Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Beth grunted. “I’m not surprised at that. Whatever other qualities he’s got, Mardina, your father is not a practical man.”

  “And Inguill was a bureaucrat,” Stef said. “In her culture. A wily one, a very clever individual, but not prepared for such a journey. Whereas we had a Roman legionary to lead us. Perhaps neither of them truly imagined what it would be like. But once they had set off—”

  Earthshine said, “They were driven on by pride and greed. Their obsession with the antistellar, with the Hatch they expected to find here. They clung to that dream, even though they left behind their health, even their sanity.”

  Titus snapped, “What is this dream?”

  “I think they believe,” the ColU said, “that the Hatch will give them the power of gods. The power to remake worlds. After all, they’ve seen it happen—we all have, more than once.”

  Stef nodded. “And maybe the deep shock of those experiences has taken a toll on them, more than we realized.” She closed her eyes, looking inward. “A toll on the rest of us too.”

  “In a way, I admit,” said Earthshine now, “we aren’t so dissimilar. I was outraged by what I saw as the meddling of the Dreamers in our histories, as it gradually unfolded. I struck at Mars, a Mars, to attract their attention. Well, it worked. I was brought here. I intended to challenge them again. And above all to try to understand . . .”

  Stef prompted, “Earthshine, Ari said you had control of the Hatch in some way.”

  “In a sense, I do. The Hatches have always chosen who they will respond to.”

  “That’s true,” Beth said. “I remember the first Hatch I ever saw, at the substellar. It—developed—grooves in its upper surfaces, for builders to lie in, like keys in locks.”

  Earthshine said, “With humans, handprints are commonly used. Here, the builders evidently sensed something of my presence. In my case the interface is electromagnetic, not physical contact. Not visible. But when I sent it a certain message—echoing a signal I received—the Hatch opened, the great lid.”

  Stef pressed, “And then the second door, to the next chamber?”

  “I have explored the second chamber,” Earthshine said. “Or at least I have sent secondary units in there. I believe I know what lies beyond the next door—and on the far side of this Hatch itself. But I have yet to open that final door. I have constructed a probe. You might be interested in the details, Stef. A sphere, of material of very high heat capacity. I hope it will last a measurable time, even as much as a nanosecond.”

  Stef tried to imagine this. “What are you saying, Earthshine? What lies beyond that door?”

  Earthshine whispered, “The ColU knows—or suspects.”

  “The boundary,” said ColU. “The edge of the multiverse. The death of the future. Yes. That is what they would bring you here to show you. So that you could understand . . .”

  “There need be no spatial deviation, you see,” said Earthshine. “You need not travel across space to reach it. And you need journey only a short distance into the future. After all, the event will occur everywhere, simultaneously. On every world.”

  The ColU said, “We must compare our estimates of the time remaining.”

  The humans absorbed this terrible conversation in silence.

  Stef said at last, “And that’s what you’ve told Ari and Inguill they will walk into, if—”

  “If they are in the second chamber when the Hatch opens, yes. But they won’t listen, Stef. They don’t believe me. They believe that the Hatch will fulfill their dreams of power and wealth.”

  Titus shook his head. “Then what are we to do?”

  Stef sighed. “I suggest we try to get Ari and Inguill out of there. After all, you are family, Beth, Mardina. You might get through where Earthshine couldn’t. And then—”

  “And then,” the ColU said, “we must consider how best to use the time remaining to us.”

  Mardina rested her hand on her belly, dropped her head, and reached blindly for Chu.

  71

  The group spent two full days trying to coax Ari and Inguill out of the pit. Beth tried the hardest, tried to get through to the man she’d almost married. Even Mardina reluctantly consented to speak to Ari, about the baby she was carrying, his grandchild.

  Neither basic human appeals, nor Earthshine’s cold logic about what must lie beyond the Hatch door, made any difference. Ari did seem anguished about the fate of the baby. But nothing would change his mind, nor Inguill’s, who babbled about the power of Inti, the Inca sun god. They were both convinced of only one thing: that Earthshine was trying to keep them from—well, from glory, Stef supposed.

  Titus remarked, “No mortal should seek the power of a god. It would burn him in a flash.”

  The ColU seemed to agree. “But who are we to stop them, Titus Valerius?”

  At last, they gave up. Earthshine agreed to open up the Hatch for them.

  • • •

  The group gathered at the lip of the pit to see the outcome.

  In response to Earthshine’s invisible signal, the door to the Hatch’s middle chamber swung back at last. In that chamber Stef could see the “probe” Earthshine had mentioned, a fat ceramic sphere sitting on the chamber floor.

  Ari and Inguill stepped through, moving gingerly, helping each other. At each step of the way, Earthshine paused to allow them to reconsider, to pull back.

  But at last they pulled the door closed behind them, without a backward glance, and they were gone.

  “I gave them a control,” Earthshine said. “To emulate the signals I use to communicate with the Hatch. A simple handheld thing . . . And I found a way to send signals through the emplacement substrate, so I will know, from my probe, when the final lid is opened.”

