Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “Families,” she muttered. She caught Beth looking at her with a grin. “Sorry. Did I say that out loud?”

  “At least you broke the silence,” Beth said.

  “Perhaps we’re all in some kind of state of shock. This has been a peculiar . . . journey. It’s difficult to know what to say.”

  Beth nodded. “Well, then, just say what you feel. You, at least, have been here before, Stef. As I have. And indeed the ColU.”

  The colonization unit sat silently, inner lights winking.

  Beth pressed, “You know I’m right, don’t you? Earthshine wouldn’t accept it. But you know this is Per Ardua. You knew it from the minute you walked through that Hatch—as I did, months back. I could see it in your face.”

  Stef sighed, and looked out at the world, the mix of muddy Arduan green-brown with the more brilliant splashes of Earth life—the vertical shadows that were appearing now that the rain was stopping, and the clouds above were clearing from the face of the overhead star. “Yes,” she admitted. “I spent enough of my own life here. I think I could even sense it in the gravity, that slight, peculiar lightness you feel, like nowhere else I ever walked. Of course it’s Per Ardua. But it’s different, right? No traces of the human structures that used to be here—this was the UN’s administrative center, after all, and a pretty well-developed city grew up here. But then we don’t know what timeline we’re in now, what became of Earth and Per Ardua—”

  “People got here,” Beth pointed out, “from whatever version of Earth. They must have. Otherwise no tea.”

  “Or, strictly speaking,” the ColU said now, “no heavily evolved wild descendant of a tea plant.”

  Stef said carefully, “So the evidence of my senses tells me—yes, this is Per Ardua. But the differences are significant.” She glanced up, at the pale image of Proxima that, as the clouds cleared, was beginning to shine through the fabric of the shelter-canopy. “Even the star seems different, somehow, subtly. My senses, my perception of the world, say one thing. But my head tells me that this isn’t the Per Ardua I know. Not quite.”

  Titus Valerius grunted, and took an angry, impatient swig of water from a flask dangling from his heavy belt. “You talk of abstractions. This world is one thing or another, it is what you remember from before, it is not. What does it matter? We are here, now, in this place.” He glanced around at the group, at their pitifully small pile of equipment, Beth’s and the Romans.’ “Our hands and hearts and muscles, and the resources we find around us—that is all we have. That is all that matters. And,” he said pointedly, looking at Beth, “those we share this world with.”

  Beth sighed. “And we are all there is. Look, I can’t prove that we’re alone here. I haven’t explored every square kilometer of the planet. But while Earthshine was here we did do some exploring, and I walked a good way off to the southeast when he began his trek to the antistellar. I didn’t see anybody else, or any traces of their works. Nothing but the bedrock structures we found buried under the dirt here.” She’d shown them the sonar images on her slate. “I’m ready to be proved wrong. But I don’t believe there’s another human soul on this world—nobody save Earthshine, wherever he is now.”

  “And he,” Stef said drily, “is neither human nor has a soul.”

  “I didn’t even find any evidence of the complex life we saw here before. When I was a kid. The builders, the structures they made, the other life-forms like the kites in the air, the fish-analogues in the water courses.”

  “No animals?” Titus snorted. “It doesn’t sound like much fun. You can’t hunt a tree.”

  Clodia patted his knee. “Come, Father. Look on the bright side. We’re Romans, the only Romans in all this world. You could be the Caesar of Per Ardua.” She wrinkled her nose. “The world already has a Latin name. I never thought of that before. How strange.”

  “That’s a long story,” Beth said. “I think my own mother was responsible for that.”

  Titus growled and shook a leonine head. “There’s no value in conquering a wilderness. No farmers to tax!”

  Beth said, “But there’s plenty of work to do here. I’ve made a start, with shelter, tools.” She grinned. “I’ve dug a latrine ditch. With eight of us using it, we’d better get that extended, fast.”

  “We must save the compost,” the ColU said gravely. “For the farm we will someday build.”

