Stephen Baxter - Reality Dust

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'Space Opera - the grand and the glorious - is alive and well, and in very good hands. Stephen Baxter is hard
at work keeping and advancing the necessary forms and traditions, expanding the discourse in a way that
both gladdens the heart and sends chills up the spines of fellow writers.' Greg Bear
Also by Stephen Baxter in Gollancz
Mammoth
Long Tusk
Icebones
Deep Future
STEPHEN BAXTER
Reality Dust
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2000 All rights reserved
The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
This edition published in Great Britain in 2002 by
Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane, London, WC2H 9EA
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 575 07306 3
Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd, Lymington, Hants
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
An explosion of light: the moment of her birth.
She cried out.
A sense of self flooded through her body. She had arms, legs; her limbs were flailing. She was falling,
and glaring light wheeled about her.
But she remembered another place: a black sky, a world - no, a moon - a face before her, smiling
gently. This won't hurt. Close your eyes.
A name. Callisto.
But the memories were dissipating.
'No!'
She landed hard, face down, and she was suffused by sudden pain. Her face was pressed into dust,
rough, gritty particles, each as big as a moon to her staring eyes.
The flitter rose from liberated Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl. The little cylindrical craft
tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling, and Hama Druz marvelled at the beauty of the mist-laden,
subtly curved landscape below him, drenched as it was in clear bright sunlight. But the scars of the
Occupation were still visible. Away
from the great Conurbations, much of the land still glistened silver-grey where starbreaker beams and
Qax nanoreplicators had chewed up the surface of the Earth, life and rocks and all, turning it into a
featureless silicate dust.
'But already,' he pointed out eagerly, 'life's green is returning. Look, Nomi, there, and there
His companion, Nomi Ferrer, grunted sceptically. 'But that greenery has nothing to do with edicts
from your Interim Coalition of Governance, or all your philosophies. That's the worms, Hama, turning
Qax dust back into soil. Just the worms, that's all.'
Hama would not be put off. Nomi, once a ragamuffin, was an officer in the Green Army, the most
significant military force yet assembled in the wake of the departing Qax. She was forty years old, her
body a solid slab of muscle, with burn marks disfiguring one cheek. And, in Hama's judgement, she
was much too sunk in cynicism.
He slapped her on the shoulder. 'Quite right. And that's how we must be, Nomi: like humble worms,
content to toil in the darkness, to turn a few scraps of our land back the way they should be. That
should be enough for any life.'
Nomi just snorted.
The two-seat flitter began to descend towards a Conurbation. Still known by its Qax registration of
11729, the Conurbation was a broad, glistening sprawl of bubble-dwellings blown from the bedrock,
and linked by the green-blue of umbilical canals. Hama saw that many of the dome-shaped buildings
had been scarred by fire,
some even cracked open. But the blue-green tetrahedral sigil of free Earth had been daubed on every
surface.
A shadow passed over the Conurbation's glistening rooftops. Hama shielded his eyes and squinted
upwards. A fleshy cloud briefly eclipsed the sun. It was a Spline ship: a living starship kilometres
across, its hardened epidermis pocked with monitor and weapon emplacements. He suppressed a
shudder. For generations the Spline had been the symbol of Qax dominance. But now the Qax had
gone, and this last abandoned Spline was in the hands of human engineers, who sought to comprehend
its strange biological workings.
On the outskirts of the Conurbation there was a broad pit scooped out of the ground, its crudely
scraped walls denoting its origin as post-Occupation: human, not Qax. In this pit rested a number of
silvery, insectile forms, and as the flitter fell further through the sunlit air, Hama could see people
moving around the gleaming shapes, talking, working. The pit was a shipyard, operated by and for
humans, who were slowly rediscovering yet another lost art; for no human engineer had built a
spacecraft on Earth for three hundred years.
Hama pressed his face to the window - like a child, he knew, reinforcing Nomi's preconception of him
- but to Lethe with self-consciousness. 'One of those ships is going to take us to Callisto. Imagine it,
Nomi - a moon of Jupiter!'
