Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “My name is Kerys. I command the vessel Ukelwydd—”

  “I know who you are.” Earthshine stepped toward her.

  The warriors tried to block his way and waved their weapons at him, but the golden figure simply walked through them. A couple of men broke away, evidently panicked by this eerie display.

  The commander, however, stood her ground.

  “Trierarchus Kerys, my name is Earthshine. And we need to talk.”

  8

  AD 2222; AUC 2975

  It took a month after Stef and Yuri emerged from the Hatch before the Malleus Jesu was ready to depart from the double-star system of Romulus and Remus for Earth—or Terra, as the Romans and Brikanti called it. The setting up of the permanent colonia continued apace, even as ferry craft blasted up to the orbiting starship carrying away personnel, equipment and supplies for the return journey. Stef was bemused to observe that the ferries themselves were driven by small clusters of kernels—“vulcans” as the Romans called the energetic wormhole-like anomalies—even in the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, like this one. No such craft had ever been allowed anywhere near the surface of the Earth, her Earth, not before the final war of 2213 anyhow.

  Early one morning, with six days left to departure, Stef Kalinski was approached by a Brikanti who introduced herself only as Eilidh. Tall and spare, Eilidh was dressed much as trierarchus Movena was in a hooded woollen poncho, trousers, boots. But unlike Movena, Eilidh wore a heavy belt as the Romans wore, with a gaudy brass buckle and loops for weapons, though empty.

  Stef, as had become her habit, had been spending her free time at the Hatch site with her slate, trying ineffectually to learn a little more of the physics of the enigmatic emplacement. Now Eilidh asked Stef if she would care to join her in a final aerial tour by cetus of the area around the colonia site.

  Stef guessed she was maybe fifty, a little older than Movena, but a good deal younger than Stef herself. “I might have taken you for a Roman with that belt.”

  “The trierarchus, Movena, remains independent of the Roman military command. I on the other hand am officially a tribune, an officer subordinate to the centurion. I am a kind of liaison between the two command structures. Complicated, I know, but it seems to work . . . As to the tour, we seek to complete our mappings of this place. And we have photographers, artists, to capture the likenesses of the structures left behind by the indigenes. We want to leave with some record of this world as it exists before the children of these Roman soldiers breed like rabbits and dismantle the fortress-mountains for building materials for their roads. I myself am a command officer but serve the trierarchus as a druidh, a scholar, hence my own interest. I have undergone some of the training . . . Will you come?”

  “I’d bite your hand off.”

  Eilidh pulled a face. “A vivid expression and oddly Roman. This was Movena’s idea; we would be fascinated by your response. We’ll be gone a couple of days. Bring what you need. We leave in an hour.”

  • • •

  So, in the unvarying light of Romulus, and as trumpet blasts roused the Roman colonia from its slumber for the first watch of a new day, Stef stood side by side with Eilidh before the big observation window of one of the expedition’s two cetus airships, as the ground fell away beneath them. Stef looked for the small barracks block where Yuri was resting, with the ColU for company; Stef would be supported in her translation by the buds in her ears, themselves smart little gadgets.

  Eilidh gestured to the west, where mountains strode across the landscape. The sky was clear, and Romulus cast a pearly light that spun shadows across the mountain chain, sharp and unvarying. “Most of the interesting structures are to be found in the mountains. So that’s where we’ll make our way. This expedition is only a final reconnaissance. The Arab navigation team with their farwatchers, working from orbit, have mapped much of the planet. And with our two cetus craft, we’ve completed two circumnavigations, one equatorial from substellar to antistellar, and the other pole to pole. The farside is, of course, masked by ice, as are the shadow faces of all worlds like these, huddling close to their suns. But the air remains breathable, and there is life, and some structure.” She smiled. “I have spent happy hours with Centurion Quintus Fabius and his staff studying these maps, plotting the routes of roads yet to be built, ports and transport nodes to be founded at river confluences and estuaries—sketching the provinces to be carved out of these silent landscapes someday. There have even been war games, military exercises, as Quintus and his boys have imagined how to counter new Hannibals marching through those sculpted mountains.”

