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.’