Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

were crowded: not just with former inhabitants
of the Qax-built city, but with others Hama couldn’t help but think
of as 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 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