Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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 swimming around him, drenched as it was in
clear bright sunlight.
    The scars of the Occupation were still visible. Away from the
great Conurbations, much of the land glistened silver-grey where
starbreaker beams and Qax 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 sceptically. ’But that
greenery has nothing to do with edicts from your Interim Coalition of
Governance, or all your philosophies. That’s the worms, Hama, turning
Qax dust back into soil. Just the worms, that’s all.’
    Hama would not be put off. Nomi, once a ragamuffin, was an officer
in the Green Army, the most significant military force yet assembled
in the wake of the departing Qax. She was forty years old, her body a
solid slab of muscle, with burn marks disfiguring one cheek. And, in
Hama’s judgement, she was much too sunk in cynicism.
    He slapped her on the shoulder. ’Quite right. And that’s how we
must be, Nomi: like humble worms, content to toil in the darkness, to
turn a few scraps of our land back the way they should be. That
should be enough for any life.’
    Nomi just snorted.
    Already the two-seat flitter was beginning its descent, towards a
Conurbation. Still known by its Qax 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 canals.
Hama 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 passed over the Conurbation’s glistening rooftops. Hama
shielded his eyes and squinted upwards. A fleshy cloud briefly
eclipsed the sun. It was a Spline ship: a living starship kilometres
across, its hardened epidermis pocked with monitor and weapon
emplacements. He suppressed a shudder. For generations the Spline had
been the symbol of Qax dominance. But now the Qax had gone, and this
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 scraped walls denoting its origin as
post-Occupation: human, not Qax. 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 spacecraft 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 be a grim
business, Hama, no matter how pretty the scenery.’
    The flitter slid easily through the final phases of its descent,
and the domes of the Conurbation loomed around them.
     
    There was a voice, talking fast, almost babbling.
    ’There is no time. There is no space. We live in a universe of
static shapes. Do you see? Imagine a grain of dust that represents
all the particles in our universe, frozen in time. Imagine a
stupendous number of such dust grains, representing all the possible
shapes the particles can take. This is reality dust, a dust of the
Nows. And each grain is an instant, in a possible history of the
universe.’ A snapping of fingers. ’There. There. There. Each moment,
each juggling of the particles, a new grain. The reality dust
contains all the arrangements of matter there could ever be. Reality
dust is an image of eternity…’
    She lay there, face pressed into the dirt, wishing none of this
was happening.
    Hands grabbed her, by shoulder and