But Nomi scowled. 'Just remember why we're going there: to hunt out jasofts - criminals and
collaborators. It will be a grim business, Hama, no matter how pretty the scenery.'
The flitter slid easily through the final phases of its descent, and the domes of the Conurbation loomed
around them.
There was a voice, talking fast, almost babbling.
'There is no time. There is no space. We live in a universe of static shapes. Do you see? Imagine a
grain of dust that represents all the particles in our universe, frozen in time. Imagine a stupendous
number of dust grains, representing all the possible shapes the particles can take. This is reality dust, a
dust of the Nows. And the dust fills a realm of instants.' A snapping of fingers. There. There. There.
Each moment, each juggling of the particles, a new grain. The reality dust contains all the
arrangements of matter there could ever be. Reality dust is an image of eternity . . .'
She lay there, face pressed into the dirt, wishing none of this was happening.
Hands grabbed her, by shoulder and hip. She was dragged, flipped over on her back. The sky above
was dazzling bright.
She cried out again.
A face loomed, silhouetted. She saw a hairless scalp, no eyebrows or lashes. The face itself was
rounded, smoothed over, as if unformed. But she had a strong impression of great age.
'This won't hurt,' she whispered, terrified. 'Close your eyes.'
The face loomed closer. 'Nothing here is real.' The voice was harsh, without inflection. A man? 'Not
even the dust.'
'Reality dust,' she murmured.
'Yes. Yes! It is reality dust. If you live, remember that.'
The face receded, turning away.
She tried to sit up. She pressed her hands into the loose dust, crushing low, crumbling structures, like
the tunnels of worms. She glimpsed a flat horizon, a black, oily sea, forest-covered hills. She was on a
beach, a beach of silvery, dusty sand. The sky was a glowing dome. The air was full of mist; she
couldn't see very far, in any direction, as if she were trapped in a glowing bubble.
Her companion was mid-sized, his body shapeless and sexless. He was dressed in a coverall of a
nondescript colour. He cast no shadow in the bright diffuse light.
She glanced down at herself. She was wearing a similar coverall. She fingered its smooth fabric,
baffled.
He was walking slowly, limping, as though exhausted. Walking away, leaving her alone.
'Please,' she said.
Without stopping, he called back, 'If you stay there you'll die.'
'What's your name?'
'Pharaoh. That is all the name I have left, at any rate.'
She thought hard. Those sharp birth memories had fled, but still . . . 'Callisto. My name is Callisto.'
Pharaoh laughed. 'Of course it is.'
Without warning, pain swamped her right hand.
She snatched it to her chest. The skin felt as if it had been drenched in acid.
The sea had risen, she saw, and the black, lapping fluid had covered her hand. Where the fluid had
touched, the
flesh was flaking away, turning to chaotic dust, exposing sketchy bones that crumbled and fell in thin
slivers.
She screamed. She had only been here a moment, and already such a terrible thing had happened.
Pharaoh limped back to her. 'Think beyond the pain.'
'I can't -'
'Think. There is no pain.'
And, as he said it, she realised it was true. Her hand was gone, her arm terminating in a smooth,
rounded stump. But it didn't hurt. How could that be?
'What do you feel?'
'. . . Diminished,' she said.
'Good,' he said. 'You're learning. There is no pain here. Only forgetting.'
The black, sticky fluid was lapping near her legs. She scrambled away. But when she tried to use her
missing right hand she stumbled, falling flat.
Pharaoh locked his hand under her arm and hauled her to her feet. The brief exertion seemed to
exhaust him; his face smoothed further, as if blurring. 'Go,' he said.
'Where?'
'Away from the sea.' And he pushed her, feebly, away from the ocean.
She looked that way doubtfully. The beach sloped upward sharply; it would be a difficult climb.
Above the beach there was what looked like a forest, tall shapes like trees, a carpet of something like
grass. She saw people moving in the darkness between the trees. But the forest was dense, a place of
colourless, flat shadows, made grey by the mist.
