Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “It is monstrous,” the ColU said. “It is magnificent. As if the universe itself, a finite block in space and time, is a kind of garden. A garden of which every square centimeter is to be tended, made as beautiful as possible, all the way to the back wall, so to speak. I am a gardener, or was; I can see the appeal of a cultivated cosmos. And all of it contained by the walls of birth and death.”

  “But the price of all this is raggedness,” Stef said, dissatisfied on a profound level. “A universe of holes and patches, where scientific inquiry doesn’t necessarily make sense. And how far would they go to get to build their empire of the Hatches? Maybe in some realities mankind was eliminated altogether, and replaced by some other clever creature. Rats, maybe. Smart rodents burrowing through the multiverse like it was some roomy loft . . .”

  Earthshine said, “And all of it, tidy or otherwise, doomed to incineration when the End Time comes. You see it now. We never mattered. We really are just a kind of technology to the Dreamers—created by their uplift programs and then modified for a purpose. In fact I suspect the Dreamers don’t really believe we are intelligent at all. We are too small; there were always too many of us, getting in each others’ way. To them we are more like social creatures, industrious creatures who blindly build things. Like ants or beavers.”

  “Or builders,” Beth said.

  “Or road-laying legionaries,” Titus said. “And given some of the lads I’ve worked with in my time, they might have a point.”

  • • •

  One morning Beth came to find Stef. She was grinning widely. “There’s something you need to see. As one veteran Per Arduan to another.”

  She led Stef over to the ColU’s small Arduan garden. The ColU itself sat on a chair by the garden, roughly made by Chu from Arduan tree-stems. “Colonel Kalinski,” it said. “Look what I did.”

  Beth took Stef to the edge of the worked soil. Reed-like stems grew in the earth in the shadow of the dwarf stromatolite, and in a shallow, marshy puddle.

  Beth said, “Remember scenery like this? The ColU says it believes that the stems we see today are descendants of those of our time, of the first colonies. And it was those stems that bundled up to make builders. The ColU thinks the genetic potential to create builders is still in there somewhere; all he needs to do is cross-breed enough samples to restore the native stock.”

  Stef thought that over. “You won’t have time, ColU. There are only months left—”

  “I know, Stef Kalinski. But you’ll forgive me for trying even so . . .”

  “I asked the ColU to do this,” Beth said. “The builders saved my life, and my parents, when we migrated with their lake—even if they didn’t know it. I always felt guilty about how the builders kind of got shoved aside when humans came pouring through the Hatch to Per Ardua. I wanted us to at least try.”

  “The ColU hasn’t succeeded, though, has it?”

  “No, but it’s made some progress. Come see. Take a closer look. Just don’t get freaked out the way my father always said he was, when he first discovered these things . . .”

  Curiosity pricking, Stef stepped forward to the edge of the pond and bent to see. The artificial pond was shallow, and its base was covered with mud, thick with lichen, from which the stems were growing. The stems themselves came up to her waist. They were an unusual kind, darker, flatter, more like blades than the usual tube-like structures, yet still substantial, still no doubt filled with marrow.

  She crept closer, right to the water’s edge.

  And on every stem, facing her, growing from the muddy pond scum, a single eye opened.

  • • •

  Earthshine said, “It was you, Stef, who first brought the Dreamers to my attention, in a sense. At least, their history-meddling. For your personal history was tinkered with in a minor way when you first opened that Hatch we found on Mercury—”

  “And suddenly I had a sister I didn’t remember. Suddenly my memory didn’t fit the facts of the universe as it existed.”

  “In retrospect, that was a classic loose end. An effect with no cause, in a universe that was now nonperfect, its causality become ragged. Or rather, more ragged.”

  “And later you found another loose end. The grave of my mother—”

  “Which still recorded she’d only had one daughter. Even as the second daughter stood there looking at the stone. And later, as you know—now I knew what to look for—I found more evidence of meddling. More evidence of lost timelines.”

  “The Drowned Culture.”

  “From these traces I deduced the existence of the Dreamers. Oh, not their nature, the fact that they were ensconced in the hearts of the rocky worlds. That came later. But I knew they were there, meddling, tinkering . . . In my fancy, I identified them with Loki, the trickster god of the Norse. Well, in the myth, Loki’s actions brought on Ragnarok, the final war—and in the course of that war, another god, Heimdall, finally killed Loki himself. Was that to be my role? That was what I began to believe.”

  “And you did try to kill them,” Stef said. “Or at least you made a start. You used Ceres to hammer Mars. Even much of the subsurface life, the Dreamers, must have been destroyed in that action. But what were you thinking? Would you have roamed the Galaxy smashing one world after the next, trying to eradicate bugs hidden kilometers deep?”

