Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “But what is interesting to me was that Penny and her sister managed to find evidence of that limited history change. I mean, other than the memory of Stef Kalinski, who remembered a previous life without a sister. Physical evidence, their mother’s grave marker in Lutetia Parisiorum—or the equivalent city in Penny’s reality—bearing an inscription that mentioned Stef alone, and not the sister. Do you see? A scrap, a trace left behind by an adjustment that was evidently—untidy. Well, with that as a lead, it occurred to me that perhaps, given we have evidence of at least two of these history changes, this world of ours might contain evidence of others. Why not?”

  Beth said, “And you’ve been looking?”

  “I have. I began a search of archives, of reports from historians and archaeologists. Looking for evidence of structures, documents, even mere inscriptions that might not fit the accepted history. But I soon found I was not working alone.” And he looked again at Penny.

  Penny smiled. “Guilty as charged. Now it can be told. I always had an ulterior motive when I set up my Academy of Saint Jonbar. Yes, I taught them mathematics, physics, as per my charter. But I always ran other classes too. History, for example. I claimed that I was using those courses as much to educate myself about your history as the students. But I always tried to make the students think about other possibilities—counterfactuals. Which is an English word that has now been adopted into your language. I see it pop up in scholarly articles.”

  “Yes,” Kerys said drily. “Along with much speculation about the identity of Saint Jonbar.”

  “Who never existed,” Penny admitted. “Not even in my own reality. It’s a term from popular culture, from fiction. A jonbar hinge is a point where history pivots—where the path forks. Well, I always hoped that I would create at least a few bright young scholars who would be predisposed to work in this area. And to look for the kind of evidence Ari describes. We haven’t yet succeeded—”

  “But I have,” Ari said.

  Mardina was no scholar, and usually hated all talk of Before, especially on such a day as this. But she found all this vaguely exciting. “It’s like a mystery story.”

  Ari smiled at his daughter. “It is, isn’t it? And what’s really exciting is that, in time, I found some clues.”

  “Clues?”

  “Not on land, but suitably, for a seafaring nation, under the oceans. Mardina, could you please pass my satchel?”

  Penny grumbled, “About time you got to the point, druidh.” She shuffled over to see better.

  • • •

  The satchel contained maps that Ari spread out over the Deputy Prefect’s table. He held his bandage to his mouth, but even so a few spots of bloodied saliva spattered on the parchments.

  “These show coastlines and oceans, as you can see,” he said, gesturing. “It’s well known that the levels of the oceans have risen since, say, the time of Kartimandia. We have historical accounts of inundations and land abandonments, and everybody is familiar with drowned settlements off the modern shores—not least in Pritanike, where vast swaths of land have been lost. But this is true all around the world. In recent centuries the archaeologists have turned their interest to such remains, and have commissioned Navy vessels to support them in their research.

  “Now, in addition to the towns and roads and so forth that we expected to find, given what we read of them in the historical accounts, we have also mapped some much more enigmatic structures, farther out from shore. Naturally these are difficult to explore and map—”

  “Spare us your scholarly caution,” Kerys said. “Show us.”

  “The most striking remains are in the Seas of Xin, and in the ocean off our own northeast shore, the Mare Germanicum . . .”

  Mardina and the rest, including Penny who hobbled over with Jiang’s help, crowded around the maps. Mardina saw structures in the offshore oceans, sketched by hand on the printed maps: what looked like tremendous walls, dikes, canals, and what might have been town plans of a particularly stylized kind, concentric circles cut through by radial passages.

  Ari let them look. “We call this the ‘Drowned Culture.’ It seems to have been a global technology, if not actually a global civilization—perhaps there were rival empires of a similar level of development, as there are in our world today.”

