Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

his or her will.’
    Hama frowned. ’ >TechnicallyPassed through    Reth stroked the metal clinging to Gemo’s face; his sister turned
her head in response. ’The core technology is an interface to the
brain via the optic nerve. In this way I can connect the quantum
structures which encode human consciousness to the structures stored
in the Callisto bacteria - or, rather, the structures which serve as,
um, a gateway to configuration space…’
    Hama started to see it. ’You’re attempting to download human minds
into your configuration space.’
    Reth smiled. ’It was not enough, you see, to study configuration
space at second-hand, through quantum structures embedded in these
silent bacteria. The next step had to be direct apprehension by the
human sensorium.’
    ’The next step in what?’
    ’In our evolution, perhaps,’ Reth murmured. ’With the help of the
Qax, we have banished death. Now we can break down the walls of this
shadow theatre we call reality.’ He eyed Hama. ’This dismal pit is
not a grave, but a gateway. And I am the gatekeeper.’
    Hama said tightly, ’You destroy minds for the promise of afterlife
- a promise concocted of theory and a scraping of cryptoendolith
bacteria.’
    ’Not a theory,’ Gemo whispered. ’I have seen it.’
    Nomi grunted, ’We don’t have time for this.’
    But Hama asked, despite himself: ’What was it like?’
    It was, Gemo said, a vast, spreading landscape, under a towering
sky; she had glimpsed a beach, a rising, oily sea, an immense
mountain shrouded in mist…
    Reth stalked back and forth, arms spread wide. ’We remain human,
Hama Druz. I cannot apprehend a multi-dimensional continuum. So I
sought a metaphor. A human interface. A beach of reality dust. A sea
of entropy, chaos. The structures folded into the living things, the
shape of the landscape, represent consistency - what we time-bound
creatures apprehend as causality.’
    ’And the rising sea?’
    ’The cosmos-spanning threat of the Xeelee,’ he said, smiling
thinly. ’And the grander rise of entropy, across the universe, which
will bring about the obliteration of all possibility.
    ’Configuration space is real, Hama Druz. This isn’t a new idea;
Pleh-toh saw that, thousands of years ago… Ah, but you know nothing
of Pleh-toh, do you? The higher manifold always existed, you see,
long before the coming of mankind, of life itself. All that has
changed is that through the patient, blind growth of the Callisto
bacteria, I have found a way to reach it. And there we can truly live
for ever - ’
    The ice floor shuddered, causing them to stagger.
    Reth peered up the length of the shaft, smiling grimly. ’Ah. Our
visitors make their presence known. Callisto is a small, hard, static
world; it rings like a bell even at the fall of a footstep. And the
footsteps of the Xeelee are heavy indeed.’
    Sarfi pushed forward again, hands twisting, agonised by her
inability to touch and be touched. She said to Gemo, ’Why do you have
to die?’
    Gemo’s voice was slow, sleepy; Hama wondered what sedative agents
Reth had fed her. ’You won’t feel anything, Sarfi. It will be as if
you never existed at all, as if all this pain never occurred. Won’t
that be better?’
    The ground shuddered again, waves of energy from some remote
Xeelee-induced explosion pulsing through Callisto’s patient ice, and
the walls groaned, stressed.
    Hama tried to imagine the black sea, the sharp-grained dust of the
beach. Hama had once visited the ocean - Earth’s ocean - to oversee
the reclamation of an abandoned Qax sea farm. He remembered the stink
of ozone, the taste of salt in the damp air. He had hated it.
    Reth seemed to sense his thoughts. ’Ah, but I forgot. You are
creatures of the Conurbations, of the Extirpation. Of round-walled
caverns and a landscape of grey dust. But this is how the Earth used
to be, you see, before the Qax unleashed their nanotech plague. No
wonder you find the idea strange. But not us.’ He slipped his hand
into his sister’s. ’For us, you see, it will be like coming
home.’
    On the table, Gemo was convulsing, her mouth open, laced with
drool.
    Sarfi screamed, a thin wail that echoed from the high walls of the
shaft. Once more she reached out to Gemo; once more her fluttering
fingers passed through Gemo’s face, sparkling.
    ’Gemo Cana is a collaborator,’ Nomi said. ’Hama, you’re letting
her escape justice.’
    Yes, Hama thought, surprised. Nomi, in her blunt way,