Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Having passed the moon, the ship turned for Earth, a button of light in the sky. But again Beth could immediately see differences from the world she remembered, even from this distance. There was no gleam of ice, for one thing, at either pole. And whole swaths of the planet, in central America, central Africa, Australia, were bare of life, as if the green had worn away to expose the rocky bones of the world.

  • • •

  The Ukelwydd, with the ruin of the Tatania in tow and the hulk ship’s tenfold crew aboard, settled neatly into a high-inclination orbit around Earth, or Terra as the home world was called by the Brikanti. The crew of the ISF ship was restricted to their sparse quarters for a full day, as the Brikanti went through their arrival protocols.

  After this brief confinement, Ari Guthfrithson, the ship’s leading druidh, invited Beth to join him to view the world, for soon the orbital pass would take the ship over Britain and north Europe, the home of the Brikanti and their allies, including Ari’s own people.

  Beth was pleased to see Ari. She felt she had grown relatively close to this calm scholar in the days they had spent on this ship. He was younger than she was, but not by much. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but like all the Brikanti crew he seemed to be exceptionally well groomed, with neat hair and finely shaped sideburns—she had glimpsed him using a portable kit, scissors, a nail file. She was attracted to him, she thought, if only faintly.

  And today the general mood was good. The Ukelwydd crew seemed relaxed as they switched over from flight mode to less demanding orbital operations.

  “Plus,” said Lex McGregor as he joined Beth and Ari at a big observation window, “maybe they are looking forward to getting rid of us. I know the military. The sooner they can kick a problem upstairs the happier they will be.”

  Ari’s voice, softly translated for Beth through Earthshine’s systems via her earpiece, was calm, melodious. “Actually ship’s crew are not used to dealing with people directly. In space conflicts, a personal encounter with the enemy is rare; the defeated rarely survive to become prisoners. And of course your Earthshine, whose nature we cannot understand, represents a double conceptual problem for us.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that,” McGregor said drily. “But he is the reason we’re all here in the first place. The objective of the flight of the poor old Tatania was specifically to save Earthshine from the consequences of our own upcoming war.” He glanced down at the world, over which the ship drifted silently. “Though whether by bringing Earthshine to this place really counts as ‘saving’ him—I suppose I’m relieved I’ll never have to justify that to my superiors, wherever they are . . . I’m sorry, I’m maundering.”

  Ari said, “Your destiny at a higher level than that has not yet been decided.”

  McGregor frowned. “I don’t understand. This is a Brikanti ship. I don’t know anything about your government, your empire—whatever—but surely we’re under your protection.”

  “I’m afraid it is more complicated than that.” Ari gestured. “Look around.”

  And when Beth looked away from the bright surface of the planet she saw an array of brilliant, unwinking stars against the dark background of space.

  Lex McGregor whistled. “Wow. Space habitats. I see tori, cylinders, platforms—mirrors, antennas . . .” He clenched a fist. “We’ve barely been allowed near a window. I never even noticed all this junk before.”

  “Junk?” Ari smiled. “I have been told that, where you come from, space is much less populated, comparatively. We find that difficult to understand. With kernel-drive ships it is easy to haul vast loads into orbit, or to ship materials in from such sources as Luna or the Tears of Ymir.”

  “But, Ari, they—umm, we—are more wary of kernels than you are. Kernel drives aren’t allowed on the Earth. Nowhere closer than the far side of the moon, where Penny Kalinski and her sister once worked. Of course, when the final war came, all bets were off.”

  “But I point out that the hardware you see in space around us represents the various forces who have taken an interest in you.”

  Beth said, “You mean the Romans, the Xin?”

  “I do.” Ari studied her, his face open, inquisitive. “I still know little of your own history. What hints I have heard are fascinating—the differences from our own. For now, you need to understand this. From what I have gathered, your history was rather more complex than ours has been. Fragmented. Essentially our world, and now the worlds beyond Terra, have been dominated by the rise of two powerful empires, Rome and Xin. Though other polities have come and gone, those two great poles of power have competed for control of the great landmasses of Asia and Europa for two thousand years. And for the last thousand years or more they have contended over the territories of the rest of the world also. The only significant exception has been my own federation, the Brikanti. Starting with a Pritanike that stayed independent of Rome, the Brikanti have managed to retain a kind of land empire of their own.”

  He studied their faces. “Terrible wars have been fought, on this world and elsewhere. Why, the battered face of Luna is a reminder of that. It is said that when the war up there was at its height, and the face of the satellite burned in the sky, a hail of debris, rocks from the great lunar detonations, rained down on Terra. Those accidental rock falls could not be distinguished from purposeful attacks, and a new wave of war was initiated on Terra itself. However, war and competition drove innovation. In many ways, it is clear, my culture is less technologically advanced than yours—but not in others.

  “And we survive, and poor Terra, almost as battered and scarred as Luna, has survived as an abode for humanity. This is because we, the competing powers of Terra, have found ways, if not to cooperate, at least to manage our conflicts. To sublimate them into angry diplomacy.”

  McGregor said, “Are you saying we are now the subject of this ‘angry diplomacy’?”

