Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

eyes,
looked that way.
    It had been a newborn, thrust arbitrarily into the air, just as
Callisto had been. But this newborn had fallen, not to the
comparative safety of the dust, but direct into the sea. She - or he
- made barely a ripple on that placid black surface. Callisto saw a
hand raised briefly above the sluggish meniscus, the flesh already
dissolving, white bones curling. And then it was gone, the newborn
lost.
    Callisto felt a deep horror. It might have happened to her.
    Now, as she looked along the beach, she saw dark masses - a mound
of flesh, the grisly articulation of fingers - fragments of the
suddenly dead, washed up on this desolate beach. This had happened
before, she realised. Over and over.
    She said, ’We can’t stay here.’
    ’No,’ Asgard agreed reluctantly. ’No, we can’t.’
     
    Hama, with Reth and Gemo, rode a platform of metal deep into the
rocky heart of Callisto.
    The walls of the pressurised shaft, sliding slowly upwards, were
lined with slick transparent sheets, barring them from the ice. Hama
reached out with a fingertip. The wall surface was cold and slippery,
lubricated by a thin sheet of condensation from the chill air. There
were no signs of structure, of strata in the ice; here and there
small bores had been dug away from the shaft, perhaps as samples.
    Callisto was a ball of dirty water ice. Save for surface impacts,
nothing had happened to this moon since it accreted from the greater
cloud that had formed the Jupiter system. The inner moons - Io,
Europa, Ganymede - were heated, to one degree or another, by tidal
pumping from Jupiter. So Europa, under a crust of ice, had a liquid
ocean; and Io was driven by that perennial squeezing to spectacular
volcanism. But Callisto had been born too far from her huge parent
for any of that gravitational succour. Here, the only heat was a
relic of primordial radioactivity; here there had been no geology, no
volcanism, no hidden ocean.
    Nevertheless, it seemed, Reth Cana had found life here. And, as
the platform descended, Reth’s cold excitement seemed to mount.
    Nomi Ferrer was pursuing her own researches, in the settlement and
out on the surface. But she had insisted that Hama be escorted by a
squat, heavily armed drone robot. Both Reth and Gemo ignored this
silent companion, as if it were somehow impolite of Hama to have
brought it along.
    Nor did either of them mention Sarfi, who hadn’t accompanied them.
To Hama it did not seem human to disregard one’s daughter, Virtual or
otherwise. But then, what was ’human’ about a near-immortal traitor
to the race? What was human about Reth, this man who had buried
himself alone in the ice of Callisto, obsessively pursuing his
obscure project, for decade after decade?
    Even though the platform was small and cramped, Hama felt cold and
alone; he suppressed a shiver.
    The platform slowed, creaking, to a halt. He faced a chamber dug
into the ice.
    Reth said, ’You are a kilometre beneath the surface. Go ahead.
Take a look.’
    Hama saw that the seal between the lip of the circular platform
and the roughly cut ice was not perfect. He felt a renewed dread at
his reliance on ancient, patched-up technology. But, suppressing
hesitation, he stepped off the platform and into the ice chamber.
With a whirr of aged bearings, the drone robot followed him.
    Hama stood in a rough cube perhaps twice his height. It had been
cut out of the ice, its walls lined by some clear glassy substance;
it was illuminated by two hovering light globes. On the floor there
was a knot of instrumentation, none of it familiar to Hama, along
with a heap of data slates, some emergency equipment, and scattered
packets of food and water. This was a working place, impersonal.
    Reth stepped past him briskly. ’Never mind the gadgetry; you
wouldn’t understand it anyhow. Look.’ And he snapped his fingers,
summoning one of the floating globes. It came to hover at Hama’s
shoulder.
    Hama leaned close to inspect the cut-away ice of the wall. He
could see texture: the ice was a pale, dirty grey, polluted by what
looked like fine dust grains - and, here and there, it was stained by
colour, crimson and purple and brown.
    Reth had become animated. ’I’d let you touch it,’ he breathed.
’But the sheeting is there to protect it from us - not the other way
around. The biota in there is much more ancient, unevolved, fragile
than we are; the bugs on your breath might wipe it out in an instant.
The prebiotic chemicals were