Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “And where do we go, sir? Not Terra.”

  “Not the hellhole it’s become, Titus, no. This is where we go.” He gestured at the screen. “This big monster, this artificial Asia. That is the center of power and wealth. Think of us as an undercover military mission if you like. Rome strikes back! I can’t take you home. But I can give your life meaning in this new situation, and mine. It may not be you who gets to sit on whatever magnificent throne they have in there, Titus Valerius—but I guarantee your grandson will, or your great-grandson!”

  That won him a cheer, as Stef might have predicted.

  “But,” Quintus said now, “the journey to the top of the mountain begins with a single step into the foothills. We make our way in, as cautiously as possible. We show up at that tremendous terminus, where the optio says he sees ships coming and going. We find a way to make them let us land. And if necessary . . .”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We surrender, Titus Valerius. We surrender.”

  39

  DATE UNKNOWN

  Once again Beth Eden Jones walked across the stars, and between realities.

  The chamber into which Beth emerged, having passed through from Mars, was empty, a bare-walled cylinder. It was Hatch architecture stripped to the basics, she thought, with no equipment—no ladder, no steps—no adornment on the walls, nothing resembling any science gear, no signs that humans had ever been here before.

  But the chamber was flooded with light.

  She looked up. The roof was open, the Hatch cover was raised, a slim circle tipped up on invisible hinges over the circular opening. And a star hung directly over her head, a sun, huge, pale, just too bright to look at directly, a circle of brilliance suspended in a clear faun-colored sky. Its light poured into the shaft, and Beth’s shadow was a patch of gray directly beneath her feet.

  She knew that star. She knew how it felt to stand directly under such a star.

  She let her Mars pressure suit run a quick check of the ambient atmosphere—she wasn’t surprised to find it was breathable, with no toxins—and opened up her faceplate with a hiss of equalizing pressure. She breathed in, deeply. The smell of the air was familiar too, a dusty, dead-leaves smell, not unpleasant. She even knew the gravity, she thought, a lot heavier than Mars, just a touch less than Earth.

  A deep warmth filled her, almost a kind of relaxation, despite the extraordinary journey she had just undergone, despite the strangeness of her only companion. She dumped her pack on the floor and began to shuck off the outer layers of her pressure suit. “I’m home,” she said.

  “What?”

  Earthshine stood beside her, projected as a slick avatar to the usual standard, a middle-aged man dressed in a robust gray coverall. His own instant disposal of his virtual pressure suit was reassuring enough, she supposed; his monitors must agree with her own suit’s that the air was safe. But the projection looked oddly unreal in the vertical starlight, not quite as convincing as usual, as if the software that generated such images hadn’t yet quite adapted to this environment.

  And the avatar looked on anxiously as his support unit, squat and blocky, rolled up to the final doorway to join them in this cylindrical shaft; it had to raise itself up on extensible rods to climb through the door frame.

  Beth ran her toe over the floor, disturbing a fine layer of dust. “I wonder how long it is since anybody was in here.”

  “Or anything. We don’t know where we are—not yet.”

  She met his gaze as he said that—he sounded almost defiant, as if denying the reality—but she knew. She recognized this star, this air, and she had some deeper body sense of the familiarity of this world, a sense she couldn’t have put into words. But the argument would keep.

  “Well,” she said practically, “wherever we are, the first priority is always the same. We have to climb out of this hole. You’re a virtual; you can hardly give me a leg-up. We have rope in our packs. We could rig up a loop, try to lasso something . . .”

  “Use the support unit.” The boxy machine rolled up to the wall and stood there, patient and silent. “You could stand on it—”

  “Reach the lip of the well, and pull myself out. OK. But I could never lift your unit out.”

  “No need. It contains grappling hooks, cables—it’s actually been specifically designed to negotiate Hatches, among other environments.”

  She smiled. “I suppose that makes sense.” She dug rope out of her pack anyhow and began to attach it to her pressure suit and her pack, so she could haul the stuff out after herself later.

  Earthshine said, “Once we establish where we are, the unit will adapt itself appropriately. It has extensive self-repair and self-modification facilities. Various kinds of fabricator, for instance.”

  “A regular Swiss Army knife.”

  He looked at her. “That’s an old reference.”

  “Something my father used to say, some relic of his own past. His boyhood on Earth, before the freezer lid closed on him.” As you know very well, she thought.

  Earthshine just turned away.

  She crossed to the machine, set her hands on its upper surface, and hoisted herself up. “I feel stiff. Stiff and heavy. That’s what a few hours on Mars will do for you. Getting too old for this.”

  “You’ll toughen up,” Earthshine said dismissively. “Excuse me if I take a shortcut.” He flickered out of existence, and reappeared over her head, standing on the lip of the pit, hands on hips, surveying his domain.

  “I bet you can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Not with my eyes and ears still stuck down that shaft, no. Nothing but the crudest extrapolation from the available information. The star in the sky. A blank landscape, a horizon appropriately positioned for a rocky world of a size that can be extrapolated from the gravity we experience.”

