaps twice his height. It had been cut out of the ice, its walls lined by some clear glassy substance; it was illuminated by two hovering light globes. On the floor there was a knot of instrumentation, none of it familiar to Hama, along with a heap of data slates, some emergency equipment, and scattered packets of food and water. This was a working place, impersonal.

Reth stepped past him briskly. ‘Never mind the gadgetry; you wouldn’t understand it anyhow. Look.’ And he snapped his fingers, summoning one of the floating globes. It came to hover at Hama’s shoulder.

Hama leaned close to inspect the cut-away ice of the wall. He could see texture: the ice was a pale, dirty grey, polluted by what looked like fine dust grains – and, here and there, it was stained by colour, crimson and purple and brown.

Reth had become animated. ‘I’d let you touch it,’ he breathed. ‘But the sheeting is there to protect it from us – not the other way around. The biota in there is much more ancient, unevolved, fragile than we are; the bugs on your breath might wipe it out in an instant. The prebiotic chemicals were probably delivered here by comet impacts during Callisto’s formation. There is carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen. The biochemistry is a matter of carbon-carbon chains and water – like Earth’s, but not precisely so. Nothing exactly like our DNA structures…’

‘Spell it out,’ Gemo said casually, prowling around the gadgetry. ‘Remember, Reth, the education of these young is woefully inadequate.’

‘This is life,’ Hama said. ‘Native to Callisto.’

‘Life – yes,’ Reth said. ‘The highest forms are about equivalent to Earth’s bacteria. But – native? I believe the life forms here have a common ancestor with Earth life, buried deep in time – and that they are related to the more extravagant biota of Europa’s buried ocean, and probably most of the living things found elsewhere in Sol system. Do you know the notion of panspermia? Life, you see, may have originated in one place, perhaps even outside the system, and then was spread through the worlds by the spraying of meteorite-impact debris. And everywhere it landed, life embarked on a different evolutionary path.’

‘But here,’ Hama said slowly, fumbling to grasp these unfamiliar concepts, ‘it was unable to rise higher than the level of a bacterium?’

‘There is no room,’ said Reth. ‘There is liquid water here: just traces of it, soaked into the pores between the grains of rock and ice, kept from freezing by the radiogenic heat. But energy flows thin, and replication is very slow – spanning thousands of years.’ He shrugged. ‘Nevertheless there is a complete ecosystem. Do you understand? My Callisto bacteria are rather like the cryptoendoliths found in some inhospitable parts of Earth. In Antarctica, for instance, you can crack open a rock and see layers of green life, leaching nutrients from the stone itself, sheltering from the wind and the desolating cold: communities of algae, cyanobacteria, fungi, yeasts—’

‘Not any more,’ Gemo murmured, running a finger over control panels. ‘Reth, the Extirpation was very thorough, an effective extinction event; I doubt if any of your cryptoendoliths can still survive.’

‘Ah,’ said Reth. ‘A shame.’

Hama straightened up, frowning. He had come far from the cramped caverns of the Conurbations; he was confronting life from another world, half a billion kilometres from Earth. He ought to feel wonder. But these pale shadows evoked only a kind of pity. Perhaps this thin, cold, purposeless existence was a suitable object for the obsessive study of a lonely, half-mad immortal.

Reth’s eyes were on him, hard.

Hama said carefully, ‘We know that before the Occupation, Sol system was extensively explored, by Michael Poole and those who followed him. The records of those times are lost – or hidden,’ he said with a glance at the impassive Gemo. ‘But we do know that everywhere humans went, they found life. Life is commonplace. And in most places we reached, life has attained a much higher peak than this. Why not just catalogue these scrapings and abandon the station?’

Reth threw up his arms theatrically. ‘I am wasting my time. Gemo, how can this mayfly mind possibly grasp the subtleties here?’

She said dryly, ‘I think it would serve you to try to explain, brother.’ She was studying a gadget that looked like a handgun mounted on a floating platform. ‘This, for example.’

When Hama approached this device, his weapon-laden drone whirred warningly. ‘What is it?’

Reth stalked forward. ‘It is an experimental mechanism based on laser light, which … It is a device for exploring the energy levels of an extended quantum structure.’ He began to talk rapidly, lacing his language with phrases like ‘spectral lines’ and ‘electrostatic potential wells’, none of which Hama understood.

At length Gemo interpreted for Hama.

‘Imagine a very simple physical system – a hydrogen atom, for instance. I can raise its energy by bombarding it with laser light. But the atom is a quantum system; it can only assume energy levels at a series of specific steps. There are simple mathematical rules to describe the steps. This is called a “potential well”.’

As he endured this lecture, irritation slowly built in Hama; it was clear there was much knowledge to be reclaimed from these patronising, arrogant pharaohs.

‘The potential well of a hydrogen atom is simple,’ said Reth rapidly. ‘The simplest quantum system of all. It follows an inverse-square rule. But I have found the potential wells of much more complex structures.’

‘Ah,’ said Gemo. ‘Structures embedded in the Callisto bacteria.’

‘Yes.’ Reth’s eyes gleamed. He snatched a data slate from a pile at his feet. Lines of numbers chattered over the slate, meaning little to Hama, a series of graphs that sloped sharply before dwindling to flatness: a portrait of the mysterious ‘potential wells’, perhaps.

Gemo seemed to understand immediately. ‘Let me.’ She took the slate, tapped its surface and quickly reconfigured the display. ‘Now, look, Hama: the energies of the photons that are absorbed by the well are proportional to this series of numbers.’

1. 2. 3. 5. 7. 11. 13…

‘Prime numbers,’ Hama said.

‘Exactly,’ snapped Reth. ‘Do you see?’

Gemo put down the slate and walked to the ice wall; she ran her hand over the translucent cover, as if longing to touch the mystery that was embedded there. ‘So inside each of these bacteria,’ she said, ‘there is a quantum potential well that encodes prime numbers.’

‘And much more,’ said Reth. ‘The primes were just the key, the first hint of a continent of structure I have barely begun to explore.’ He paced back and forth, restless, animated. ‘Life is never content simply to subsist, to cling on. Life seeks room to spread. That is another commonplace, young man. But here, on Callisto, there was no room: not in the physical world; the energy and nutrients were simply too sparse for that. And so—’

‘Yes?’

‘And so they grew sideways,’ he said. ‘And they reached orthogonal realms we never imagined existed.’

Hama stared at the thin purple scrapings and chattering primes, here at the bottom of a pit with these two immortals, and feared he had descended into madness.

... 41. 43. 47. 53. 59…

In a suit no more substantial than a thin layer of cloth, Nomi Ferrer walked over Callisto’s raw surface, seeking evidence of crimes.

The sun was low on the horizon, evoking highlights from the curved ice plain all around her. From here, Jupiter was forever invisible, but Nomi saw two small discs, inner moons, following their endless dance of gravitational clockwork.

Gemo Cana had told her mayfly companions how the Jovian system had once been. She told them of Io’s mineral mines, nestling in the shadow of the huge volcano Babbar Patera. She told them of Ganymede: larger than Mercury, heavily cratered and geologically rich – the most stable and heavily populated of all the Jovian moons. And Europa’s icy crust had sheltered an ocean hosting life, an ecosystem much more complex and rewarding than anybody had dreamed. ‘They were worlds. Human worlds, in the end. All gone now, shut down by the Qax. But I remember…’

Away from the sun’s glare, lesser stars glittered, surrounding Nomi with immensity. But it was a crowded sky, despite that immensity. Crowded and dangerous. For – she had been warned by the Coalition – the Xeelee craft that had glowered over Earth was now coming here, hotly pursued by a Spline ship retrieved from the hands of jasoft rebels and manned by Green Army officers. What would happen when that miniature armada got here, Nomi couldn’t imagine.

Nomi knew about the Xeelee from barracks-room scuttlebutt. She had tried to educate a sceptical Hama. The Xeelee were a danger mankind encountered long before anybody had heard of the Qax; in the Occupation years they had become legends of a deep-buried, partly extirpated past – and perhaps they were monsters of the human future. The Xeelee were said to be godlike entities so aloof that humans might never understand their goals. Some scraps of Xeelee technology, like starbreaker beams, had fallen into the hands of ‘lesser’ species, like the Qax, and transformed their fortunes. The Xeelee seemed to care little for this – but, on occasion, they intervened. To devastating effect.