  “You are Brikanti,” Stef said carefully. “I understand that Brikanti is a distinct nation. Independent of the Romans and their Empire.”

  Eilidh looked at her sideways. “You really do know nothing of us. Yes, Brikanti is an independent nation. The heartland is Pritanike, an island separated from the mainland of Europa, and therefore from the Romans’ ancient holdings.”

  Stef hazarded, “An island the Romans called Britannia?”

  “Well, they still do, in their arrogance. For most of our history we’ve traded with Rome peaceably enough. The Romans are the better soldiers; we are the better sailors. We build on the expertise of our Scand cousins, who have always been expert shipbuilders, back to the days of longships with their wooden hulls and woollen sails. When the Scand first burst from their northern fastnesses—they had run out of land to parcel out to too many sons—they were pirates and raiders, and the Brikanti and the Romans made a rare show of unity to beat them back. But it was the Brikanti in the end who forged alliances with the Scand. We had far-seeing leaders in those days—unlike the current lot—who were able to see the potential of this new nation of warriors and traders. There was a kind of revolution of the heart. With Scand ships and their expansive spirit, Brikanti stopped being a rather defensive ally of the Empire and began to forge its own global ambitions.

  “Now our own northern empire stretches across the reaches of Europa, and also Asia, where we have a long frontier with the Xin. We are one of the three great powers, I suppose you might say, who dominate Europa, Asia, Africa between us. And we battle over the spoils of the Valhallan continents to the west, much to the chagrin of the native inhabitants.” She tapped her heavy soldier’s belt. “But Valhalla is an arena useful for developing military capabilities.”

  Stef said, “And you are able to work with the Romans.”

  “Yes. At this time we are officially at peace; the two of us are closer to each other than either of us is to the Xin . . . In other ages the pattern changes, though the underlying relationships endure.”

  “Your culture is different from the Romans in other ways,” Stef said. “Women are stronger.”

  Eilidh grinned. “Well, the Romans have strong women too, but they are powers behind the throne—the wives and mothers and sisters of emperors and generals. Our culture has a history of strong women, going back to Kartimandia, who saved us from the Romans.” She looked at Stef. “Is this a story you know? It is two thousand years old; every Brikanti child could tell it.”

  Stef shrugged.

  “You see, Julius Caesar had already set foot on our island, and had planted the dream of conquest in the Romans’ empty heads. Fifty years later Kartimandia, queen of a realm in the north, was informed that the time had come, that the legions were massing in Portus Itius on the coast of Gaul for the invasion. It was she who traveled in person to Rome, she who managed to persuade Emperor Claudius that there was much greater glory to be gained if he turned his legions north, into Germania transrhenus, which even his glorious predecessor Augustus had failed to conquer. Continental provinces would be easier to consolidate for the Romans, and besides, she pledged to become an ally of Rome so that the invasion was unnecessary. She made a good case, it was said, much to the surprise of many Romans. But, despite the Romans’ prejudice at the time—and despite what Caesar
said about us—we were no hairy savages, and Kartimandia was sophisticated and wily.

  “Well, it was Outer Germania that felt the tramp of the legionaries’ boots and not the fields of Pritanike. Kartimandia, with some Roman help, went on to consolidate her hold on the whole of southern Pritanike, and her successors made themselves valuable allies of Rome by becoming a secure exporter of grain, wool and leather to supply the Empire’s continental armies. The Brikanti have never forgotten the achievements of Kartimandia. And forever since, Brikanti women have won positions of power.”