  Beth went on, “The good news is there’s air to breathe, water to drink—I don’t know if we had a right to expect that on the far side of a Hatch on Mars. There’s even food to eat. Not just tea. I’ve found root vegetables, things like peas, beans, squashes, even something like maize, I think, but gone wild.”

  All this was slowly sinking in for Stef. “Wild variants of crop plants presumably brought from Earth. From an Earth.”

  The ColU said, “They could be domesticated once more, given time and patience.”

  “Time, yes. ColU, how much time must it have taken for the various strains to drift so much?”

  “Not long,” the ColU said. “Not nearly as long as, for example, it must have taken for the installation here at the substellar, whatever it was, to erode away to its foundations and then be covered over by meters of earth. That is a better indication of duration. There has evidently been plenty of time here for all this to happen—time behind us—even if, as I fear, there may be little time ahead of us.”

  They all stared at the complex little unit, its glistening lights.

  “Textbook enigmatic,” Stef said, annoyed.

  Titus growled, “You know, that twisted piece of junk always seems so much less human when it isn’t in the bag on the boy’s back. When you can see what it really is. Do you have something you want to tell us, you glass demon?”

  But the ColU was silent.

  Beth broke in, “I’ll talk to it . . . I grew up with it, remember. We’ll figure out what’s on its mind, and what to do about it.”

  “All of which,” Titus said, “is less of a priority than digging that latrine you talked about. We’ve got spades and other tools in the bundles of gear from the Malleus. At least in the army I was used to that.” He rubbed his daughter’s shoulder. “As is my Clodia, who grew up in army camps.”

  “I can dig a ditch,” Clodia said defensively. “I wanted to be in the army, before all this made a mess of everything.”

  Stef studied Titus. “This won’t be the life you’re used to, Titus Valerius—or you, Clodia.”

  “We came here in pursuit of Earthshine,” the ColU said simply.

  “Well, that’s true, but—”

  “The glass demon is right,” Titus growled. “That was the mission we set ourselves. That was what I expected, and all I expected. That remains so.” He glanced around, at the stem-trees, the face of Proxima dimly visible through the canopy. “And this is where we have been brought—where Earthshine was brought. We must remember we are not the only agents in this matter. The beings who control the Hatches—”

  “The Dreamers,” Beth said. “As Earthshine calls them. Among other, more insulting names.”

  “We build these Hatches—we Romans, and you Incas,” and he nodded at Inguill. “But we have no control over how they work, do we? Over what points they connect, how they take a traveler from this place to that, one world to the next. Any more than a trained ape shoveling coal into the maw of a steam engine has control over the layout of the track. Even Earthshine does not control this.”

  And Stef knew he was right. In her own root reality, the Hatch at the substellar of Per Ardua had been linked to a Hatch on Mercury, not Mars. Maybe it still was, in some higher-order dimensionality. But for this trip, it was as if the points had been changed, the travelers rerouted . . .

  Titus Valerius said, “The Dreamers sent Earthshine to this world, this place—if it is your Per Ardua or not—they could, presumably, have sent him anywhere. And they allow
ed us to follow. Yes—allowed! The Dreamers are like our old gods, before the light of Jesu filled the Empire—jealous gods who meddle endlessly in the affairs of humans. We have been brought here for a reason, even if we don’t yet see it ourselves, fully.” Titus shook his huge head. “What we Romans do have is a sense of mission. Of purpose. As far as I’m concerned that mission remains to be fulfillled—and if the first step in doing that is to dig a latrine ditch, well, that was the first step in the winning of most of our provinces, I daresay, so let’s get on with it. Just as soon as that tea brews. Well, I remember once on campaign—”

  Everybody stopped listening. Beth passed around cups and began to ladle out her tea, which was boiling at last.

  And Stef looked over at Inguill and Ari, who had barely said a word since arriving in this new reality.

  In the heart of this world, as in a hundred billion others—

  In the chthonic silence of an aged planet—

  There was satisfaction.

