Part 15 (1/2)

Reth, on his hands and knees, turned his masked face to Hama, ”You can come with me, Hama Druz. To a better place, a higher place.”

”You go alone, pharaoh.”

Reth forced a laugh. Then he cried out, his back arching.

He fell forward, and was still.

Nomi raked the body with laser fire. ”Good riddance,” she growled. ”Now can we get out of here?”

There was a mountain.

It rose high above the night-dark sea, proudly challenging the featureless, glowing sky. Rivers flowed from that single great peak, she saw: black and ma.s.sive, striping its huge conical flanks, merging into great tumbling cascades that poured into the ocean.

The mountain was the center of the world, thrusting from the sea.

She was high above an island, a small sc.r.a.p of land that defied the dissolving drenching of the featureless sea. Islands were few, small, scattered, threatened everywhere by the black, crowding ocean.

But, not far away, there was another island, she saw, pus.h.i.+ng above the sea of mist. It was a heaping of dust on which trees grew thickly, their branches tangled. In fact the branches reached across the neck of sea that separated this island from her own. She thought she could see a way to reach that island, scrambling from tree to tree, following a great highway of branches.

The other island rose higher than her own above the encroaching sea. There, she thought, she-and whoever followed her-would be safe from lapping dissolution.

For now, anyhow.

But what did that mean? What would Pharaoh have said of this-that the new island was an unlikely heap of reality dust, further from looming entropic destruction?

She shook her head. The deeper meaning of her journey scarcely mattered-and nor did its connection to any other place. If this world were a symbol, so be it: this was where she lived, and this was where she would, with determination and perseverance, survive.

She looked one last time at the towering mountain. Damaged arm or not, she itched to climb it, to challenge its ne- gentropic heights. But in the future, perhaps. Not now.

Carefully, clinging to her branch with arms and legs and her one good hand, she made her way along the branch to the low-probability island. One by one, the people of the beach followed her.

In the mist, far below, she glimpsed slow, ponderous movement: huge beasts, perhaps giant depraved cousins of Night. But, though they bellowed up at her, they could not reach her.

Once more Kama and Nomi stood on the silver-black surface of Callisto, under a sky littered with stars, just as before, the low, slumped ridges of Valhalla still marched to the silent horizon.

But this was no longer a world of antiquity and stillness. The shudders were coming every few minutes now. In places the ice crust was collapsing, ancient features subsiding, here and there sending up sprays of dust and ice splinters that sparkled briefly before falling back, all in utter silence.

Kama thought back to a time before this a.s.signment, to the convocations he had joined. He had been a foolish boy, he thought, his ideas half-formed. Now, when he looked into his heart, he saw crystal-hard determination.

”No more pharaohs,” Hama murmured. ”No more immortality. That way lies arrogance and compromise and introversion and surrender. A brief life burns brightly.”

Nomi growled, ”More theory, Hama? Let's count the ways we might die. 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.s 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 vapor, ice splinters, dust, thrown up from the trench they are digging.”

Kama felt a fierce anger burn. ”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. Let this be an end-and a beginning, a new Day Zero. You know, perhaps the ax 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. 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 mankind.

”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. It was like an immense, black-winged bird. Kama could see crimson starbreaker light stab down into the pa.s.sive, defenseless ice of Callisto. The shuddering of the ground was constant now, as that ma.s.s of shattered ice and steam rolled relentlessly toward them.

Nomi grabbed onto 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 s.h.i.+p was gone, vanished.

He struggled to his feet.

The wave of vapor 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 vapor into Jovian s.p.a.ce. The land's shuddering ceased, though he could feel deep slow echoes of huge convulsions was.h.i.+ng 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.