  Stef and Yuri had quietly talked over some of this with the ColU, as they speculated how this history had diverged from their own. In the account lodged in the ColU’s memory, at the time of the invasion of Britain, a woman Roman historians knew as Cartimandua had indeed ruled a kingdom in the north of Britain, called by the Romans “Brigantia.” And northern Germany, meanwhile, had never been conquered by Rome after the disastrous loss of three legions in the Teutoberg forest a generation earlier. Not so here. Stef supposed that even if they could figure out how history had diverged to deliver this strange new outcome, there was a deeper question of why. Why this history—why the change now? And how had she and her companions survived the transformation of human destiny?

  Eilidh, evidently sharply intelligent, was watching her. “Much of this is unfamiliar to you, isn’t it? Someday we must explore our differences fully. Yet, whoever you are, wherever you come from, I see your soul. Watching you at the Hatch, I saw the wonder in your eyes.”

  Stef shrugged. “Guilty as charged. In my—home—I was a philosopher, as the Romans would say. I studied the kernels, and later Hatches, because I wanted to understand how it all worked.” That had been her goal since she was eleven years old and she’d stood with her father on Mercury, and watched a kernel-driven manned spacecraft drive like a spear of light into the heavens. “Where do the kernels get their energy from? How do the Hatches work? What are they for? Why are they here? How was it I and my companions came walking out of that thing ourselves? And, frankly, I’m fascinated by what you’ve done here. On this world you’ve gone beyond anything my people ever achieved. You’ve built a Hatch . . .”

  Eilidh grinned. “We have, haven’t we?”

  • • •

  Eilidh had the cetus pause over the Hatch construction site: the dull sheen of the Hatch installation itself at the center, the land shattered and melted for a wide area around that central point, and a loose cordon of bored-looking legionaries playing knucklebones with fragments of broken rock.

  Eilidh and Stef sipped Xin tea. There was no coffee to be had, one miracle of globalization that evidently hadn’t translated to this timeline. Yuri had joked about going into business cultivating the stuff once they got back to Earth. But Yuri’s health was worsening; he’d been in a continual decline since they’d emerged from the Hatch . . .

  Stef tried to concentrate on what Eilidh was telling her.

  “To create a Hatch is like mating wild boar: a simple act to understand but dangerous in practice, especially if you get in the way . . . You take kernels. You arrange them in a spherical array, with all their mouths directed inward, to a single point in space. And at that center you place one more kernel, its mouth tightly closed. You understand that kernels can be handled with etheric fields?”

  By which, Stef had learned, she meant electromagnetic fields. “Of course. We too first found kernels on Mercury. You can position them, even close or open their mouths to control their energy output.”

  Eilidh frowned. “Some of your terms are unfamiliar, but clearly we agree on the essence. Well then, with sufficient kernels, held with sufficient precision, there is an inward blast of energy. You can only watch this from a distance, and many lives were spent in determining that distance precisely.

  “The configuration holds for only a splinter of time before the arrangement is blown apart. The land, the air all around is shattered, melted, by an outpouring of heat and shock waves—well, you see the result here. But if you get it right, when the glowing gases and the rain of liquid rock and the shocked air have all passed, and you can go back in to see—when all that is done, what is left is a brand new Hatch in its neat installation, just as you see here.”

  Stef frowned. “I’m not sure I understand. You don’t have to construct the Hatch?”

  “No more than we have to ‘construct’ a chicken emerging from the egg. Our druidh speculate that there is a Hatch implicit in the form of every kernel. It is merely a question of breaking the egg to release the chick, to use the kernels’ own energy to shock one of their brood to adopt this new form. You never discovered this?”

  “My culture was more cautious than yours. More timid, perhaps. We would never have won approval for such an experiment.” For better or worse, she thought, we cared more about the lives of our technicians than to spend them on such stunts. Even if it had occurred to us to try. “How did you get the idea? I can hardly believe you found such a specific arrangement by trial and error.”

  Eilidh smiled. “We did not. Somebody else found it for us.” Now the cetus was rising, turning its prow to the jagged row of mountains on the misty horizon. “We first found the kernels on Mercury—as did you, yes? We were already traveling beyond Terra—well, obviously. We had big ships driven by Xin fire-of-life, and by potent liquid elixirs . . . I fear our common vocabulary is not yet rich enough.”