  On top of the support unit, Beth unsteadily stood upright and reached up to take hold of the rim of the cylindrical pit. The substance of the Hatch structure was smooth under the skin of her hands, and, as always, felt oddly elusive, as if her hands were slipping sideways. The Kalinskis had tried to explain to her that a Hatch, to the best of anybody’s knowledge, wasn’t a material artifact at all but a structure of distorted space-time, and that the sideways forces she felt were something like a tide, a secondary gravitational effect . . . None of that made it any easier to climb out of this hole, however.

  “The gravity, yes.” With a lunge she pulled herself up, straightening her arms under her and lifting one leg over the lip of the pit. “Ninety-two percent of Earth’s. Right?” Of course that was the value; she’d grown up knowing it. She got to her feet, panting a little; she really did feel out of condition.

  Now from the pit came a sound like small crossbows being fired. She glanced down and saw that two hooks, supported by suckers, had fixed themselves to the rim of the pit. Fine cables laced down to the support unit, and with a whir of hidden winches, the unit began to rise up from the pit floor. So that was how it got around.

  Leaving the unit to its business, Beth turned and looked around.

  She was in a forest, surrounded by trees with stout trunks and big, sprawling leaves that caught the light streaming down from above. But there was plenty of open ground—there was no continuous canopy, evidently no permanent cover. The Hatch structure itself sat in a broad clearing, with saplings sprouting beside trunks like fallen pillars, trunks infested with what looked like lichen, mosses, fungi. All of this was tinged in shades of green, some of it drab, some of it more vivid, brilliant in the wan light of the star overhead. In one direction, she saw, the view was more open, revealing water glimmering in the light. What looked like stubby reeds pushed out of the water. And, by the water’s edge, a cluster of glistening forms stood, almost like huge mushrooms. “Stromatolites.” She said the word aloud, letting it roll on her tongue. She remembered how hard it had been for her to learn that word
as a little kid, and how confused she had been when her mother had told her that the name was wrong, really, that it had been taken from an Earth organism that was like the structures she saw around her but not quite, structures that grew in the water, but not on land . . .

  All this was familiar. And yet, she thought, it was not.

  The support unit labored to haul itself out of the hole in the ground. As it made the last perilous step, and extended stubby caterpillar tracks to claw at the ground, Beth stood by, trying to think of ways she could help if the hefty unit started to topple back into the pit.

  Earthshine, meanwhile, paid no attention. He stalked back and forth, impatiently. “Nothing here,” he growled.

  Beth frowned. “Nothing? Nothing but the trees. The undergrowth. The water over there, a lake maybe. Life—”

  “Just this damn Hatch unit, sitting on the ground. Look at it . . .”

  It was like every other Hatch she’d ever seen, a square of smooth, grayish material with the circular lid raised up over the cylindrical shaft beneath. “Just like the Hatch on Mercury, the first I came out of with my mother and father and the Peacekeeper. Just like the first I walked into, on Per Ardua.”

  “But there’s nothing here. No buildings, no structures, no community—no people . . .”

  She raised her face, closed her eyes in the light.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he snapped.

  “It’s not what I think. It’s what I feel. I grew up on Per Ardua. I know its air, its scents, the way its gravity pulls on my bones.”

  “You think this is Per Ardua. That that star up there is Proxima.”

  “What else could it be? Look around, Earthshine. You’ve never been here before but you’ve seen the records; I’m sure of that. You’ve seen the analysis the scientists did once we came back to the solar system, the data the UN teams returned later. Look at these stems, pushing out of the ground. Stems, the basis of all complex Per Arduan life, all the way up to the builders.”

  “You really think that’s Proxima?” He was squinting up into the light, his supporting software casting perfectly formed shadows across his face. “Kind of bland-looking, don’t you think? Where are the stellar flares? Where are the starspots?”

  That was a point, and, oddly, she hadn’t noticed it before. The star’s surface, seen through scrunched-up eyes, was smooth, almost featureless, marked by only a few patches of grayish mottling—not the map of restless stellar energies she’d grown up beneath, not the uneasy god that had inflicted particle storms and starspot winters on its hapless planets.

  Planets, yes. She walked a few steps and turned around, looking up at the sky, which was a featureless bronze wash. Proxima had had more than one planet. In the permanent daylight of its star-facing hemisphere, the stars and planets had been forever invisible—all save one, a brilliant beacon . . . “There,” she said, pointing at a spark of light unwavering in the sky. “Proxima e, the fifth planet. We called it the Pearl.” She laughed. “Just where I left it.”

  He walked around, growing increasingly angry. “You seem to be seeing the similarities and screening out the differences. Such as the life-forms. These tree-like structures, the ‘stromatolites’—they are like the samples shown in images retrieved from Proxima c, from Per Ardua. But they aren’t identical, are they? And what about this?” He pointed dramatically at a small clump of plants at his feet, with sprawling bright green leaves. “How does this fit in?”

  She crouched down to see. No, this didn’t fit in with her memories of a childhood on Per Ardua at all, at least not of the wild country away from the farms she and her parents and the ColU had labored to create. These leaves bore the green, not of Arduan life, but of Earth life, a brighter and more vivid color born under a more energetic star. You’d never have found such things growing in the wild. She dug her fingers into the soil—it was rust brown, quite dry—and found a mass of small tubers. “These look like potatoes, or a distant relative.”