  The Dreamers understood little of the beings whose destinies they manipulated, little enough of the primary constructs of organic chemistry, let alone the second-order creature of silicon and metals that had been born in their industries, the creature that had done so much damage to the Dreaming. United in wider coherences themselves, they comprehended little of individuality, of identity.

  It wasn’t clear to the Dreamers if any of these creatures were truly intelligent at all.

  So, to minimize the risk of a mistake, they had allowed the organic-chemistry creatures who had clustered around their silicon-metal leader to follow it to this place, this ultimate destination. Perhaps they were necessary to supplement its existence. Perhaps they even formed part of its intelligence, in some collective form. Perhaps this composite group could yet achieve an understanding beyond any individual, just as it was for the Dreamers.

  In a sense, Titus Valerius was right. The group had been given a mission, of sorts, by the Dreamers. But it had not been compassion that had led the Dreamers to reunite this group on this world at this time: to bring Beth Eden Jones back into contact with her daughter, and the father of the child. It had not been manipulation on a human level. It had been more a question of imposing order. Of tidying up loose ends.

  But time was short, and ever shorter.

  And the Dream of the End Time was blossoming into actuality.

  60

  The new arrivals agreed to live to a clock and calendar based on what Beth had already set up—her twenty-four-hour cycle was some hours adrift of theirs, which they had brought from Yupanquisuyu. But that meant that they had to stay awake a few extra hours that first night, and then they slept uncomfortably on improvised beds, mostly under the canopy.

  Beth, more used to the conditions of Per Ardua, was happy to lie out in the open. And, Stef wondered, maybe that helped her to adjust to this company, to get over the resentment she must feel at this sudden intrusion into the little world she had been constructing for herself—even if her own daughter had been among the intruders.

  In the morning Beth served a breakfast of more tea and food from her stock: mostly potato, boiled and dried. The new arrivals ate hungrily but without relish, and Stef could see Beth was faintly embarrassed at not being able to offer them anything better, a totally illogical feeling but understandable.

  Titus organized a party—himself, Clodia, Ari and Inguill—to extend that latrine ditch. “It has to be done!”

  And Beth led Stef, Mardina and Chu bearing his pack with the ColU, on a short tour of her little homestead.

  It was a well-chosen spot, Stef could see immediately. Beth had made her camp on top of a low rise, away from any obvious water courses; she’d have lived through all but the most monumental flooding events. But there was a stream for drinking water on the lower ground only a short distance away, and a forest clump on top of the rise that could provide fuel for burning and other materials. And Beth had put in a lot of work. In addition to her bubble shelter she had already started to construct lean-tos and tepees, supported by the sapling-like stems of young native trees, and with dead stems woven to create a kind of thatch. Under the lean-tos, and in holes in the ground, she’d built up a food store: the remains of the rations she’d brought through the Hatch, as well as wild food she’d gathered from the countryside. She was even building a kind of cart.

  As they looked around the little compound, Stef was reminded that Beth Eden Jones was, after all, a pioneer, a daughter of pioneers, who had survived in this unearthly wilderness for decades. And Beth, apparently instinctively, had gone to work applying all the wisdom she’d acquired in those days—wisdom, Stef supposed, that had been entirely useless back on Earth, after she and her parents had returned through the Hatch to Mercury. It must have felt good to use those skills, to find purpose again.

  Beth showed them her clocks.

  She’d set up a whole array of them, using sand and water dribbling through funnels woven from dead stems: improvised hourglasses, all running independently. And on a tree trunk nearby she was notching off the days. “I have two chronometers,” she said. “My wristwatch, and a timekeeper in the pack Earthshine gave me from his support unit. This homemade stuff is for backups for when the power eventually fails—”

  “Timing will no longer be a problem,” the ColU said blandly. “I have internal chronometers, which—”

  “Which will work until you run out of power,” Beth said firmly. “I did learn some basic disciplines from my ISF-lieutenant mother, ColU. You should know that. You always have backups.”

