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.