Some believed that by such interventions the Xeelee were maintaining their monopoly on power, controlling an empire which, perhaps, held sway across the Galaxy. Others said that, like the vengeful gods of humanity’s childhood, the Xeelee were protecting the ‘junior races’ from themselves.

Either way, Nomi thought, it’s insulting. Claustrophobic. She felt an unexpected stab of resentment. We only just got rid of the Qax, she thought. And now, this.

Gemo Cana had argued that in such a dangerous universe, humanity needed the pharaohs. ‘Everything humans know about the Xeelee today, every bit of intelligence we have, was preserved by the pharaohs. I refuse to plead with you for my life. But I am concerned that you should understand. We pharaohs were not dynastic tyrants. We fought, in our way, to survive the Qax Occupation, and the Extirpation. For we are the wisdom and continuity of the race. Destroy us and you complete the work of the Qax for them, finish the Extirpation. Destroy us and you destroy your own past – which we preserved for you, at great cost to ourselves.’

Perhaps, Nomi thought. But in the end it was the bravery and ingenuity of one human – a mayfly – that had brought down the Qax, not the supine compromising of the jasofts and pharaohs.

She looked up towards the sun, towards invisible Earth. I just want a sky clear of alien ships, she thought. And to achieve that, perhaps we will have to sacrifice much.

Reth Cana began to describe where the Callisto bugs had ‘gone’, seeking room to grow.

‘There is no time,’ he whispered. ‘There is no space. This is the resolution of an ancient debate – do we live in a universe of perpetual change, or a universe where neither time nor motion exist? Now we understand. Now we know we live in a universe of static shapes. Nothing exists but the particles that make up the universe – that make up us. Do you see? And we can measure nothing but the separation between those particles.

‘Imagine a universe consisting of a single elementary particle, an electron perhaps. Then there could be no space. For space is only the separation between particles. Time is only the measurement of changes in that separation. So there could be no time.

‘Imagine now a universe consisting of two particles…’ Gemo nodded. ‘Now you can have separation, and time.’ Reth bent and, with one finger, scattered a line of dark dust grains across the floor. ‘Let each dust grain represent a distance – a configuration of my miniature two-particle cosmos. Each grain is labelled with a single number: the separation between the two particles.’ He stabbed his finger into the line, picking out grains. ‘Here the particles are a metre apart; here a micron; here a light year. There is one special grain, of course: the one that represents zero separation, the particles overlaid. This diagram of dust shows all that is important about the underlying universe – the separation between its two components. And every possible configuration is shown at once, from this god-like perspective.’

He let his finger wander back and forth along the line, tracing out a twisting path in the grains. ‘And here is a history: the two particles close and separate, close and separate. If they were conscious, the particles would think they were embedded in time, that they are coming near and far. But we can see that their universe is no more than dust grains, the lined-up configurations jostling against each other. It feels like time, inside. But from outside, it is just – sequence, a scattering of instants, of reality dust.’

Gemo said, ‘Yes. “It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things.”’ She eyed Hama. ‘An ancient philosopher. Mach, or Mar-que…’

‘If the universe has three particles,’ said Reth, ‘you need three numbers. Three relative distances – the separation of the particles, one from the other – determine the cosmos’s shape. And so the dust grains, mapping possible configurations, would fill up three-dimensional space – though there is still that unique grain, representing the special instant where all the particles are joined. And with four particles—’

‘There would be six separation distances,’ Hama said. ‘And you would need a six-dimensional space to map the possible configurations.’

Reth glared at him, eyes hard. ‘You are beginning to understand. Now. Imagine a space of stupendously many dimensions.’ He held up a dust grain. ‘Each grain represents one configuration of all the particles in our universe, frozen in time. This is reality dust, a dust of the Nows. And the dust fills configuration space, the realm of instants. Some of the dust grains may represent slices of our own history.’ He snapped his fingers, once, twice, three times. ‘There. There. There. Each moment, each juggling of the particles, a new grain, a new coordinate on the map. There is one unique grain that represents the coalescing of all the universe’s particles into a single point. There are many more grains representing chaos – darkness – a random, structureless shuffling of the atoms.

‘Configuration space contains all the arrangements of matter there could ever be. It is an image of eternity.’ He waved a fingertip through the air. ‘But if I trace out a path from point to point—’

‘You are tracing out a history,’ said Hama. ‘A sequence of configurations, the universe evolving from point to point.’

‘Yes. But we know that time is an illusion. In configuration space, all the moments that comprise our history exist simultaneously. And all the other configurations that are logically possible also exist, whether they lie along the track of that history or not.’

Hama frowned. ‘And the Callisto bugs—’

Reth smiled. ‘I believe that, constrained in this space and time, the Callisto lifeforms have started to explore the wider realms of configuration space. Seeking a place to play. Life will find a way.’

Nomi toiled up the gentle slope of the ridge that loomed above the settlement. This was one of the great ring walls of the Valhalla system, curving away from this place for thousands of kilometres, rising nearly a kilometre above the surrounding plains.

The land around her was silver and black, a midnight sculpture of ridges and craters. There were no mountains here, none at all; any created by primordial geology or the impacts since Callisto’s birth had long since subsided, slumping into formlessness. There was a thin smearing of black dust over the dirty white of the underlying ice; the dust was loose and fine-grained, and she disturbed it as she passed, leaving bright footprints.

‘…Do you understand what you’re looking at?’

The sudden voice startled her; she looked up.

It was Sarfi. She was dressed, as Nomi was, in a translucent protective suit, another nod to the laws of consistency that seemed to bind her Virtual existence. But she left no footprints, nor even cast a shadow.

Sarfi kicked at the black dust, not disturbing a single grain. ‘The ice sublimes – did you know that? It shrivels away, a metre every ten million years – but it leaves the dust behind. That’s why the human settlements were established on the north side of the Valhalla ridges. There it is just a shade colder, and some of the sublimed ice condenses out. So there is a layer of purer ice, right at the surface. The humans lived off ten-million-year frost … You’re surprised I know so much. Nomi Ferrer, I was dead before you were born. Now I’m a ghost imprisoned in my mother’s head. But I’m conscious. And I am still curious.’

Nothing in Nomi’s life had prepared her for this conversation. ‘Do you love your mother, Sarfi?’

Sarfi glared at her. ‘She preserved me. She gave up part of herself for me. It was a great sacrifice.’

Nomi thought, You resent her. You resent this cloying, possessive love. And all this resentment bubbles inside you, seeking release. ‘There was nothing else she could have done for you.’

‘But I died anyway. I’m not me. I’m a download. I don’t exist for me, but for her. I’m a walking, talking construct of her guilt.’ She stalked away, climbing the slumped ice ridge.

Gemo started to argue detail with her brother. How was it possible for isolated bacteria-like creatures to form any kind of sophisticated sensorium? – but Reth believed there were slow pathways of chemical and electrical communication, etched into the ice and rock, tracks for great slow thoughts that pulsed through the substance of Callisto. Very well, but what of quantum mechanics? The universe was not made up of neat little particles, but was a mesh of quantum probability waves. – Ah, but Reth imagined quantum probability lying like a mist over his reality dust, constrained by two things: the geometry of configuration space, as acoustic echoes are determined by the geometry of a room; and something called a ‘static universal wave function’, a mist of probability that governed the likelihood of a given Now sharing configuration space with a given other…

Hama closed his eyes, his mind whirling. Blocky pixels flickered across his vision, within his closed eyes.

Startled, he looked up. Sarfi was kneeling before him; she had brushed her Virtual fingertips through his skull, his eyes. He hadn’t even known she had come here.

‘I know it’s hard to accept,’ she said. ‘My mother spent a long time making me understand. You just have to open your mind.’

‘I am no fool,’ he said sharply. ‘I can imagine a map of all the logical possibilities of a universe. But it would be just that – a map, a theoretical construct, a thing of data and logic. It would not be a place. The universe doesn’t feel like that, I feel time passing. I don’t experience disconnected instants, Reth’s dusty reality.’

‘Of course not,’ said Reth. ‘But you must understand that everything we know of the past is a record embedded in the present – the fossils and geology of Earth, so cruelly obliterated by the Qax, even the traces of chemicals and electricity in your own brain that comprise your memory, maintaining your illusion of past times. Sarfi herself is an illustration of the point. Gemo, may I—?’