  Ari sighed. “The whole world saw the Ukelwydd come sailing in with the wreck of a ship of unknown origin. Our crew is riddled with spies for Xin and Rome. Of course it is; it is to be expected. You represent treasure, or perhaps danger, of unknown potential. We Brikanti spotted you first, and showed the initiative to retrieve you, but that is not to say that Xin and Rome are happy for us to keep you to ourselves. And as a result, right now, this ship, and you, are the subject of scrutiny. And as they watch us, they watch each other too.”

  McGregor grunted. “And everybody is armed to the teeth.”

  “That’s the idea. The fact that there is a native Xin among you, or so we would classify Jiang Youwei, makes the situation that much more complex; all sides feel they have a claim. At some point the trierarchus, as the command authority on the spot, will need to decide whether it is worth the risk of trying to transport you to Brikanti territory on the ground, or else to give you up to either Rome or Xin—or even to cast you adrift in your Tatania and let them fight it out over you. For we Brikanti, you see, are a small and nimble power who strive to stay safe by not being trodden on by either of our world’s lumbering giants . . .”

  Penny Kalinski joined them now, entering through the door at the back of the cabin. Swimming easily in the absence of gravity, she looked comfortable in a loose-fitting Brikanti costume of tunic and trousers. She was carrying a slate, and sipping something from a covered pottery mug. “Watered-down mead,” she said to Beth. “Pleasant stuff.”

  Beth had to smile. “You look as if you fit in here, Penny.”

  “Well, what can you do but make the best of it? I doubt we’re going home any time soon. Even if ‘home’ still exists, in any meaningful sense. So what’s going on? I heard we were due to pass over Britain; I wanted to come see.”

  Lex McGregor did a double take, turned to the panorama of the world below, and frowned at what he saw. “Really? That’s Britain? What the hell?”

  Beth, a stranger to Earth, had comparatively little preconception about what she e
xpected to see, looking down on Britain / Pritanike. She saw a kind of archipelago, a scatter of islands off the shore of a greater continent to the east. There was a grayish urban tangle laid over the green-brown of the countryside on the eastern coast of the larger of the islands, nearest the continent; she saw the glitter of glass and metal, arrow-straight roads. And in the mountainous country of an island to the far north she saw tremendous rectangular workings that looked as if they might rival the minefields of the lunar maria.

  Lex said grimly, “I was born in England. The southern counties, Angleterre. I have seen my home country from space many times. But I do not recognize that. Half of it’s missing altogether.”

  Penny touched his shoulder. “History’s been different here, Lex. Rome in the west never fell, apparently. Here, they industrialized centuries before we did. With the consequences you’d expect.”

  “Greenhouse gases. Deforestation. Sea level rises?”

  “That’s it. It will all have gone a lot farther and a lot earlier than in our timeline. We had the great twenty-first century crisis of the climate Jolts, the heavy-handed repair work of the Heroic Generation. Maybe here, as it unfolded more slowly, they understood it all less—maybe they cared less—and just adapted to it. I think we can expect to see the coastlines transformed all around the world. Lowlands lost, like south and east England here.”

  McGregor squinted. “That big sprawl in northern England looks like it’s centered on York.”

  “That is Eboraki,” said Ari. “The capital of an independent Pritanike since the days of Queen Kartimandia herself, she who defied Rome. It has always been a city of war. Later, in the early days of contact between my own ancestral people and the Brikanti, for some years Eboraki was held by us. It was a Scand city, not a Brikanti one.”

  Penny grinned. “But all that’s a long time ago. Forgive and forget?”

  “At least we Brikanti and Scand loathe each other less than we loathe the Romans and the Xin. Now Eboraki is the capital of a world empire—though we have no emperors.”

  Lex said, “The development on the scraps of high ground to the south of the Thames, beyond the Isle of Dogs. That might be some version of London.”

  “That is Lund,” Ari said. “The most obvious gateway to Europa, and the Roman provinces. The town was a petty community before contact with the Romans; there was no particular purpose for it. After Kartimandia it became a trading hub with the Empire, and the nearest to a Roman city in Pritanike. But it was always dwarfed by Eboraki.”

  McGregor pointed. “And what the hell did you do to Scotland?”

  Ari frowned. “We know it as Kaledon. An arena of heroic engineering.”

  “It looks like you demolished mountains,” McGregor said. “Some areas look like they’ve been melted.”

  “Some have been,” Ari said. “A kernel-drive spacecraft, landing or taking off, generates rather a lot of heat.”

  “My God,” Penny said. “They really have brought kernel technology down to the face of the Earth. All that heat energy dumped into the ground, the air. It’s a wonder they haven’t flipped the whole damn planet into some catastrophic greenhouse-warming event, into a Venus.”

  “Maybe,” Lex said, “they were lucky. They got away with it. Just. Perhaps there are other timelines where precisely that happened. Does that make sense, Kalinski? If there are two timelines, why not many?”

  “Or an infinite number.” She grinned, lopsided. “That had occurred to me too. You’re thinking like a scientist, McGregor.”

  “I’ll cut that out immediately.”

  Ari followed this exchange closely.

