‘Of course not,’ said Reth. ‘But you must understand that everything we know of the past is a record embedded in the present - the fossils and geology of Earth, so cruelly obliterated by the Qax, even the traces of chemicals and electricity in your own brain that comprise your memory, maintaining your illusion of past times. Sarfi herself is an illustration of the point. Gemo, may I—?’
Gemo nodded, unsmiling. Hama noted he hadn’t asked Sarfi’s permission for whatever he was about to do.
Reth tapped a data slate. Sarfi froze, becoming a static, inanimate sculpture of light. Then, after perhaps ten seconds, she melted, began to move once more.
She saw Hama staring at her. ‘What’s wrong?’
Reth, ignoring her, said, ‘The child contains a record of her own shallow past, embedded in her programmes and data stores. She is unaware of intervals of time when she is frozen, or deactivated. If I could start and stop you, Hama Druz, you would wake protesting that your memories contained no gaps. But your memories themselves would have been frozen. I could even chop up your life and rearrange its instants in any way I chose; at each instant you would have an intact set of memories, a record of a past, and you would believe yourself to have lived through a continuous, consistent reality.
‘And thus the maximal-reality dust grains contain embedded within themselves a record of the eras which “preceded” them. Each grain contains brains, like yours and mine, with “memories” embedded in them, frozen like sculptures. And history emerges in configuration space because those rich grains are then drawn, by a least-energy matching principle, to the grains which “precede” and “follow” them . . . You see?’
Sarfi looked to Gemo. ‘Mother? What does he mean?’
Gemo watched her clinically. ‘Sarfi has been reset many times, of course,’ she said absently. ‘I had no wish to see her grow old, accreted with worthless memory. It was rather like the Extirpation, actually. The Qax sought to reset humanity, to abolish the memory of the race. In the ultimate realisation, we would have become a race of children, waking every day to a fresh world, every day a new creation. It was cruel, of course, but theoretically intriguing. Don’t you think?’
Sarfi was trembling.
Now Reth began telling Gemo, rapidly and with enthusiasm, of his plans to explore his continent of configurations. ‘No human mind could apprehend that multi-dimensional domain unaided, of course. But it can be modelled, with metaphors - rivers, seas, mountains. It is possible to explore it . . .’
Hama said, ‘But, if your meta-universe is static, timeless, how could it be experienced? For experience depends on duration.’
Reth shook his head impatiently. He tapped his data slate and beckoned to Sarfi. ‘Here, child.’
Hesitantly, she stepped forward. Now she trailed a worm-like tube of light, as if her image had been captured at each moment in some invisible emulsion. She emerged, blinking, from the tube, and looked back at it, bewildered.
‘Stop these games,’ Hama said tightly.
‘You see?’ Reth said. ‘Here is an evolution of Sarfi’s structure, but mapped in space, not time. But it makes no difference to Sarfi. Her memory at each frozen instant contains a record of her walking across the floor towards me - doesn’t it, dear? And thus, in static configuration space, sentient creatures could have experiences, afforded them by the evolution of information structures across space.’
Hama turned to Sarfi. ‘Are you all right?’
She snapped back, ‘What do you think?’
‘I think Reth may be insane,’ he said.
She stiffened, pulling back. ‘Don’t ask me. I’m not even a mayfly, remember?’
‘It is comforting to know that configuration space exists, Hama,’ Gemo said. ‘Nothing matters, you see: not even death, not even the Extirpation. For we persist, each moment exists for ever, in a greater universe . . .’
It was a philosophy of decadence, Hama thought angrily. A philosophy of morbid contemplation, a consolation for ageless pharaohs as they sought to justify the way they administered the suffering of their fellow creatures. No wonder it appealed to them so much.
Gemo and Reth talked on, more and more rapidly, entering realms of speculation he couldn’t begin to follow.
Callisto told Asgard what she was intending to do. She wanted to climb that tall, braided tree. But she would have to take on Night to do it.
She walked along the narrowing beach, seeking scraps of people, of newborns and others, washed up by the pitiless black sea. She picked up what looked like a human foot. It was oddly dry, cold, the flesh and even the bones crumbling at her touch.
She collected as many of these hideous shards as she could hold, and toiled back along the barren dust.
Then she worked her way through the forest back to the great tree, where she had encountered the creature called Night. She paused every few paces and pushed a section of corpse into the ground. She covered each fragment with ripped-up grass and bits of bark.
‘You’re crazy,’ Asgard said, trailing her, arms full of dried, crumbling flesh and bone.
‘I know,’ Callisto said. ‘I’m going anyway.’
Asgard would not come far enough to reach the tree itself. So Callisto completed her journey alone.
Once more she reached the base of Night’s tree. Once more, her heart thumping hard, she began to climb.
The creature, Night, seemed to have expected her. He moved from branch to branch, far above, a massive blur, and he clambered with ferocious purpose down the trunk.