  “Interesting terminology,” Penny said. “Cultures. Perhaps our own history, then, was the UN-China Culture . . . The town plans are intriguing, if you study them, as I have. You find the same motif of circles and bars everywhere. Here to the east of the Xin mainland. Here, between Pritanike and Jutland. The ‘towns,’ incidentally, are not systems of roads and walls but mostly extensive systems of drainage ditches and other flood-control measures—just as the Romans have built in Belgica and Germania Inferior, for example. Ways to save the land from the sea, or even to reclaim it once flooded. This seems to have been a civilization that resisted the sea-level rise, long before that rise even reached the coastlines known to our ancients.”

  “That circle-and-bar motif,” Penny said. “Youwei, could you fetch my bag?”

  Kerys said, “I don’t see why this is so exciting. So here is a culture that evidently vanished, drowned, long before the rise of Brikanti or Rome, the traces lost under the rising sea.”

  “But it’s not as simple as that,” Ari said, looking pleased with himself. “We took a closer look. The Navy teams even sent down divers. They found evidence of war. Bomb craters and burning and the like. These communities seem to have ended in a catastrophic global conflict. For we can date such things, you see, with a little ingenuity, by looking at the thickness of the marine deposits laid down over the ruins in the centuries since—”

  “Yes, yes,” Kerys said irritably. “Just tell us.”

  “The problem is the date, you see. The date of their terrible war. It occurred in the twenty-first century.”

  Penny stared. “You Brikanti use the Roman calendar.” She glanced at Beth. “That’s the fourteenth century by our timeline.”

  Ari pursed his lips. “You see the problem? Our own history is robust and complete, a heavily documented and multiply sourced account. This builds on an unbroken tradition of literacy that reaches back three millennia, if not more. There is no mention of walls and cities in the Mare Germanicum a thousand years after Kartimandia and Claudius—certainly no account of a devastating war in the twenty-first century. Xin scholars make similar observations. Here, then, is a set of evidence that does not fit into the history we know. There was another world, dominated by this Drowned Culture, which ended in a terrible war, and somehow our history was—recast—”

  “And not just yours,” Penny Kalinski said. She was rummaging ineffectually in her bag. “Where is that damn slate?”

  Mardina looked around the room, at her mother, at Jiang, even Kerys—at stunned faces. She touched Kerys’s arm and whispered, “Nauarchus . . .”

  “Yes, cadet?”

  “Everybody seems amazed by all this. But it’s just a bunch of old ruins under the ocean, isn’t it? What difference does it make?”

  Kerys looked at her curiously, almost fondly. “Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.”

  “I’ve seen this before,” Penny said now, still searching her bag. “The motif of your Drowned Culture, the circles and bars. Earthshine showed me before. When he took us all down into his bunker under Paris, before the Nail fell.” She closed her eyes. “And he had a plaque on his wall, some kind of rock art, etchings in sea-corroded concrete, the first time he brought the two of us to Paris—oh, years earlier, my sister and myself. And he brought the plaque with him on the Tatania.” At last she found her slate, tapped it with bony fingers, and showed them an image. It was a brooch, Mardina saw, a bit of stone, marked with concentric circles and a radial groove. “Earthshine was wearing this on Mars eight years ago. And in meetings I had with him, Before.�
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  Ari frowned. “Earthshine? Then somehow he knows about the Drowned Culture already.”

  “Yes.” Penny pursed her lips. “But you don’t get it; you don’t see the bigger picture, Ari. Earthshine must have already gathered evidence of this ‘Drowned Culture’ from Earth. From my history. Not from Terra. Do you see? It is as if our divergent histories are not organized in any kind of linear fashion, an orderly sequence, so that one gives way to the next, and then the next. They are like . . . ice floes on a frozen ocean, bumping up against one another in a random way. But I suppose if Earthshine is right that the kernels are wormholes—if in fact we live in a universe riddled with wormholes—then this kind of chaos is what we must expect.”

