The beach curved around on itself.
So she was on an island. At least she had learned that much. Eventually, she supposed, that dark sea would rise so high it would cover everything. And they would all die.
There was no night. When she was tired, she rested on the beach, eyes closed.
There was no time here – not in the way she seemed to remember, on some deep level of herself: no days, no nights, no change. There was only the beach, the forest, that black oily sea, lapping ever closer, all of it under a shadowless grey-white sky.
She looked inward, seeking herself. She found only fragments of memory: an ice moon, a black sky – a face, a girl’s perhaps, delicate, troubled, but the face broke up into blocks of light. She didn’t like to think about the face. It made her feel lonely. Guilty.
She asked Asgard about time.
Asgard, gnawing absently on a handful of bark chips, ran a casual finger through the reality dust, from grain to grain. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Time passing. From one moment to the next.
For we, you see, are above time.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t. A row of dust grains is a shard of story. A blade of grass is a narrative. Where the grass knits itself into vines and trees, that story deepens. And if I eat a grass blade I absorb its tiny story, and it becomes mine. So Pharaoh said. And I don’t know who told him. Do you see?’
‘No,’ said Callisto frankly.
Asgard just looked at her, apathetic, contemptuous.
There was a thin cry, from the ocean. Callisto, shading her eyes, looked that way.
It had been a newborn, thrust arbitrarily into the air, just as Callisto had been. But this newborn had fallen, not to the comparative safety of the dust, but direct into the sea. She – or he – made barely a ripple on that placid black surface. Callisto saw a hand raised briefly above the sluggish meniscus, the flesh already dissolving, white bones curling. And then it was gone, the newborn lost.
Callisto felt a deep horror. It might have happened to her.
Now, as she looked along the beach, she saw dark masses – a mound of flesh, the grisly articulation of fingers – fragments of the suddenly dead, washed up on this desolate beach. This had happened before, she realised. Over and over.
She said, ‘We can’t stay here.’
‘No,’ Asgard agreed reluctantly. ‘No, we can’t.’
Hama, with Reth and Gemo, rode a platform of metal deep into the rocky heart of Callisto.
The walls of the pressurised shaft, sliding slowly upwards, were lined with slick transparent sheets, barring them from the ice. Hama reached out with a fingertip. The wall surface was cold and slippery, lubricated by a thin sheet of condensation from the chill air. There were no signs of structure, of strata in the ice; here and there small bores had been dug away from the shaft, perhaps as samples.
Callisto was a ball of dirty water ice. Save for surface impacts, nothing had happened to this moon since it accreted from the greater cloud that had formed the Jupiter system. The inner moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede – were heated, to one degree or another, by tidal pumping from Jupiter. So Europa, under a crust of ice, had a liquid ocean; and Io was driven by that perennial squeezing to spectacular volcanism. But Callisto had been born too far from her huge parent for any of that gravitational succour. Here, the only heat was a relic of primordial radioactivity; here there had been no geology, no volcanism, no hidden ocean.
Nevertheless, it seemed, Reth Cana had found life here. And, as the platform descended, Reth’s cold excitement seemed to mount.
Nomi Ferrer was pursuing her own researches, in the settlement and out on the surface. But she had insisted that Hama be escorted by a squat, heavily armed drone robot. Both Reth and Gemo ignored this silent companion, as if it were somehow impolite of Hama to have brought it along.
Nor did either of them mention Sarfi, who hadn’t accompanied them. To Hama it did not seem human to disregard one’s daughter, Virtual or otherwise. But then, what was ‘human’ about a near-immortal traitor to the race? What was human about Reth, this man who had buried himself alone in the ice of Callisto, obsessively pursuing his obscure project, for decade after decade?
Even though the platform was small and cramped, Hama felt cold and alone; he suppressed a shiver.
The platform slowed, creaking, to a halt. He faced a chamber dug into the ice.
Reth said, ‘You are a kilometre beneath the surface. Go ahead. Take a look.’
Hama saw that the seal between the lip of the circular platform and the roughly cut ice was not perfect. He felt a renewed dread at his reliance on ancient, patched-up technology. But, suppressing hesitation, he stepped off the platform and into the ice chamber. With a whirr of aged bearings, the drone robot followed him.
Hama stood in a rough cube perhaps twice his height. It had been cut out of the ice, its walls lined by some clear glassy substance; it was illuminated by two hovering light globes. On the floor there was a knot of instrumentation, none of it familiar to Hama, along with a heap of data slates, some emergency equipment, and scattered packets of food and water. This was a working place, impersonal.
Reth stepped past him briskly. ‘Never mind the gadgetry; you wouldn’t understand it anyhow. Look.’ And he snapped his fingers, summoning one of the floating globes. It came to hover at Hama’s shoulder.
Hama leaned close to inspect the cut-away ice of the wall. He could see texture: the ice was a pale, dirty grey, polluted by what looked like fine dust grains – and, here and there, it was stained by colour, crimson and purple and brown.
Reth had become animated. ‘I’d let you touch it,’ he breathed. ‘But the sheeting is there to protect it from us – not the other way around. The biota in there is much more ancient, unevolved, fragile than we are; the bugs on your breath might wipe it out in an instant. The prebiotic chemicals were probably delivered here by comet impacts during Callisto’s formation. There is carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen. The biochemistry is a matter of carbon-carbon chains and water – like Earth’s, but not precisely so. Nothing exactly like our DNA structures…’
‘Spell it out,’ Gemo said casually, prowling around the gadgetry. ‘Remember, Reth, the education of these young is woefully inadequate.’
‘This is life,’ Hama said. ‘Native to Callisto.’
‘Life – yes,’ Reth said. ‘The highest forms are about equivalent to Earth’s bacteria. But – native? I believe the life forms here have a common ancestor with Earth life, buried deep in time – and that they are related to the more extravagant biota of Europa’s buried ocean, and probably most of the living things found elsewhere in Sol system. Do you know the notion of panspermia? Life, you see, may have originated in one place, perhaps even outside the system, and then was spread through the worlds by the spraying of meteorite-impact debris. And everywhere it landed, life embarked on a different evolutionary path.’
‘But here,’ Hama said slowly, fumbling to grasp these unfamiliar concepts, ‘it was unable to rise higher than the level of a bacterium?’
‘There is no room,’ said Reth. ‘There is liquid water here: just traces of it, soaked into the pores between the grains of rock and ice, kept from freezing by the radiogenic heat. But energy flows thin, and replication is very slow – spanning thousands of years.’ He shrugged. ‘Nevertheless there is a complete ecosystem. Do you understand? My Callisto bacteria are rather like the cryptoendoliths found in some inhospitable parts of Earth. In Antarctica, for instance, you can crack open a rock and see layers of green life, leaching nutrients from the stone itself, sheltering from the wind and the desolating cold: communities of algae, cyanobacteria, fungi, yeasts—’