Gemo nodded, unsmiling. Hama noted he hadn’t asked Sarfi’s permission for whatever he was about to do.

Reth tapped a data slate. Sarfi froze, becoming a static, inanimate sculpture of light. Then, after perhaps ten seconds, she melted, began to move once more.

She saw Hama staring at her. ‘What’s wrong?’

Reth, ignoring her, said, ‘The child contains a record of her own shallow past, embedded in her programmes and data stores. She is unaware of intervals of time when she is frozen, or deactivated. If I could start and stop you, Hama Druz, you would wake protesting that your memories contained no gaps. But your memories themselves would have been frozen. I could even chop up your life and rearrange its instants in any way I chose; at each instant you would have an intact set of memories, a record of a past, and you would believe yourself to have lived through a continuous, consistent reality.

‘And thus the maximal-reality dust grains contain embedded within themselves a record of the eras which “preceded” them. Each grain contains brains, like yours and mine, with “memories” embedded in them, frozen like sculptures. And history emerges in configuration space because those rich grains are then drawn, by a least-energy matching principle, to the grains which “precede” and “follow” them … You see?’

Sarfi looked to Gemo. ‘Mother? What does he mean?’

Gemo watched her clinically. ‘Sarfi has been reset many times, of course,’ she said absently. ‘I had no wish to see her grow old, accreted with worthless memory. It was rather like the Extirpation, actually. The Qax sought to reset humanity, to abolish the memory of the race. In the ultimate realisation, we would have become a race of children, waking every day to a fresh world, every day a new creation. It was cruel, of course, but theoretically intriguing. Don’t you think?’

Sarfi was trembling.

Now Reth began telling Gemo, rapidly and with enthusiasm, of his plans to explore his continent of configurations. ‘No human mind could apprehend that multi-dimensional domain unaided, of course. But it can be modelled, with metaphors – rivers, seas, mountains. It is possible to explore it…’

Hama said, ‘But, if your meta-universe is static, timeless, how could it be experienced? For experience depends on duration.’

Reth shook his head impatiently. He tapped his data slate and beckoned to Sarfi. ‘Here, child.’

Hesitantly, she stepped forward. Now she trailed a worm-like tube of light, as if her image had been captured at each moment in some invisible emulsion. She emerged, blinking, from the tube, and looked back at it, bewildered.

‘Stop these games,’ Hama said tightly.

‘You see?’ Reth said. ‘Here is an evolution of Sarfi’s structure, but mapped in space, not time. But it makes no difference to Sarfi. Her memory at each frozen instant contains a record of her walking across the floor towards me – doesn’t it, dear? And thus, in static configuration space, sentient creatures could have experiences, afforded them by the evolution of information structures across space.’

Hama turned to Sarfi. ‘Are you all right?’

She snapped back, ‘What do you think?’

‘I think Reth may be insane,’ he said.

She stiffened, pulling back. ‘Don’t ask me. I’m not even a mayfly, remember?’

‘It is comforting to know that configuration space exists, Hama,’ Gemo said. ‘Nothing matters, you see: not even death, not even the Extirpation. For we persist, each moment exists for ever, in a greater universe…’

It was a philosophy of decadence, Hama thought angrily. A philosophy of morbid contemplation, a consolation for ageless pharaohs as they sought to justify the way they administered the suffering of their fellow creatures. No wonder it appealed to them so much.

Gemo and Reth talked on, more and more rapidly, entering realms of speculation he couldn’t begin to follow.

Callisto told Asgard what she was intending to do. She wanted to climb that tall, braided tree. But she would have to take on Night to do it.

She walked along the narrowing beach, seeking scraps of people, of newborns and others, washed up by the pitiless black sea. She picked up what looked like a human foot. It was oddly dry, cold, the flesh and even the bones crumbling at her touch.

She collected as many of these hideous shards as she could hold, and toiled back along the barren dust.

Then she worked her way through the forest back to the great tree, where she had encountered the creature called Night. She paused every few paces and pushed a section of corpse into the ground. She covered each fragment with ripped-up grass and bits of bark.

‘You’re crazy,’ Asgard said, trailing her, arms full of dried, crumbling flesh and bone.

‘I know,’ Callisto said. ‘I’m going anyway.’

Asgard would not come far enough to reach the tree itself. So Callisto completed her journey alone.

Once more she reached the base of Night’s tree. Once more, her heart thumping hard, she began to climb.

The creature, Night, seemed to have expected her. He moved from branch to branch, far above, a massive blur, and he clambered with ferocious purpose down the trunk.

When she was sure he had seen her she scrambled hurriedly back to the ground.

He followed her – but not all the way to the ground. He clung to his trunk, his broad face broken by that immense, bloody mouth, hissing at her.

She glowered back, and took a tentative step towards the tree. ‘Come get me,’ she muttered. ‘What are you waiting for?’ She took a piece of corpse (a hand – briefly her stomach turned), and she hurled it up at him.

He ducked aside, startled. But as the severed hand came by he caught it neatly in his scoop of a mouth, crunched once and swallowed it whole. He looked down at her with new interest.

And he took one tentative step towards the ground.

‘That’s it,’ she crooned. ‘Come on. Come eat the flesh. Come eat me, if that’s what you want—’

Without warning he leapt from the trunk, immense hands splayed.

She screamed and staggered back. He crashed to the ground perhaps an arm’s length from her. One massive fist slammed into her ankle, sending a stab of pain that made her cry out. If he’d landed on top of her he would surely have crushed her.

The beast, winded, was already clambering to his feet.

She got up and ran, ignoring the pain of her ankle. Night followed her, his lumbering four-legged pursuit slow but relentless. As she ran she kicked open her buried caches of body parts. He snapped them up and gobbled them down, barely slowing. The morsels seemed pathetically inadequate in the face of Night’s giant reality.

She burst out onto the open beach, still running for her life. She reached the lip of the sea, skidding to a halt before the lapping black liquid. Her plan had been to reach the sea, to lure Night into it.

But when she turned, she saw that Night had hesitated on the fringe of the forest, blinking in the light. Perhaps he was aware that she had deliberately drawn him here. He seemed to dismiss her calculations. He stepped forward deliberately, his immense feet sinking into the soft dust. There was no need for him to rush.

Callisto was already exhausted, and, trapped before the sea, there was nowhere for her to run.

Now he was out in the open she saw how far from the human form he had become, with his body a distorted slab of muscle, a mouth that had widened until it stretched around his head. And yet scraps of clothing clung to him, the remnants of a coverall of the same unidentifiable colour as her own. Once this creature, too, had been a newborn here, landing screaming on this desolate beach.

He walked up to her. He towered over her, and she wondered how many unfortunates he had devoured to reach such proportions.

Beyond his looming shoulder, she could see Asgard, pacing back and forth along the beach.

‘Great plan,’ Asgard called. ‘Now what?’

‘I—’

Night raised himself up on his hind legs, huge hands pawing at the air over her head. He roared wordlessly, and bloody breath gushed over her.

Close your eyes, Callisto thought. This won’t hurt.

‘No,’ Asgard said. She took a step towards the looming beast, began to run. ‘No, no, no!’ With a final yell she hurled herself at his back.

He looked around, startled, and swiped at Asgard with one giant paw. She was flung away like a scrap of bark, to land in a heap on the dust. But Night, off-balance, was stumbling backward, back toward the sea.

When his foot sank into the oily ocean, he looked down, as if surprised. Even as he lifted his leg from the fluid the flesh was drying, crumbling, the muscles and bone sloughing away in layers of purple and white. He roared his defiance, and cuffed at the sea – then gazed in horror at one immense hand left shredded by contact with the entropic ooze.

He began to fall, slowly, ponderously. Without a splash, the fluid opened up to accept his immense bulk. He was immediately submerged, the shallow fluid flowing eagerly over him. In one last burst of defiance he broke the surface, mouth open, his flesh dissolving. His face was restored, briefly, to the human, his eyes a startling blue. He cried out, his voice thin: ‘Reth Cana! You betrayed me!’

The name sent a shiver of recognition through Callisto.

Then he fell back, and was gone.

She hurried to Asgard. Her chest was crushed, Callisto saw immediately, and her limbs were splayed at impossible angles. Her face was growing smooth, featureless, like a child’s, beautiful in its innocence. Her gaze slid over Callisto.