  Ari looked doubtful. “Wormholes? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Connections across space and time, even between universes . . . If you have such links, then causality can be violated. Cause and effect disconnected, mixed up. Even archaeology need not make sense, as we see here, because its basic logic, that whatever lies beneath the ground was put there by somebody in your own past, need not apply anymore. Anything is possible; history is ragged . . .”

  “Chaos,” Kerys said. “The signature of Loki. In whom officially, as a Navy officer in a Christian federation, I don’t believe at all.”

  A junior officer burst into the room, looked for Kerys, and thrust a note into her hand. She looked over it quickly and frowned.

  “But if all this is true,” Mardina said practically, “what are we supposed to do about it?”

  Ari said, “We could ask Earthshine.”

  “Yes,” Penny said. “Obviously. But what is he intending? And what has Ceres got to do with it?”

  “Maybe we’ll find out more soon,” Kerys said grimly. “Just when I thought this mess couldn’t get any odder . . .”

  Mardina asked, “Nauarchus? What’s happened?”

  “A Roman vessel has just returned from interstellar space. Twenty-five-year Hatch-building jaunt. And at their target system they found strangers.” She looked round at the group.

  Beth asked, “Strangers?”

  “They were speaking your tongue. English. Knowing about you, the Roman authorities have asked for our help.”

  Beth, Jiang, Penny, survivors of the Tatania, shared stunned looks.

  Kerys stood up. “Well, we need to deal with this. Cadet, you’re with me. I’m afraid your formal induction is going to have to wait for another day.”

  She hurried out of the room, and Mardina ran to follow her.

  24

  The Roman exploration vessel Malleus Jesu was directed to land near Lutetia Parisiorum, in Roman Gaul. And Penny and her companions were to be brought to the city to meet the ship’s strange passengers.

  Penny prepared for the journey, slowly gathering her old-lady stuff, her favorite quilted blankets and duck-down slippers, the pills and ointments and mysterious poultices supplied to her by the local doctors for her various aches and pains. She wondered what strings had been pulled to achieve all this, to bring together the survivors of the Tatania, and now these other individuals found on the planet of a distant star by Roman explorers—a dialogue between two governments already wary of each other and dealing with an existential mystery that had dropped out of the sky into their hands. She supposed the calculation was that at least the encounter might yield information. And, she supposed, that was what she was hoping for too, at the minimum. What was she doing here? How did she get here? What did all this mean? . . . As for herself, she had long ago given up hope of ever going home again. She knew she would die here. She hadn’t expected to see her twin sister again, however.

  And what were they to do about Earthshine?

  As she finished her preparations, she had no doubt Earthshine was very well aware of all that was going on, and would be monitoring closely.

  • • •

  They were to travel from Eboraki, in the north of what Penny would have called England, to a city called Dubru on the south coast. And from there they would cross into Gaul.

  With Jiang and Marie Golvin, Penny was brought from her lodgings at the Academy by a coach to a transport hub to the south of the city. The place was a clash of technological eras, with a cobbled road bearing horse-drawn traffic leading to a railway terminus, and splashes of scarred concrete where stood slim needles, kernel-driven ships of air and space.

  “You know, I realize now in fact that I’ve traveled little since I got here,” Penny said as Marie helped her down from the coach. “Twenty years since the jonbar hinge brought us here, and I’ve barely left the city. I’ve spent more time off the planet than traveling on it, probably.”

  Marie gave her an arm to lean on. “Well, why travel when you are immersed in strangeness every time you open your door?”

  “True, true.”

  Marie was in her forties now, plump, graying, a mother of three; she still worked with Penny at the Academy, and in fact had long since taken over many of Penny’s administrative duties. Penny depended on Marie in many ways—and, she believed, Marie had found a reasonable happiness in her life here, with her husband Rajeev, even though they were all so far from home.

