Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  In a ghastly moment he reached out for her, but his hands passed through the substance of her flesh, shattering into blocky pixels. And tears leaked from his eyes, she saw, turning to frost on his cheeks. She wondered if he was even aware of this minor artifice.

  • • •

  Once Earthshine released her from Mars, Penny Kalinski returned home, as she thought of it now, to her Academy at Eboraki, to her friends, the new life she had slowly established.

  With Kerys’s help she avoided Ari Guthfrithson on the journey back, and later. She had no idea how to report to him what she’d learned from Earthshine, or even if she should. If he suspected Earthshine of having hidden agendas—well, so did Ari himself, she was becoming sure.

  And then, as the years passed, she watched over Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson as she grew, under the faintly obsessive care of her mother, Beth. Grew at last into a young woman in her own right, with dreams and ambitions of her own—all of them, naturally enough, rooted in this reality, the world of Romans and the descendants of Norse and Britons into which she had been born.

  And still, as Mardina began to make her own plans for her future, and as Ceres steadily approached Mars as asteroid and planet circled the sun, the call from Earthshine did not come.

  22

  AD 2233; AUC 2986

  The command base of the Brikanti Navy was in a city called Dumnona, on the south coast of Pritanike.

  The Navy was all over this city, as eighteen-year-old Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson already knew very well, with training establishments and administrative facilities, a deep old harbor that had accommodated oceangoing ships for centuries—and, on the higher ground inland, a vast modern spaceport from which a new generation of Brikanti-Scand ships sailed into the sky itself. But the old city was still a human place, crammed with barracks and a host of hostels and inns—and brothels and gambling palaces—to cater to the huge resident population of support staff, as well as for the steady flow through the port of elderly officials and healthy young serving personnel. To Mardina, who had been fascinated by the Navy since she’d been a small child growing up in the austere newness of the Saint Jonbar Academy, Dumnona was a place thick with history—even though, she knew, it had been repeatedly flattened to rubble in the wars with Rome, and even Xin, that had rolled over this countryside in the course of centuries past.

  And of all the city’s buildings, more tradition was attached to the great Hall of the Navy than to any other single site.

  The Hall was a sculpture of wood and glass and concrete whose form suggested the hull of a Scand longboat, of the kind that had first landed on the shores of northeastern Pritanike to begin the engagement of two peoples. Now Mardina, in her new cadet uniform, walking into the Hall for the first time with her mother on one side and nauarchus Kerys as her sponsor on the other, looked up as she passed beneath the tremendous sculpted dragon’s head at the faux boat’s prow, as had thousands of Navy recruits before.

  Beth stared up at the dragon, shading her eyes from a watery spring sun. “Good grief,” she said in her native English, before lapsing back into Brikanti. “That thing looks dangerous.”

  “As if it will bend down and gobble us up, Mother?” Mardina asked.

  “No, as if that silly lump of concrete is going to break off and land on our heads.”

  Kerys laughed. “Highly unlikely. The concrete sculpting is reinforced by a massive steel frame which is designed to withstand—”

  “Unlikely, is it?” Beth was fifty-six years old now, and was always skeptical, always impatient—always vaguely unhappy, Mardina was now old enough to realize, and with a temper that was not improving with age. When she frowned, the vivid tattoo on her face stretched and puckered. “I couldn’t list the unlikely events that I’ve had to survive in the course of my long life. That lot dropping on me wouldn’t come near the top.”

  “Now, Mother, you mustn’t show me up,” Mardina said, faintly embarrassed, trying to hurry her on. “Not today.” She glanced at Kerys, who was a pretty significant figure in Mardina’s universe. The ship’s commander who had once plucked Mardina’s mother from a hulk ship of unknown origins was no longer a trierarchus. Now she was a nauarchus, another hierarchical title borrowed from the Latin, a language replete with such words as Brikanti was not—a commander of a squadron of ten ships, and, it was said, overdue for further promotion, which she had refused so far because of her love of life in her own command, out in Ymir’s Skull.

