Resplendent by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page B

warlords armed with Qax weaponry.

    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 Coalition had quelled the bloodshed by promising that the collaborators would be brought to justice before its new Commission for Historical Truth.

    But Hama - alone in his office, poring over his data slates - knew that justice was easier promised than delivered. How were short-lived humans - dismissively called mayflies by the pharaohs - to try crimes that 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 Qax’s great Extirpation had wiped the Earth clean of its past.

    What made it even more difficult, Hama 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 under the Coalition, just as they had under the Qax.

    And meanwhile, children were going hungry.

    Hama had, subtly, protested against his new assignment. He felt his strength lay in philosophy, in abstraction. He longed to rejoin the debates going on in great constitutional conventions all over the planet, as the human race, newly liberated from the Qax, sought a new way to govern itself.

    But his appeal against reassignment 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.

    As he witnessed the clamour of the crowds around the failing food dispensers, Hama felt a deep determination that things should be fixed, that such a situation as this should not recur. And yet, to his shame, he looked forward to escaping from all this complexity to the cool open spaces 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 grass, 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. Favouring her truncated arm, it was difficult to keep her balance. With her left hand she pulled a few blades of the grass stuff from the dust. She crammed the grass into her mouth and chewed. It was moist, tasteless, slippery. She found that the grass blades weren’t connected to roots. Rather they seemed to blend back into the dust, to the tube-like structures there.

    People moved through the shadows of the forest, 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 grass. ‘What colour is this?’

    ‘Green,’ Callisto said immediately. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t green. What colour, then? She realised 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