She looked back. Pharaoh was standing where she had left him, a pale, smoothed-over figure just a
few paces from the lapping, encroaching sea, already dimmed by the thick white mist.
She called, 'Aren't you coming?'
'Go.'
'I'm afraid.'
'Asgard. Help her.'
Callisto turned. There was a woman, not far away, crawling over the beach. She seemed to be
plucking stray grass blades from the dust, cramming them into her mouth. Her face was a mask of
wrinkles, complex, textured - a stark contrast to Pharaoh's smoothed-over countenance. Her voice
querulous, she snapped, 'Why should I?'
'Because I once helped you.'
The woman got to her feet, growling.
Callisto quailed. But Asgard took her good hand and began to haul her up the beach.
Callisto looked back once more. The oil-black sea lapped thickly over a flat, empty beach. Pharaoh
had gone.
As they made their way to Hama's assigned office, Nomi drew closer to Hama's side, keeping her
weapons obvious.
The narrow corridors of Conurbation 11729 were grievously damaged by fire and weaponry - and they
were scars inflicted not by Qax, but by humans. In some places there was even a smell of burning.
The Conurbation itself faced endless problems day to day. The Conurbations had been deliberately
designed by the Qax as temporary cities. It was all part of the grand strategy of the latter Occupation;
the Qax's human subjects were not to be allowed ties of family, of home, of loyalty to anybody or
anything - except perhaps the Occupation itself.
The practical result was that the hastily-constructed Conurbation was quickly running down. Hama
read gloomily through report after report of silting-up canals and failing heating or lighting and
crumbling dwelling-places. There were people sickening of diseases long thought vanished from the
planet - even hunger had returned.
And then there were the wars.
The aftermath of the Qax's withdrawal - the overnight removal of the government of Earth after three
centuries - had been extremely difficult. In less than a month humans had begun fighting humans once
more. It had taken a chaotic half-year before the Interim Coalition had coalesced, and even now,
around the planet, brushfire battles still raged against warlords armed with Qax weaponry.
And it had been the jasofts, of course, who had been the focus of the worst conflicts. In many places
jasofts, including pharaohs, had been summarily executed. Elsewhere the jasofts had gone into hiding,
or fled off-world, or had even fought back.
The Interim Coalition had quelled the bloodshed by promising that the collaborators would be brought
to
justice before the new Commission for Historical Truth. But Hama - alone in his office, poring over
his data slates - knew that justice was easier promised than delivered. How were short-lived humans -
dismissively called mayflies by the pharaohs - to try crimes whose commission might date back
centuries? There were no witnesses save the pharaohs themselves; no formal records save those
maintained under the Occupation; no testimony save a handful of legends preserved through the
endless dissolutions of the Conurbations; not even any physical evidence since the Qax's great
Extirpation had wiped the Earth clean of its past.
What made it even more difficult, Hama was slowly discovering, was that the jasofts were useful.
It was a matter of compromise, of practical politics. The jasofts knew how the world worked, on the
mundane level of keeping people alive, for they had administered the planet for centuries. So some
jasofts - offered amnesties for cooperating - were discreetly running parts of Earth's new, slowly-
coalescing administration, just as they had under the Qax.
And meanwhile, children were going hungry.
Hama had, subtly, protested against his new assignment.
He felt his strength lay in philosophy, in abstraction. He longed to rejoin the debates going on in great
constitutional conventions all over the planet, as the human race, newly liberated from the Qax, sought
a new way to govern itself.
But his appeal against reassignment had been turned
down. There was simply too much to do now, too great a mess to clear up, and too few able and
trustworthy people available to do it.
It was so bad, in fact, that some people were openly calling for the return of the Qax. At least we were
kept warm and fed under the Qax. At least there were no bandits trying to rob or kill us. And there
were none of these disgusting ragamuffins cluttering up the public places . . .
