Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Penny turned on Ari. “That seems unnecessarily brutal.”

  He managed to smile, self-deprecating. “It’s not the time for a history lesson. You may blame the Romans from whom we borrowed the custom. The rule is indeed—what did you say?—rough and ready. Better a few healthy children are lost, than that society is burdened with the weak—”

  Beth snapped, “The father gets to choose to save her, or not. Not the mother. Most mothers will have families to back them up—sometimes they take the child, though the mother can’t see her again. But I had no one to help me. And he chose to abandon her.”

  Ari shook his head. “All of this was unplanned. Most men in my position would have done the same.”

  “But you found out, Beth,” Penny prompted.

  “I busted out of that damn house where they were keeping me,” Beth said. “I got up on the roof, and saved my baby, and I came straight here, where I knew you would be. I wonder how many laws I broke doing that. Will you prosecute me, scholar? Will I be thrown in jail, or mutilated, or executed, or whatever else you do to disobedient mothers?”

  Ari shook his head again. “No, no. There are always exceptions. You will be welcome in my home, with my family—with the baby—”

  “Not after this.” She turned to Penny with a look of pleading. “Let me stay here. With you.”

  “Of course you can stay,” Penny said immediately.

  Ari stood. “This changes nothing. This Academy is here at my discretion. In a sense you are still under my roof—”

  “They stay,” Penny said firmly, “with us.”

  “And the future? As the child has needs, as she grows?”

  Penny sighed. “We’ll deal with that when we come to it. I think it’s best if you go now, Ari Guthfrithson.”

  He stood still for a moment, clenching one fist. Then he stalked away, almost colliding with Marie Golvin as she approached with a tray of drinks.

  Stef watched him go. “I thought I understood him. I thought we communicated, as scholars. Druidh. But now—”

  “You don’t know him at all,” Beth said. “I didn’t. These people aren’t like us, Stef. Not even Ari. Not even the man I thought I loved, who fathered my child. Especially not him.”

  18

  AD 2227; AUC 2980

  “ColU, I thought Quintus Fabius was a pompous ass from the moment he came strutting down from that airship.”

  “He is a good commander, Yuri Eden. But as he hails from what is still regarded as an outer province of the Empire, he has to be more Roman than the Romans.”

  “So he’s got a chip on his shoulder. Boo hoo. Actually he reminded me of that other pompous ass Lex McGregor . . . I’m sorry. Kind of lost my way there.”

  “Relax, Yuri Eden. Breathe the oxygen.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Do you remember what we were talking about? I am here to witness your final testament.”

  “Always busy, eh, ColU? Look, just talk to me. I’ve had enough of my own miserable life for now. You’re the nearest thing I’ve got to a friend on this tub—you and Stef, but you were there first, right?”

  “Even if I was an instrument of the ISF, the organization that stranded you against your will on an alien world.”

  “Well, there is that. No hard feelings, eh? And don’t tell me I need to rest. I’ll soon be enjoying the long sleep, drifting between the stars in a Roman sarcophagus. Fine way to go, actually.”

  “You are aware that I did quietly suggest to the optio that that would be the best course of action regarding the disposal of your body, and indeed Colonel Kalinski’s if it came to that. As opposed to depositing your corpses in the recycling tanks.”

  “Don’t spare my feelings, will you?”

  “After all, we hail from another timeline. Your bodies may contain pathogens exotic to this reality. And both of your bodies contain foreign elements, even dental work, for example, which might be harmful in the ship’s food chain.”

  “Ha! Oh, don’t make me laugh, ColU. Now I have an image of my false teeth chewing their way out of some fat legionary’s gut.”

  “Well, you don’t wear false teeth, Yuri Eden. But the image is an amusing one.”

  “Don’t laugh too hard.”

  “Do you wish me to call the medicus again? Michael did say that if—”

  “Oh, don’t fuss, ColU. If I want the damn quack, I’ll call him. It’s only been palliative care, and you know that as well as I do. He can treat the actual condition no better than you can. But with that suite of drugs he has, all those psychoactive substances from the South American jungles, he can play my level of pain like a fiddle . . . You know, I sometimes wonder if I haven’t carried these damn passengers all my life.”

  “That’s possible, actually, Yuri Eden. Your body has been exposed to a series of extraordinary environments. This is your second journey through interstellar space. You spent decades on Per Ardua, a planet of a flare star. Before that, you spent some time under a dome on Mars, a world lacking a thick atmosphere, an ozone layer. Even before that, a journey across interplanetary space from Earth to Mars.”

  “Also I passed through Hatches. Three times.”

  “Indeed. And before all that you spent a century in a casket, buried in a vault in Antarctica with a thousand others. The casualty rates from cancers of various sorts of survivors of that process—”

  “We called it ‘freezer burn.’ So the parents who put me on ice and stuffed me in a hole—”

  “Surely they sought to send you to a better time, Yuri Eden.”

  “And now, it turns out, after all I’ve survived, it will be the damn cryo that kills me off in the end. Oh, the irony.”

  “I am only speculating, Yuri Eden.”

  “I know, buddy. I don’t take it personally.”

