Free Resplendent by Stephen Baxter Page B

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