As he witnessed the clamour of the crowds around the failing food dispensers, Hama felt a deep
horror - and a determination that this should not recur. And yet, to his shame, he looked forward to
escaping from all this complexity to the cool open spaces of the Jovian system.
It was while he was in this uncertain mood that the pharaoh sought him out.
Asgard led her to the fringe of the forest. There, ignoring Callisto, she hunkered down and began to
pull at strands of grass, ripping them from the ground and pushing them into her mouth.
Callisto watched doubtfully. 'What should I do?'
Asgard shrugged. 'Eat.'
Reluctantly, Callisto got to her knees. Favouring her truncated arm, it was difficult to keep her
balance. With her left hand she pulled a few blades of the grass stuff from the dust. She crammed the
grass into her mouth and chewed. It was moist, tasteless, slippery.
She found that the grass blades weren't connected to roots. Rather they seemed to blend back into the
dust, to the tube-like structures there. Deeper into the forest's
gathering darkness the grass grew longer, plaiting itself into ropy vine-like plants. And deeper still she
saw things like trees looming tall.
People moved among the trees, digging at the roots with their bare hands, pushing fragments of food
into their faces.
'My name,' she said, 'is Callisto.' Asgard grunted. 'Your dream-name.' 'I remembered it.' 'No, you
dreamed.' 'What is this place?' 'It isn't a place.' 'What's it called?'
'It has no name.' Asgard held up a blade of grass. 'What colour is this?'
'Green,' Callisto said immediately . . . but that wasn't true. It wasn't green. What colour, then? She
realised she couldn't say.
Asgard laughed, and shoved the blade in her mouth. Callisto looked down the beach. 'What happened
to Pharaoh?'
Asgard shrugged. 'He might be dead by now. Washed away by the sea.'
'Why doesn't he come up here, where it's safe?' 'Because he's weak. Weak and mad.' 'He saved me
from the sea.' 'He helps all the newborns.' 'Why?'
'How should I know? But it's futile. The ocean rises and falls. Every time it comes a little closer,
higher up
the beach. Soon it will lap right up here, to the forest itself.'
'We'll have to go into the forest.'
Try that and Night will kill you.'
Night? Callisto looked into the forest's darkness, and shuddered.
Asgard eyed Callisto with curiosity, no sympathy. 'You really are a newborn, aren't you?' She dug her
hand into the dust, shook it until a few grains were left on her palm. 'You know what the first thing
Pharaoh said to me was? "Nothing is real."'
'Yes -'
' "Not even the dust. Because every grain is a whole world."' She looked up at Callisto, calculating.
Callisto gazed at the sparkling grains, wondering, baffled, frightened.
Too much strangeness.
I want to go home, she thought desperately. But where, and what, is home?
Two women walked into Hama's office: one short, squat, her face a hard mask, and the other
apparently younger, taller, willowy. They both wore bland, rather scuffed Occupation-era robes - as he
did - and their heads were shaven bare.
The older woman met his gaze steadily. 'My name is Gemo Cana. This is my daughter. She is called
Sarfi.'
Hama eyed them with brief curiosity.
This was a routine appointment. Gemo Cana was, supposedly, a representative of a citizens' group
concerned
about details of the testimony being heard by the preliminary hearings of the Truth Commission. The
archaic words of family - daughter, mother - were still strange to Hama, but they were becoming
increasingly more common, as the era of the Qax cadres faded from memory.
The daughter, Sarfi, averted her eyes. She looked very young, and her face was thin, her skin sallow.
He welcomed them with his standard opening remarks. 'My name is Hama Druz. I am an advisor to
the Interim Coalition and specifically to the Commission for Historical Truth. I will listen to whatever
you wish to tell me and will help you any way I can; but you must understand that my role here is not
formal, and -'
'You're tired,' Gemo Cana said.
'What?'
She stepped forward and studied him, her gaze direct, disconcerting. 'It's harder than you thought, isn't
it? Running an office, a city - a world. Especially as you must work by persuasion, consent.' She
walked around the room, ran a finger over the data slates fixed on the walls, and paused before the
window, gazing out at the glistening rooftops of the Conurbation, the muddy blue-green of the canals.
