Resplendent (11 page)
Hama frowned. ‘And the Callisto bugs—’
Reth smiled. ‘I believe that, constrained in this space and time, the Callisto lifeforms have started to explore the wider realms of configuration space. Seeking a place to play. Life will find a way.’
Nomi toiled up the gentle slope of the ridge that loomed above the settlement. This was one of the great ring walls of the Valhalla system, curving away from this place for thousands of kilometres, rising nearly a kilometre above the surrounding plains.
The land around her was silver and black, a midnight sculpture of ridges and craters. There were no mountains here, none at all; any created by primordial geology or the impacts since Callisto’s birth had long since subsided, slumping into formlessness. There was a thin smearing of black dust over the dirty white of the underlying ice; the dust was loose and fine-grained, and she disturbed it as she passed, leaving bright footprints.
‘… Do you understand what you’re looking at?’
The sudden voice startled her; she looked up.
It was Sarfi. She was dressed, as Nomi was, in a translucent protective suit, another nod to the laws of consistency that seemed to bind her Virtual existence. But she left no footprints, nor even cast a shadow.
Sarfi kicked at the black dust, not disturbing a single grain. ‘The ice sublimes - did you know that? It shrivels away, a metre every ten million years - but it leaves the dust behind. That’s why the human settlements were established on the north side of the Valhalla ridges. There it is just a shade colder, and some of the sublimed ice condenses out. So there is a layer of purer ice, right at the surface. The humans lived off ten-million-year frost … You’re surprised I know so much. Nomi Ferrer, I was dead before you were born. Now I’m a ghost imprisoned in my mother’s head. But I’m conscious. And I am still curious.’
Nothing in Nomi’s life had prepared her for this conversation. ‘Do you love your mother, Sarfi?’
Sarfi glared at her. ‘She preserved me. She gave up part of herself for me. It was a great sacrifice.’
Nomi thought, You resent her. You resent this cloying, possessive love. And all this resentment bubbles inside you, seeking release. ‘There was nothing else she could have done for you.’
‘But I died anyway. I’m not me. I’m a download. I don’t exist for me, but for her. I’m a walking, talking construct of her guilt.’ She stalked away, climbing the slumped ice ridge.
Gemo started to argue detail with her brother. How was it possible for isolated bacteria-like creatures to form any kind of sophisticated sensorium? - but Reth believed there were slow pathways of chemical and electrical communication, etched into the ice and rock, tracks for great slow thoughts that pulsed through the substance of Callisto. Very well, but what of quantum mechanics? The universe was not made up of neat little particles, but was a mesh of quantum probability waves. - Ah, but Reth imagined quantum probability lying like a mist over his reality dust, constrained by two things: the geometry of configuration space, as acoustic echoes are determined by the geometry of a room; and something called a ‘static universal wave function’, a mist of probability that governed the likelihood of a given Now sharing configuration space with a given other …
Hama closed his eyes, his mind whirling. Blocky pixels flickered across his vision, within his closed eyes.
Startled, he looked up. Sarfi was kneeling before him; she had brushed her Virtual fingertips through his skull, his eyes. He hadn’t even known she had come here.
‘I know it’s hard to accept,’ she said. ‘My mother spent a long time making me understand. You just have to open your mind.’
‘I am no fool,’ he said sharply. ‘I can imagine a map of all the logical possibilities of a universe. But it would be just that - a map, a theoretical construct, a thing of data and logic. It would not be a place. The universe doesn’t feel like that, I feel time passing. I don’t experience disconnected instants, Reth’s dusty reality.’
‘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 walked 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.
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