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 …’