  The ColU seemed to chuckle, to Stef’s hearing. Since when had a farm robot learned to chuckle? It said now, “Just like old times, Beth Eden Jones.”

  “Sure it is. I’m aiming for bigger barrels, smaller nozzles, that won’t require refilling—oh, for several days, enough time for me to make decent excursions from this site without losing track of time.”

  “Of course,” Mardina said, “you won’t need all that now, Mother. Not now that we’re all here. As long as there’s one person to stay behind and tend the fire and change over the clocks and whatever—”

  She was casually holding the hand of the silent Chu Yuen, Stef noticed. She risked a glance at Beth, who raised her eyebrows in response. She’s not letting that boy out of her sight, and to hell with doe-eyed Clodia.

  Beth said breezily, “If I’d known a whole gang of you was going to turn up, I’d not have gone to all this trouble, would I? In the meantime, come see what else I’ve built.”

  She seemed proud of the plots she’d cleared, and started to seed with crops of her own. “I may never get to see these potatoes and peas and whatnot become fully domesticated. But it’s a start.”

  “Of course,” the ColU said, “now that I am here to advise, we can make much faster progress.”

  Beth fumed. “More advice? I was doing pretty well before you ever showed up, you clanking heap of—”

  “The work’s doing you good, Mother,” Mardina said quickly. “I haven’t seen you look so fit in years. Or as slim.”

  “Thanks,” Beth said drily.

  “The crops are also going to be a useful winter larder,” Stef said, “in case Prox ever decides to let us down again.”

  “A future winter is very unlikely,” the ColU murmured, peering from the slate on Chu’s chest, its voice muffled by the fabric of the pack. “The Proxima Centauri in the sky above is rather different from the beast we knew, Colonel Kalinski. Much less irregular. And the incidence of flares must be a lot lower too.”

  “I figured that,” Beth said. “But I took precautions even so.” She pointed to a stromatolite garden, a huddle of table-like forms glistening brown in the watery Prox light, only a hundred paces away. “I picked out a storm shelter to hide in—hacked away the carapace in advance. Of course we need to extend that so there’s shelter for all of us. But . . .” She raised her face t
o the sky, the heavy bulk of Proxima directly overhead. “I don’t know what’s going on here. This is Per Ardua. But why is it so different from what I remember? Even the jonbar hinges didn’t change Earth itself that much, aside from what humanity was able to do to it.”

  “We are here to seek answers to such questions,” the ColU said. “That is true even of Earthshine. Especially true of him, even if his method of inquiry is somewhat destructive. Chu Yuen, would you please turn around? Pan the slate—let me see the sky, the landscape from this vantage . . . And, Beth Eden Jones, would you show me a handful of the soil you are so assiduously cultivating?”

  “Why do you want to see that? Oh, very well.”

  Stef watched the former slave swivel on the spot, slowly, even gracefully. And Mardina was watching him too. He was nineteen, twenty years old now. Having spent a few days with him, Stef knew that Chu Yuen was working to get his body in better physical condition, and he studied, too, reading from slates, generally alone. All this was in order better to serve the ColU, he said. Stef felt a kind of faint echo of lust of her own. If she could shave off a few decades, the Mardina-Clodia-Chu triangle could well become a quadrilateral . . .

  Beth, her cupped hands holding a mass of soil, was grinning at Stef knowingly.

  “Beth Eden Jones, please hold the soil up before the slate. That’s it—ah! See that?”

  Stef and Mardina closed in to see. Something was wriggling in the dark brown soil, pale and pink. It was an earthworm, Stef saw with a jolt of wonder. There could be nothing more mundane than such a thing, and yet here it was burrowing through the ground on a world of another star.

  “This is no surprise,” the ColU said. “A potato from Earth needs soil from Earth, which is more than just dirt; soil is a complex and nutrient-rich structure in its own right. Do you remember, Beth Eden Jones, how my primary duty in the days of pioneering with your parents was to manufacture soil, using Per Arduan dirt as the basis?”