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.’