Callisto cradled Asgard’s head. ‘This won’t hurt,’ she murmured. ‘Close your eyes.’

Asgard sighed, and was still.

‘Let me tell you the truth about pharaohs,’ Nomi said bitterly.

Hama listened in silence. They stood on the Valhalla ridge, overlooking the old, dark settlement; the brightest point on the silver-black surface of Callisto was their own lifedome.

Nomi said, ‘This was just after the Qax left. I got this from a couple of our people who survived, who were there. They found a nest of the pharaohs, in one of the biggest Conurbations – one of the first to be constructed, one of the oldest. The pharaohs retreated into a pit, under the surface dwellings. They fought hard; we didn’t know why. They had to be torched out. A lot of good people, good mayflies, died that day. When our people had dealt with the pharaohs, shut down the mines and drone robots and booby-traps … after all that, they went into the pit. It was dark. But it was warm, the air was moist, and there was movement everywhere. Small movements. And, so they say, there was a smell. Of milk.’

Nomi was silent for a long moment; Hama waited.

‘Hama, I can’t have children. I grew up knowing that. So maybe I ought to find some pity for the pharaohs. They don’t breed true – like Gemo and Sarfi. Oh, sometimes their children are born with Qax immortality. But—’

‘Yes?’

‘But they don’t all grow. They stop developing, at the age of two years or one year or six months or a month; some of them even stop growing before they are ready to be born, and have to be plucked from their mothers’ wombs.

‘And that was what our soldiers found in the pit, Hama. Racked up like specimens in a lab, hundreds of them. Must have been accumulating for centuries. Plugged into machines, mewling and crying.’

‘Lethe.’ Maybe Gemo is right, Hama thought; maybe the pharaohs really have paid a price we can’t begin to understand.

‘The pit was torched…’

Hama thought he saw a shadow pass across the sky, the scattered stars. ‘Why are you telling me this, Nomi?’

‘To show you that pharaohs have experiences we can’t share. And they do things we would find incomprehensible. To figure them out you have to think like a pharaoh.’

‘You’ve found something, haven’t you?’

Nomi pointed. ‘There’s a line of shallow graves over there. Not hard to find, in the end.’

‘Ah.’

‘The killings seemed to be uniform, the same method every time. A laser to the head. The bodies seemed peaceful,’ Nomi mused. ‘Almost as if they welcomed it.’

He had killed them. Reth had killed the other pharaohs who came here, one by one. But why? And why would an immortal welcome death? Only if – Hama’s mind raced – only if she were promised a better place to go, a safer place—

Everything happened at once.

A shadow, unmistakable now, spread out over the stars: a hole in the sky, black as night, winged, purposeful. And, low towards the horizon, there was a flare of light.

‘Lethe,’ said Nomi softly. ‘That was the GUTship. It’s gone – just like that.’

‘Then we aren’t going home.’ Hama felt numb; he seemed beyond shock.

‘…Help me. Oh, help me…’

A form coalesced before them, a cloud of blocky pixels. Hama made out a sketch of limbs, a face, an open, pleading mouth. It was Sarfi, and she wasn’t in a protective suit. Her face was twisted in pain; she must be breaking all her consistency overrides to have projected herself to the surface like this.

Hama held out his gloved hands, driven by an impulse to hold her; but that, of course, was impossible.

‘Please,’ she whispered, her voice a thin, badly realised scratch. ‘It is Reth. He plans to kill Gemo.’

Nomi set off down the ridge slope in a bouncing low-G run.

Hama said to Sarfi, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll help your mother.’

Now he saw anger in that blurred, sketchy face. ‘To Lethe with her! Save me…’ The pixels dispersed into a meaningless cloud, and winked out.

Callisto returned to the great tree.

The trunk soared upwards, a pillar of rigid logic and history and consistency. She slapped its hide, its solidity giving her renewed confidence. And now there was no Night, no lurking monster, waiting up there to oppose her.

Ignoring the aches of her healing flesh and torn muscles, she began to climb.

As she rose above the trunk’s lower tangle and encountered the merged and melded upper length, the search for crevices became more difficult, just as it had before. But she was immersed in the rhythm of the climb, and however high she rose there seemed to be pocks and ledges moulded into the smooth surface of the trunk, sufficient to support her progress.

Soon she had far surpassed the heights she had reached that first time she had tried. The mist was thick here, and when she looked down the ground was already lost: the great trunk rose from blank emptiness, as if rooted in nothingness.

But she thought she could see shadows, moving along the trunk’s perspective-dwindled immensity: the others from the beach, some of them at least, were following her on her unlikely adventure.

And still she climbed.

The trunk began to split into great arcing branches that pushed through the thick mist. She paused, breathing deeply. Some of the branches were thin, spindly limbs that dwindled away from the main trunk. But others were much more substantial, highways that seemed anchored to the invisible sky.

She picked the most solid-looking of these upper branches, and continued her climb. Impeded by her damaged arm, her progress was slow but steady. It was actually more difficult to make her way along this tipped-over branch than it had been to climb the vertical trunk. But she was able to find handholds, and places where she could she wrap her limbs around the branch.

The mist thickened further until she could see nothing around her but this branch: no sky or ground, not even the rest of this great tree, as if nothing existed but herself and the climb, as if she had been toiling for ever along this branch that came from the mist and finished in the mist.

And then, without warning, she broke through the fog.

In a pit dug into the heart of Callisto, illuminated by a single hovering globe lamp, Gemo Cana lay on a flat, hard pallet, unmoving. Her brother stood hunched over her, working at her face with gleaming equipment. ‘This won’t hurt. Close your eyes…’

‘Stop this!’ Sarfi ran forward. She pushed her hands into Gemo’s face, crying out as the pain of consistency violation pulsed through her.

Gemo turned, blindly. Hama saw that a silvery mask had been laid over her face, hugging the flesh. ‘Sarfi … ?’

Nomi stepped forward, laser pistol poised. ‘Stop this obscenity.’

Reth wore a mask of his own, a smaller cap that covered half his face; the exposed eye peered at them, hard, suspicious, calculating. ‘Don’t try to stop us. You’ll kill her if you try. Let us go, Hama Druz.’

Nomi raised her pistol at his head.

But Hama touched the soldier’s arm. ‘Not yet.’

On her pallet, Gemo Cana turned her head blindly. She whispered, ‘There’s so much you don’t understand.’

Hama snapped, ‘You’d better make us understand, Reth Cana, before I let Nomi here off the leash.’

Reth paced back and forth. ‘Yes – technically, this is a kind of death. But not a single one of the pharaohs who passed through here did it against his or her will.’

Hama frowned. ‘“Technically”? “Passed through”?’

Reth stroked the metal clinging to Gemo’s face; his sister turned her head in response. ‘The core technology is an interface to the brain via the optic nerve. In this way I can connect the quantum structures which encode human consciousness to the structures stored in the Callisto bacteria – or, rather, the structures which serve as, um, a gateway to configuration space…’

Hama started to see it. ‘You’re attempting to download human minds into your configuration space.’

Reth smiled. ‘It was not enough, you see, to study configuration space at second-hand, through quantum structures embedded in these silent bacteria. The next step had to be direct apprehension by the human sensorium.’

‘The next step in what?’

‘In our evolution, perhaps,’ Reth murmured. ‘With the help of the Qax, we have banished death. Now we can break down the walls of this shadow theatre we call reality.’ He eyed Hama. ‘This dismal pit is not a grave, but a gateway. And I am the gatekeeper.’

Hama said tightly, ‘You destroy minds for the promise of afterlife – a promise concocted of theory and a scraping of cryptoendolith bacteria.’

‘Not a theory,’ Gemo whispered. ‘I have seen it.’

Nomi grunted, ‘We don’t have time for this.’

But Hama asked, despite himself: ‘What was it like?’

It was, Gemo said, a vast, spreading landscape, under a towering sky; she had glimpsed a beach, a rising, oily sea, an immense mountain shrouded in mist…

Reth stalked back and forth, arms spread wide. ‘We remain human, Hama Druz. I cannot apprehend a multi-dimensional continuum. So I sought a metaphor. A human interface. A beach of reality dust. A sea of entropy, chaos. The structures folded into the living things, the shape of the landscape, represent consistency – what we time-bound creatures apprehend as causality.’