When she was sure he had seen her she scrambled hurriedly back to the ground.
He followed her - but not all the way to the ground. He clung to his trunk, his broad face broken by that immense, bloody mouth, hissing at her.
She glowered back, and took a tentative step towards the tree. ‘Come get me,’ she muttered. ‘What are you waiting for?’ She took a piece of corpse (a hand - briefly her stomach turned), and she hurled it up at him.
He ducked aside, startled. But as the severed hand came by he caught it neatly in his scoop of a mouth, crunched once and swallowed it whole. He looked down at her with new interest.
And he took one tentative step towards the ground.
‘That’s it,’ she crooned. ‘Come on. Come eat the flesh. Come eat me, if that’s what you want—’
Without warning he leapt from the trunk, immense hands splayed.
She screamed and staggered back. He crashed to the ground perhaps an arm’s length from her. One massive fist slammed into her ankle, sending a stab of pain that made her cry out. If he’d landed on top of her he would surely have crushed her.
The beast, winded, was already clambering to his feet.
She got up and ran, ignoring the pain of her ankle. Night followed her, his lumbering four-legged pursuit slow but relentless. As she ran she kicked open her buried caches of body parts. He snapped them up and gobbled them down, barely slowing. The morsels seemed pathetically inadequate in the face of Night’s giant reality.
She burst out onto the open beach, still running for her life. She reached the lip of the sea, skidding to a halt before the lapping black liquid. Her plan had been to reach the sea, to lure Night into it.
But when she turned, she saw that Night had hesitated on the fringe of the forest, blinking in the light. Perhaps he was aware that she had deliberately drawn him here. He seemed to dismiss her calculations. He stepped forward deliberately, his immense feet sinking into the soft dust. There was no need for him to rush.
Callisto was already exhausted, and, trapped before the sea, there was nowhere for her to run.
Now he was out in the open she saw how far from the human form he had become, with his body a distorted slab of muscle, a mouth that had widened until it stretched around his head. And yet scraps of clothing clung to him, the remnants of a coverall of the same unidentifiable colour as her own. Once this creature, too, had been a newborn here, landing screaming on this desolate beach.
He walk
ed up to her. He towered over her, and she wondered how many unfortunates he had devoured to reach such proportions.
Beyond his looming shoulder, she could see Asgard, pacing back and forth along the beach.
‘Great plan,’ Asgard called. ‘Now what?’
‘I—’
Night raised himself up on his hind legs, huge hands pawing at the air over her head. He roared wordlessly, and bloody breath gushed over her.
Close your eyes, Callisto thought. This won’t hurt.
‘No,’ Asgard said. She took a step towards the looming beast, began to run. ‘No, no, no!’ With a final yell she hurled herself at his back.
He looked around, startled, and swiped at Asgard with one giant paw. She was flung away like a scrap of bark, to land in a heap on the dust. But Night, off-balance, was stumbling backward, back toward the sea.
When his foot sank into the oily ocean, he looked down, as if surprised. Even as he lifted his leg from the fluid the flesh was drying, crumbling, the muscles and bone sloughing away in layers of purple and white. He roared his defiance, and cuffed at the sea - then gazed in horror at one immense hand left shredded by contact with the entropic ooze.
He began to fall, slowly, ponderously. Without a splash, the fluid opened up to accept his immense bulk. He was immediately submerged, the shallow fluid flowing eagerly over him. In one last burst of defiance he broke the surface, mouth open, his flesh dissolving. His face was restored, briefly, to the human, his eyes a startling blue. He cried out, his voice thin: ‘Reth Cana! You betrayed me! ’
The name sent a shiver of recognition through Callisto.
Then he fell back, and was gone.
She hurried to Asgard. Her chest was crushed, Callisto saw immediately, and her limbs were splayed at impossible angles. Her face was growing smooth, featureless, like a child’s, beautiful in its innocence. Her gaze slid over Callisto.
Callisto cradled Asgard’s head. ‘This won’t hurt,’ she murmured. ‘Close your eyes.’
Asgard sighed, and was still.
‘Let me tell you the truth about pharaohs,’ Nomi said bitterly.
Hama listened in silence. They stood on the Valhalla ridge, overlooking the old, dark settlement; the brightest point on the silver-black surface of Callisto was their own lifedome.
Nomi said, ‘This was just after the Qax left. I got this from a couple of our people who survived, who were there. They found a nest of the pharaohs, in one of the biggest Conurbations - one of the first to be constructed, one of the oldest. The pharaohs retreated into a pit, under the surface dwellings. They fought hard; we didn’t know why. They had to be torched out. A lot of good people, good mayflies, died that day. When our people had dealt with the pharaohs, shut down the mines and drone robots and booby-traps . . . after all that, they went into the pit. It was dark. But it was warm, the air was moist, and there was movement everywhere. Small movements. And, so they say, there was a smell. Of milk.’
