Part 14 (1/2)

A shadow, unmistakable now, spread out over the stars: a hole in the sky, black as night, winged, purposeful. And, low toward the horizon, there was a flare of light.

”Lethe,” said Nomi softly. ”That was the GUTs.h.i.+p. It's gone-just like that.”

”Then we aren't going home.” Hama felt numb; he seemed beyond shock. ”... Help me. Oh, help me ...”

A form coalesced before them, a cloud of blocky pixels.

Kama made out a sketch of limbs, a face, an open, pleading mouth. It was Sarfi, and she wasn't in a protective suit. Her face was twisted in pain; she must be breaking all her consistency overrides to have projected herself to the surface like this.

Kama held out his gloved hands, driven by an impulse to hold her; but that, of course, was impossible.

”Please,” she whispered, her voice a thin, badly-realized scratch. ”It is Reth. He plans to kill Gemo.”

Nomi set off down the ridge slope hi a bouncing low-G run.

Hama said to Sarfi, ”Don't worry. We'll help your mother-”

Now he saw anger in that blurred, sketchy face. 'To Lethe with her! Save me ...”

The pixels dispersed into a meaningless cloud, and winked out.

Callisto reached the great tree.

The trunk soared upward, a pillar of rigid logic and history and consistency. She slapped its hide, its solidity giving her renewed confidence. And now there was no Night, no lurking monster, waiting up there to oppose her.

With purpose, ignoring the aches of her healing flesh and torn muscles, she began to climb.

As she rose above the trunk's lower tangle and encountered the merged and melded upper length, the search for crevices became more difficult, just as it had before. But she was immersed in the rhythm of the climb, and however high she rose there seemed to be pocks and ledges molded into the smooth surface of the trunk, sufficient to support her progress.

Soon she had far surpa.s.sed the heights she had reached that first time she had tried. The mist was thick here, and when she looked down the ground was already lost: the great trunk rose from blank emptiness, as if rooted in nothingness.

But she thought she could see shadows, moving along the trunk's perspective-dwindled immensity: the others from the beach, some of them at least, were following her on her unlikely adventure.

And still she climbed.

The trunk began to split into great arcing branches that pushed through the thick mist. She paused, breathing deeply. Some of the branches were thin, spindly limbs that dwindled away from the main trunk. But others were much more substantial, great highways that seemed anch.o.r.ed to the invisible sky.

She picked the most solid-looking of these upper branches, and continued her climb.

Impeded by her damaged arm, her progress was slow but steady. It was actually more difficult to make her way along this tipped-over branch than it had been to climb the vertical trunk. But she was able to find handholds, and places where she could wrap her limbs around the branch.

The mist thickened further until she could see nothing around her but this branch: no sky or ground, not even the rest of this great tree, as if nothing existed but herself and the climb, as if the branch came from the mist and finished in the mist, a strange smooth surface over which she must toil forever.

And then, without warning, she broke through the mist.

In a pit dug into the heart of Callisto, illuminated by a single hovering globe lamp, Gemo Cana lay on a flat, hard pallet, unmoving.

Her brother stood hunched over her, working at her face with gleaming equipment. ”This won't hurt.

Close your eyes ...”

”Stop this!” Sarfi ran forward. She pushed her hands into Gemo's face, crying out as the pain of consistency violation pulsed through her.

Gemo turned, blindly. Hama saw that a silvery mask had been laid over her eyes, hugging the flesh there. ”Sarfi? ...”

Nomi stepped forward, laser pistol poised. ”Stop this obscenity.”

Reth wore a mask of his own, a smaller cap that covered half his face; the exposed eye peered at them, hard, suspicious, calculating. ”Don't try to stop us. You'll kill her if you try. Let us go, Hama Druz.”

Nomi raised her pistol at his head.

But Hama touched the soldier's arm. ”Not yet.”

On her pallet, Gemo Cana turned her head blindly. She whispered, ”There's so much you don't understand.”

Hama snapped, ”You'd better make us understand, Reth Cana, before I let Nomi here off the leash.”

Reth paced back and forth. ”Yes-technically, this is a kind of death. But not a single one of the pharaohs who pa.s.sed through here did it against his or her will.”

Hama frowned. ” 'Pa.s.sed through'?”

Reth stroked the metal clinging to Gemo's face; his sister toned her head in response. ”The core technology is an interface to the brain via the optic nerve. In this way I can connect the quantum structures which encode human consciousness to the structures stored in the Callis...o...b..cteria- or rather, the structures which serve as, umm, a gateway to configuration s.p.a.ce ...”

Kama started to see it. ”You're attempting to download human minds into your configuration s.p.a.ce.”

Reth smiled. ”It was not enough, you see, to study configuration s.p.a.ce at second-hand, through quantum structures embedded in these silent bacteria. The next step had to be direct apprehension by the human sensorium.”

”The next step in what?”

”In our evolution, perhaps,” Reth murmured. ”With the help of the ax, we have banished death. Now we can break down the walls of this shadow theater we call reality.” He eyed Kama. ”This dismal pit is not a grave, but a gateway. And I am the gatekeeper.”

Hama said tightly, ”You destroy minds on the promise of afterlife-a promise concocted of theory and a sc.r.a.ping of cryptoendolith bacteria.”

”Not a theory,” Gemo whispered. ”I have seen it.”

Nomi grunted, ”We don't have time for this.”

But Hama asked, despite himself, ”What was it like?”

It was, Gemo said, a vast, spreading landscape, under a towering sky; she had glimpsed a beach, a rising, oily sea, an immense mountain shrouded in mist...

Reth stalked back and forth, arms spread wide. ”We remain human, Hama Druz. / cannot apprehend a multidimensional continuum. So I sought a metaphor. A human interface. A beach of reality dust. A sea of-entropy, chaos. The structures folded into the living things, the shape of the landscape, represent consistency-what we time-bound creatures apprehend as causality.”

”And the rising sea-”

”The threat of the Xeelee,” he said, smiling thinly. ”The destruction to come. The obliteration of possibility. Even there, threats can reach ... but life, mind can persist.