Part 10 (1/2)

”It would,” I said. ”If not you, then someone else would have reached the breakthrough point. You said it yourself, we were freefalling to the plateau.”

”All this does put us in an extremely awkward position,” Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar said. ”You are the inventor of biononics, the mother of today's society. But we can hardly allow a murderer to go around unpunished, now can we.”

”I'll leave,” she said. ”Go into exile for a thousand years or whatever. That way n.o.body will be embarra.s.sed, and the family won't lose any political respect.”

”That's what you want,” I said. ”I cannot agree to that. The whole reason that we have family command protocols built in to biononics is to ensure that there can be no radical breakaways. n.o.body is able to set up by themselves and inflict harm on the rest of us. Humanity even in its current state has to be able to police itself, though the occasions where such actions are needed are thankfully rare. You taking off by yourself, and probably transcending into a pure energy form is hardly an act of penance. You killed a member of my family so that you could have that opportunity. Therefore, it must be denied you.” My cybershadow reported that she issued a flurry of instructions to the local biononic connate. It didn't acknowledge. Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar had kept his word. And I marveled at the irony in that. Justice served by an act of trust, enacted by a personality forged in a time where honesty and integrity were the highest values to which anyone could aspire. Maybe the likes of he and I did have something valid to contribute to everything today's youngsters were busy building.

Bethany Maria Caesar stiffened as she realized there was to be no escape this time. No window with a convenient creeper down which to climb. ”Very well,” she said. ”What do you think my punishment should be? Am I to hang from the gallows until I'm dead.”

”Don't be so melodramatic,” Neill h.e.l.ler Caesar told her. ”Edward and I have come to an agreement which allows us to resolve this satisfactorily.”

”Of course you have,” she muttered.

”You took Justin's life away from him,” I said. ”We can produce a physical clone of him from the samples we kept. But that still won't be him. His personality, its uniqueness is lost to us forever. When you're dealing with a potentially immortal being there could be no crime worse. You have wasted his life and the potential it offered; in return you will be sentenced to exactly that same punishment. The difference is, you will be aware of it.”

Was that too cruel of me? Possibly. But then consider this: I once knew a man who knew a man who had seen the Empire's legionaries enforcing Rome's rule at the tip of a sword. None of us is as far removed from barbarism as we like to think.

SEVEN Life Time Bethany Maria Caesar was taken from the Eta Cannae habitat on our deepflight s.h.i.+p. We disembarked her on a similar habitat in Jupiter orbit which the Caesars had resource funded. She is its sole inhabitant. None of its biononics will respond to her instructions. The medical modules in her body will continue to reset her DNA. She will never age nor succ.u.mb to disease. In order to eat, she must catch or grow her own food. Her clothes have to be sewn or knitted by herself. Her house must be built from local materials, which are subject to entropy hastened by climate, requiring considerable maintenance. Such physical activities occupy a great deal of her time. If she wishes to continue living she must deny herself the luxury of devoting her superb mind to pure and abstract thoughts. However, she is able to see the new and wondrous shapes which slide fluidly past her region of s.p.a.ce, and know her loss.

Her case is one of the oldest to remain active within our family thoughtcl.u.s.ter. One day, when I've matured and mellowed, and the Borgias have left the Vatican, I may access it again.

Reality Dust

by Stephen Baxter

An explosion of light: the moment of her birth.

She cried out.

A sense of self flooded through her body. She had arms, legs; her limbs were flailing. She was falling, and glaring light wheeled about her.

But she remembered another place: a black sky, a world-no, a moon-a face before her, smiling gently.

This won't hurt. Close your eyes.

A name. Callisto.

But the memories were dissipating.

”No!”

She landed hard, face down, and she was suffused by sudden pain. Her face was pressed into dust, rough, gritty particles, each as big as a moon to her staring eyes.

The flitter rose from liberated Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl. The little cylindrical craft tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling, and Hama Druz marvelled at the beauty of the mist-laden, subtly curved landscape below him, drenched as it was in clear bright sunlight.

