"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 ship. 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 shielded his eyes and squinted upward. A fleshy cloud briefly eclipsed the sun. It was a Spline ship: a living starship 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 shipyard, 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 ships 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."

"Asgard. Help her."

Callisto turned. There was a woman, not far away, crawling over the beach. She seemed to be plucking stray gra.s.s blades from the dust, cramming them into her mouth. Her face was a mask of wrinkles, complex, textured-a stark contrast to Pharaoh"s smoothed-over countenance. Her voice querulous, she snapped, "Why should I?"

"Because I once helped you."

The woman got to her feet, growling.

Callisto quailed. But Asgard took her good hand and began to haul her up the beach.

Callisto looked back once more. The oil-black sea lapped thickly over a flat, empty beach, Pharaoh had gone.

As they made their way to Mama"s a.s.signed office, Nomi drew closer to Kama"s side, keeping her weapons obvious. The narrow corridors of Conurbation 11729 were grievously damaged by fire and weaponry-and they were scars inflicted not by ax, but by humans. In some places there was even a smell of burning. And the corridors were crowded; not just with former inhabitants of the ax-built city, but with others Hama couldn"t help but think of as outsiders. There were ragam.u.f.fins-like Nomi herself-the product of generations who had waited out the Occupation in the ruins of ancient human cities, and other corners of wilderness Earth. And there were returned refugees and traders, the descendants of people who had fled to the outer moons and even beyond the Solar System to escape the ax"s powerful, if inefficient, grasp. Some of these returned s.p.a.ce travelers were exotic indeed, with skin darkened by the light of other stars, and frames made spindly or squat by other gravities-even eyes replaced by Eyes, mechanical supplements. And most of them had hair: hair sprouting wildly from their heads and even their faces, in colors of varying degrees of outrage. They made the Conurbation"s Occupation era inhabitants, with their drab monkish robes and shaven heads, look like characterless drones. The various factions eyed each other with suspicion, even hostility; Hama saw no signs of unity among liberated mankind. Kama"s office turned out to be a s.p.a.cious room, the walls lined with data slates. It even had a natural-light window, overlooking a swathe of the Conurbation and the lands beyond. This prestigious room had once, of course, been a.s.signed to a jasoft-a human collaborator administering Earth on behalf of the ax-and Hama felt a deep reluctance to enter it. For Hama, up to now, the liberation had been painless, a time of opportunity and freedom, like a wonderful game. But that, he knew, was about to change. Hama Druz, twenty-five years old, had been a.s.signed to the Commission for Historical Truth, the tribunal appointed to investigate and try collaboration crimes. His job was to hunt out jasofts. Some of these collaborators were said to be pharaohs, kept alive by ax technology, perhaps for centuries... Some, it was said, were even survivors of the preOccupation period, when human science had advanced enough to beat back death. If the jasofts were hated, the pharaohs had been despised most of all; for the longer they had lived, the more loyalty they owed to the ax, and the more effectively they administered the ax regime. And that regime had become especially brutal after a flawed human Rebellion more than a century earlier. Hama, accompanied by Nomi, would spend a few days here, acquainting himself with the issues around the collaborators. But to complete his a.s.signment 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-& 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 Kama worked through the data slates a.s.sembled for him, and received visitors, pet.i.tions, claimants. He quickly learned that there were many issues here beyond the crimes of the collaborator cla.s.s. The Conurbation itself faced endless problems day to day. The Conurbations had been deliberately designed by the ax as temporary cities. It was all part of the grand strategy of the latter Occupation; the ax"s human subjects were not to be allowed ties of family, of home, of loyalty to anybody or anything-except perhaps the Occupation itself.

The practical result was that the hastily-constructed Conurbation was quickly running down. Hama read gloomily through report after report of silting-up ca.n.a.ls and failing heating or lighting and crumbling dwelling-places. There were people sickening of diseases long thought vanished from the planet-even hunger had returned. And then there were the wars. The aftermath of ax"s withdrawal-the overnight removal of the government of Earth after three centuries-had been extremely difficult. In less than a month humans had begun righting humans once more. It had taken a chaotic half-year before the Interim Coalition had coalesced, and even now, around the planet, brushfire battles still raged against warlords armed with ax weaponry. And 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 Interim Coalition had quelled the bloodshed by promising that the collaborators would be brought to justice before the new Commission for Historical Truth. But Kama-alone in his office, poring over his data slates- knew that justice was easier promised than delivered. How were shortlived humansdismissively called mayflies by the pharaohs-to try crimes whose commission 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 ax"s great Extirpation had wiped the Earth clean of its past. What made it even more difficult, Kama 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, just as they had under the ax. And meanwhile, children were going hungry. Kama had, subtly, protested against his new a.s.signment. He felt his strength lay in philosophy, in abstraction. He longed to rejoin the debates going on in great const.i.tutional conventions all over the planet, as the human race, newly liberated from the ax, sought a new way to govern itself. But his appeal against rea.s.signment 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. It was so bad, in fact, that some people were openly calling for the return of the ax. At least we were kept warm and fed under the ax. At least there were no bandits trying to rob or kill us. And there were none of these disgusting ragam.u.f.fins cluttering up the public places... As he witnessed the clamor of the crowds around the failing food dispensers, Kama felt a deep horror-and a determination that this should not recur. And yet, to his shame, he looked forward to escaping from all this complexity to the cool open s.p.a.ces 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 gra.s.s, 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. Favoring her truncated arm, it was difficult to keep her balance.

With her left hand she pulled a few blades of the gra.s.s stuff from the dust. She crammed the gra.s.s into her mouth and chewed. It was moist, tasteless, slippery.

She found that the gra.s.s blades weren"t connected to roots. Rather they seemed to blend back into the dust, to the tube-like structures there. Deeper into the forest"s gathering darkness the gra.s.s grew longer, plaiting itself into ropy vine like plants. And deeper still she saw things like trees looming tall.

People moved among the trees, 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 gra.s.s. "What color is this?"

"Green," Callisto said immediately ... but that wasn"t true. It wasn"t green. What color, then? She realized 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." i.UL Stephen Baxter 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 Mama"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."

Kama eyed them with brief curiosity.

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 ax cadres faded from memory.

The daughter, Sarfi, averted her eyes. She looked very young, and her face was thin, her skin sallow.

He welcomed them with his standard opening remarks. "My name is Hama Druz. I am an advisor 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-"

"You"re tired," Gemo Cana said.