And meanwhile, children were going hungry.
Hama had, subtly, protested against his new assignment. He felt his strength lay in philosophy, in abstraction. He longed to rejoin the debates going on in great constitutional conventions all over the planet, as the human race, newly liberated from the Qax, sought a new way to govern itself.
But his appeal against reassignment had been turned down. There was simply too much to do now, too great a mess to clear up, and too few able and trustworthy people available to do it.
As he witnessed the clamour of the crowds around the failing food dispensers, Hama felt a deep determination that things should be fixed, that such a situation as this should not recur. And yet, to his shame, he looked forward to escaping from all this complexity to the cool open spaces of the Jovian system.
It was while he was in this uncertain mood that the pharaoh sought him out.
Asgard led her to the fringe of the forest. There, ignoring Callisto, she hunkered down and began to pull at strands of grass, ripping them from the ground and pushing them into her mouth.
Callisto watched doubtfully. ‘What should I do?’
Asgard shrugged. ‘Eat.’
Reluctantly Callisto got to her knees. Favouring her truncated arm, it was difficult to keep her balance. With her left hand she pulled a few blades of the grass stuff from the dust. She crammed the grass into her mouth and chewed. It was moist, tasteless, slippery. She found that the grass blades weren’t connected to roots. Rather they seemed to blend back into the dust, to the tube-like structures there.
People moved through the shadows of the forest, digging at the roots with their bare hands, pushing fragments of food into their faces.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Callisto.’
Asgard grunted. ‘Your dream-name.’
‘I remembered it.’
‘No, you dreamed.’
‘What is this place?’
‘It isn’t a place.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘It has no name.’ Asgard held up a blade of grass. ‘What colour is this?’
‘Green,’ Callisto said immediately. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t green. What colour, then? She realised she couldn’t say.
Asgard laughed, and shoved the blade in her mouth.
Callisto looked down the beach. ‘What happened to Pharaoh?’
Asgard shrugged. ‘He might be dead by now. Washed away by the sea.’
‘Why doesn’t he come up here, where it’s safe?’
‘Because he’s weak. Weak and mad.’
‘He saved me from the sea.’
‘He helps all the newborns.’
‘Why?’
‘How should I know? But it’s futile. The ocean rises and falls. Every time it comes a little closer, higher up the beach. Soon it will lap right up here, to the forest itself.’
‘We’ll have to go into the forest.’
‘Try that and Night will kill you.’
Night? Callisto looked into the forest’s darkness, and shuddered.
Asgard eyed Callisto with curiosity, no sympathy. ‘You really are a newborn, aren’t you?’ She dug her hand into the dust, shook it until a few grains were left on her palm. ‘You know what the first thing Pharaoh said to me was? “Nothing is real.” ’
‘Yes—’
‘ “Not even the dust. Because every grain is a whole world.” ’ She looked up at Callisto, calculating.
Callisto gazed at the sparkling grains, wondering, baffled, frightened. Too much strangeness.
I want to go home, she thought desperately. But where, and what, is home?
Two women walked into Hama’s office: one short, squat, her face a hard mask, and the other apparently younger, taller, willowy. They both wore bland, rather scuffed Occupation-era robes - as he did - and their heads were shaven bare.
The older woman met his gaze steadily. ‘My name is Gemo Cana. This is my daughter. She is called Sarfi.’
Hama eyed them with brief curiosity. The daughter, Sarfi, averted her eyes. She looked very young, and her face was thin, her skin sallow.
This was a routine appointment. Gemo Cana was, supposedly, a representative of a citizens’ group concerned about details of the testimony being heard by the preliminary hearings of the Truth Commission. The archaic words of family - daughter, mother - were still strange to Hama, but they were becoming increasingly more common, as the era of the Qax cadres faded from memory.
He welcomed them with his standard opening remarks. ‘My name is Hama Druz. I am an adviser to the Interim Coalition and specifically to the Commission for Historical Truth. I will listen to whatever you wish to tell me and will help you any way I can; but you must understand that my role here is not formal, and—’
‘You’re tired,’ Gemo Cana said.
‘What?’
She stepped forward and studied him, her gaze direct, disconcerting. ‘It’s harder than you thought, isn’t it? Running an office, a city - a world. Especially as you must work by persuasion, consent.’ She walked around the room, ran a finger over the data slates fixed on the walls, and paused before the window, gazing out at the glistening rooftops of the Conurbation, the muddy blue-green of the canals. Hama could see the Spline ship rolling in the sky, a wrinkled moon. She said, ‘It was difficult enough in the era of the Qax, whose authority, backed by Spline gunships, was unquestionable.’
‘And,’ asked Hama, ‘how exactly do you know that?’
‘This used to be one of my offices.’
Hama reached immediately for his desktop.
‘Please.’ The girl, Sarfi, reached out towards him, then seemed to think better of it. ‘Don’t call your guards. Hear us out.’
He stood. ‘You’re a jasoft. Aren’t you, Gemo Cana?’
‘Oh, worse than that,’ Gemo murmured. ‘I’m a pharaoh … You know, I have missed this view. The Qax knew what they were doing when they gave us jasofts the sunlight.’
She was the first pharaoh Hama had encountered face to face. Before her easy authority, her sense of dusty age, Hama felt young, foolish, his precious philosophies half-formed. And he found himself staring at the girl; he hadn’t even known pharaohs could have children.
Deliberately he looked away, seeking a way to regain control of the situation. ‘You’ve been in hiding.’
Gemo inclined her head. ‘I spent a long time working in offices like this one, Hama Druz. Longer than you can imagine. I always knew the day would come when the Qax would leave us exposed, us pharaohs.’
‘So you prepared.’
‘Wouldn’t you? I was doing my duty. I didn’t want to die for it.’