  Earthshine snapped, “So what do you conclude?”

  She stood, clutching a couple of the tubers, brushing the dirt from her hands. Even the texture of the dirt felt familiar. “This is Per Ardua. That is Proxima. If there are potatoes here, people must have brought them—people must have been here. But—”

  “But it’s not the Per Ardua you remember. Not quite. If this is the substellar, where’s the UN base? Where’s the relic of the Ad Astra? Yes, you see, I did my homework. Where are all the people?”

  “And where are the builders?” she mused. “Of course, they might have learned to keep away from people and all their works, given enough time.” She glanced up at Proxima—if it was Proxima. “How much time?” she wondered.

  “This may be another reality strand,” Earthshine said. “Correction: it probably is another reality strand. That’s what the Hatches do, don’t they? Knit up the timelines. Even if it is Per Ardua, this may not be the version of history in which your family pioneered.”

  “Maybe not,” she admitted. “But there have been people here.” She held out the tubers in her palm. “Somebody brought these here.” She broke one of the tubers, revealing crisp white flesh within a sleeve of dirt-matted skin. “Looks edible.” She nibbled the raw flesh, avoiding the skin; it was crisp, moist, cool, all but flavorless.

  “Well, if you live for a few more hours, we’ll know if that’s true or not, won’t we?”

  “At least I’m not going to starve here,” Beth said. The light changed, subtly. She glanced up and saw clouds, thin streaks of white, drifting over the face of the star. “Looks like there’s still weather here after all. I’ll make camp.”

  • • •

  She got to work hauling her pressure suit and pack up from the Hatch with her rope.

  In the pack she had a pop-up inflatable shelter, emergency blankets, a small stove, and scrunched-up disposable clothes: a space-age Roman legionary’s survival gear, all she needed to survive a few days in the wilderness. She soon had the shelter erected. She shoved the rest of her gear, the pack, the pressure suit, the helmet, inside the tent, and began to haul the whole lot toward the nearest dense-looking clump of trees, seeking anchorage.

  Earthshine grunted. “I apologize I can’t help with your chores.” He rubbed his palms together and glanced at the sky. “If this is Per Ardua, and I still reserve judgment, it is a quieter Per Ardua. Look at the ground, the soil. The rust color, like Australia, like Mars. Per Ardua always had a peculiar way of letting out its tectonic energy . . .”

  The continents did not drift on Per Ardua. Perhaps that was something to do with the way this world was tidally locked to its star, the same hemisphere forever bathed in the light, the other forever dark. But there had been internal heat that needed release, as on Earth, and the result had been volcanic provinces, as the ColU had identified them. Every so often a whole chunk of some continent or seafloor would dissolve into chaotic geological upheavals, releasing heat, ash, lava, even building new mountains to be eroded away by the rain.

  But, Beth saw, Earthshine was right; this dirt looked old. And that dusty Martian color in the sky wasn’t the way she remembered it either. It was a long time since any mountains had got built here.

  A small voice asked again, How long? And how could that be?

  “But there’s still weather here,” Earthshine said. “Which is logical. The substellar point, directly beneath the star, will always be the hottest place on the planet, always a center of low pressure, like a permanent storm system. And the antistellar, the opposite point, will always be the coldest—ouch.” The first few heavy drops of rain fell, pattering on the broad, dead leaves around them, and slicing through Earthshine’s body. “I don’t get wet in the rain, but it hurts me.”

  “Your software’s consistency protocols.”

  She dragged the tent over the ground, trying to get to the shelter of the trees.

&nbs
p; She saw that the upright cylindrical carcass of the support unit had sprouted open panels, from which manipulator arms had emerged. Small components were being lifted out of the interior of the carcass, while net-like structures were being used to scrape together heaps of dirt. “What is it doing?”

  “Wheels,” Earthshine said, walking slowly beside her. “It’s making wheels.”

  “Planning a journey, are you?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Where to?”

  “Away from here. Away from this wrong place.” His anger was evident now; he said this with a snarl.

  She reminded herself that he wasn’t human. Everything about him was the product of software logic of some kind. Yet she wondered too if he had the artificial equivalent of a subconscious. Given the way he’d behaved in the past, including smashing the Mars of the Rome-Xin history, that would explain a lot. So maybe his anger was genuine, the display unconscious.

  At the fringe of the forest clump she found a couple of stout trees ideally positioned to anchor her shelter. She took lengths of her rope and began lashing the shelter to the trunks. The trees at least were as she remembered them, basically expanded forms of the ubiquitous stems. “If this isn’t Per Ardua, it’s a damn good impersonation,” she muttered as she worked.

  By the time she was done the rain was coming down harder, hissing on the leaf-carpeted ground. She looked back at the Hatch, whose lid, she saw, was closing. “The Hatch is a space-time artifact, and yet its designers took care that it’s protected from the rain. Well, that’s attention to detail for you.” But there was no reply, and when she glanced around she saw that Earthshine had already retreated to the interior of the tent.

  Beside the Hatch, in the rain, the support unit was rapidly assembling big skeletal wheels, four of them.