Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

great tumbling cascades that poured into the ocean.
    The mountain was the centre of the world, thrusting from the
sea.
    She was high above an island, a small scrap of land that defied
the dissolving drenching of the featureless sea. Islands were few,
small, scattered, threatened everywhere by the black, crowding
ocean.
    But, not far away, there was another island, she saw, pushing
above the sea of mist. It was a heaping of dust on which trees grew
thickly, their branches tangled. In fact the branches reached across
the neck of sea that separated this island from her own. She thought
she could see a way to reach that island, scrambling from tree to
tree, following a great highway of branches. The other island rose
higher than her own above the encroaching sea. There, she thought,
she - and whoever followed her - would be safe from lapping
dissolution. For now, anyhow.
    But what did that mean? What would Pharaoh have said of this -
that the new island was an unlikely heap of reality dust, further
from looming entropic destruction?
    She shook her head. The deeper meaning of her journey scarcely
mattered - and nor did its connection to any other place. If this
world were a symbol, so be it: this was where she lived, and this was
where she would, with determination and perseverance, survive.
    She looked one last time at the towering mountain. Damaged arm or
not, she itched to climb it, to challenge its negentropic heights.
But in the future, perhaps. Not now.
    Carefully, clinging to her branch with arms and legs and her one
good hand, she made her way along the branch to the low-probability
island. One by one, the people of the beach followed her.
    In the mist, far below, she glimpsed slow, ponderous movement:
huge beasts, perhaps giant depraved cousins of Night. But, though
they bellowed up at her, they could not reach her.
     
    Once more Hama and Nomi stood on the silver-black surface of
Callisto, under a sky littered with stars. Just as before, the low,
slumped ridges of Valhalla marched to the silent horizon.
    But this was no longer a world of antiquity and stillness. The
shudders were coming every few minutes now. In places the ice crust
was collapsing, ancient features subsiding, here and there sending up
sprays of dust and ice splinters that sparkled briefly before falling
back, all in utter silence.
    Hama thought back to a time before this assignment, to the
convocations he had joined, the earnest talk of political futures and
ethical settlements. He had been a foolish boy, he thought, his ideas
half-formed. Now, when he looked into his heart, he saw crystal-hard
determination. In an implacably hostile universe humanity must
survive, whatever the cost.
    ’No more pharaohs,’ Hama murmured. ’No more immortality. That way
lies selfishness and arrogance and compromise and introversion and
surrender. A brief life burns brightly - that is the way.’
    Nomi growled, ’Even now you’re theorising, Hama? Let’s count the
ways we might die, standing right here. The Xeelee starbreaker might
cream us. One of these miniature quakes might erupt right under us.
Or maybe we’ll last long enough to suffocate in our own farts, stuck
inside these damn suits. What do you think? I don’t know why you let
that arrogant pharaoh kill himself.’
    Hama murmured, ’You see death as an escape?’
    ’If it’s easy, if it’s under your control - yes.’
    ’Reth did escape,’ Hama said. ’But I don’t think it was into
death.’
    ’You believed all that stuff about theoretical worlds?’
    ’Yes,’ Hama said. ’Yes, in the end I think I did believe it.’
    ’Why?’
    ’Because of them.’ He gestured at the sky. ’The Xeelee. If our
second-hand wisdom has any validity at all, we know that the Xeelee
react to what they fear. And almost as soon as Reth constructed his
interface to his world of logic and data, as soon as the pharaohs
began to pass into it, they came here.’
    ’You think the Xeelee fear us?’
    ’Not us. The bugs in the ice: Reth’s cryptoendoliths, dreaming
their billion-year dreams… The Xeelee seem intent on keeping those
dreams from escaping. And that’s why I think Reth hit on a truth, you
see. Because the Xeelee see it too.’
    Now, over one horizon, there was a glowing crimson cloud, like
dawn approaching - but there could be no dawn on this all-but-airless
world.
    ’Starbreaker light,’ murmured Nomi. ’The glow must be vapour, ice
splinters, dust, thrown up from the trench they are