Nomi growled, ‘Even now you’re theorising, Hama? Let’s count the ways we might die, standing right here. The Xeelee starbreaker might cream us. One of these miniature quakes might erupt right under us. Or maybe we’ll last long enough to suffocate in our own farts, stuck inside these damn suits. What do you think? I don’t know why you let that arrogant pharaoh kill himself.’
Hama murmured, ‘You see death as an escape?’
‘If it’s easy, if it’s under your control – yes.’
‘Reth did escape,’ Hama said. ‘But I don’t think it was into death.’
‘You believed all that stuff about theoretical worlds?’
‘Yes,’ Hama said. ‘Yes, in the end I think I did believe it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of them.’ He gestured at the sky. ‘The Xeelee. If our second-hand wisdom has any validity at all, we know that the Xeelee react to what they fear. And almost as soon as Reth constructed his interface to his world of logic and data, as soon as the pharaohs began to pass into it, they came here.’
‘You think the Xeelee fear us?’
‘Not us. The bugs in the ice: Reth’s cryptoendoliths, dreaming their billion-year dreams … The Xeelee seem intent on keeping those dreams from escaping. And that’s why I think Reth hit on a truth, you see. Because the Xeelee see it too.’
Now, over one horizon, there was a glowing crimson cloud, like dawn approaching – but there could be no dawn on this all-but-airless world.
‘Starbreaker light,’ murmured Nomi. ‘The glow must be vapour, ice splinters, dust, thrown up from the trench they are digging.’
Hama felt a fierce anger burn – anger, and a new certainty. ‘Once again aliens have walked into our system, for their own purposes, and we can do nothing to stop them. This mustn’t happen again, Nomi. You know, perhaps the Qax were right to attempt the Extirpation. If we are to survive in this dangerous universe we must remake ourselves, without sentiment, without nostalgia, without pity. Let this be an end – and a beginning, a new Day Zero. History is irrelevant. Only the future is important.’ He longed to be gone from this place, to bring his hard new ideas to the great debates that were shaping the future of humankind.
‘You’re starting to frighten me, my friend,’ Nomi said gently. ‘But not as much as that.’
Now the Xeelee nightfighter itself came climbing above the shattered fog of the horizon. Somehow in his ardour Hama had forgotten this mortal peril. The nightfighter was like an immense, black-winged bird. Hama could see crimson Starbreaker light stab down again and again into the passive, defenceless ice of Callisto. The shuddering of the ground was constant now, as that mass of shattered ice and steam rolled relentlessly towards them.
Nomi grabbed him; holding each other, they struggled to stay on their feet as ice particles battered their faceplates. A tide of destruction spanned Callisto from horizon to horizon. There was, of course, no escape.
And then the world turned silver, and the stars swam.
Hama cried out, clinging to Nomi, and they fell. They hit the ice hard, despite the low gravity.
Nomi, combat-hardened, was on her feet immediately. An oddly pink light caught her squat outline. But Hama, winded, bewildered, found himself gazing up at the stars.
Different stars? No. Just – moved. The Xeelee ship was gone, vanished.
He struggled to his feet.
The wave of vapour and ice was subsiding, as quickly as it had been created; there was no air here to prevent the parabolic fall of the crystals back to the shattered land, little gravity to prevent the escape of the vapour into Jovian space. The land’s shuddering ceased, though he could feel deep slow echoes of huge convulsions washing through the rigid ground.
But the stars had moved.
He turned, taking in the changed sky. Surely the shrunken sun was a little further up the dome of sky. And a pink slice of Jupiter now showed above the smoothly curved horizon, where none had shown before on this tide-locked moon.
Nomi touched his arm, and pointed deep into the ice. ‘Look.’
It was like some immense fish, embedded in the ground, its spreadeagled black wings clearly visible through layers of dusty ice. A red glow shone fitfully at its heart; as Hama watched it sputtered, died, and the buried ship grew dark.
Nomi said, ‘At first I thought the Xeelee must have lit up some exotic super-drive and got out of here. But I was wrong. That thing must be half a kilometre down. How did it get there?’
‘I don’t think it did,’ Hama said. He turned away and peered at Jupiter. ‘I think Callisto moved, Nomi.’
‘What?’
‘It didn’t have to be far. Just a couple of kilometres. Just enough to swallow up the Xeelee craft.’
Nomi was staring at him. ‘That’s insane. Hama, what can move a moon?’
Why, a child could, Hama thought in awe. A child playing on a beach – if every grain on that beach is a slice in time. I see a line sketched in the dust, a history, smooth and complete. I pick out a grain with Callisto positioned just here. And I replace it with a grain in which Callisto is positioned just a little further over there. As easy, as wilful, as that.
No wonder the Xeelee are afraid.
A new shuddering began, deep and powerful.
‘Lethe,’ said Nomi. ‘What now?’
Hama shouted, ‘Not the Xeelee this time. Callisto spent four billion years settling into its slow waltz around Jupiter. Now I think it’s going to have to learn those lessons over again.’
‘Tides,’ Nomi growled.
‘It might be enough to melt the surface. Perhaps those cryptoendoliths will be wiped out after all, and the route to configuration space blocked. I wonder if the Xeelee planned it that way all along.’
He saw a grin spread across Nomi’s face. ‘We aren’t done yet.’ She pointed.
Hama turned. A new moon was rising over Callisto’s tight horizon. It was a moon of flesh and metal, and it bore a sigil, a blue-green tetrahedron, burned into its hide.
‘The Spline ship, by Lethe,’ Nomi said. She punched Hama’s arm. ‘Our Spline. So the story goes on for us, my friend.’
Hama glared down into the ice, at the Xeelee craft buried there. Yes, the story goes on, he thought. But we have introduced a virus into the software of the universe. And I wonder what eyes will be here to see, when that ship is finally freed from this tortured ice.
An orifice opened up in the Spline’s immense hide. A flitter squirted out and soared over Callisto’s ice, seeking a place to land.
Exhausted, disoriented, Callisto and her followers stumbled down the last length of trunk and collapsed to the ground.
She dug her good hand into the loose grains of reality dust. She felt a surge of pride, of achievement. This island, an island of a new possibility, was her island now.
Hers, perhaps, but not empty, she realised slowly. There was a newborn here: lost, bewildered, suddenly arrived. She saw his face smoothing over, working with anguish and doubt, as he forgot.
But when his gaze lit on her, he became animated.
He tried to stand, to walk towards her. He stumbled, weak and drained, and fell on his face.
Dredging up the last of her own strength, she went to him. She dug her hand under him and turned him on his back – as, once, Pharaoh had done for her.
He opened his mouth. Spittle looped between his lips, and his voice was a harsh rasp. ‘Gemo!’ he gasped.
‘My name is Callisto.’