‘And the rising sea?’

‘The cosmos-spanning threat of the Xeelee,’ he said, smiling thinly. ‘And the grander rise of entropy, across the universe, which will bring about the obliteration of all possibility.

‘Configuration space is real, Hama Druz. This isn’t a new idea; Pleh-toh saw that, thousands of years ago … Ah, but you know nothing of Pleh-toh, do you? The higher manifold always existed, you see, long before the coming of mankind, of life itself. All that has changed is that through the patient, blind growth of the Callisto bacteria, I have found a way to reach it. And there we can truly live for ever—’

The ice floor shuddered, causing them to stagger.

Reth peered up the length of the shaft, smiling grimly. ‘Ah. Our visitors make their presence known. Callisto is a small, hard, static world; it rings like a bell even at the fall of a footstep. And the footsteps of the Xeelee are heavy indeed.’

Sarfi pushed forward again, hands twisting, agonised by her inability to touch and be touched. She said to Gemo, ‘Why do you have to die?’

Gemo’s voice was slow, sleepy; Hama wondered what sedative agents Reth had fed her. ‘You won’t feel anything, Sarfi. It will be as if you never existed at all, as if all this pain never occurred. Won’t that be better?’

The ground shuddered again, waves of energy from some remote Xeelee-induced explosion pulsing through Callisto’s patient ice, and the walls groaned, stressed.

Hama tried to imagine the black sea, the sharp-grained dust of the beach. Hama had once visited the ocean – Earth’s ocean – to oversee the reclamation of an abandoned Qax sea farm. He remembered the stink of ozone, the taste of salt in the damp air. He had hated it.

Reth seemed to sense his thoughts. ‘Ah, but I forgot. You are creatures of the Conurbations, of the Extirpation. Of round-walled caverns and a landscape of grey dust. But this is how the Earth used to be, you see, before the Qax unleashed their nanotech plague. No wonder you find the idea strange. But not us.’ He slipped his hand into his sister’s. ‘For us, you see, it will be like coming home.’

On the table, Gemo was convulsing, her mouth open, laced with drool.

Sarfi screamed, a thin wail that echoed from the high walls of the shaft. Once more she reached out to Gemo; once more her fluttering fingers passed through Gemo’s face, sparkling.

‘Gemo Cana is a collaborator,’ Nomi said. ‘Hama, you’re letting her escape justice.’

Yes, Hama thought, surprised. Nomi, in her blunt way, had once more hit on the essence of the situation here. The pharaohs were the refugees now, and Reth’s configuration space – if it existed at all – might prove their ultimate bolt-hole. Gemo Cana was escaping, leaving behind the consequences of her work, for good or ill. But did that justify killing her?

Sarfi was crying. ‘Mother, please. I’ll die.’

The pharaoh turned her head. ‘Hush,’ said Gemo. ‘You can’t die. You were never alive. Don’t you see that?’ Her back arched. ‘Oh…’

Sarfi straightened and looked at her hands. The illusion of solidity was breaking down, Hama saw; pixels swarmed like fat, cubic insects, grudgingly cooperating to maintain the girl’s form. Sarfi looked up at Hama, and her voice was a flat, emotionless husk, devoid of intonation and character. ‘Help me.’

Again Hama reached out to her; again he dropped his hands, the most basic of human instincts invalidated. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It hurts.’ Her face swarmed with pixels that erupted from the crumbling surface of her skin and fled her body, as if evaporating; she was becoming tenuous, unstable.

Hama forced himself to meet her gaze. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. ‘It will be over soon…’ On and on, meaningless endearments; but she gazed into his eyes, as if seeking refuge there.

For a last instant her face congealed, clearly, from the dispersing cloud. ‘Oh!’ She reached out to him with a hand that was no more than a mass of diffuse light. And then, with a silent implosion, her face crumbled, eyes closing.

Gemo shuddered once, and was still.

Hama could feel his heart pulse within him. His humanity was warm in this place of cold and death. Nomi placed her strong hand on his shoulder, and he relished its fierce solidity.

Hama faced Reth. ‘You are monsters.’

Reth smiled easily. ‘Gemo is beyond your mayfly reproach. And as for the Virtual child – you may learn, Hama Druz, if you pass beyond your current limitations, that the first thing to be eroded by time is sentiment.’

Hama flared. ‘I will never be like you, pharaoh. Sarfi was no toy.’

‘But you still don’t see it,’ Reth said evenly. ‘She is alive – but our time-bound language can’t describe it – she persists, somewhere out there, beyond the walls of our petty realisation.’

Again the moon shuddered, and primordial ice groaned.

Reth murmured, ‘Callisto was not designed to take such hammer blows. The situation is reduced, you see. Now there is only me.’

‘And me.’ Nomi raised the laser pistol.

‘Is this what you want?’ Reth asked of Hama. ‘To cut down centuries of endeavour with a bolt of light?’

Hama shook his head. ‘You really believe you can reach your configuration space – that you can survive there?’

‘But I have proof,’ Reth said. ‘You saw it.’

‘All I saw was a woman dying on a slab.’

Reth glowered at him. ‘Hama Druz, make your decision.’

Nomi aimed the pistol. ‘Hama?’

‘Let him go,’ Hama said bitterly. ‘He has only contempt for our mayfly justice anyhow. His death would mean nothing, even to him.’

Reth grinned and stepped back. ‘You may be a mayfly, but you have the beginnings of wisdom, Hama Druz.’

‘Yes,’ Hama said quietly. ‘Yes, I believe I do. Perhaps there is something there, some new realm of logic to be explored. But you, Reth, are blinded by your arrogance and your obsessions. Surely this new reality is nothing like the Earth of your childhood. And it will have little sympathy for your ambitions. Perhaps whatever survives the download will have no resemblance to you. Perhaps you won’t even remember who you were. What then?’

Reth’s mask sparkled; he raised his hand to his face. He made for the pallet, to lie beside the cooling body of his sister. But he stumbled and fell before he got there.

Hama and Nomi watched, neither moving to help him.

Reth, on his hands and knees, turned his masked face to Hama. ‘You can come with me, Hama Druz. To a better place, a higher place.’

‘You go alone, pharaoh.’

Reth forced a laugh. He cried out, his back arching. Then he fell forward, and was still.

Nomi raked the body with laser fire. ‘Good riddance,’ she growled. ‘Now can we get out of here?’

There was a mountain.

It rose high above the night-dark sea, proudly challenging the featureless, glowing sky. Rivers flowed from that single great peak, she saw: black and massive, striping its huge conical flanks, merging into great tumbling cascades that poured into the ocean.

The mountain was the centre of the world, thrusting from the sea.

She was high above an island, a small scrap of land that defied the dissolving drenching of the featureless sea. Islands were few, small, scattered, threatened everywhere by the black, crowding ocean.

But, not far away, there was another island, she saw, pushing above the sea of mist. It was a heaping of dust on which trees grew thickly, their branches tangled. In fact the branches reached across the neck of sea that separated this island from her own. She thought she could see a way to reach that island, scrambling from tree to tree, following a great highway of branches. The other island rose higher than her own above the encroaching sea. There, she thought, she – and whoever followed her – would be safe from lapping dissolution. For now, anyhow.

But what did that mean? What would Pharaoh have said of this – that the new island was an unlikely heap of reality dust, further from looming entropic destruction?

She shook her head. The deeper meaning of her journey scarcely mattered – and nor did its connection to any other place. If this world were a symbol, so be it: this was where she lived, and this was where she would, with determination and perseverance, survive.

She looked one last time at the towering mountain. Damaged arm or not, she itched to climb it, to challenge its negentropic heights. But in the future, perhaps. Not now.

Carefully, clinging to her branch with arms and legs and her one good hand, she made her way along the branch to the low-probability island. One by one, the people of the beach followed her.

In the mist, far below, she glimpsed slow, ponderous movement: huge beasts, perhaps giant depraved cousins of Night. But, though they bellowed up at her, they could not reach her.

Once more Hama and Nomi stood on the silver-black surface of Callisto, under a sky littered with stars. Just as before, the low, slumped ridges of Valhalla marched to the silent horizon.

But this was no longer a world of antiquity and stillness. The shudders were coming every few minutes now. In places the ice crust was collapsing, ancient features subsiding, here and there sending up sprays of dust and ice splinters that sparkled briefly before falling back, all in utter silence.