  Gunpowder and chemical propellants. “I get the idea.”

  “Such substances had been discovered and developed during centuries of war. We had already flown to Luna, to Mars, though many died in those days, and our first attempts to plant colonia on those bodies were often catastrophic . . .”

  Stef’s head swam. Without the fall of Rome in the west, without the Dark Ages, could technological development have been that much faster? She imagined a medieval world with crude rocketships lumbering into space, with lessons slowly being learned about the vacuum of space, about radiation, about weightlessness, by cultures utterly unsophisticated in the relevant science—lessons learned the hard way, at the expense of many deaths. She was thrilled at the idea. Thrilled and appalled.

  “Then came Mercury,” Eilidh said. “There was a war of acquisition, more intense than most. We all wanted Mercury and its resources to capture the energy of the sun, you see. It was seen as a strategic position in terms of advantage for the future. And just how strategic only became clear when a Xin party stumbled across a field of kernels.”

  “Ah.”

  “After the usual blood toll the kernels were tamed, their energies used to drive our ships, and they were unleashed as weapons of war.”

  That simple phrase managed to shock Stef, despite all she’d witnessed in her own home timeline. “Surely not on Earth itself.”

  Eilidh just returned her look. “But we are speaking of the Hatches. The first Hatch of all was found on Mercury, in the kernel field.”

  “As it was for us,” Stef said.

  Eilidh raised her eyebrows. “On a different Mercury too? We do have much to discuss. Of course the Hatch was opened; of course there were attempts to pass through . . . None of those who entered, unwilling slaves, bold soldiers, curious philosophers, ever returned.”

  “Perhaps they are still in transit.”

  “In transit?”

  “Our Mercury Hatch is connected to one on Per Ardua. Umm, which is a world of Proxima Centauri. Which is—”

  “The nearest star, in the Centaur’s Hoof. For us, it has been given the same name. Proxima.” She smiled, a little sourly. “So there are Romans in your country too.”

  “Were. Long story. Look, it’s only four years as light travels between Mercury and Proxima. So it’s possible to go there and step back with only eight years elapsing.”

  Eilidh frowned as she puzzled all that out; Stef had no idea how much understanding of such basic physics they shared
.

  “The point is,” Stef said, “maybe your Hatch on your Mercury was hooked up to somewhere else. Somewhere much farther away.” There was no reason why that shouldn’t be true, she realized. They knew so little, despite the decades that had passed since her own first brush with all this strangeness. “Your travelers may have arrived alive and well, but just haven’t had time to step back home yet. Maybe they are still traveling, oblivious.”

  “It’s possible. Oddly there is a soldiers’ legend along those lines. Perhaps the travelers have gone, not to Proxima, the nearest star, but to Ultima, the furthest star of all.”

  Stef frowned. What could that mean? The furthest star, in an expanding universe full of galaxies and clusters of galaxies . . .

  “But, though we have not walked through the Hatches to Proxima and its worlds, we have journeyed there in ships—ships like the Malleus Jesu, orbiting high above. When we got there, on the third planet from the star—”

  Per Ardua.

  “—we found a kernel field, not unlike that on Mercury—by then we had learned how to search for such things—and we found a Hatch, and we found instructions on how to construct a fresh one. Just as I have described.”

  “Instructions. Of what kind?”

  “Enigmatic. Graphic, but enigmatic. Enough for us to work out the rest, after—”

  “Another blood toll.” Stef remembered the builders, natives of Per Ardua—her Per Ardua. She had seen little of them, but she knew Yuri remembered them with affection from his early, near-solitary years on the planet. “These graphic instructions—was there any sign of the natives who created them?”

  “None. So I’m told. Not a trace save these odd diagrams, and even they were lodged inside a Hatch.” She eyed Stef. “It was another scrap that doesn’t fit, another fragment of a lost history. Like you and your companions. What do you think?”