  With servants from the Academy handling their luggage, they walked slowly to the railway terminus, a sprawling roof over multiple platforms, a tangle of lines spreading away in the distance. The architecture seemed very familiar to Penny; there was a certain inevitable economic and engineering logic to rail technology, it seemed. But Brikanti trains ran on gleaming monorails supported by elegant Roman-style viaducts, and their locomotives were powered by kernels, a handful of the mysterious wormholes in the heart of each engine. The train itself was a suspended tube of metal and glass. Penny was relieved to see there was an escalator to lift her up.

  They had a carriage to themselves at the heart of the train, a roomy space centered on a broad table, brightly lit through big picture windows. It was almost like a dining room, Penny thought. Marie and Penny were in fact the last to arrive. Here were Beth and Mardina, Beth looking resentful, and a rather more complex expression on Mardina’s face; she seemed uncertain, withdrawn. And here were Kerys and Ari Guthfrithson—Ari sitting a respectful distance away from his estranged wife and daughter.

  Kerys stood to welcome Penny, and helped her get settled in her seat between Marie and Jiang, and called a servant to bring drinks. Kerys had been put in nominal charge of this peculiar mission, and if the nauarchus was irritated to be dragged once again into all this jonbar-hinge strangeness, she didn’t show it.

  The train slid smoothly out of the station and into watery sunlight.

  They soon passed beyond the city limits, heading south, and Penny looked down from above at scattered suburbs of roundhouses, set in a wider landscape of farmed fields, horizon-wide expanses of wheat and other crops, tended by huge machines that weeded and watered. The individual farming machines didn’t run on kernels; there was an extensive grid of cables to carry power from central stations. There were people around, of course—this culture didn’t have machinery smart enough to direct itself—but only a few worked in the fields.

  Marie said, “The Academician was saying that she hasn’t traveled much since she came here.”

  Kerys smiled. “Your first time on a train, Penny?”

  “Not quite. But I suppose I’ve never thought very much about the nature of your transport systems. Your history, you know, diverged from ours so long ago that much is unfamiliar from the foundations up. Pritanike never had the Romans here . . .” Even the Brikanti towns didn’t map onto the ones she was familiar with. For example, Stonehenge here was the center of a major urban sprawl and transport junction, a very modern city that seemed to have continuous cultural roots going back almost to the last Ice Age. “Also you don’t have automobiles”—she used the English word—“by which I mean small vehicles under the control of individuals.”<
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  Ari said, “Of course we have automobiles, but they are under the control of the military and the police exclusively.”

  Beth smiled. “No. That’s not what she means. You don’t have cars. You have tanks.”

  Kerys said, “It seems there was less conflict in your world compared to ours. We live in a state of perpetual war, declared or undeclared. Our lives are more . . . militarized. Our cities are fortresses; our transport systems are troop carriers that cannot easily be subverted by hostile forces—”

  Mardina snapped suddenly. “I wish you’d all stop going on like this.”

  Beth looked surprised. Ari glared at his daughter, but kept his counsel, wisely, Penny thought.

  In the end it was Kerys who spoke first. “Is there a problem, cadet?”

  Mardina calmed down quickly. “I apologize, nauarchus. It’s just all this talk; it’s so”—she was visibly searching for the words—“old. Weird. Cobwebby stuff, like you’re all remembering a bad dream.”

  Penny covered the girl’s hand with her own. “But you can’t blame us for that, dear. I was already impossibly old by your standards when we first came here. Even after all this time on Terra, it’s impossible to put Earth aside. But you’re right; that’s no excuse to inflict our maunderings on you. And I for one need to conserve my energies for the trials to come. Do you have my pillow, Youwei?”

  Kerys grinned, and produced a leather pouch. “You’re taking a nap? Good plan, Academician. And as for the rest of us, we can while away the time the way soldiers always have—playing pointless games. So what’s it to be? I have knucklebones, chess, cards . . .”

  • • •

  Penny woke some hours later.

  When she glanced out the window she was startled to find the train was suspended over water. Reflexively she grabbed Jiang’s hand. “Oh, my,” she said in English.