‘Your duty to Qax occupiers?’
‘No,’ she said, a note of weariness in her voice. ‘You seem more intelligent than the rest; I had hoped you might understand that much. It was a duty to mankind, of course. It always was.’
He tapped a data slate on his desk. ‘Gemo Cana. I should have recognised the name. You are one of the most hunted jasofts. Your testimony before the Commission—’
She snapped, ‘I’m not here to surrender, Hama Druz, but to ask for your help.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I know about your mission to Callisto. To the enclave there. Reth has been running a science station since before the Occupation. Now you are going out there to close him down.’
He said grimly, ‘These last few years have not been a time for science.’
She nodded. ‘So you believe science is a luxury, a plaything for easier times. But science is a thread in the tapestry of our humanity - a thread Reth has maintained. Do you even know what he is doing out there?’
‘Something to do with life forms in the ice—’
‘Oh, much more than that. Reth has been exploring the nature of reality - seeking a way to abolish time itself.’ She smiled coolly. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. But it has been a fitting goal, in an era when the Qax have sought to obliterate human history - to abolish the passage of time from human consciousness …’
He frowned. Abolishing time? Such notions were strange to him, meaningless. He said, ‘We have evidence that the science performed on Callisto was only a cover - that many pharaohs fled there during the chaotic period following the Qax withdrawal.’
‘Only a handful. There only ever was a handful of us, you know. And now that some have achieved a more fundamental escape, into death, there are fewer than ever.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to take us there.’
‘To Callisto?’
‘We will remain in your custody, you and your guards. You may restrain us as you like. We will not try anything - heroic. All we want is sanctuary. They will kill us, you see.’
‘The Commission is not a mob.’
She ignored that. ‘I am not concerned for myself, but for my daughter. Sarfi has nothing to do with this; she is no jasoft.’
‘Then she will not be harmed.’
Gemo just laughed.
‘You are evading justice, Gemo Cana.’
She leaned forward, resting her hands on the desk nonchalantly; this really had once been her office, he realised. ‘There is no justice here,’ she hissed. ‘How can there be? I am asking you to spare my daughter’s life. Later, I will gladly return to face whatever inquisition you choose to set up.’
‘Why would this Reth help you?’
‘His name is Reth Cana,’ she said. ‘He is my brother. Do you understand? Not my cadre sibling. My brother.’
Gemo Cana; Reth Cana; Sarfi Cana. In the Qax world, families had been a thing for ragamuffins and refugees, and human names had become arbitrary labels; the coincidence of names had meant nothing to Hama. But to these ancient survivors, a shared name was a badge of kinship. He glanced at Gemo and Sarfi, uneasy in the presence of these close primitive ties, of mother and brother and daughter.
Abruptly the door opened. Nomi Ferrer walked in, reading from a data slate. ‘Hama, your ship is ready to go. But I think we have to—’ She looked up, and took in the scene at a glance. In an instant she was at Gemo’s side, with a laser pistol pressed against the pharaoh’s throat. ‘Gemo Cana,’ she hissed. ‘How did you get in here?’
Sarfi stepped towards Nomi, hands fluttering like birds.
Hama held up his hand. ‘Nomi, wait.’
Nomi was angered. ‘Wait for what? Standing orders, Hama. This is a Category One jasoft who hasn’t presented herself to the Commission. I should already have killed her.’
Gemo smiled thinly. ‘It isn’t so easy, is it, Hama Druz? You can theorise all you want about justice and retribution. But here, in this office, you must confront the reality of a mother and her child.’
Sarfi said to Hama, ‘If your guard kills my mother, she kills me too.’
‘No,’ said Hama. ‘We aren’t barbarians. You have nothing to fear—’
Sarfi reached out and swept her arm down at the desk - no, Hama saw, startled; her arm passed through the desk, briefly breaking up into a cloud of pixels, boxes of glowing colour.
‘You’re a Virtual,’ he whispered.
‘Yes. And do you want to know where I live?’ She stepped up to her mother and pushed her hand into Gemo’s skull.
Gemo observed his lack of comprehension. ‘You don’t know much about us, do you, even though you presume to judge us? Hama, pharaohs rarely breed true.’
‘Your daughter was mortal?’
‘The Qax’s gift was ambiguous. We watched our children grow old and die. That was our reward for serving the Qax; perhaps your Commission will accept that historical truth. And when she died—’
‘When she died, you downloaded her into your head?’
‘Nowhere else was safe,’ Gemo said. ‘And I was glad to, um, make room for her. I have lived a long time; there were memories I was happy to shed.’
Nomi said harshly, ‘But she isn’t your daughter. She’s a copy.’
Gemo closed her eyes. ‘But she’s all I have left.’
Hama felt moved, and repelled, by this act of obsessive love.
Sarfi looked away, as if ashamed.
There was a low concussion. The floor shuddered. Hama could hear running footsteps, cries.
Nomi Ferrer understood immediately. ‘Lethe. That was an explosion.’
The light dropped, as if some immense shadow were passing over the sky. Hama ran to the window.
All around the Conurbation, ships were lifting, hauled into the sky by silent technology, an eerie rising. But they entered a sky that was already crowded, darkened by the rolling, meaty bulk of a Spline craft, from whose flanks fire spat.
Hama cringed from the brute physical reality of the erupting conflict. And he knew who to blame. ‘It’s the jasofts,’ he said. ‘The ones taken to orbit to help with the salvaging of the Spline. They took it over. And now they’ve come here, to rescue their colleagues.’
Gemo Cana smiled, squinting up at the sky. ‘Sadly, stupidity is not the sole prerogative of mayflies. This counter-coup cannot succeed. And then, when this Spline no longer darkens the sky, your vengeance will not be moderated by show trials and bleats about justice and truth. You must save us, Hama Druz. Now!’