  Now the island cluster was passing away to the northwest, and the ship was sailing over the near continent—Gaul to the Romans and the Brikanti, France to the crew of the Tatania. The countryside, where it was spared by the sea-level rise, glowed with urbanization. But on the track of a broad river Beth made out a neat circular feature, a set of rays spanning out from it, a lunar crater partially overgrown by the green. She pointed. “What’s that?”

  Ari said, “Once a major city of the Roman province. Destroyed in a war some centuries back, by a Xin missile that got through the local defenses.”

  Penny said, “The missile—kernel-tipped? It was, wasn’t it? So it’s true. You people don’t just use kernels as sources of power on Earth. You actually use them in weapons, to fight your Iron Age wars.”

  Ari Guthfrithson frowned. “Would you have me apologize for my whole history? And is your history so laudable?”

  McGregor murmured, “We’re missing the point here, Penny. Forget your judgments. We need to learn as much about this world as we can while we’ve got the chance.”

  Penny nodded. “You’re right, of course, since it looks like we’re going to be stuck here.” She thought it over. “The Ukelwydd is following a high-inclination orbit around the Earth—around Terra. That is, the orbit is tipped up at an angle to the equator—”

  “That is intentional, of course,” Ari said, “so that our track takes us over Pritanike and the landing grounds of Kaledon.”

  “But that means we get to fly over a good span of latitudes. And as the planet turns beneath us, with time we get to look down on a swath of longitudes too. Give me a few hours with a slate, and I’ll capture what I can. Then with some educated guesswork maybe we can figure out the story of this world . . .”

  11

  Twelve hours later Penny called her companions, with Ari, back to the observation lounge. She’d found a way to project slate images onto a blank wall, and had prepared a digest of her observations of the turning world beneath.

  She showed them landscapes of dense urbanization, the cities glowing nodes in a wider network of roads and urban sprawl. “Welcome to Terra,” she said drily.

  “This is Europa—Europe. Some of the oldest Roman provinces. Give or take the odd invasion from Asia, this whole swath from the Baltic coast in the north to the Mediterranean in the south has been urbanized continually for more than two thousand years, and the result is what you can see. Many of the denser nodes map onto cities we’re familiar with from our own timeline, which are either successor cities to Roman settlements—like Paris, for instance—or, in places the Romans never reached in our timeline, they follow the geographic logic of their position. Hamburg, Berlin. The nature of the country is different farther north, the Danish peninsula, Scandinavia. Just as heavily urbanized, but a different geography.”

  “The heartland of my people,” Ari said. “You may have images of the canal which severs the peninsula from the mainland. A very ancient construction, which was widened extensively when kernels became available.”

  Penny goggled. “You’re telling me you use kernels to shape landscapes as well? On Earth?”

  “This is Terra, Penny,” McGregor said evenly. “Not Earth. I guess that’s their business.”

  Penny showed images now of a desolate coastline, an angry gray sea, ports and industrial cities defiant blights on the gray-brown landscape. “This is northern Asia,” she said. “In our reality, the Arctic Ocean coast of Russia. There never was a Russia here, I don’t believe. But nor is there any sign of a boreal forest at these latitudes. Even the sea looks sterile—nobody fishing out there—and no sign of any Arctic ice, by the way, though we haven’t been able to see all the way to the pole.”

  Ari shrugged. “It is dead country. It always has been dead. Good only for extraction of minerals, methane for fuel.”

  Penny tapped her screen. “I’m going to pan south. The extent of the main Roman holdings seems to reach the Urals, roughly. Whereas you have the Xin empire, presumably some descendant of the early Chinese states we know about, extending up from the north of central China through Mongolia and eastern Siberia, all the way to the Bering Strait. In Central Asia, though—”

  More craters. A desolate, lifeless landscape.

  Thi
s made Beth gasp. “What happened here?”

  Ari sighed. “The steppe was historically always a problem. A source of ferocious nomadic herdsmen and warriors, who, whenever the weather took a turn for the worst, would come bursting out of their heartland to ravage the urban communities to the west and east. Finally Xin and Rome agreed to administer those worthless plains as a kind of joint protectorate. It is an arrangement that worked quite well, for centuries. Mostly.”

  McGregor’s grin was cold. “Mostly?”

  “Wherever two great empires clash directly there will be war. And when weapons such as the kernels are available—well, you can see the result.”

  Penny said, “Here’s the Xin homeland. Again there seems to be a historical continuity with the cities and nations we know about from the early first millennium . . .”

  Some of the images had been taken at night. Half a continent glowed, a network of light embedded with jewel-like cities—and yet here and there Beth could see the distinctive circular holes of darkness that must be relics of kernel strikes.

  Ari was watching Beth, as much as he was following the images. “Your reaction is different from the others. You seem—dismayed.”

  “That’s one word for it. I grew up on an empty world.”

  “Ah. Whereas all this, in comparison, billions of us crammed into vast developments—”

  “How do you breathe? How do you find dignity?”

  “You mean, how will you live here?” He smiled. “Beth Eden Jones, you, of all the crew of the Tatania, are by far the most intriguing to me. The most complicated. If fortune allows it, I hope to be able to help you find a place in this, the third world you have had to learn to call home . . .”