  “It is to be regretted that more advanced medicine is not available. I hope to help the ship’s navigators devise a medical scanner to emulate the functions of the slate I used to diagnose your condition.”

  “The navigators? Oh, your Arab buddies, in their observation blisters . . .”

  “This vessel navigates by the stars, by astronomical observations made by the Arab teams.”

  “These Arab buddies of yours sound like they are as advanced as anybody else in this timeline.”

  “It would seem so. Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilization, the dar-al Islam, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of interfaith conflict in Europe—no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.”

  “And the Arabs are the best astronomers.”

  “They are. Yuri Eden, I hope you will have the chance to see their observation blisters. There is an atmosphere of calm—of learning, of reverence. They are like college study rooms, or religious sanctuaries. Indeed, one of them is dedicated as a mosque.

  “In space, Muslims were always drawn to astronomy because of the need to find reliably the position of Earth, and therefore Mecca, for the purposes of daily prayers. But the Arabs have gone much further. They have fine optical telescopes, but also spectroscopes to analyze the light—though no image capture more advanced than wet-chemistry photography. And they have made a suite of discoveries, of more or less relevance to the mission of the Malleus Jesu. Of course, a kernel ship under heavy acceleration, like this one, is a rather noisy platform. And they have to compensate for relativistic distortion, so close do we travel to the speed of light. They have sophisticated rule-of-thumb mathematics to achieve this, without, again, having the underlying theory . . .

  “Yuri Eden, the Arabs allowed me to peruse their libraries. They have painstakingly
compiled good maps of the cosmic background radiation, the relic glow of the Big Bang—not that they have the cosmological theories to describe it that way.

  “And they seek out life-bearing planets, among the stars we pass. Targets for future missions like this one. Living worlds have certain characteristics. On Earth, for instance, the atmosphere holds oxygen and methane, reactive gases that if left to themselves would combine with other substances—iron ore in the rocks would rust—and be lost to the air. But it is the action of life that replenishes those reservoirs. Another kind of biosphere would produce other kinds of traces. Sometimes you can tell there’s life simply from color changes, visible from space. Early Earth was probably predominantly purple, on the sea coasts anyhow . . .”

  “All this you found in their libraries? With Chu Yuen as your search engine. Ha! I imagine poor Chu getting pretty tired turning pages—”

  “Usually it’s unraveling scrolls. But, yes, it can be like that . . . One striking observation, Yuri Eden, is that many worlds the Arabs have observed are not living, but dead: once life-bearing, but evidently killed off, at least at the surface. And in some cases, recently. You can tell this from remote observations. If all life on Earth were ended suddenly, the decomposition of a glut of corpses would dump ethane into the air, in great quantities. Without the water cycle mediated by the plants, there would be a rapid heating spike. And so on. All this can be observed from afar. Yuri Eden, the Arabs have made many such discoveries.”

  “What could kill off whole worlds? War?”

  “Perhaps, Yuri Eden.”

  “And with who knows what history-tweaking strangeness to follow? If our experience is any precedent.”

  “One can only speculate. Of course the Arabs also search for kernels. Worlds laden with them, targets for future Hatch-building expeditions. Again there are certain characteristic signatures you can spot from afar. They have even begun to map the distribution of kernel-bearing worlds, and Hatches, across this part of the Galaxy. Their maps are difficult to decipher, in fact: not maps as we know them but more itineraries, lists of distances and directions between locations . . . It appears that there is a kind of network. A certain percentage of kernel worlds are concentrated toward the center of the Galaxy. As if whatever initiated this process originated deeper in the Galaxy, and the network of Hatch-building has been heading out to the outer reaches ever since.”

  “Hm. What’s different about the center of the Galaxy?”

  “It is older, in a sense. The Galaxy is like a vast factory for manufacturing stars from interstellar dust and gas. Star-making started close to the center, and is spreading out to the periphery. It is thought that toward the center there may be habitable worlds born a billion years before the Earth.”

  “So the Hatches may have been started off by some ancient intelligence, lurking on one of these old, old worlds . . .”

  “The Arabs’ observations would fit that, Yuri Eden.”

  “But what’s it all for? Do you ever get the feeling we’re missing the big picture here, ColU? All the strangeness—the kernels, the Hatches, the dumping of whole histories . . . Maybe this is my South American drugs talking.”

  “Mostly we are too busy trying to survive to think too deeply about such matters, Yuri Eden.”

  “And also too busy riding these various gift horses to look them too closely in the mouth. The kernels are just too damn useful . . . But we do ask such questions—or at least you do, ColU.”

  “I try. My mission has always been to nurture the humanity around me—to nurture you and your family, Yuri Eden. By doing that I must consider the wider questions of which you speak. I must consider the future. And some of what I have learned about the future disturbs me.”

  “Maybe the drugs are hitting me again. Or else they’re wearing off. Run that by me again. The future?”

