Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

69

  The dome was perhaps fifty meters across, Stef estimated as they walked around it, maybe ten meters tall at its midpoint, the highest point. Its skin was reasonably clear, translucent, and she saw no signs of support, no framework, no ribbing.

  Titus glared in through the wall, as if he were scouting out the war camp of a bunch of unruly barbarians. Well, perhaps that wasn’t so far from the truth. He pointed out structures within the dome, piles of matériel. “That looks like what might have brought Ari and Inguill here.” A sled, much smaller and cruder than theirs, with heaps of garments and blankets roughly dumped around it—heavy coats, thick boots.

  “And that object in the center, a kind of pillar in the middle of a mesh framework—”

  “I believe that is Earthshine,” the ColU murmured. “His support unit anyhow. But evidently heavily modified, for some purpose. And, over there . . .”

  They could all see what it meant. At one side of the dome was a Hatch emplacement, set into the rocky floor.

  Stef cupped her hands around her eyes and peered in through the wall, trying to see better, cursing the vapor that rose up from her breath. A Hatch like any other Hatch. Just like the one she’d been brought to on Mercury, the first she’d seen—like the one Dexter Cole had found here on Per Ardua, right here at the antistellar— just like the Hatches she’d seen on worlds of other stars. All of them were alike, just a rectangular panel a few meters across set in the ground, the fine circular seam that marked the position of the lid. Crude functional simplicity.

  Yet these simple gadgets were responsible for altering history itself, for adjusting the destinies of billions of souls. Stef was a physicist, and she’d been studying Hatches most of her adult life. Still, they made her shudder.

  And on this particular Hatch that lid gaped open.

  “So,” the legionary snapped. “Now what? Do we cut our way in?”

  Clodia pointed. “Either that, Father, or follow the arrow on the wall.”

  • • •

  They came to a doorway, a blister that protruded from the smooth dome wall.

  Titus said, “This door has a handle; that’s simple enough.” He squinted through the wall. “And a second door within.”

  “I think it’s a kind of airlock,” Stef said, surveying the dome again. “This structure has no internal skeleton. Has to be air pressure holding it up. Se we need to go through these double doors to avoid letting out all the inner air, and the warmth.”

  Titus said sourly, “I have served on starships, you know; I do know what an airlock is. Not that I was expecting to find one here. The practicalities concern me more. Such as, I doubt if this lock could take more than three of us at a time. Two, if laden with baggage. We’ll have to be separated to enter.”

  “I sincerely doubt there will be any threat,” Stef said briskly. “Legionary, you can see through the wall. There is only Earthshine . . . Even Ari and Inguill are nowhere in sight. I think we can take the risk, don’t you?”

  “And I for one,” said Beth, “am keen to get out of this cold, for the first time in weeks.”

  “Lead us, Titus Valerius,” Stef said.

  It proved simple enough for Titus and Clodia to cycle through the airlock. Experimenting, Titus found there was a simple fail-safe. “The inner door won’t open unless the outer one is firmly shut,” he boomed, his voice muffled by the thick dome wall. “The air within is warm and moist.” Still inside the airlock, he pressed his hand against the material of the dome. “This is pliant, yielding a little, but evidently thick and strong. It will be interesting to see how it withstands the blade of my pugio—”

  “Not now, Father,” Clodia said. “Come on.” She led the way through the airlock’s inner door and into the interior of the dome, pulling open her heavy clothing as she walked.

  Stef took Mardina’s hand, and they both stepped into the airlock together, leaving Chu and Beth unloading stuff from the sled. Mardina closed the outer door, and Titus opened the inner for them—and, just as Titus had described, warm, moist air gushed over them. Stef took deep, shuddering breaths, already feeling warmer than she’d been since crossing the terminator.

  She walked out of the lock and stood by Titus. Mardina followed, more uncertainly. The dome itself was a silvery, translucent roof that excluded the sky, lit by small hanging lamps. Even Andromeda was reduced to a washed-out crimson glow. The ground was bare rock, blackish like some kind of basalt, scraped and grooved—presumably by the action of ice across millions of years. Stef looked over at the central clutter of gear. There was Earthshine’s support unit, clearly identifiable, embedded in a nest of other equipment. There was no sign of Earthshine’s avatar projection.