Hama thought back to a time before this assignment, to the convocations he had joined, the earnest talk of political futures and ethical settlements. He had been a foolish boy, he thought, his ideas half-formed. Now, when he looked into his heart, he saw crystal-hard determination. In an implacably hostile universe humanity must survive, whatever the cost.

‘No more pharaohs,’ Hama murmured. ‘No more immortality. That way lies selfishness and arrogance and compromise and introversion and surrender. A brief life burns brightly – that is the way.’

Nomi growled, ‘Even now you’re theorising, Hama? Let’s count the ways we might die, standing right here. The Xeelee starbreaker might cream us. One of these miniature quakes might erupt right under us. Or maybe we’ll last long enough to suffocate in our own farts, stuck inside these damn suits. What do you think? I don’t know why you let that arrogant pharaoh kill himself.’

Hama murmured, ‘You see death as an escape?’

‘If it’s easy, if it’s under your control – yes.’

‘Reth did escape,’ Hama said. ‘But I don’t think it was into death.’

‘You believed all that stuff about theoretical worlds?’

‘Yes,’ Hama said. ‘Yes, in the end I think I did believe it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of them.’ He gestured at the sky. ‘The Xeelee. If our second-hand wisdom has any validity at all, we know that the Xeelee react to what they fear. And almost as soon as Reth constructed his interface to his world of logic and data, as soon as the pharaohs began to pass into it, they came here.’

‘You think the Xeelee fear us?’

‘Not us. The bugs in the ice: Reth’s cryptoendoliths, dreaming their billion-year dreams … The Xeelee seem intent on keeping those dreams from escaping. And that’s why I think Reth hit on a truth, you see. Because the Xeelee see it too.’

Now, over one horizon, there was a glowing crimson cloud, like dawn approaching – but there could be no dawn on this all-but-airless world.

‘Starbreaker light,’ murmured Nomi. ‘The glow must be vapour, ice splinters, dust, thrown up from the trench they are digging.’

Hama felt a fierce anger burn – anger, and a new certainty. ‘Once again aliens have walked into our system, for their own purposes, and we can do nothing to stop them. This mustn’t happen again, Nomi. You know, perhaps the Qax were right to attempt the Extirpation. If we are to survive in this dangerous universe we must remake ourselves, without sentiment, without nostalgia, without pity. Let this be an end – and a beginning, a new Day Zero. History is irrelevant. Only the future is important.’ He longed to be gone from this place, to bring his hard new ideas to the great debates that were shaping the future of humankind.

‘You’re starting to frighten me, my friend,’ Nomi said gently. ‘But not as much as that.’

Now the Xeelee nightfighter itself came climbing above the shattered fog of the horizon. Somehow in his ardour Hama had forgotten this mortal peril. The nightfighter was like an immense, black-winged bird. Hama could see crimson Starbreaker light stab down again and again into the passive, defenceless ice of Callisto. The shuddering of the ground was constant now, as that mass of shattered ice and steam rolled relentlessly towards them.

Nomi grabbed him; holding each other, they struggled to stay on their feet as ice particles battered their faceplates. A tide of destruction spanned Callisto from horizon to horizon. There was, of course, no escape.

And then the world turned silver, and the stars swam.

Hama cried out, clinging to Nomi, and they fell. They hit the ice hard, despite the low gravity.

Nomi, combat-hardened, was on her feet immediately. An oddly pink light caught her squat outline. But Hama, winded, bewildered, found himself gazing up at the stars.

Different stars? No. Just – moved. The Xeelee ship was gone, vanished.

He struggled to his feet.

The wave of vapour and ice was subsiding, as quickly as it had been created; there was no air here to prevent the parabolic fall of the crystals back to the shattered land, little gravity to prevent the escape of the vapour into Jovian space. The land’s shuddering ceased, though he could feel deep slow echoes of huge convulsions washing through the rigid ground.

But the stars had moved.

He turned, taking in the changed sky. Surely the shrunken sun was a little further up the dome of sky. And a pink slice of Jupiter now showed above the smoothly curved horizon, where none had shown before on this tide-locked moon.

Nomi touched his arm, and pointed deep into the ice. ‘Look.’

It was like some immense fish, embedded in the ground, its spreadeagled black wings clearly visible through layers of dusty ice. A red glow shone fitfully at its heart; as Hama watched it sputtered, died, and the buried ship grew dark.

Nomi said, ‘At first I thought the Xeelee must have lit up some exotic super-drive and got out of here. But I was wrong. That thing must be half a kilometre down. How did it get there?’

‘I don’t think it did,’ Hama said. He turned away and peered at Jupiter. ‘I think Callisto moved, Nomi.’

‘What?’

‘It didn’t have to be far. Just a couple of kilometres. Just enough to swallow up the Xeelee craft.’

Nomi was staring at him. ‘That’s insane. Hama, what can move a moon?’

Why, a child could, Hama thought in awe. A child playing on a beach – if every grain on that beach is a slice in time. I see a line sketched in the dust, a history, smooth and complete. I pick out a grain with Callisto positioned just here. And I replace it with a grain in which Callisto is positioned just a little further over there. As easy, as wilful, as that.

No wonder the Xeelee are afraid.

A new shuddering began, deep and powerful.

‘Lethe,’ said Nomi. ‘What now?’

Hama shouted, ‘Not the Xeelee this time. Callisto spent four billion years settling into its slow waltz around Jupiter. Now I think it’s going to have to learn those lessons over again.’

‘Tides,’ Nomi growled.

‘It might be enough to melt the surface. Perhaps those cryptoendoliths will be wiped out after all, and the route to configuration space blocked. I wonder if the Xeelee planned it that way all along.’

He saw a grin spread across Nomi’s face. ‘We aren’t done yet.’ She pointed.

Hama turned. A new moon was rising over Callisto’s tight horizon. It was a moon of flesh and metal, and it bore a sigil, a blue-green tetrahedron, burned into its hide.

‘The Spline ship, by Lethe,’ Nomi said. She punched Hama’s arm. ‘Our Spline. So the story goes on for us, my friend.’

Hama glared down into the ice, at the Xeelee craft buried there. Yes, the story goes on, he thought. But we have introduced a virus into the software of the universe. And I wonder what eyes will be here to see, when that ship is finally freed from this tortured ice.

An orifice opened up in the Spline’s immense hide. A flitter squirted out and soared over Callisto’s ice, seeking a place to land.

Exhausted, disoriented, Callisto and her followers stumbled down the last length of trunk and collapsed to the ground.

She dug her good hand into the loose grains of reality dust. She felt a surge of pride, of achievement. This island, an island of a new possibility, was her island now.

Hers, perhaps, but not empty, she realised slowly. There was a newborn here: lost, bewildered, suddenly arrived. She saw his face smoothing over, working with anguish and doubt, as he forgot.

But when his gaze lit on her, he became animated.

He tried to stand, to walk towards her. He stumbled, weak and drained, and fell on his face.

Dredging up the last of her own strength, she went to him. She dug her hand under him and turned him on his back – as, once, Pharaoh had done for her.

He opened his mouth. Spittle looped between his lips, and his voice was a harsh rasp. ‘Gemo!’ he gasped.

‘My name is Callisto.’

‘I am your brother! I made you! Help me! Love me!’

Something tugged at her: recognition – and resentment.

She held his head to her chest. ‘This won’t hurt,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’ And she held him, until the last of his unwelcome memories had leaked away, and, forgetting who he was, he lay still.

The Coalition, hardened by Hama Druz’s doctrines of constancy and racial destiny, proved persistent, and determined. Cleansing themselves of the past, they continued to try to eradicate the undying, for we collaborators embodied the past. We had to flee, to hide.

But our taint of immortality went deeper than those who persecuted us could know. I, already an elder, found a new role.

ALL IN A BLAZE

AD 5478

On some level Faya Parz had always known the truth about herself. In the background of her life there had been bits of family gossip. And then as she grew older, and her friends began to grey, even though she had had to give up her Dancing, she stayed supple – as if she was charmed, time sliding by her, barely touching her.

But these were subtle things. She had never articulated it to herself, never framed the thought. On some deeper level she hadn’t wanted to know.

She had to meet Luru Parz before she faced it.

It all came to a head on the day of the Halo Dance.

