Futures - Four Novellas Part 11

"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 ca.n.a.ls. Hama could see the Spline ship rolling in the sky, a wrinkled moon. She said, "It was difficult enough hi the era of the ax, whose authority, backed by Spline gunships, was unquestionable,"

"And," asked Hama, "how exactly do you know that?"

"This used to be my office."

Hama reached immediately for his desktop.

"Please." The girl, Sarfi, reached out toward him, then seemed to think better of it. "Don't call your guards. Hear us out."

He stood. "You're a jasoft, Gemo Cana."

"Oh, worse than that," Gemo murmured. "I'm a pharaoh ... You know, I have missed this view. The ax knew what they were doing when they gave us jasofts the sunlight."

She was the first pharaoh Hama had encountered face to face. Hama quailed before her easy authority, her sense of dusty age; he 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 in this office, Hama Druz. Longer than you can imagine. I always knew the day would come when the ax would leave us exposed."

"So you prepared."

"Wouldn't you? I was doing my duty. I didn't want to die for it."

"Your duty to ax 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 recognized 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 play-thing for easier times. But science is a thread in the tapestry of our humanity-a thread Reth had 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 ax sought to obliterate human history-to abolish the pa.s.sage of time from the 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 ax 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 ja- soft."

"Then she will not be harmed."

Gemo just laughed.

"You are evading justice, Gemo Cana."

She leaned forward, resting her hands on the desk non chalantly; this really had been her office, he realized. "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.

In the ax world, families had been a thing for ragam.u.f.fins 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, 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 toward 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 theorize 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 pa.s.sed through the desk, briefly breaking up into a cloud of pixels, boxes of glowing color.

"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 do not breed true."

"Your daughter was mortal?"

"The ax's gift was ambiguous. We watched our children grow old and die. That was our reward for serving the ax; 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, umm, 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."

Sarfi looked away, as if ashamed.

Hama felt moved, and repelled, by this act of obsessive love.

There was a low concussion. The floor shuddered.

Nomi Ferrer understood immediately. "Lethe. That was an explosion."

Hama could hear running footsteps, cries. The light dropped, as if some immense shadow were pa.s.sing over the sky. Kama ran to the window.

All around the Conurbation, ships were lifting, hauled into the sky by silent ax technology, an eerie rising of ballooning metal flanks. But they entered a sky that was already crowded, darkened by the rolling, meaty bulk of a Spline craft.

Hama quailed 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 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 ..."

Sarfi pressed her hands to her face.

Hama stared at Gemo. "You knew. You knew this was about to happen. You timed your visit to force me to act."

"It's all very complicated, Hama Druz," Gemo said softly, manipulating. "Don't you think so? Get us out of here-all of us-and sort it out later."

Nomi pulled back the pharaoh's head. "You know what I think? I think you're a monster, pharaoh. I

think you killed your daughter, long ago, and stuck her in your head. An insurance against a day like today."

Gemo, her face twisted by Nomi's strong fingers, forced a smile. "Even if that were true, what difference would it make?" And she gazed at Hama, waiting for his decision.

Obeying Nomi's stern voice commands, the ship rose sharply. Hama felt nothing as shadows slipped over his lap.

This small craft, commissioned to take Hama to Jupiter's moons, was little more than a translucent hemisphere. In fact it would serve as a lifedome, part of a greater structure waiting in Earth orbit to propel him across the Solar System. The three of them, plus Sarfi, were jammed into a cabin made for two.

The Virtual girl was forced to share the s.p.a.ce already occupied by Hama and Gemo. Where her projection intersected their bodies it dimmed and broke up, and she averted her face; Hama was embarra.s.sed by this brutal indignity.

The ship emerged from its pit and rushed beneath the looming belly of the spline; there was a brief, ugly moment of fleeing, crumpled flesh, oozing scars meters long, glistening weapon emplacements dug in like stab wounds.

The air was crowded, Ships of all sizes cruised above Conurbation 11729, seeking to engage the Spline.

Hama saw, with a sinking heart, that one of the ancient, half-salvaged ships had crashed back to Earth. It had made a broad crater, a wound in the ground circled by burning blown-silicate buildings. Already people had died today, irreplaceable lives lost forever.

The ship reached clear sky and soared upward. Earth folded over into a glowing blue abstraction, poinflessly beautiful, hiding the gruesome scenes below; the air thinned, the sky dimming through violet, to black.

The lifedome began to seek out the orbiting angular structure that would carry it to the outer planets.

Hama began to relax, for the first time since Gemo had revealed herself. Despite everything that had happened he was relieved to leave behind the complication of the Conurbation; perhaps in the thin light of Jupiter the dilemmas he would have to face would be simpler.

Sarfi gasped.

A vast winged shape sailed over the blue hide of Earth, silent, like a predator.

Kama's heart sank at the sight of this new, unexpected intruder. What now?

Nomi said softly, "Those wings must be hundreds of kilometers across."