  Titus said, “The air smells—funny. Like a ship. Or a factory.”

  Stef’s senses were dulled by age, but she agreed. “I smell ozone. No scent of people, or not much—”

  Mardina wrinkled her nose. “Maybe my nose is sharper. I can smell a hint of sewage. Yuck. Not unlike what we smell like in the mornings, after a night under the canopy. They are here, then. My father and Inguill.”

  Titus snapped, “Well, we can’t hover by the door all day. Clodia! With me. We will organize the work of moving our equipment in. Beth and Chu have made a start.”

  “Bring in the ColU first,” Stef suggested. “It will help us make sense of all this . . .”

  Soon the ColU was set on a heap of grubby blankets just inside the lock, and Mardina had hung its sensor unit around her own neck.

  Then, as the pile of their belongings gradually accumulated inside the lock, a puddle forming at its base as residual ice melted in the warmth, Stef and Mardina approached the Earthshine unit.

  The processor pillar stood at the center of what looked like a sculpture of a spider, itself a few meters tall, with angled rods hinging from the central unit and plunging into the rocky ground. The rods seemed to Stef to be made of some kind of ceramic, milky and smooth. The pillar itself had long lost the wheels Beth had described, on which it had rolled around the planet. Stef could see that the casing of the support unit had been broken open, much of its innards removed or redeployed.

  Because of the framework of rods, they could get no closer than a few meters from the central unit. Beyond the support unit Stef made out what looked like a manufacturing area of some kind, with various devices littering the ground—devices of an uncertain function, but an oddly smoothed-out appearance. The materials used seemed to be similar to the ceramic-like substance of the spider legs.

  And beyond that, set in the ground, that open Hatch.

  Stef faced the support unit. “Earthshine. Are you in there?”

  “You took your time.”

  • • •

  The voice sounded as authentic as ever, but there was still no sign of a virtual human body, any of his “suits” as he’d once called them, Stef recalled.

  Mardina said, “Hello, Great-grandfather. We did come as fast as we could. Given that you abandoned us in the first place . . .”

  “Mardina, I can see you, even if I’m not much to look at. Come closer, child . . . My word. You’re pregnant!”

  Mardina blushed.

  “The dynasty continues,” Stef said drily.

  “If only for now. Who is the father?”

  “Chu Yuen,” said the ColU, speaking from the slate at Mardina’s neck—and, perhaps, directly to Earthshine by other means, Stef thought. “You recall, the slave from the Rome-Xin Culture who is my bearer. An intelligent boy, evidently of good stock, even if he did fall on hard times.”

  “A good father, then. I look forward to getting to know him better. And I already know you too well, ColU.”

  “I told you on Mars—on that other Mars—that I would hunt you down, wherever you fled.”

  “And so you have. Well done. Perhaps you will do me the courtesy of listening to what I have discove
red here . . .”

  Stef was starting to feel dizzy. “I’m too hot, damn it, after months of being too cold.” She began to pull ineffectually at her outer coat.

  At a call from Mardina, Beth and Chu hurried over with blankets from the cart, and heaped them up on the rocky ground. Beth helped Stef remove a few layers of clothing, and Chu handed her a canteen of water, brought in from outside—icy, but refreshing—and they sat her down on the blankets. Beth and Mardina sat with her, and soon Stef felt a lot more human. She refused food, however. “If I never eat another mouthful of freeze-dried potato, I won’t be sorry.”

  Earthshine said, “I of course need no food of that sort. But since the arrival of the others, one of my fabricators has been devoted to manufacturing human-suitable food from the raw materials of the environment—broken-up rock, organics filtered from the ice.”

  The others. It was the first time he had mentioned Ari and Inguill, even tangentially.

  “A fabricator.” Mardina frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Advanced technology from our own timeline,” the ColU said. “A device that can take apart matter at the molecular level, or even below, and assemble it into—well, whatever you desire. It’s slow but effective. My own physical frame once contained such machines. Once Earthshine and his two brothers, artificial intellects as powerful as him, lurked in holes in the ground, on Earth. And they were surrounded by fabricators and other gadgets, like miniature factories, that used the raw materials of the planet to supply them with all they needed—materials for maintenance, energy.”

