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.’