Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  GUT, it seemed, was an acronym for Grand Unified Theory. Once, Gemo whispered, unified-theory energy had fuelled the expansion of the universe. In the heart of each GUT engine asteroid ice was compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity - the Big Bang. There, the fundamental forces governing the structure of matter merged into a single unified superforce. When the matter was allowed to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce, released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel asteroid matter as a vapour rocket.

  Remarkable, exotic, strange. This might be a primitive ship compared to a mighty Spline vessel, but Hama had never dreamed that mere humans had once mastered such technologies.

  But when they were underway, with the lifedome opaqued over and all the strangeness shut out, none of that mattered. To Hama it was like being back in the Conurbations, in the enclosed, claustrophobic days before the Occupation was lifted. A deep part of his mind seemed to believe that what lay beyond these walls - occupied Earth, or endless universe - did not matter, so long as he was safe and warm. He felt comfortable in his mobile prison, and was guilty to feel that way.

  All that changed when they reached Callisto.

  The sun was shrunk to the tiniest of discs by Jupiter’s remoteness, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When Hama held up his hand it cast sharp, straight shadows, the shadows of infinity, and he felt no warmth.

  And through this rectilinear, reduced light, Callisto swam.

  They entered a wide, slow orbit around the ice moon. The satellite was like a dark, misty twin of Earth’s Moon. Its surface was crowded with craters - even more so than the Moon’s, for there were none of the giant lava-flood seas that smoothed over much lunar terrain. The largest craters were complex structures, plains of pale ice surrounded by multiple arcs of folded and cracked land, like ripples frozen into shattered ice and rock. Some of these features were the size of continents, large enough to stretch around this lonely moon’s curved horizon, evidently the results of immense, terrifying impacts.

  But these great geological sculptures were oddly smoothed out, the cracks and ripples reduced to shallow ridges. Unlike Earth’s rocky Moon, Callisto was made of rock and water ice. Over billions of years the ice had suffered viscous relaxation; it flowed and slumped. The most ancient craters had simply subsided, like geological sighs, leaving these spectacular palimpsests.

  ‘The largest impact structure is called Valhalla,’ Gemo was saying. ‘Once there were human settlements all along the northern faces of the circular ridges. All dark now, of course - save where Reth has made his base.’

  Nomi grunted, uninterested in tourism. ‘Then that’s where we land.’

  Hama gazed out. ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘I never imagined—’

  Gemo said caustically, ‘You are a drone of the Occupation. You never imagined a universe beyond the walls of your Conurbation, you never even saw the sunlight, you have never lived. You have no memory. And yet you presume to judge. Do you even know why Callisto is so-called? It is an ancient myth. Callisto was a nymph, beloved of Zeus and hated by jealous Hera, who metamorphosed her into a bear . . .’ She seemed to sense Hama’s bafflement. ‘Ah, but you don’t even remember the Gree-chs, do you?’

  Nomi confronted her. ‘You administered the Extirpation, pharaoh. Your arrogance over the memories you took from us is—’

  ‘Ill-mannered,’ Hama said smoothly, and he touched Nomi’s shoulder, seeking to calm the situation. ‘A lack of grace that invalidates her assumption of superiority over us. Don’t concern yourself, Nomi. She condemns herself and her kind every time she speaks.’

  Gemo glared at him, full of contempt.

  But now Jupiter rose.

  The four of them crowded to see. They bobbed in the air like balloons, thrust into weightlessness now the drive was shut down.

  The largest of planets was a dish of muddy light, of cloudy bands, pink and purple and brown. Where the bands met, Hama could see fine lines of turbulence, swoops and swirls like a lunatic water-colour. But a single vast storm disfigured those smooth bands, twisting and stirring them right across the southern hemisphere of the planet, as if the whole of Jupiter were being sucked into some central maw.

  As perhaps it was. There was a legend that, a century before, human rebels called the Friends of Wigner had climaxed their revolt by escaping back through time, across thousands of years, and had hurled a black hole into the heart of Jupiter. The knot of compressed spacetime was already distorting Jupiter’s immense, dreamy structure, and perhaps in time would destroy the great world altogether. It was a fantastic story, probably no more than a tale spun for comfort during the darkest hours of Occupation. Still, it was clear that something was wrong with Jupiter. Nobody knew the truth - except perhaps the pharaohs, and they would say nothing.

  Hama saw how Sarfi, entranced, tried to rest her hand against the lifedome’s smooth transparency. But her hand sank into the surface, crumbling, and she snatched it away quickly. Such incidents seemed to cause Sarfi deep distress - as if she had been programmed with deep taboos about violating the physical laws governing ‘real’ humans. Perhaps it even hurt her when such breaches occurred.

  Gemo Cana did not appear to notice her daughter’s pain.