  Earthshine said, “I carried such gadgets with me in this support module. Now, here, I have broken them out and have put them to work. Everything you see here, the dome, this framework around me, has been manufactured from local materials, the rocks, the ice. Over on the far side of the dome I have created a pond, a body of standing water, to refresh the air. As for energy, though I have an internal store of my own, I have plumbed the planet itself for its inner heat. Manufactured drills to penetrate the surface rock layers . . .”

  Stef asked, “Why did you build all this?”

  “I came here because of the Hatch, Stef. To study it, and its makers. That’s why we were brought to this planet in the first place, to this epoch—what other reason could there be? That’s what I’ve been doing since I got here, primarily. But I always expected you, some of you at least, to follow. So I prepared this habitat.”

  “Generous of you—”

  “Although I did not expect those others to be the first of the group to come here.”

  Mardina pushed herself to her feet. “‘Those others.’ You mean my father and the Inca woman, don’t you? You keep hinting they’re here, but I don’t see them. Well, there’s only one place they can be.” She set off toward the open Hatch.

  Beth called, “Be careful, Mardina.”

  But Mardina didn’t slow her pace.

  Stef said now, “This frame you’ve put up around yourself, Earthshine. You’ve rooted yourself into the ground. Is this part of your thermal energy mine?”

  “Oh, no,” he said now. “You’ll see that outside—a few panels flush to the ground, deep bores beneath. All this is to achieve a more intimate kind of contact.”

  Beth asked, “Contact with who?”

  “The Dreamers,” the ColU said suddenly. “You’re trying to talk to the Dreamers, aren’t you?”

  “This ancient world is infested with them,” Earthshine said. “Well, I imagine it always was. ColU, it is as if I have dropped an antenna into a brain. And I think—”

  “Yes?” The ColU sounded breathless, eager.

  “I think I hear their thoughts . . .”

  And Stef Kalinski heard a gunshot.

  70

  Mardina, who had been approaching the open Hatch, threw herself down on the ground.

  Chu and Titus were with her faster than Stef would have believed possible. Sprawling, they grabbed Mardina by the arms, slithered back along the ground, and delivered her to Stef and Beth. Beth took her pregnant daughter in her arms.

  To Stef, Mardina looked shocked, furious.

  “I’m not hurt, Mother. Really, I’m not. I heard the shot—I thought I saw something fly past me—I dropped to the ground—I guess it was a warning shot. I can’t believe he did it. My father.”

  Beth stroked her head. “Frankly, love, you and I always meant less to Ari than his ambition.”

  “I’ll give them a warning shot,” Titus yelled. With gladio in his good hand, he approached the pit. Chu, too, followed the legionary, a dagger in his hand, looking coldly furious. It was after all his lover and the mother of his baby who had been shot at. That quiet intensity seemed to have burned away the last of his slavish deference, Stef thought.

  Titus called, “You, Inguill, quipucamayoc! Ari the druidh!”

  “Come no closer, legionary!” It was undoubtedly Ari’s voice, Stef could hear, though it sounded strained, weak. “We are protecting our property . . . We have rights of priority that . . .” He broke up in coughing.

  “Wait, legionary,” Stef called. “Let’s see if we can talk our way out of this.”

  “Talk? Ha! And who in Hades gave them a ballista?”

  “It was manufactured here,” Earthshine said. “Using a fabricator. I was naive—I showed them how to operate the fabricator with voice commands. It uses an electrical charge to drive a projectile of—”

  “And who fires a ballista in a dome like this?”

  “The dome material is self-sealing,” Earthshine said, still more softly. “In that regard at least we are secure. Besides, the outside air is breathable, if cold. We are in no danger.”

  Stef got stiffly to her feet. “I don’t understand any of this. What property do they think they own? What do they mean by priority?” She draped a blanket over her shoulders and began to shuffle toward the pit.