Hama could see the Spline ship rolling in the sky, a wrinkled moon. She said, 'It was difficult enough
in the era of the Qax, whose authority, backed by Spline gunships, was unquestionable.'
'And,' asked Hama, 'how exactly do you know that?'
'This used to be my office.'
Hama reached immediately for his desktop.
'Please.' The girl, Sarfi, reached out towards him, then seemed to think better of it. 'Don't call your
guards. Hear us out.'
He stood. 'You're a jasoft, Gemo Cana.'
'Oh, worse than that,' Gemo murmured. 'I'm a pharaoh . . . You know, I have missed this view. The
Qax knew what they were doing when they gave us jasofts the sunlight.'
She was the first pharaoh Hama had encountered face to face. Hama quailed before her easy authority,
her sense of dusty age; he felt young, foolish, his precious philosophies half-formed. And he found
himself staring at the girl; he hadn't even known pharaohs could have children.
Deliberately he looked away, seeking a way to regain control of the situation. 'You've been in hiding.'
Gemo inclined her head. 'I spent a long time in this office, Hama Druz. Longer than you can imagine.
I always knew the day would come when the Qax would leave us exposed.'
'So you prepared.'
'Wouldn't you? I was doing my duty. I didn't want to die for it.'
'Your duty to Qax occupiers?'
'No,' she said, a note of weariness in her voice. 'You seem more intelligent than the rest; I had hoped
you might understand that much. It was a duty to mankind, of course. It always was.'
He tapped a data slate on his desk. 'Gemo Cana. I should have recognised the name. You are one of
the most hunted jasofts. Your testimony before the Commission -'
She snapped, 'I'm not here to surrender, Hama Druz, but to ask for your help.'
'I don't understand.'
'I know about your mission to Callisto. To the enclave there. Reth has been running a science station
since before the Occupation. Now you are going out there to close him down.'
He said grimly, 'These last few years have not been a time for science.'
She nodded. 'So you believe science is a luxury, a plaything for easier times. But science is a thread in
the tapestry of our humanity - a thread Reth has maintained. Do you even know what he is doing out
there?'
'Something to do with life forms in the ice -'
'Oh, much more than that. Reth has been exploring the nature of reality - seeking a way to abolish
time itself.' She smiled coolly. 'I don't expect you to understand. But it has been a fitting goal, in an era
when the Qax have sought to obliterate human history - to abolish the passage of time from the human
consciousness . . .'
He frowned. Abolishing time? Such notions were strange to him, meaningless. He said, 'We have
evidence that the science performed on Callisto was only a cover - that many pharaohs fled there
during the chaotic period following the Qax withdrawal.'
'Only a handful. There only ever was a handful of us, you know. And now that some have achieved a
more fundamental escape, into death, there are fewer than ever.'
'What do you want?'
'I want you to take us there.' 'To Callisto?'
'We will remain in your custody, you and your guards. You may restrain us as you like. We will not
try anything - heroic. All we want is sanctuary. They will kill us, you see.'
'The Commission is not a mob.'
She ignored that. 'I am not concerned for myself, but for my daughter. Sarfi has nothing to do with
this; she is no jasoft.'
Then she will not be harmed.' Gemo just laughed. 'You are evading justice, Gemo Cana.' She leaned
forward, resting her hands on the desk nonchalantly; this really had been her office, he realised.
'There is no justice here,' she hissed. 'How can there be? I am asking you to spare my daughter's life.
Later, I will gladly return to face whatever inquisition you choose to set up.'
'Why would this Reth help you?' 'His name is Reth Cana,' she said. 'He is my brother. Do you
understand? Not my cadre sibling. My brother.' Gemo Cana; Reth Cana.
In the Qax world, families had been a thing for ragamuffins and refugees, and human names had be-
come arbitrary labels; the coincidence of names had meant nothing to Hama. But to these ancient
摘要：

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