  Stef was intrigued. “You sent signals through Hatch substrate material? That’s more than we ever managed, in the years I spent studying Hatches and kernels on Luna and Mars—”

  “They are gone,” Earthshine said simply.

  • • •

  When it was safe, Earthshine opened the second door once more. The central chamber, with its door firmly closed once more, seemed entirely undamaged to Stef, and was entirely empty.

  Earthshine said that his probe had after all lasted a healthy fraction of a nanosecond, and it had learned a good deal about the nature of the “multiverse boundary.” It and the ColU immediately locked into a silent, high-speed electronic communication about the new data.

  And Clodia and Chu, exploring the Hatch, found something new: grooves to take human hands, on the inner side of the Hatch’s second door. Three pairs of them.

  “That,” the ColU said enigmatically, when it was told, “deserves further consideration.”

  72

  Earthshine said, “I believe that the Dreamers have spoken to me as they have spoken to none other of our kind. And by ‘our kind’ I mean complex life-forms, equivalent to your own multicellular nature, although the details differ from world to world, biosphere to biosphere . . . That sounds arrogant, I know. Even grandiose.”

  Stef said skeptically, “I’ll say. Of all that vast cosmic host—”

  “Yet I am unusual, for them. I am a product of human technology, of course. And yet I think that humanity itself, all of our biosphere above the level of the single-celled creatures, is a kind of technology to them. Created for a purpose, you see, or at least modified. But I am a secondary creation—as if one of my fabricators produced, not a copy of itself, but an entirely new design of its own. As such I am perhaps of—interest—to them. And I am not entirely under their control.”

  “As we are?” Stef asked sourly.

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  Titus grunted. “This all sounds too philosophical to me. What am I, a Greek?” He, Stef, Beth, the ColU, the elders of this tiny antistellar colony, sat in a loose circle, beside the comfort of an
open fire burning on a hearth of stone slabs, in the shadow of the strange spider-like structure that encompassed Earthshine’s support unit. Now Titus dipped his clay mug into the slowly boiling bowl of tea on the fire. “Face it, Earthshine. You got the Dreamers’ attention because you smashed Mars to pieces, and murdered a whole world of these clever animalcules in the process. That would get most people’s attention.”

  “Well, that’s true. And that of course was the intention.”

  “And so they brought you here,” said the ColU, a glittering mass of technology set on a blanket away from the fire. “They guided you through their Hatch network to this place. And—”

  “And they spoke to me,” Earthshine said, cutting in. “They told me their story. If that term is adequate for such a biography . . . In a way, you see, it is the story of life, in this universe.”

  “Tell us, then,” Stef said, leaning forward, swathed in a blanket. “Tell us, Earthshine.”

  • • •

  “From the beginning, even when the universe was still very young, there was life.

  “Life self-organized, from collections of more or less simple chemicals, blindly following the laws of chemistry and physics, guided by mathematical rules evidently inherent in reality. Microbial life, single-cell life, viral life . . . Some scientists used to think life could have emerged even when the Big Bang glow was still bright, and the whole universe was warm enough to be one big habitable zone.

  “On worlds with similar surface conditions, similar kinds of life emerged. Earth and Per Ardua, for example. But life spread, too, as rogue comets and asteroids blasted the surfaces of the young worlds, and handfuls of bugs buried deep in rock fragments survived chance journeys between the planets, and, more rarely, between the stars. Panspermia bubbles formed, worlds with similar conditions hosting related forms of life, sharing common origins. Across the Galaxy such bubbles jostled, and even permeated; worlds of warm-Earth life could share stellar systems with worlds of cold-Titan life, as you’ve seen for yourselves.

  “And life spread inward too, down into the guts of the worlds, following deep water flows, mineral seeps, leaks of heat energy, radioactivity . . . The interiors of worlds, too deep even for the immense bombardments of the young cosmos to do any damage, were warm, safe cradles in those early days, and life got down there pretty quickly—on Earth we found deep bugs all over the world, all of similar species. The deep rock is a static shelter, though, and relatively starved of energy. Life was slow to spread, even slow to procreate. To survive on such thin resources, living things learned to repair rather than to reproduce. But gradually a kind of complexity grew and spread, as the microbes gathered themselves into mutually supportive colonies, and the colonies combined into supercolonies.

  “A threshold was passed. Consciousness emerged.

  “On Earth, and on Per Ardua, most of the biomass of the planet—most of its weight of living stuff—dwells in the deep subsurface rocks. For most of their history, humans never even suspected it existed. And it is aware, a constellation of huge, slow minds. These are the Dreamers. They remember their birth, when the universe was young.

  “And world after world woke up . . .”

  • • •

  The story was told in fragments, day by day, amid intense interrogation by Stef and the others.

  As the weeks and months passed since their arrival at the antistellar point of Per Ardua—as the deaths of Ari and Inguill faded in the memory—the audience around Earthshine came and went. They all needed to sleep and eat; they all had chores to do with the maintenance of the colony that kept them all alive—and they were all determined to support Mardina through her pregnancy. That drew even the ColU away from Earthshine, and its slow, sometimes rambling monologue.

