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.