‘Gemo Cana is a collaborator,’ Nomi said. ‘Hama, you’re letting her escape justice.’
Yes, Hama thought, surprised. Nomi, in her blunt way, had once more hit on the essence of the situation here. The pharaohs were the refugees now, and Reth’s configuration space – if it existed at all – might prove their ultimate bolt-hole. Gemo Cana was escaping, leaving behind the consequences of her work, for good or ill. But did that justify killing her?
Sarfi was crying. ‘Mother, please. I’ll die.’
The pharaoh turned her head. ‘Hush,’ said Gemo. ‘You can’t die. You were never alive. Don’t you see that?’ Her back arched. ‘Oh…’
Sarfi straightened and looked at her hands. The illusion of solidity was breaking down, Hama saw; pixels swarmed like fat, cubic insects, grudgingly cooperating to maintain the girl’s form. Sarfi looked up at Hama, and her voice was a flat, emotionless husk, devoid of intonation and character. ‘Help me.’
Again Hama reached out to her; again he dropped his hands, the most basic of human instincts invalidated. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It hurts.’ Her face swarmed with pixels that erupted from the crumbling surface of her skin and fled her body, as if evaporating; she was becoming tenuous, unstable.
Hama forced himself to meet her gaze. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. ‘It will be over soon…’ On and on, meaningless endearments; but she gazed into his eyes, as if seeking refuge there.
For a last instant her face congealed, clearly, from the dispersing cloud. ‘Oh!’ She reached out to him with a hand that was no more than a mass of diffuse light. And then, with a silent implosion, her face crumbled, eyes closing.
Gemo shuddered once, and was still.
Hama could feel his heart pulse within him. His humanity was warm in this place of cold and death. Nomi placed her strong hand on his shoulder, and he relished its fierce solidity.
Hama faced Reth. ‘You are monsters.’
Reth smiled easily. ‘Gemo is beyond your mayfly reproach. And as for the Virtual child – you may learn, Hama Druz, if you pass beyond your current limitations, that the first thing to be eroded by time is sentiment.’
Hama flared. ‘I will never be like you, pharaoh. Sarfi was no toy.’
‘But you still don’t see it,’ Reth said evenly. ‘She is alive – but our time-bound language can’t describe it – she persists, somewhere out there, beyond the walls of our petty realisation.’
Again the moon shuddered, and primordial ice groaned.
Reth murmured, ‘Callisto was not designed to take such hammer blows. The situation is reduced, you see. Now there is only me.’
‘And me.’ Nomi raised the laser pistol.
‘Is this what you want?’ Reth asked of Hama. ‘To cut down centuries of endeavour with a bolt of light?’
Hama shook his head. ‘You really believe you can reach your configuration space – that you can survive there?’
‘But I have proof,’ Reth said. ‘You saw it.’
‘All I saw was a woman dying on a slab.’
Reth glowered at him. ‘Hama Druz, make your decision.’
Nomi aimed the pistol. ‘Hama?’
‘Let him go,’ Hama said bitterly. ‘He has only contempt for our mayfly justice anyhow. His death would mean nothing, even to him.’
Reth grinned and stepped back. ‘You may be a mayfly, but you have the beginnings of wisdom, Hama Druz.’
‘Yes,’ Hama said quietly. ‘Yes, I believe I do. Perhaps there is something there, some new realm of logic to be explored. But you, Reth, are blinded by your arrogance and your obsessions. Surely this new reality is nothing like the Earth of your childhood. And it will have little sympathy for your ambitions. Perhaps whatever survives the download will have no resemblance to you. Perhaps you won’t even remember who you were. What then?’
Reth’s mask sparkled; he raised his hand to his face. He made for the pallet, to lie beside the cooling body of his sister. But he stumbled and fell before he got there.
Hama and Nomi watched, neither moving to help him.
Reth, on his hands and knees, turned his masked face to Hama. ‘You can come with me, Hama Druz. To a better place, a higher place.’
‘You go alone, pharaoh.’
Reth forced a laugh. He cried out, his back arching. Then he fell forward, and was still.
Nomi raked the body with laser fire. ‘Good riddance,’ she growled. ‘Now can we get out of here?’
There was a mountain.
It rose high above the night-dark sea, proudly challenging the featureless, glowing sky. Rivers flowed from that single great peak, she saw: black and massive, striping its huge conical flanks, merging into great tumbling cascades that poured into the ocean.
The mountain was the centre of the world, thrusting from the sea.
She was high above an island, a small scrap of land that defied the dissolving drenching of the featureless sea. Islands were few, small, scattered, threatened everywhere by the black, crowding ocean.
But, not far away, there was another island, she saw, pushing above the sea of mist. It was a heaping of dust on which trees grew thickly, their branches tangled. In fact the branches reached across the neck of sea that separated this island from her own. She thought she could see a way to reach that island, scrambling from tree to tree, following a great highway of branches. The other island rose higher than her own above the encroaching sea. There, she thought, she – and whoever followed her – would be safe from lapping dissolution. For now, anyhow.
But what did that mean? What would Pharaoh have said of this – that the new island was an unlikely heap of reality dust, further from looming entropic destruction?
She shook her head. The deeper meaning of her journey scarcely mattered – and nor did its connection to any other place. If this world were a symbol, so be it: this was where she lived, and this was where she would, with determination and perseverance, survive.
She looked one last time at the towering mountain. Damaged arm or not, she itched to climb it, to challenge its negentropic heights. But in the future, perhaps. Not now.
Carefully, clinging to her branch with arms and legs and her one good hand, she made her way along the branch to the low-probability island. One by one, the people of the beach followed her.
In the mist, far below, she glimpsed slow, ponderous movement: huge beasts, perhaps giant depraved cousins of Night. But, though they bellowed up at her, they could not reach her.
Once more Hama and Nomi stood on the silver-black surface of Callisto, under a sky littered with stars. Just as before, the low, slumped ridges of Valhalla marched to the silent horizon.
But this was no longer a world of antiquity and stillness. The shudders were coming every few minutes now. In places the ice crust was collapsing, ancient features subsiding, here and there sending up sprays of dust and ice splinters that sparkled briefly before falling back, all in utter silence.
Hama thought back to a time before this assignment, to the convocations he had joined, the earnest talk of political futures and ethical settlements. He had been a foolish boy, he thought, his ideas half-formed. Now, when he looked into his heart, he saw crystal-hard determination. In an implacably hostile universe humanity must survive, whatever the cost.
‘No more pharaohs,’ Hama murmured. ‘No more immortality. That way lies selfishness and arrogance and compromise and introversion and surrender. A brief life burns brightly – that is the way.’