  But they listened, and they questioned Earthshine on confusing details from their different viewpoints. Gradually a kind of summary of the story was emerging, one that they could all grasp, one way or another.

  And in the midst of cosmic strangeness, human life went on.

  As Mardina’s pregnancy approached its full term, she became ever heavier, ever more slow moving. At least she felt she had good support, isolated as she was here. The ColU had been specifically instructed in childbirth procedure to support the growth of the original ISF colonies, and Earthshine’s fabricators were capable of synthesizing any medicinal support she needed. She had at her side wise women in her own mother and Stef Kalinski. And Chu was turning out to be a doting parent-to-be. Only Clodia remained a problem for now, her residual jealousy over Chu getting in the way—and, perhaps, Mardina thought, Clodia’s resentment at having her own ambitions to be a soldier thwarted. It was a shame that the comradeship they’d built up on Yupanquisuyu was gone now—or maybe they’d just grown out of it, she thought.

  No, Mardina couldn’t complain about the support she had, even if she would have preferred to have Michael the medicus on hand, or better yet, a fully equipped Brikanti hospital.

  Still, as time passed, she felt less and less enthusiastic about work. Even about moving around too much.

  And, in a dome where there wasn’t a lot of entertainment, she found the slow processes of the fabricators’ labor an increasing distraction. One morning Mardina found one little gadget, no larger than a loaf of bread, sitting in a pool of ground-up Arduan rock, which in turn it was processing into machine parts that it gathered in neat heaps. She knelt to watch it, rapt.

  Chu said, “It is proceeding faster than I imagined.”

  “This one’s actually making a copy of itself.”

  “I suppose it is giving birth, in a way. Bit by bit.”

  Mardina, sitting on a heap of blankets, rubbed her belly. “I wish I could do it that way. Take out this little monster one limb at a time and then assemble it on the floor.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I do. But if these machines keep this up, we’ll start to become a real colony. Titus wants to call it ‘Nova Roma.’”

  But Chu did not smile. “It is a shame that we will have so little time to enjoy what we build.”

  Mardina flinched; it wasn’t the kind of thing Chu usually said. She looked down at the solidity of the rocky floor, and up at the star-strewn sky beyond the dome, and she reached for Chu’s hand. “We can’t think like that.”

  “No. I am sorry. For even if what the mechanical sage says is true, it is up to us to behave as if it is not so.”

  She tried to absorb that. Then she stirred. “Come on. Help me up; I’m getting stiff. Time for my exercise, a couple of tours of the dome . . .”

  • • •

  “From the beginning the great communities of Dreamers apprehended something of the universe around them.

  “They sensed the early battering of their worlds by the debris of planetary formation. They were tugged by the subtle tides exerted by their worlds’ parent stars and sister planets. They could feel the slow geological evolution of their host worlds—an evolution shaped from the beginning by life itself; there’s evidence that the presence of life on a planet like Earth, for instance, even helps stabilize the formation of continents.

  “Even multicellular life, when it evolved—infrequently, sporadically—served as a kind of sensory mechanism for the living worlds.

  “For some worlds, given the right conditions, with an atmosphere reasonably transparent to the parent star’s radiation, energy could pour down from the sky onto the land and into the upper layers of the oceans, and the familiar miracles of complex life could come about. Photosynthesis, a chemical means to exploit the energy of stellar radiation. Grand rebuildings of oceans and atmospheres through the injections of such gases as oxygen or methane. The evolution of secondary forms of life—like Earth’s animals—to feed off those products. But the outer layers of complex planetary life, so important to creatures like humans, were all but an irrelevance to the
Dreamers. They only ever amounted to a trivial fraction of any world’s total biomass. And the complex creatures were usually not even aware of the noostrata that permeated the rocks beneath their feet.

  “Yet, through the frantic reactions of the complex forms, ‘animals’ and ‘plants,’ to external events like asteroid strikes or stellar flares or supernova explosions, the Dreamers came to know the universe in more detail.

  “I think even then, far back in cosmic time, the Dreamers began to get the first hints of the approach of the End Time.

  “And then there was communication, between Dreamer worlds.

  “The complex forms, in their haphazard way, built spacecraft, or infested comets and other wandering bodies, and began a new kind of contact, supplementing natural panspermia, the slow drift of impact-loosened rocks. Panspermia had always been a way for the worlds to be linked to each other. A package of living things and genetic data is a kind of communication, a message from one minded world to another. With the coming of complex life and interstellar travel, that process remained random, without central direction, but did become more frequent.

  “From the beginning, the living worlds had been aware of each other’s existence. Now, slowly, sporadically, imperfectly, they began to talk.

  “Imagine a community of minded worlds, then. All different in detail, yet all with fundamental similarities, engaged in a slow, chance conversation. They shared ideas, perceptions. Some grew in stature, while others became more inward-looking. They were all effectively immortal, of course—and they were stuck with each other. I imagine them as like a college of bickering professors, locked in decades-long rivalries. But in the case of the Dreamer worlds, aeons-long. Not quite immortal, though; in a dangerous universe, whole worlds can be lost, sometimes, and all their freight of life and mind with them.