Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

I have found the potential wells of much
more complex structures.’
    ’Ah,’ said Gemo. ’Structures embedded in the Callisto
bacteria.’
    ’Yes.’ Reth’s eyes gleamed. He snatched a data slate from a pile
at his feet. Lines of numbers chattered over the slate, meaning
little to Hama, a series of graphs that sloped sharply before
dwindling to flatness: a portrait of the mysterious ’potential
wells’, perhaps.
    Gemo seemed to understand immediately. ’Let me.’ She took the
slate, tapped its surface and quickly reconfigured the display. ’Now,
look, Hama: the energies of the photons that are absorbed by the well
are proportional to this series of numbers.’
    1. 2. 3. 5. 7. 11. 13…
    ’Prime numbers,’ Hama said.
    ’Exactly,’ snapped Reth. ’Do you see?’
    Gemo put down the slate and walked to the ice wall; she ran her
hand over the translucent cover, as if longing to touch the mystery
that was embedded there. ’So inside each of these bacteria,’ she
said, ’there is a quantum potential well that encodes prime
numbers.’
    ’And much more,’ said Reth. ’The primes were just the key, the
first hint of a continent of structure I have barely begun to
explore.’ He paced back and forth, restless, animated. ’Life is never
content simply to subsist, to cling on. Life seeks room to spread.
That is another commonplace, young man. But here, on Callisto, there
was no room: not in the physical world; the energy and nutrients were
simply too sparse for that. And so - ’
    ’Yes?’
    ’And so they grew sideways,’ he said. ’And they reached orthogonal
realms we never imagined existed.’
    Hama stared at the thin purple scrapings and chattering primes,
here at the bottom of a pit with these two immortals, and feared he
had descended into madness.
    … 41. 43. 47. 53. 59…
     
    In a suit no more substantial than a thin layer of cloth, Nomi
Ferrer walked over Callisto’s raw surface, seeking evidence of
crimes.
    The sun was low on the horizon, evoking highlights from the curved
ice plain all around her. From here, Jupiter was forever invisible,
but Nomi saw two small discs, inner moons, following their endless
dance of gravitational clockwork.
    Gemo Cana had told her mayfly companions how the Jovian system had
once been. She told them of Io’s mineral mines, nestling in the
shadow of the huge volcano Babbar Patera. She told them of Ganymede:
larger than Mercury, heavily cratered and geologically rich - the
most stable and heavily populated of all the Jovian moons. And
Europa’s icy crust had sheltered an ocean hosting life, an ecosystem
much more complex and rewarding than anybody had dreamed. ’They were
worlds. Human worlds, in the end. All gone now, shut down by the Qax.
But I remember…’
    Away from the sun’s glare, lesser stars glittered, surrounding
Nomi with immensity. But it was a crowded sky, despite that
immensity. Crowded and dangerous. For - she had been warned by the
Coalition - the Xeelee craft that had glowered over Earth was now
coming here, hotly pursued by a Spline ship retrieved from the hands
of jasoft rebels and manned by Green Army officers. What would happen
when that miniature armada got here, Nomi couldn’t imagine.
    Nomi knew about the Xeelee from barracks-room scuttlebutt. She had
tried to educate a sceptical Hama. The Xeelee were a danger mankind
encountered long before anybody had heard of the Qax; in the
Occupation years they had become legends of a deep-buried, partly
extirpated past - and perhaps they were monsters of the human future.
The Xeelee were said to be godlike entities so aloof that humans
might never understand their goals. Some scraps of Xeelee technology,
like starbreaker beams, had fallen into the hands of ’lesser’
species, like the Qax, and transformed their fortunes. The Xeelee
seemed to care little for this - but, on occasion, they intervened.
To devastating effect.
    Some believed that by such interventions the Xeelee were
maintaining their monopoly on power, controlling an empire which,
perhaps, held sway across the Galaxy. Others said that, like the
vengeful gods of humanity’s childhood, the Xeelee were protecting the
’junior races’ from themselves.
    Either way, Nomi thought, it’s insulting. Claustrophobic. She felt
an unexpected stab of resentment. We only just got rid of the Qax,
she thought. And now, this.
    Gemo Cana had argued that in such a dangerous universe, humanity
needed the pharaohs. ’Everything humans know