But the scars of the Occupation were still visible. Away from the great Conurbations, much of the land still glistened silver-gray where starbreaker beams and ax nanoreplicators had chewed up the surface of the Earth, life and rocks and all, turning it into a featureless silicate dust.

”But already,” he pointed out eagerly, ”life's green is returning. Look, Nomi, there, and there ...”

His companion, Nomi Ferrer, grunted skeptically. ”But that greenery has nothing to do with edicts from your Interim Coalition of Governance, or all your philosophies. That's the worms, Kama, turning ax dust back into soil. Just the worms, that's all.”

Kama would not be put off. Nomi, once a ragam.u.f.fin, was an officer in the Green Army, the most significant military force yet a.s.sembled in the wake of the departing ax. She was forty years old, her body a solid slab of muscle, with b.u.m marks disfiguring one cheek. And, in Kama's judgment, she was much too sunk in cynicism.

He slapped her on the shoulder, ”uite right, And that's how we must be, Nomi: like humble worms, content to toil in the darkness, to turn a few sc.r.a.ps of our land back the way they should be. That should be enough for any life''

Nomi just snorted.

The two-seat flitter began to descend toward a Conurbation. Still known by its ax registration of 11729, the Conurbation was a broad, glistening sprawl of bubble- dwellings blown from the bedrock, and linked by the green- blue of umbilical ca.n.a.ls. Kama saw that many of the dome-shaped buildings had been scarred by fire, some even cracked open. But the blue-green tetrahedral sigil of free Earth had been daubed on every surface.

A shadow pa.s.sed over the Conurbation's glistening rooftops. Kama s.h.i.+elded his eyes and squinted upward. A fleshy cloud briefly eclipsed the sun. It was a Spline s.h.i.+p: a living stars.h.i.+p kilometers across, its hardened epidermis pocked with monitor and weapon emplacements. He suppressed a shudder. For generations the Spline had been the symbol of ax dominance.

But now the ax had gone, and this last abandoned Spline was in the hands of human engineers, who sought to comprehend its strange biological workings.

On the outskirts of the Conurbation there was a broad pit scooped out of the ground, its crudely sc.r.a.ped walls denoting its origin as post-Occupation: human, not ax. In this pit rested a number of silvery, insectile forms, and as the flitter fell further through the sunlit air, Hama could see people moving around the gleaming shapes, talking, working. The pit was a s.h.i.+pyard, operated by and for humans, who were slowly rediscovering yet another lost art; for no human engineer had built a s.p.a.cecraft on Earth for three hundred years.

Hama pressed his face to the window-like a child, he knew, reinforcing Nomi's preconception of him-but to Lethe with self-consciousness. ”One of those s.h.i.+ps is going to take us to Callisto. imagine it, Nomi-a moon of Jupiter!”

But Nomi scowled. ”Just remember why we're going there: to hunt out jasofts-criminals and collaborators. It will fgrim business, Hama, no matter how pretty the scenery.”

The flitter slid easily through the final phases of its deem, and the domes of the Conurbation loomed around Ttawas a voice, talking fast, almost babbling. re 1S no time- There is no s.p.a.ce. We live in a uni- ”What do you feel?”

”... Diminished,” she said.

”Good,” he said. ”You're learning. There is no pain here. Only forgetting.”

The black, sticky fluid was lapping near her legs. She scrambled away. But when she tried to use her missing right hand she stumbled, falling flat.

Pharaoh locked his hand under her arm and hauled her to her feet. The brief exertion seemed to exhaust him; his face smoothed further, as if blurring. ”Go,” he said.

”Where?”

”Away from the sea.” And he pushed her, feebly, away from the ocean.

She looked that way doubtfully. The beach sloped upward sharply; it would be a difficult climb. Above the beach there was what looked like a forest, tall shapes like trees, a carpet of something like gra.s.s. She saw people moving in the darkness between the trees. But the forest was dense, a place of colorless, flat shadows, made gray by the mist.

She looked back. Pharaoh was standing where she had left him, a pale, smoothed-over figure just a few paces from the lapping, encroaching sea, already dimmed by the thick white mist.

She called, ”Aren't you coining?”

”Go.”

”I'm afraid.”