Nomi was silent for a long moment; Hama waited.
‘Hama, I can’t have children. I grew up knowing that. So maybe I ought to find some pity for the pharaohs. They don’t breed true - like Gemo and Sarfi. Oh, sometimes their children are born with Qax immortality. But—’
‘Yes?’
‘But they don’t all grow. They stop developing, at the age of two years or one year or six months or a month; some of them even stop growing before they are ready to be born, and have to be plucked from their mothers’ wombs.
‘And that was what our soldiers found in the pit, Hama. Racked up like specimens in a lab, hundreds of them. Must have been accumulating for centuries. Plugged into machines, mewling and crying.’
‘Lethe.’ Maybe Gemo is right, Hama thought; maybe the pharaohs really have paid a price we can’t begin to understand.
‘The pit was torched . . .’
Hama thought he saw a shadow pass across the sky, the scattered stars. ‘Why are you telling me this, Nomi?’
‘To show you that pharaohs have experiences we can’t share. And they do things we would find incomprehensible. To figure them out you have to think like a pharaoh.’
‘You’ve found something, haven’t you?’
Nomi pointed. ‘There’s a line of shallow graves over there. Not hard to find, in the end.’
‘Ah.’
‘The killings seemed to be uniform, the same method every time. A laser to the head. The bodies seemed peaceful,’ Nomi mused. ‘Almost as if they welcomed it.’
He had killed them. Reth had killed the other pharaohs who came here, one by one. But why? And why would an immortal welcome death? Only if - Hama’s mind raced - only if she were promised a better place to go, a safer place—
Everything happened at once.
A shadow, unmistakable now, spread out over the stars: a hole in the sky, black as night, winged, purposeful. And, low towards the horizon, there was a flare of light.
‘Lethe,’ said Nomi softly. ‘That was the GUTship. It’s gone - just like that.’
‘Then we aren’t going home.’ Hama felt numb; he seemed beyond shock.
‘. . . Help me. Oh, help me . . .’
A form coalesced before them, a cloud of blocky pixels. Hama made out a sketch of limbs, a face, an open, pleading mouth. It was Sarfi, and she wasn’t in a protective suit. Her face was twisted in pain; she must be breaking all her consistency overrides to have projected herself to the surface like this.
Hama held out his gloved hands, driven by an impulse to hold her; but that, of course, was impossible.
‘Please,’ she whispered, her voice a thin, badly realised scratch. ‘It is Reth. He plans to kill Gemo.’
Nomi set off down the ridge slope in a bouncing low-G run.
Hama said to Sarfi, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll help your mother.’
Now he saw anger in that blurred, sketchy face. ‘To Lethe with her! Save me . . .’ The pixels dispersed into a meaningless cloud, and winked out.
Callisto returned to the great tree.
The trunk soared upwards, a pillar of rigid logic and history and consistency. She slapped its hide, its solidity giving her renewed confidence. And now there was no Night, no lurking monster, waiting up there to oppose her.
Ignoring the aches of her healing flesh and torn muscles, she began to climb.
As she rose above the trunk’s lower tangle and encountered the merged and melded upper length, the search for crevices became more difficult, just as it had before. But she was immersed in the rhythm of the climb, and however high she rose there seemed to be pocks and ledges moulded into the smooth surface of the trunk, sufficient to support her progress.
Soon she had far surpassed the heights she had reached that first time she had tried. The mist was thick here, and when she looked down the ground was already lost: the great trunk rose from blank emptiness, as if rooted in nothingness.
But she thought she could see shadows, moving along the trunk’s perspective-dwindled immensity: the others from the beach, some of them at least, were following her on her unlikely adventure.
And still she climbed.
The trunk began to split into great arcing branches that pushed through the thick mist. She paused, breathing deeply. Some of the branches were thin, spindly limbs that dwindled away from the main trunk. But others were much more substantial, highways that seemed anchored to the invisible sky.
She picked the most solid-looking of these upper branches, and continued her climb. Impeded by her damaged arm, her progress was slow but steady. It was actually more difficult to make her way along this tipped-over branch than it had been to climb the vertical trunk. But she was able to find handholds, and places where she could she wrap her limbs around the branch.
The mist thickened further until she could see nothing around her but this branch: no sky or ground, not even the rest of this great tree, as if nothing existed but herself and the climb, as if she had been toiling for ever along this branch that came from the mist and finished in the
mist.
And then, without warning, she broke through the fog.
In a pit dug into the heart of Callisto, illuminated by a single hovering globe lamp, Gemo Cana lay on a flat, hard pallet, unmoving. Her brother stood hunched over her, working at her face with gleaming equipment. ‘This won’t hurt. Close your eyes . . .’
‘Stop this!’ Sarfi ran forward. She pushed her hands into Gemo’s face, crying out as the pain of consistency violation pulsed through her.
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