  But Beth said, “Oh, don’t worry. Your father will be embarrassment enough. Does he have to be here, Kerys?”

  “A recruit for officer school has to be sponsored by both sides of her family, Beth. Yes, I’m afraid he does.”

  “Well, just stop making silly remarks about the architecture then,” Mardina said.

  “Actually your mother is being perfectly sensible,” Kerys put in diplomatically. “One thing you’ll learn as an officer, Mardina, is that you don’t take unnecessary risks. A good survival strategy.”

  “There,” said Beth, satisfied. “I remember very well my mother, your grandmother, Mardina, saying the same thing. She was a space officer, you know, Kerys.”

  “As you’ve told me once or twice since I picked you up in the Ukelwydd. Now, follow me.” She led them to the Hall’s huge doors, and waved security credentials at the guards to gain admittance.

  • • •

  Inside the Hall, Mardina found herself facing a long corridor walled by rows of doors on two levels, the upper accessible by iron gantries and walkways. Clerks and other officials carrying bundles of parchment hurried along the central hall and the upper walkways, and strip lamps suspended from the ceiling cast a light that seemed to turn everything gray. Mardina felt oddly disappointed.

  Kerys grinned back at her. “Not the romance you were expecting? This is where we administer the largest single organization controlled by the Brikanti government—a Navy that now spans the planets and beyond, as well as its traditional seafaring arm. Mardina, it’s not some kind of temple, or museum—and nor does everything revolve around you, I’m afraid.” She winked. “But don’t worry. I felt just as small and insignificant when I was in your position. The Navy does notice you, I promise . . .”

  Beth grunted. “It’s like a hive. I grew up on an empty planet. You couldn’t get a place more unlike that than this.”

  Mardina shook her head. “Oh, Mother, please don’t start on about Before. Not today.” The English word was their private code for Beth’s strange other life before she had come to this place, this world, to Terra, to Brikanti. But Brikanti was all Mardina knew. She had come to loathe all that strangeness, as if it were a kind of flaw in her own nature.

  If Kerys was aware of all this—and after all it was she who had retrieved Beth from the ship that had carried her here from Before—she didn’t show it, to Mardina’s relief.

  They came to a small office maybe halfway along the length of the Hall, a nondescript little room that Mardina probably couldn’t have found again without memorizing the number etched into the wooden door. The room was laid out like a classroom, maybe, or a court, with rows of benches and small desks facing a more substantial table at the front. Here two officers sat, looking over paperwork, murmuring to each other; one, a burly man, was evidently the senior, judging by the ornate flashes on the shoulder of his tunic, and the other a scribe or adviser. The room was otherwise empty.

  But it was in this mundane room, Mardina realized, one of a warren of such rooms, that her future was to be decided, for good or ill, in the next few hours.

  She tried to stay composed as she sat with her mother on the front row of benches, close to the wall. The older man barely looked up at Kerys as she approached the table and presented a packet of papers, and he did not bother to look over at Mardina at all.

  Beth whispered, “So who’s the big cheese?”

  “Stick to
Brikanti, Mother.”

  “Sorry.”

  Kerys sat with them. “That is Deputy Prefect Skafhog. Very senior. Do you know how senior, cadet? You should . . .”

  Mardina nodded. She’d soon become aware that the most important thing a would-be naval officer had to learn was the constellation of ranking officials above her. “A Deputy Prefect reports only to—well, the Prefect. The chief of the whole Navy, who reports in to the relevant minister in the Althing—”

  “There are only a dozen Deputy Prefects to administer the whole of the Navy, on Terra and in the Skull. So you see, cadet, we are taking you seriously.”

  “Then it’s a shame such a prominent officer, with respect, is going to have to wait for you,” came a voice behind Mardina. “Or rather, for all of us. Because we have family business to discuss.”

  Beth stood slowly, her tattooed face a mask of anger. “Ari Guthfrithson. So you deigned to turn up.”

  Mardina gave a look of pleading to Kerys, who shrugged and whispered, “It’s your family.” Mardina closed her eyes for one second, made a fervent prayer to Jesu the Boatman, and stood with her mother.

