Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

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 sea.’
    ’He helps all the newborns.’
    ’Why?’
    ’How should I know? But it’s futile. The ocean rises and falls.
Every time it comes a little closer, higher up the beach. Soon it
will lap right up here, to the forest itself.’
    ’We’ll have to go into the forest.’
    ’Try that and Night will kill you.’
    Night? Callisto looked into the forest’s darkness, and
shuddered.
    Asgard eyed Callisto with curiosity, no sympathy. ’You really are
a newborn, aren’t you?’ She dug her hand into the dust, shook it
until a few grains were left on her palm. ’You know what the first
thing Pharaoh said to me was? >Nothing is real.< ’
    ’Yes - ’
    ’ >Not even the dust. Because every grain is a whole world.<
’ She looked up at Callisto, calculating.
    Callisto gazed at the sparkling grains, wondering, baffled,
frightened. Too much strangeness.
    I want to go home, she thought desperately. But