  “I have seen it in the sky, Yuri Eden. I told you that the Arab astronomers have carefully observed the background radiation from the Big Bang. That radiation, and distortions in it—ripples, distortions, nonhomogeneities, polarization—carries a great deal of information about the wider structure of the universe. After all, it has permeated the whole cosmos from the beginning. For instance, our cosmologists looked for evidence of other universes than our own. An interaction of two universes, a collision in some higher dimension, might leave echoes in the background, tremendous circles in the sky. But I, studying the Arab records with a depth of understanding that they cannot share, have seen . . . something else.”

  “What? The suspense is killing me, and I’m already dying.”

  “I apologize, Yuri Eden. I believe I have seen evidence of superluminal events. Faster-than-light phenomena.”

  “What the hell are you talking about now? Warp drive? Some kind of super-starship? A higher civilization?”

  “Not that. Not on that scale. Much bigger. Please listen, Yuri Eden. In relativity theory, you know that nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. That was Einstein’s most fundamental discovery. Even a transition through a Hatch, say from Mercury to Per Ardua, by whatever unknown mechanism enables such transitions, is marginally slower than lightspeed. But there is a get-out clause in the physics.”

  “Go on.”

  “Nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. But space-time is a substance, of a kind; it has structure. It can be distorted . . . Yuri Eden, waves can propagate in space-time itself. And they can travel faster than light. The theoreticians have wondered if such warps could be used to carry ships at superluminal speeds.”

  “Beating light by surfing space-time waves . . .”

  “That’s the idea, Yuri Eden. We never achieved a warp drive. But warp waves, as described by the theory, would emit certain kinds of exotic radiations. Even if we could never create them, we thought we could detect them.

  “Yuri Eden, I think I have seen the traces of warp ripples in the cosmic background radiation. Not small, contained signals, as you would associate with a starship. These are relics of events on a tremendous scale. By which I mean billions of light-years wide, events spanning the universe.”

  “Larger than galaxies—”

  “Larger than superclusters of galaxies.”

  “Nurse! I think my drip’s come loose.”

  “I apologize, Yuri Eden. I will discuss all this with Colonel Kalinski; perhaps she will be able to make it clearer. But, you see, I am struggling to grasp the hypothesis I am formulating.”

  “What hypothesis?”

  “Imagine that in the future there is a—cataclysm. A tremendously violent event of some kind, spanning space—spanning the entire universe. This event is so energetic that among its effects are ripples in space-time, tremendous waves—”

  “Ah. Warp waves, which can travel back in time.”

  “Yes, Yuri Eden. I believe that—in these faint traces of structure in the cosmic background reaction, visible to the Arab astronomers in the silence of their observation capsules—I am witnessing a kind of foreshadowing, echoes traveling back in time . . .”

  “Echoes from the future. But echoes of what, ColU?”

  “Something terrible.”

  “Umm. Well, you’re not given to exaggeration, ColU.”

  “Are you falling asleep, Yuri Eden?”

  “Not just yet. All this talk of calamity in the future. You know, ColU, I don’t fear dying. In fact, I feel like I died already, a number of times. All those doors I had to pass through, from my own time to the future, from Mars to Per Ardua . . .”

  “It will just be another door, Yuri Eden.”

  “I know, my friend. I know. But I do fear for those I love. Listen— I want you to find Beth, if you can.”

  “I know. You asked me this before. But, Yuri Eden, she may not exist, in this new reality. She may have been left behind.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. I know Mard
ina—or knew her. If there was a way to save Beth, she’d have found it.”

  “I always flattered myself that I was close to Beth Eden Jones.”

  “You were the kindly monster who made her toy builders with those manipulator arms of yours. Remember Mister Sticks? Find her, ColU. And whoever she’s with now. Tell her you’re her property now. And help her, as best you can. Because I can’t, you see. I can’t help her anymore.”

  “Yuri Eden—”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise, Yuri Eden. You are tiring. I will ask Michael to call on you.”

  “Yeah. Oh, ColU, one thing. This future cataclysm you think you see. When?”

  “The whole thing is very partial, Yuri Eden. I can only make preliminary guesses—”

  “I remember that ass Lex McGregor, when he dumped us on Per Ardua, telling us that Proxima would shine for thousands of times as long as the sun.”

  “Proxima will barely have aged by the time the event is upon us, Yuri Eden.”

  “Barely?”

  “I have tentatively dated the source of the space-time waves to less than four billion years from now. Perhaps three and a half billion—”

  “Four billion years? Ha! Why didn’t you say so? I don’t even have four years, let alone four billion. Four billion years ago the Earth itself had barely formed—right? Why should I worry about running out of time four billion years from now?”

  “Because you, or your descendants, will have been robbed of trillions, Yuri Eden. Sleep now, and I will find Michael . . .”

  19

  AD 2225; AUC 2978

  The Ukelwydd, riding kernel fire as it slowed, slid out of deep space and entered orbit around Mars.

  As the drive cut out and the acceleration weight was lifted from her chest, Penny Kalinski, now eighty-one years old, cocooned in a deep couch, uttered a sigh of deep relief. It was her first spaceflight for a dozen years, the first since the Tatania. After spending twelve years as an elderly, eccentric, Earthbound teacher, she’d forgotten how grueling a launch was. Well, now it was done.