Stephen Baxter - Resplendent

Hama, accompanied by Nomi, would spend a few days here, acquainting himself with the issues around the collaborators. But to complete his assignment he would have to travel far beyond the Earth: to Jupiter’s moon, Callisto, in fact. There – according to records kept during the Occupation by the jasofts themselves – a number of pharaohs had fled to a science station maintained by one of their number, a man named Reth Cana.

For the next few days Hama worked through the data slates assembled for him, and received visitors, petitions, claimants. He quickly learned that there were many issues here beyond the crimes of the collaborator class.

The Conurbation itself faced endless problems day to day. The Conurbations had been deliberately designed by the Qax as temporary cities. It was all part of the grand strategy of the latter Occupation; the Qax’s human subjects were not allowed ties of family, of home, of loyalty to anybody or anything – except perhaps the Occupation itself. A Conurbation wasn’t a home; sooner or later you would be moved on.

The practical result was that the hastily constructed Conurbation was quickly running down. Hama read gloomily through report after report of silting-up canals and failing heating or lighting and crumbling dwelling places. People were sickening of diseases long thought vanished from the planet – even hunger had returned.

And then there were the wars.

The aftermath of the Qax’s withdrawal – the overnight removal of the government of Earth after three centuries – had been extremely turbulent. In less than a month humans had begun fighting humans once more. It had taken a chaotic half-year before the Coalition had coalesced, and even now, around the planet, brushfire battles still raged against warlords armed with Qax weaponry.

It had been the jasofts, of course, who had been the focus of the worst conflicts. In many places jasofts, including pharaohs, had been summarily executed. Elsewhere the jasofts had gone into hiding, or fled off-world, or had even fought back. The Coalition had quelled the bloodshed by promising that the collaborators would be brought to justice before its new Commission for Historical Truth.

But Hama – alone in his office, poring over his data slates – knew that justice was easier promised than delivered. How were short-lived humans – dismissively called mayflies by the pharaohs – to try crimes that might date back centuries? There were no witnesses save the pharaohs themselves; no formal records save those maintained under the Occupation; no testimony save a handful of legends preserved through the endless dissolutions of the Conurbations; not even any physical evidence since the Qax’s great Extirpation had wiped the Earth clean of its past.

What made it even more difficult, Hama was slowly discovering, was that the jasofts were useful .

It was a matter of compromise, of practical politics. The jasofts knew how the world worked, on the mundane level of keeping people alive, for they had administered the planet for centuries. So some jasofts – offered amnesties for cooperating – were discreetly running parts of Earth’s new, slowly coalescing administration under the Coalition, just as they had under the Qax.

And meanwhile, children were going hungry.

Hama had, subtly, protested against his new assignment. He felt his strength lay in philosophy, in abstraction. He longed to rejoin the debates going on in great constitutional conventions all over the planet, as the human race, newly liberated from the Qax, sought a new way to govern itself.

But his appeal against reassignment had been turned down. There was simply too much to do now , too great a mess to clear up, and too few able and trustworthy people available to do it.

As he witnessed the clamour of the crowds around the failing food dispensers, Hama felt a deep determination that things should be fixed, that such a situation as this should not recur. And yet, to his shame, he looked forward to escaping from all this complexity to the cool open spaces of the Jovian system.

It was while he was in this uncertain mood that the pharaoh sought him out.

Asgard led her to the fringe of the forest. There, ignoring Callisto, she hunkered down and began to pull at strands of grass, ripping them from the ground and pushing them into her mouth.

Callisto watched doubtfully. ‘What should I do?’

Asgard shrugged. ‘Eat.’

Reluctantly Callisto got to her knees. Favouring her truncated arm, it was difficult to keep her balance. With her left hand she pulled a few blades of the grass stuff from the dust. She crammed the grass into her mouth and chewed. It was moist, tasteless, slippery. She found that the grass blades weren’t connected to roots. Rather they seemed to blend back into the dust, to the tube-like structures there.

People moved through the shadows of the forest, digging at the roots with their bare hands, pushing fragments of food into their faces.

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Callisto.’

Asgard grunted. ‘Your dream-name.’

‘I remembered it.’

‘No, you dreamed .’

‘What is this place?’

‘It isn’t a place.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘It has no name.’ Asgard held up a blade of grass. ‘What colour is this?’

‘Green,’ Callisto said immediately. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t green. What colour, then? She realised she couldn’t say.

Asgard laughed, and shoved the blade in her mouth.

Callisto looked down the beach. ‘What happened to Pharaoh?’

Asgard shrugged. ‘He might be dead by now. Washed away by the sea.’

‘Why doesn’t he come up here, where it’s safe?’

‘Because he’s weak. Weak and mad.’

‘He saved me from the sea.’

‘He helps all the newborns.’

‘Why?’

‘How should I know? But it’s futile. The ocean rises and falls. Every time it comes a little closer, higher up the beach. Soon it will lap right up here, to the forest itself.’

‘We’ll have to go into the forest.’

‘Try that and Night will kill you.’

Night? Callisto looked into the forest’s darkness, and shuddered.

Asgard eyed Callisto with curiosity, no sympathy. ‘You really are a newborn, aren’t you?’ She dug her hand into the dust, shook it until a few grains were left on her palm. ‘You know what the first thing Pharaoh said to me was? “Nothing is real.”’

‘Yes—’

‘“Not even the dust. Because every grain is a whole world .”’ She looked up at Callisto, calculating.

Callisto gazed at the sparkling grains, wondering, baffled, frightened. Too much strangeness.

I want to go home, she thought desperately. But where, and what, is home?

Two women walked into Hama’s office: one short, squat, her face a hard mask, and the other apparently younger, taller, willowy. They both wore bland, rather scuffed Occupation-era robes – as he did – and their heads were shaven bare.

The older woman met his gaze steadily. ‘My name is Gemo Cana. This is my daughter. She is called Sarfi.’

Hama eyed them with brief curiosity. The daughter, Sarfi, averted her eyes. She looked very young, and her face was thin, her skin sallow.

This was a routine appointment. Gemo Cana was, supposedly, a representative of a citizens’ group concerned about details of the testimony being heard by the preliminary hearings of the Truth Commission. The archaic words of family – daughter, mother – were still strange to Hama, but they were becoming increasingly more common, as the era of the Qax cadres faded from memory.

He welcomed them with his standard opening remarks. ‘My name is Hama Druz. I am an adviser to the Interim Coalition and specifically to the Commission for Historical Truth. I will listen to whatever you wish to tell me and will help you any way I can; but you must understand that my role here is not formal, and—’