"Ah," said Gemo. "just like the old stories. The ship is like a sycamore seed... But none of you remembers sycamore trees, do you? Perhaps you need us, and our memories, after all."

Nomi said, anger erupting, "People are dying down there because of your kind, Gemo-"

Kama placed a hand on her arm. 'Tell us, pharaoh. Is it ax?"

"Not ax," she said. "Xeelee" It was the first time Hama had heard the name. "That is a Xeelee nightfighter," said Gemo. "The question is-what does it want here?"

There was a soft warning chime.

The ship shot away from Earth. The planet dwindled, closing on itself, becoming a sparkling blue bauble, a bauble over which a black-winged insect crawled.

Callisto joined the community of foragers.

Dwelling where the forest met the beach, the people ate the gra.s.s, and sometimes leaves from the lower

branches, even loose flaps of bark. The people were wary, solitary. She didn't learn their names-if they had any-nor gained a clear impression of their faces, their s.e.xes. She wasn't even sure how many of them there were here. Not many, she thought. Callisto found herself eating incessantly. With every mouthful she took she felt herself grow, subtly, in some invisible direction-the opposite to the diminution she had suffered when she lost her hand to the burning power of the sea. There was nothing to drink-no fluid save the oily black ink of the ocean, and she wasn't tempted to try that. But it didn't seem to matter. Callisto was not without curiosity. The beach curved away, in either direction. Perhaps this was an island, poking out of the looming black ocean. There was no bedrock, not as far as she could dig. Only the drifting, uniform dust. There were structures in the dust: crude tubes and trails, like the markings of worms or crabs. The gra.s.s emerged, somehow, coalescing from looser dust formations. The gra.s.s grew spa.r.s.ely on the open beach, but at the fringe of the forest it gathered in dense clumps. In some tufts the long blades wove together until they merged, forming more substantial, ropy plants. Tiring of Asgard's cold company, she plucked up her courage and walked away from the beach, deeper into the forest. Away from the lapping of the sea and the wordless rustle of the foraging people, it grew dark, quiet. Gra.s.s ropes wrapped around her legs, tugging, yielding with reluctance as she pa.s.sed. This was a drab, still, lifeless place, she thought. In a bush like this there ought to be texture: movement, noise, scent. So, anyhow, her flawed memories dimly protested. She found a thick, solid ma.s.s, like a tree root. It was a tangle of gra.s.sy ropes, melding into a more substantial whole. She followed it. The root soon twined around another, and then another, the whole soon merging into a snaking cylinder broad enough to walk on. And from all around her more such giant roots were converging, as if she were approaching some great confluence of life. At last the roots left the ground before her and rose up in a thick, twisted tangle, impossible to penetrate. She peered up. The root stems coalesced into a thick unified trunk. It was a "tree" that rose above the surrounding vegetative ma.s.s and into the light of the sky. But a low mist lay heavily, obscuring her view of the tree's upper branches. She felt curiosity spark. She placed her hand on the knotted-up lower trunk, then one foot, and then the other. The stuff of the tree was hard and cold. At first the climbing was easy, the components of the "trunk" loosely separated. She found a way to lodge her bad arm in gaps in the trunk so she could release her left hand briefly, and grab for a new handhold before she fell back. But as she climbed higher the ropey sub-trunks grew ever more tangled. High above her the trunk soared upward, daunting, disappearing into the mist. But she thought she made out branches arching through the mist, high above the surrounding vegetation. When she looked down, she saw how the "roots" of this great structure dispersed over the forest floor, branching into narrower trees and vine-thin creepers and at last clumps of gra.s.s, dispersing into the underlying dust. She felt unexpectedly exhilarated by this small adventureThere was a snarl, of greed and anger. It came from just above her head. She quailed, slipped. She finished up dangling by her one hand. It was human. Or, it might once have been human. It must have been four, five times her size. It was naked, and it clung to the tree above her, upside down, so that a broad face leered, predator's eyes fixed on her, its limbs were cylinders of muscle, its chest and bulging belly ma.s.sive, weighty. And it was male: an erection poked crudely between its legs. It thrust its mouth at her, hissing. She could smell blood on its breath. She screamed and lost her grip. She fell, sliding down the trunk. She scrabbled for purchase with her feet and her one good hand. She slammed repeatedly against the trunk, and the wind was knocked out of her. Above her, the beast receded, still staring into her eyes. When she reached the ground, ignoring the aches of battered body and torn feet, she blundered away, running until she reached the openness of the beach. For an unmeasured time she lay on the beach, drawing comfort from the graininess of the dust. The craft was called a GUTship. As finally a.s.sembled, it looked something like a parasol of iron and ice. The canopy of the parasol was the habitable lifedome, and the "handle" was the GUTdrive unit itself, embedded in a block of asteroid ice which served as reaction ma.s.s. The shaft of the parasol, separating the lifedome from the drive unit, was a kilometer-long spine of metal bristling with antennae and sensors. The design was centuries old. The ship itself had been