  The lifedome neatly detached itself from the ship’s drive section and swept smoothly down from orbit. Hama watched the moon’s folded-over, crater-starred landscape flatten out, the great circular ramparts of Valhalla marching over the close horizon.

  The lifedome settled to the ice with the gentlest of crunches. A walkway extended from a darkened building block and nuzzled hesitantly against the ship. A hatch sighed open.

  Hama stood in the hatchway. The walkway was a transparent, shimmering tube before him, concealing little of the silver-black morphology of the collapsed landscape beyond. The main feature was the big Valhalla ridge, of course. Seen this close it was merely a rise in the land, a scarp that marched to either horizon: it would have been impossible to tell from the ground that this was in fact part of a circular rampart surrounding a continent-sized impact scar, and Hama felt insignificant, dwarfed.

  He forced himself to take the first step along the walkway.

  To walk through Callisto’s crystal stillness was enchanting; he floated between footsteps in great bounds. The gravity here was about an eighth of Earth’s, comparable to the Moon’s.

  Gemo mocked his pleasure. ‘You are like Armm-stron and Alldinn on the Moon.’

  Nomi growled, ‘More Gree-chs, pharaoh?’

  Reth Cana was waiting to meet them at the end of the walkway. He was short, squat, with a scalp of crisp white hair, and he wore a practical-looking coverall of some papery fabric. He was scowling at them, his face a round wrinkled mask. Beyond him, Hama glimpsed extensive chambers, dug into the ice, dimly lit by a handful of floating globe lamps - extensive, but deserted.

  Hama’s gaze was drawn back to Reth. He looks like Gemo.

  Gemo stepped forward now, and she and Reth faced each other, brother and sister separated for centuries. They were like copies of each other, subtly morphed. Stiffly, they embraced. Sarfi hung back, watching, hands folded before her.

  Hama felt excluded, almost envious of this piece of complex humanity. How must it be to be bound to another person by such strong ties - for life?

  Reth stepped away from his sister and inspected Sarfi. Without warning he swept his clenched fist through the girl’s belly. He made a trail of disrupted pixels, like a fleshy comet. Sarfi crumpled over, crying out. The sudden brutality shocked Hama.

  Reth laughed. ‘A Virtual? I didn’t suspect you were so sentimental, Gemo.’

  Gemo stepped forward, her mouth working. ‘But I remember your cruelty.’

  Now Reth faced Hama. ‘And this is the one sent by Earth’s new junta of children.’

  Hama shrank before Reth’s arrogance and authority. His accent was exotic - antique, perhaps; there was a rustle of history about this man. Hama tried to
keep his voice steady. ‘I have a specific assignment here, sir—’

  Reth snorted. ‘My work, a project of centuries, deals with the essence of reality itself. It is an achievement of which you have no understanding. If you had a glimmer of sensitivity you would leave now. Just as, if you and your mayfly friends had any true notion of duty, you would abandon your petty attempts at governing and leave it to us.’

  Nomi growled, ‘You think we got rid of the Qax just to hand over our lives to the likes of you?’

  Reth glared at her. ‘And can you really believe that we would have administered the withdrawal of the Qax with more death and destruction than you have inflicted?’

  Hama stood straight. ‘I’m not here to discuss hypotheticals with you, Reth Cana. We are pragmatic. If your work is in the interest of the species—’

  Reth laughed out loud; Hama saw how his teeth were discoloured, greenish. ‘The interest of the species.’ He stalked about the echoing cavern, posturing. ‘Gemo, I give you the future. If this young man has his way, science will be no more than a weapon! . . . And if I refuse to cooperate with his pragmatism?’

  Nomi said smoothly, ‘Those who follow us will be a lot tougher. Believe it, jasoft.’

  Gemo listened, stony-faced. ‘They mean it, Reth.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Reth said to Hama. ‘Twelve hours from now. I will demonstrate my work, my results. But I will not justify it to the likes of you; make of it what you will.’ And he swept away into shadows beyond the fitful glow of the hovering globe lamps.

  Nomi said quietly to Hama, ‘Reth is a man who has spent too long alone.’

  ‘We can deal with him,’ Hama said, with more confidence than he felt.

  ‘Perhaps. But why is he alone? Hama, we know that at least a dozen pharaohs came to this settlement before the Occupation was ended, and probably more during the collapse. Where are they?’

  Hama frowned. ‘Find out.’

  Nomi nodded briskly.

  The oily sea lapped even closer now. The beach was reduced to a thin strip, trapped between forest and sea.

  Callisto walked far along the beach. There was nothing different, just the same dense forest, the oily sea. Here and there the sea had already covered the beach, encroaching into the forest, and she had to push into the vegetation to make further progress. Everywhere she found the tangle of roots and vine-like growths. Where the rising liquid had touched, the grasses and vines and trees crumbled and died, leaving bare, scattered dust.

  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 . . .’