  “Stef Kalinski,” Titus said, “stay back!”

  “Oh, nonsense, legionary. Somebody’s got to deal with this. At least I won’t be missed if I get shot. And when it comes to Hatches, I’m the expert, remember.”

  “Take me,” the ColU said urgently. “The slate, an earphone . . .”

  Beth ran up to hand her the slate, which Stef hung around her neck. It felt inordinately heavy. “Now, then . . .”

  Feeling neither brave nor scared—maybe she was just too old to be bothered anymore—Stef neared the pit. The material of the emplacement panel felt very eerie under her feet, smooth, alien, neither hot nor cold.

  “Ari Guthfrithson! Inguill! It’s me—Stef Kalinski. I’m coming to talk to you. Shoot me if you must, but try not to hit your pregnant daughter at least, Ari . . .”

  She came to the lip of the open pit. Ari and Inguill were sitting together at the base, huddled against a wall—near a rounded doorway, she noticed. If this was a typical Hatch, that door would lead to a transitional chamber, with another door beyond leading to—somewhere else. But for now the door was sealed shut, featureless save for a seam in the wall.

  Ari and Inguill, their knees up against their chests, wore filthy remnants of the clothes of their cultures, Ari his druidh’s gown, Inguill in her formal attire as a quipucamayoc. They were surrounded by the basics of living, a heap of grimy blankets, piles of food—tired-looking vegetables, what might be dried meat—and simple buckets in which slopped piss and watery shit. The source of Mardina’s sewage smell, then. They looked impossibly skinny, even skeletal, in their loose clothing. Stef saw glossy, dead-looking patches of skin on Ari’s cheeks, his forehead. Frostbitten?

  But in two bony hands Ari held a convincing-looking gun, pointing it out of the pit at her. “No closer, Stef Kalinski.”

  Stef held her empty hands in the air. “I’m no threat to you, Ari. I never was . . . Can I lower my hands? I’m kind of tired, and only just got over a dizzy spell.”

 
; He nodded curtly.

  “Thank you. Mind you, I’m a picture of health compared to you. You should have waited for us, you two. Traveled with us.”

  “You are all fools,” Inguill snapped. “And we got here first. Which was the whole point.”

  Stef leaned down, cautiously. “So why in heaven’s name are you sitting in that hole?”

  “We’re waiting for Earthshine to let us in,” Inguill said. “Through that door. We know he can open it; we’ve seen it . . . We want to go through the Hatch. We want to be first.”

  “And now you’re mounting a sit-down strike? But why? After plodding all that way across the ice muttering to each other, do you even remember anymore?”

  Ari raised his gun; it wavered uncertainly. “You won’t trick us out of here.”

  “I’ve no intention to. Believe me, I’ve been through enough Hatches; you’re welcome to this one. But, look—will you let me bring you some fresh food, at least? Or one of the others. And how about I get the legionary to take out those slop buckets for you?”

  “Not Titus,” Inguill snapped.

  “Chu, then.” Stef looked directly at Ari. “Who is the father of your grandchild.”

  The gun lowered at last. “I heard you speak of this . . . It’s true, then?”

  “I’m afraid so. Look, I’ll go get help. Don’t go away, now.”

  As she walked away she heard Inguill’s ranting voice. “We won’t be tricked, Stef Kalinski! We won’t be tricked!”

  • • •

  With Ari and Inguill fed, and their slop buckets emptied out of the airlock, Titus’s group gathered, sitting on heaped blankets and bits of Earthshine’s equipment, before Earthshine in his spidery cage. They had hot drinks and portions of food manufactured by Earthshine’s fabricators, bland but nutritious.

  Beth had spoken to Ari. But Mardina had refused even to look at her father, who had taken a shot at her.

  “I fear they are no longer sane,” Earthshine whispered.

  “Oh, you don’t say,” Stef said drily.

  “They have developed an obsession with the power they perceive to lie beyond the Hatch. That was why they abandoned the rest of you, stole your equipment . . . Why they abandoned the history they had been born into. Even abandoned you, Mardina, Beth. Why, the trek here itself nearly killed them, but they would not be stopped.”