The amphitheatre was a bowl gouged out of the icy surface of Port Sol. Of course the amphitheatre was crowded, as it was every four years for this famous event; there was a sea of upturned faces all around Faya. She gazed up at the platforms hovering high above, just under the envelope of the dome itself, where her sister and the other Dancers were preparing for their performance. And beyond it all the sun, seen from here at the edge of Sol system, was just a brighter pinprick in a tapestry of stars, its sharpness softened a little by the immense dome that spanned the theatre.

‘…Excuse me.’

Faya glanced down. A small woman faced her, stocky, broad-faced, dressed in a nondescript coverall. Faya couldn’t tell her age, but there was something solid about her, something heavy, despite the micro-gravity of Port Sol. And she looked oddly familiar.

The woman smiled at her.

Faya was staring. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘The seat next to you—’

‘It’s free.’

With slow care, the woman climbed the couple of steps up to Faya’s row and sat down on the carved and insulated ice. ‘You’re Faya Parz, aren’t you? I’ve seen your Virtuals. You were one of the best Dancers of all.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You wish you were up there now.’

Faya was used to fans, but this woman was a little unsettling. ‘I’m past forty. In the Dance, when you’ve had your day, you must make way.’

‘But you are ageing well.’

It was an odd remark from a stranger. ‘My sister’s up there.’

‘Lieta, yes. Ten years younger. But you could still challenge her.’

Faya turned to study the woman. ‘I don’t want to be rude, but—’

‘But I seem to know a lot about you, don’t I? I don’t mean to put you at a disadvantage. My name is Luru Parz.’

Faya did a double-take. ‘I thought I knew all the Parz on Port Sol.’

‘We’re relatives even so. I’m – a great-aunt, dear. Think of me that way.’

‘Do you live here?’

‘No, no. Just a transient, as we all are. Everything passes, you know; everything changes.’ She waved her hand, indicating the amphitheatre. Her gestures were small, economical in their use of time and space. ‘Take this place. Do you know its history?’

Faya shrugged. ‘I never thought about it. Is it natural, a crater?’

Luru shook her head. ‘No. A starship was born here, right where we’re sitting, its fuel dug out of the ice. It was the greatest of them all, called Great Northern.’

‘You know a lot of history,’ said Faya, a little edgy. The Coalition, focusing on mankind’s future, frowned on any obsession with lost heroic days.

Luru would only shrug. ‘Some of us have long memories.’

A crackling, ripping sound washed down over the audience, and a pale blue mist erupted over the domed sky. And now the first haloes formed, glowing arcs and rings around the brighter stars and especially around the sun itself, light scattered by air full of tiny ice prisms. There were more gasps from the crowd.

‘What a beautiful effect,’ said Luru.

‘But it’s just water,’ Faya said.

So it was. The dome’s upper layers of air were allowed to become extremely cold, far below freezing. At such temperatures you could just throw water into the air and it would spontaneously freeze. A water droplet froze quickly from the outside in – but ice was less dense than water, and when the central region froze it would expand and shatter the outer shell. So the air was suddenly filled with tiny bombs.

On this ice moon, cold was art’s raw material.

The main event began. One by one the Dancers leapt from their platforms. They were allowed no aids; they followed simple low-gravity parabolas that arched between one floating platform and the next. But the art was in the selection of that parabola among the shifting, shivering ice haloes – which were, of course, invisible to the Dancers – and in the way you spun, turned, starfished and swam against that background.

As one Dancer after another passed over the dome, ripples of applause broke out around the amphitheatre. Glowing numerals and Virtual bar graphs littered the air in the central arena; the voting had already begun. But the sheer beauty of the Dance silenced many of the spectators, as the tiny human figures, naked and lithe, spun defiantly against the stars.

Here, at last, was Lieta herself, ready for the few seconds of flight for which she had rehearsed for four years. Faya remembered how it used to feel, the nervousness as her body tried to soar – and then the exhilaration when she succeeded, one more time.

Lieta’s launch was good, Faya saw, her track well chosen. But her movements were stiff, lacking the liquid grace of her competitors. Lieta, her little sister, was already thirty years old, and one of the oldest in the field; and suddenly it showed.

At the centre of the arena a display of Lieta’s marks coalesced. A perfect score would have showed as bright green, but Lieta’s bars were flecked with yellow. A Virtual of Lieta’s upper body and head appeared; she was smiling bravely in reaction to the scores.

‘There is grey in her hair,’ murmured Luru. ‘Look at the lines around her eyes, her mouth. You have aged better than your ten-years-younger sister. You have aged less, in fact. There is no grey in your hair.’

Faya wasn’t sure how to respond. She looked away, disturbed.

‘Tell me why you gave up the Dance. Your performances weren’t declining, were they? You felt you could have kept going for ever. Isn’t that true? But something worried you.’

Faya turned on her in irritation. ‘Look, I don’t know what you want—’

‘It’s a shock when you see them grow old around you. I remember it happening to me, the first time – long ago, of course.’ She grinned coldly.

‘You’re frightening me.’ Faya said it loud enough to make people stare.

Luru stood. ‘I’m like you, Faya Parz. The same blood. You know what I’m talking about. When you need to see me, you’ll be able to find me.’

Faya waited in her seat until the Dance was over, and the audience had filed away. She didn’t even try to find Lieta, as they’d arranged. Instead she made her own way up into the dome.

She stood on the lip of the highest platform. The amphitheatre was a pit, far below, but she had no fear of heights. The star-filled sky beyond the dome was huge, inhuman. And, through the subtle glimmer of the dome walls, she could see the tightly curving horizon of this little world of ice.

She closed her eyes, visualising the pattern of haloes, just as it had been when Lieta had launched herself into space. And then she jumped.

Though she had no audience, she had the automated systems assess her. She found the bars glowing an unbroken green. She had recorded a perfect mark. If she had taken part in the competition, against these kids half her age, she would have won.

She had known what Luru was had been talking about. Of course she had. Where others aged, even her own sister, she stayed young. It was as simple as that. The trouble was, it was starting to show.

And it was illegal.

Home was a palace of metal and ice she shared with her extended family. This place, one of the most select on Port Sol, had been purchased with the riches Faya had made from her Dancing.

Her mother was here. Spina Parz was over sixty; her grey, straying hair was tied back in a stern bun.

And, waiting for Faya, here was a Commissary, a representative of the Commission for Historical Truth. Originally an agency for ferreting out Qax collaborators, the Commission had evolved seamlessly into the police force of the Coalition, government of Sol system. This Commissary wore his head shaved, and a simple ground-length robe.

Everybody was frightened of Commissaries. It was only a couple of generations since Coalition ships had come to take Port Sol into the new government’s deadly embrace, by force. But somehow Faya wasn’t surprised to see him; evidently today was the day everything unravelled for her.

The Commissary stood up and faced her. ‘My name is Ank Sool.’

‘I’m not ageing, am I?’

He seemed taken aback by her bluntness. ‘I can cure you. Don’t be afraid.’

Her mother Spina said wistfully, ‘I knew you were special even when you were very small, Faya. You were an immortal baby, born among mortals. I could tell when I held you in my arms. And you were beautiful. My heart sang because you were beautiful and you would live for ever. You were wonderful.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Spina looked tired. ‘Because I wanted you to figure it out for yourself. On the other hand I never thought it would take you until you were forty.’ She smiled. ‘You never were the brightest crystal in the snowflake, were you, dear?’

Faya’s anger melted. She hugged her mother. ‘The great family secret…’

‘I saw the truth, working its way through you. You always had trouble with relationships with men. They kept growing too old for you, didn’t they? When you’re young even a subtle distancing is enough to spoil a relationship. And—’

‘And I haven’t had children.’

‘You kept putting it off. Your body knew, love. And now your head knows too.’

Sool said earnestly, ‘You must understand the situation.’

‘I understand I’m in trouble. Immortality is illegal.’

He shook his head. ‘You are the victim of a crime – a crime committed centuries ago.’

It was all the fault of the Qax, as so many things were. During their Occupation of Earth the Qax had rewarded those who had collaborated with them with an anti-ageing treatment. The Qax, masters of nanotechnological transformations, had rewired human genomes.

‘After the fall of the Qax the surviving collaborators and their children were given the gift of mortality.’ The Commissary said this without irony.