  Her father, Ari, looked sleek in his own uniform, that of a senior druidh, one of the Navy’s intellectual elite; he carried a neat leather satchel at his side. At least he had been expected. Mardina was more surprised to see that he was accompanied by Penny Kalinski, one of her mother’s old companions from the semi-mythical days of Before. Penny was bent and old—how old was she now? Eighty-eight, eighty-nine? And she leaned on the arm of Jiang Youwei. A comparatively youthful sixty, with a heavy-looking bag slung across his shoulder, Mardina had only rarely heard the taciturn Xin speak, but he was never far from Penny’s side.

  With care, Penny sat down, a couple of rows back from Mardina and Beth. She said with a voice like rustling paper, “I’m afraid you must blame me for this. Well, indirectly.”

  Beth glowered. “I know who to blame. You—Ari—you’d do anything to worm your way back into our lives, wouldn’t you? You knew we had to ask you to attend this procedure today. The rules demanded it. Just this one day, I have to stand your company.”

  He grinned. “Yes, you do, don’t you?”

  “And you can’t resist manipulating the situation to your own ends.”

  Ari, nearly fifty years old now, glanced around at the company, at Penny and Jiang, at Kerys—at the Deputy Prefect at his desk, who was rapidly becoming visibly irritated. “It’s not so much that I couldn’t resist it. I couldn’t waste the opportunity. We need to talk, Beth. And not about us—not even about Mardina.”

  Mardina’s hopes of getting through this day successfully were receding. With rising panic she took her father’s arm. “Father, please—this is a big day for me. I’ve waited half a year already for this hearing. Can’t we wait until later?”

  He patted her hand. “I’m afraid not, darling—but, oh! It’s good to see you again, and I’m so proud of you today, of what you’ve become.”

  Beth growled, “Become? She wouldn’t even exist if you’d had your way.”

  “Mother, please—”

  “It’s all right, Mardina. But, look—no, I’m afraid we can’t wait. Because once this ceremony is done, you’ll be gone, won’t you, Mardina? Lost in your career, lost in Ymir’s Skull. And the opportunity to talk will be lost. And we must talk, you know.”

  “About what, for Jupiter’s sake?”

  “About—what is the English word you use? Before, Beth.”

  Beth shook her head. “That’s all gone. This is our life now—here in Brikanti, in this world of Romans and Xin. There’s been nothing new to say about all that old stuff for twenty years, not since we stepped off the Tatania.”

  “I’m afraid that’s no longer true, Beth,” Penny said tiredly. “If it ever was. I don’t know what Ari has to tell you today. But part of it’s my fault. The Academy of Saint Jonbar. I always hoped it would bear fruit . . . Now it has.”

  “What kind of fruit? What are you talking about?”

  “And then there’s Earthshine,” Penny said doggedly. “Earthshine. He’s been holed up on Mars for decades. Now—well, now he may be making his move.” She glanced up at Kerys. “Ask the Navy types about Ceres. Höd, as they call it here.”

  The Deputy Prefect had been listening with commendable calm to all this. But now he intervened, speaking directly to Kerys: “What’s going on, nauarchus?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” she said honestly, looking warily at Ari. “I feel as if the druidh here has handed me an unexploded bomb, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.”

  Skafhog tapped a pen against his teeth. “One hour,” he said briskly, standing up. “I’ll let you get all this family nonsense out of your systems in one hour—or not,” he said severely to Mardina, “in which case all you’ll be seeing of the Navy, young woman, will be lights in the sky.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kerys said with some relief. “You’re being very indulgent.”

  “I am, aren’t I? Get on with it.” And he stalked out of the room, with his official scrambling behind.

  When he’d gone, Ari smiled around at them. “Well. I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here today.”

  Beth punched him square in the face.

  23

  “Hold still,” said Kerys. She was crouching before Ari, dabbing at the wreckage of his mouth. “I think the bleeding from your cheek has stopped.”

