Resplendent by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

outsiders.

    There were ragamuffins - 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, the descendants of people who had fled to the outer moons and even beyond Sol system to escape the Qax’s powerful, if inefficient, grasp. Some of these returned space travellers 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 colours of varying degrees of outrage. They made the Conurbation’s Occupation-era inhabitants, with their drab 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.

    Hama’s office turned out to be a spacious 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 assigned to a jasoft - a human collaborator administering Earth on behalf of the Qax - 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 assigned 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 Qax technology, perhaps for centuries … Some, it was said, were even survivors of the pre-Occupation 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 Qax, and the more effectively they administered the Qax 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 assignment 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 - a 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 Hama worked through the data slates assembled for him, and received visitors, petitions, claimants. He quickly learned that there were many issues here beyond the crimes of the collaborator class.

    The Conurbation itself faced endless problems day to day. The Conurbations had been deliberately designed by the Qax as temporary cities. It was all part of the grand strategy of the latter Occupation; the Qax’s human subjects were not allowed ties of family, of home, of loyalty to anybody or anything - except perhaps the Occupation itself. A Conurbation wasn’t a home; sooner or later you would be moved on.

    The practical result was that the hastily constructed Conurbation was quickly running down. Hama read gloomily through report after report of silting-up canals and failing heating or lighting and crumbling dwelling places. People were sickening of diseases long thought vanished from the planet - even hunger had returned.

    And then there were the wars.

    The aftermath of the Qax’s withdrawal - the overnight removal of the government of Earth after three centuries - had been extremely turbulent. In less than a month humans had begun fighting humans once more. It had taken a chaotic half-year before the Coalition had coalesced, and even now, around the planet, brushfire battles still raged against