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doctrine?’
    ’I don’t know. I’d have to ask my political officer.’ The Hero let
the weapon drop. ’I’m not changing my decision. I’m just postponing
its implementation.’
    Rala nodded sagely.
     
    After that, as the weeks passed, she saw that the patch she had
cultivated was spreading, a stain of a richer dark seeping through
the ground. Her replicators were now turning soil and sunlight not
just into food but into copies of themselves, and so spreading
further, slowly, doggedly. The food she got from the ground became
handfuls a day, almost enough to stave off the hunger that nagged at
her constantly.
    Ingre said to her, ’You have a child. I knew they wouldn’t hurt
you because of that.’
    ’It’s OK, Ingre.’
    ’Although betraying you was doctrinally the correct thing to
do.’
    ’I said it’s OK.’
    ’The children are the future.’
    Yes, thought Rala. But what future? We are insane, she thought, an
insane species. As soon as the Qax get out of the way we start to rip
each other apart. We rule each other with armbands, bits of rag. And
now the Million Heroes are prepared to starve us all - they might
still do it - for the sake of an abstract doctrine. Maybe we really
were better off under the Qax.
    But Ingre seemed eager for forgiveness. She worked in the dirt
beside her cadre sibling, gazing earnestly at her.
    So Rala forced a smile. ’Yes,’ she said, and patted her belly.
’Yes, the children are the future. Now here, help me with this
sieve.’
    Under their fingers, the alien nano seeds spread through the dirt
of Earth.
     
    During the churning of the post-Qax era, we undying, our actions
during the Occupation misunderstood, were forced to flee.
    The Interim Coalition of Governance consolidated its power, as
such agencies do, and proved itself to be rather less than
interim.
    But from the ranks of the Coalition’s stultifying bureaucracy
emerged one man whose strange genius would shape human history for
twenty thousand years.

 
REALITY DUST
AD 5408
     
     
    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 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 swimming around him, drenched as it was in
clear bright sunlight.
    The scars of the Occupation were still visible. Away from the
great Conurbations, much of the land 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,