‘But you evidently didn’t get us all,’ Faya said.

Sool said, ‘The genome cleansing was not perfect. After centuries of Occupation we didn’t have the technology. In every generation there are throwbacks.’

‘Throwbacks. Immortals, born to mortal humans.’

‘Yes.’

Faya felt numb. It was as if he was talking about somebody else. ‘My sister—’

Her mother said, ‘Lieta is as mortal as I am, as your poor father was. It’s only you, Faya.’

‘We can cure you,’ Sool said, smiling. ‘It will be quite painless.’

‘But I could stay young,’ Faya said rapidly. She turned to Sool. ‘Once I was famous for my Dancing. They even knew my name on Earth.’ She waved a hand. ‘Look around! I made a fortune. I was the best. Grown men of twenty-five – your age, yes? – would follow me down the street. You can’t know what that was like; you never saw their eyes.’ She stood straight. ‘I could have it all again. I could have it for ever, couldn’t I? If I came out about what I am.’

Sool said stiffly, ‘The Coalition frowns on celebrity. The species, not the individual, should be at the centre of our thoughts.’

Her mother was shaking her head. ‘Anyhow, Faya, it can’t be like that. You’re still young; you haven’t thought it through. Once I hoped you would be able to – hide. To survive. But it would be impossible. Mortals won’t accept you.’

‘Your mother is right,’ Sool said. ‘You would spend your life tinting your hair, masking your face. Abandoning your home every few years. Otherwise they will kill you. No matter how beautifully you Danced.’ He said this with a flat certainty, and she realised that he was speaking from experience.

‘I need time,’ she said abruptly, and forced a smile. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? Just as I’ve been given all the time anybody could ask for.’

Spina sighed. ‘Time for what?’

‘To talk to Luru Parz.’ And she left before they could react.

‘I am nearly two hundred years old,’ said Luru Parz. ‘I was born in the era of the Occupation. I grew up knowing nothing else. And I took the gift of immortality from the Qax. I have already lived to see the liberation of mankind.’

They were in a two-person flitter. Faya had briskly piloted them into a slow orbit around Port Sol; beneath them the landscape stretched to its close-crowding horizon. Here, in this cramped cabin, they were safely alone.

Port Sol was a Kuiper object: like a huge comet nucleus, circling the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto. The little ice moon was gouged by hundreds of artificial craters. Faya could see the remnants of domes, pylons and arches, spectacular microgravity architecture. But the pylons and graceful domes were collapsed, with bits of glass and metal jutting like snapped bones. Everything was smashed up. Much of this architecture was a relic of pre-Occupation days. The Qax had never come here; during the Occupation the moon had been a refuge. It had been humans, the forces of the young Coalition, who had done all this damage in their ideological enthusiasm. Now, even after decades of reoccupation and restoration, most of the old buildings were closed, darkened, and thin frost coated their surfaces.

Luru said, ‘Do you know what I see, when I look down at this landscape? I see layers of history. The great engineer Michael Poole himself founded this place. He built a great system of wormholes, rapid-transit pathways from the worlds of the inner system. And having united Sol system, here, at the system’s outermost terminus, Poole’s disciples used great mountains of ice to fuel interstellar vessels. It was the start of mankind’s First Expansion. But then humans acquired a hyperdrive.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Economic logic. The hyper-ships could fly right out of the crowded heart of Sol system, straight to the stars. Nobody needed Poole’s huge wormhole tunnels, or his mighty ice mine. And then the Qax came, and then the Coalition.’

‘But now Port Sol has revived.’

‘Yes. Because now we are building a new generation of starships, great living ships thirsty for Port Sol’s water. Layers of history.’

‘Luru, why should I be tainted in this way? Why my family?’

‘It’s common on Port Sol,’ Luru said. ‘Relatively. Even during the Occupation, and again under the Coalition’s persecution, the undying fled to the outer system – to the gas giants’ moons, to here, a forgotten backwater. Yes, this was a hideout for undying.’

‘I know. That’s why the Coalition were so brutal.’

‘Yes. Many undying escaped the Coalition invasion, and fled further. A flock of generation starships rose from the ice of Port Sol, even as the Coalition ships approached, commanded by undying; nobody knows what became of them. But while they were here, you see, the undying perturbed the gene pool, with their own taint of longevity. It’s not a surprise that throwbacks like you, as the Commission calls you, should arise here.’

‘Luru Parz, I don’t know what to do. Will I have to hide?’

‘Yes. But you mustn’t be ashamed. There is an evolutionary logic to our longevity.’ Luru clutched a fist over her heart. ‘Listen to me. Before we were human, when we were animals, we died after the end of our fertile years, like animals. But then, as we evolved, we changed. We lived on, long after fertility ended. Do you know why? So that grandmothers could help their daughters raise the next generation. And that is how we overcame the other animals, and came to own the Earth – through longevity. Immortality is good for the species, even if the species doesn’t know it. You must hide, Faya. But you must not be ashamed of what you are.’

‘I don’t want to hide.’

‘You don’t have a choice. The Coalition are planning a new future for mankind, an expansion to the stars that will sweep on, for ever. There will be no place for the old. But of course that’s just the latest rationalisation. People have always burned witches.’

Faya didn’t know what a witch was.

And then a Virtual of Faya’s mother’s face congealed in the air before her, the bearer of bad news about Lieta.

Faya and Spina held each other, sitting side by side. For now they were done with weeping, and they had readmitted Ank Sool, the Commissary.

‘I don’t understand,’ Faya said. It was the brevity that was impossible to bear – a handful of Dances, a flash of beauty and joy, and then dust. And why should her sister die so suddenly now, why was her life cut short, just as the prospect of eternity opened up for Faya? ‘Why Lieta? Why now?’

Sool said, ‘Blame the Qax. The pharaohs never bred true. Many of their offspring died young, or their development stopped at an unsuitable age, so that immortality remained in the gift of the occupiers. The Qax were always in control, you see.’

Faya said carefully, ‘Commissary, I think I will always suspect, in a corner of my heart, that you allowed this death to happen, in order to bring me under control.’

His eyes were blank. ‘The Commission for Historical Truth has no need of such devices.’

Spina grasped her daughter’s hands. ‘Take the mortality treatment, dear. It’s painless. Get it over, and you will be safe.’

‘You could have sent me to the Commission as a child. I could have been cured then. I need never have even known.’

Sool said dryly, ‘So you would blame your mother rather than the Qax. How – human.’

Spina’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, love, how could I take such a gift away from you – even to protect you?’

‘It’s your decision,’ said Sool.

‘It always had to be,’ said her mother.

Again she swept into orbit with Luru Parz, seeking privacy.

This is how it will be for me from now on, she thought: hiding from people. I will be one of a handful of immortal companions, like crabbed, folded-over Luru here, standing like unchanging rocks in a landscape of evanescent flowers.

That or mortality.

‘I can’t stand the thought of seeing them all growing old and dying around me. For ever.’

Luru nodded. ‘I know. But you aren’t thinking big enough, child. On a long enough timescale, everything is as transient as one of your Halo Dances. Why, perhaps we will even live to see the stars themselves sputter to life, fade and die.’ She smiled. ‘Stars are like people. Even stars come and go, you see. They die all in a blaze, or fade like the last light of the sun – but you’ve never seen a sunset, have you? The glory is always brief – but it is worth having, even so. And you will remember the glory, and make it live on. It’s your purpose, Faya.’

‘My burden,’ she said bleakly.

‘We have great projects, long ambitions, beyond the imagination of these others. Come with me.’

Tentatively Faya reached out her hand, Luru took it. Her flesh was cold.

‘I will have to say farewell—’

‘Not farewell. Goodbye. Get used to it.’

Before they left she visited the amphitheatre, one last time. And – though she knew she could never let anybody watch her, ever again – she Danced and Danced, as the waiting stars blazed.

Even as the Coalition hardened its grip on mankind, and continued its hideous cleansing of Sol system, it launched a new thrust to the stars.

The Third Expansion of mankind was the most vigorous yet and, driven by the new ideology of Hama Druz, the most purposeful.

I and those like me tried to stay out of the way of the engines of history.

As the Expansion unfolded humanity once more encountered alien kinds, and re-engaged in wider Galactic history. It was only a little more than eighty years after the liberation from the Qax that a first contact of devastating significance was made.