  “I should hope so. That spirit stung.”

  “You’re lucky we had the right stuff to hand. Then again the Navy is used to handling scuffles—even in its headquarters, even in the heart of Dumnona. Now, I want to put some ointment on the swelling under your eye . . .”

  “Ow!”

  “If you wouldn’t keep yakking, I could get it done. And you have a dislodged tooth. I’ll push it back in its socket for now—”

  “Yow!”

  “You need to see a dentist. Again, you’re in the right place. The Navy has the best dentists in all Brikanti; we can’t afford to send out crews on years-long missions with rotting teeth . . . There. Hold this compress against your face until you get better attention.”

  “Thank you, Kerys,” he said dully, and indistinctly, Mardina thought. K-chh-er-yssh. “How you enrich my life, Beth Eden Jones. In so many ways.”

  “Maybe you should have stayed away from me in the first place,” Beth snapped back.

  “Perhaps . . . but I could not resist. Even from the beginning, when we found your ship, the Tatania. I thought you were so beautiful. And a woman born under the light of a different star, in a different history altogether! That was why I fell in love with you.”

  “You didn’t love me,” Beth said, and she sounded desolate to Mardina. “You loved the idea of me.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “It wasn’t like that. After all, we did manage to bridge the vast divergence in our cultures, did we not? For a time at least. We married—or would have, if we could have resolved the legalities. And we had a daughter! Here she is, standing before us. A child who is a product of two different histories.”

  Mardina pouted. “You make me sound like some exotic crossbreed.”

  Penny cackled. “True enough. You’re a mongrel, child. A mongrel in space and time.”

  Kerys touched Mardina’s hand. “Ignore all this, cadet. Where you came from doesn’t determine who you are, and that’s true for any of us.”

  Mardina forced a nod. “Thank you, nauarchus.”

  Ari said now, “I have always remained fascinated by the question of your origin, what it means for all of us. And that question has become more urgent in recent years.”

  “Why? What’s changed?”

  “Earthshine,” Penny said grimly. “That’s what.”

  “He is long established on Mars,” Ari said. “He could not be dislodged, even if we
tried, I believe. And for years he’s been moving Höd, a tremendous mass, around our planetary system. Of course he has a stated objective to bring Höd to Mars, to use its substance to enrich that planet. It was always going to take years, decades, to nudge such a huge body into the correct trajectory. But now he’s stopped filing reports to the Navy on the burns he directs the crews to make, the trajectory adjustments. The crew managing the kernel banks, driving the thing in its slow approach to Mars, are nominally Navy, but it’s become clear their loyalty has drifted to Earthshine. He seems to have promised them extraordinary wealth, power, on a transformed Mars of the future. As a result we can no longer predict the path of Höd, not in precise detail. This creature has accrued extraordinary power over us, in just a few decades. And you brought him here—”

  “You released him,” Penny pointed out.

  “Some of us who remember the old faiths think he is Loki returned,” Ari said with a smile distorted by his injuries. “Loki, on the loose among the planets, and planning a devastating trick.”

  Beth shook her head at that. “I don’t think he would see it that way. I heard him talk about those old legends—as they existed in our timeline anyhow. He sees himself as opposing Loki.”

  Kerys frowned. “That’s interesting. And to him, who is Loki?”

  Penny said, “The Hatch builders, of course. Whoever gave us the kernels. Whoever’s meddling with our history.”

  Ari shook his head. “Mythic monsters aside, it is Earthshine’s actions that have motivated me to dig deeper into this question of the adjusted histories. Because this was the origin of Earthshine, this extraordinary threat.” He glanced at Penny. “Whether you were prepared to cooperate with my investigations or not.”

  Penny smiled, a tired old-lady smile, Mardina thought.

  Ari said, “What intrigued me particularly about Penny’s own account was not the great leap across realities that she seems to have made aboard the Tatania. It was the smaller, subtler adjustment that she suffered in her own personal history, when a Hatch was first opened on Mercury. An odd case. Nothing but a twist to a personal history.