Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

body and torn feet, she blundered
away, running until she reached the openness of the beach. For an
unmeasured time she lay there, drawing comfort from the graininess of
the dust.
     
    The craft was called a GUTship.
    As finally assembled, it looked something like a parasol of iron
and ice. The canopy of the parasol was the surface ferry, now serving
as a habitable lifedome, and the ’handle’ was the GUTdrive unit
itself, embedded in a block of asteroid ice which served as reaction
mass. The shaft of the parasol, separating the lifedome from the
drive unit, was a kilometre-long spine of metal bristling with
antennae and sensors.
    In a hundred subtle ways the ship showed its age. Every surface in
the lifedome was scuffed and polished from use, the soft coverings of
chairs and bunks were extensively patched, and many of the major
systems bore the scars of rebuilding. The design was centuries old.
The ship itself had been built long before the Occupation, and
lovingly maintained by a colony of refugees who had seen out the Qax
era huddled in the asteroid belt.
    GUT, it seemed, was an acronym for Grand Unified Theory. Once,
Gemo whispered, unified-theory energy had fuelled the expansion of
the universe. In the heart of each GUT engine asteroid ice was
compressed to conditions resembling the initial singularity - the Big
Bang. There, the fundamental forces governing the structure of matter
merged into a single unified superforce. When the matter was allowed
to expand again, the phase energy of the decomposing superforce,
released like heat from condensing steam, was used to expel asteroid
matter as a vapour rocket.
    Remarkable, exotic, strange. This might be a primitive ship
compared to a mighty Spline vessel, but Hama had never dreamed that
mere humans had once mastered such technologies.
    But when they were underway, with the lifedome opaqued over and
all the strangeness shut out, none of that mattered. To Hama it was
like being back in the Conurbations, in the enclosed, claustrophobic
days before the Occupation was lifted. A deep part of his mind seemed
to believe that what lay beyond these walls - occupied Earth, or
endless universe - did not matter, so long as he was safe and warm.
He felt comfortable in his mobile prison, and was guilty to feel that
way.
    All that changed when they reached Callisto.
    The sun was shrunk to the tiniest of discs by Jupiter’s
remoteness, five times as far as Earth from the central light. When
Hama held up his hand it cast sharp, straight shadows, the shadows of
infinity, and he felt no warmth.
    And through this rectilinear, reduced light, Callisto swam.
    They entered a wide, slow orbit around the ice moon. The satellite
was like a dark, misty twin of Earth’s Moon. Its surface was crowded
with craters - even more so than the Moon’s, for there were none of
the giant lava-flood seas that smoothed over much lunar terrain. The
largest craters were complex structures, plains of pale ice
surrounded by multiple arcs of folded and cracked land, like ripples
frozen into shattered ice and rock. Some of these features were the
size of continents, large enough to stretch around this lonely moon’s
curved horizon, evidently the results of immense, terrifying
impacts.
    But these great geological sculptures were oddly smoothed out, the
cracks and ripples reduced to shallow ridges. Unlike Earth’s rocky
Moon, Callisto was made of rock and water ice. Over billions of years
the ice had suffered viscous relaxation; it flowed and slumped. The
most ancient craters had simply subsided, like geological sighs,
leaving these spectacular palimpsests.
    ’The largest impact structure is called Valhalla,’ Gemo was
saying. ’Once there were human settlements all along the northern
faces of the circular ridges. All dark now, of course - save where
Reth has made his base.’
    Nomi grunted, uninterested in tourism. ’Then that’s where we
land.’
    Hama gazed out. ’Remarkable,’ he said. ’I never imagined - ’
    Gemo said caustically, ’You are a drone of the Occupation. You
never imagined a universe beyond the walls of your Conurbation, you
never even saw the sunlight, you have never lived. You have no
memory. And yet you presume to judge. Do you even know why Callisto
is so-called? It is an ancient myth. Callisto was a nymph, beloved of
Zeus and hated by jealous Hera, who metamorphosed her into a bear…’
She seemed to sense Hama’s bafflement. ’Ah, but you don’t even
remember the