built long before the Occupation, and lovingly maintained by a colony of refugees who had seen out the ax era huddled in the asteroid belt. In a hundred subtle ways the ship showed its age. Every surface in the lifedome was scuffed and polished from use, the soft coverings of chairs and bunks were extensively patched, and many of the major systems bore the scars of rebuilding. GUT, it seemed, was an acronym for Grand Unified Theory. Once, Gemo whispered, unified-theory energy had fueled the expansion of the universe itself. In the heart of each GUTdrive asteroid ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity-the Big Bang. There, the fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing super- force, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel asteroid matter as a vapor rocket... Remarkable, exotic, strange; this might be a primitive ship compared to a mighty Spline vessel, but Hama had never dreamed that mere humans had once mastered such technologies. But when they were underway, with the lifedome opaqued over and all the strangeness shut out, none of that mattered. To Hama it was like being back in the Conurbations, in the enclosed, claustrophobic days before the Occupation was lifted. A deep part of his mind seemed to believe that way lay beyond these walls-occupied Earth, or endless universe-did not matter so long as he was safe and warm. He felt comfortable in his mobile prison-and was guilty to feel that way. But everything changed when they reached Callisto. They entered a wide, slow orbit around the ice moon. The sun was shrunk to the tiniest of discs by Jupiter's remoteness, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Kama held up his hand it cast sharp, straight shadows, the shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth. And through this rectilinear, reduced light, Callisto swam. The satellite was like a dark, misty twin of Earth's Moon, its surface was crowded with craters-even more so than the Moon's, for there were none of the giant lava-flood seas that smoothed over much lunar terrain. The largest craters were complex structures, plains of pale ice surrounded by multiple arcs of folded and cracked land, like ripples frozen into shattered ice and rock. Some of these features were the size of continents, large enough to stretch around this lonely moon's curved horizon, evidently the result of immense, terrifying impacts. But these great geological sculptures were oddly smoothed out, the cracks and ripples reduced to shallow ridges. Unlike the rocky Moon, Callisto was made of rock and water ice. Over billions of years the ice had suffered viscous relaxation; it flowed and slumped. The most ancient craters had simply subsided, like great geological sighs, leaving these spectacular palimpsests. "The largest impact structure is called Valhalla," Gemo was saying. "Once there were human settlements all along the northern faces of the circular ridges. All dark now, of course-save where Reth has made his base." Nomi grunted, uninterested in tourism. "Then that's where we land." Kama gazed out at this silent sculpture of ice and time. "Remarkable," he said. "I never imagined-" Gemo said caustically, "You are a drone of the Occupation. You never even saw the sunlight, you never imagined a universe beyond the walls of your Conurbation, you have never lived. You have no memory. And yet you presume to judge. Do you even know why Callisto is so-called? It is an ancient myth. Callisto was a nymph, beloved of Zeus and hated by jealous Hera, who metamorphosed her into a bear..." She seemed to sense Kama's bafflement. "Ah, but you don't even remember the Gree-chs, do you?" Nomi confronted her. "You administered the Extirpation, pharaoh. Your arrogance over the memories you took from us is-" "Hi-mannered," Hama said smoothly, and he touched Nomi's shoulder, seeking to calm the situation. "A lack of grace that invalidates her a.s.sumption of superiority over us. Don't concern yourself, Nomi. She condemns herself and her kind every time she speaks." Gemo glared at him, full of contempt. But now Jupiter rose. The four of them crowded to see. They bobbed in the air like balloons, thrust into weightlessness now that the drive was shut down. The largest of planets was a dish of muddy light, of cloudy bands, pink and purple and brown. Where the bands met, Hama could see fine lines of turbulence, swoops and swirls like a lunatic watercolor. But a single vast storm disfigured those smooth bands, twisting and stirring them right across the southern hemisphere of the planet, as if the whole of Jupiter were being sucked into some vast central maw. As perhaps it was. There was a legend that, a century before, human rebels called the Friends of Wigner had climaxed their revolt by escaping back through time, across thousands of years, and had hurled a black hole into the heart of Jupiter. The knot of compressed s.p.a.cetime was already distorting Jupiter's immense, dreamy structure, and in perhaps a million years would destroy the great world altogether. It was a fantastic story, probably no more than a tale spun for comfort during the darkest hours of Occupation. Still, it was clear that something was wrong with Jupiter. n.o.body knew the truth-except perhaps the pharaohs, and they would say nothing. Kama saw how Sarfi, entranced, tried to rest her hand against the lifedome's smooth transparency. But her hand sank into the surface, crumbling, and she s.n.a.t.c.hed it away quickly. Such incidents seemed to cause Sarfi deep distress -as if she had been programmed with deep taboos about violating the physical laws governing "real" humans. Perhaps it even hurt her when such breaches occurred.

Gemo Cana did not appear to notice her daughter's pain.