  “I would probably have come up with a better strategy,” Earthshine said evenly. “Consider this. Each infested world is isolated, biologically, in its deepest layers. Isolated, and therefore vulnerable to an engineered virus, perhaps, a bacteriophage . . . It might take a thousand years or a million, but such an agent could rip through the noostrata of such a world, and—behead it. Yes, there are many such worlds, but they are connected by the Hatch network—and again, that’s a weakness. Perhaps some agent could be delivered through the Hatches themselves, targeting the destination world, before moving on . . .

  “This is a sketchy scheme. The point is that every life-form has vulnerabilities, and every community is made vulnerable by interconnectedness. Given time and motivation, I believe that I, or another, could find a way.” He said softly, “It may not have taken much effort. In Norse myth, Loki killed Baldr, favorite child of the gods, with an arrow made of mistletoe. A single arrow. Perhaps I wasn’t even the first to try.

  “But that initial assault on Mars—call it a spasm of rage—was enough for me to attract the Dreamers’ attention. Enough for them to send me here, with the rest of you as a presumably unintended consequence. I think they wanted me to see this, you see. The End Time. I think they wanted me to understand what they were trying to do—and to make sure I gave up my efforts to hinder them.

  “And I did understand. In any event I would not try to harm them now—that ambition is gone. I feel—honored—to have had my strength recognized, at least. And to have been brought to this place. To Ultima.”

  Titus frowned. “Ultima?”

  “You know, every starfaring culture we found had a legend of Ultima, the furthest star. Even the Incas you met spoke of Kaylla, nearest star, and Karu, furthest. Perhaps alien minds frame such ideas too. We were all surprised to be delivered to Proxima, the nearest star to the sun. But in the end, you see—”

  “Every star is Ultima,” Stef said. “Every star is the last star. For all the stars will encounter the End Time in the same instant.”

  Titus looked around the group. “So,” he said, “that’s the story told. All we need to do now in the time left is sit around and wait for the end. Is that it?”

  Beth, impulsively, embraced Stef. “If so, there are worse places to be. And worse people to be with.”

  And then the ColU coughed, making them all stare.

  “A polite interruption,” said Stef. “What do you have to say, ColU?”

  “Just that the situation may not be quite so simple. Perhaps we have—an option. If not hope.”


  “An option? What do you mean?”

  “Do you recall that when Ari Guthfrithson and Inguill foolishly lost their lives in the Hatch—”

  Mardina’s scream filled the dome.

  Chu called, “It is time! The first contraction!”

  The conversation broke up. Falling into a much-practiced routine, the group hurried to Mardina’s side.

  73

  After the birth, the baby grew healthy and happy, a little girl who absorbed all their attention, soon repaying in smiles.

  But the time they had left dwindled, from months, to weeks, and at last to days.

  • • •

  Earthshine said he was calling a group conference, by the Hatch. He had matters to discuss.

  Titus just grunted at this news. “In any other circumstances, that might sound ominous.”

  Of course, they would all come; they would do as Earthshine asked. They were nothing if not a team by now.

  But first, this morning, as every camp morning, Mardina, Beth and baby Gwen took a walk around the growing colony.

  They gravely inspected the rows of terrestrial plants, sprouting from carefully manufactured and tilled soil, under ever-extending banks of sunlight lamps constructed in turn by an army of fabricators. And as they walked past the banks of Arduan green there was a soft rustle: the sound of eye-leaves turning to watch them go by. At the wall of the dome, they peered out to see the farther extensions of the colony beyond, scars in the ground where more fabricators were toiling to turn Arduan rock into soil, the slumped form of a second dome yet to be inflated—and it probably never would be, Mardina thought. The vision of an hourglass coalesced in her head, to be firmly pushed away.

  Cradled in Mardina’s arms, bundled in a blanket, little Gwen gazed around at whatever she could see. She was three months old now. Her hair looked as if it would be crisp black, a legacy of her grandmother, Mardina Jones, and she had dark eyes, like her father’s. And those eyes were wide and seemed full of wonder, gazing at this world of marvels into which she had been thrust. Even if, and Mardina couldn’t help the thought, it was a world that would betray her long before she could hope to understand why. Just months old. Just days left to live . . .

  “We’re doing well,” she said aloud, to distract herself from her own thoughts. “The colony, I mean. Given we started from nothing but the gadgets in Earthshine’s support kit.”

  Beth said, “I grew up a pioneer, with my parents, alone on this world. It’s pleasing to build stuff, isn’t it, to bring life and order to a world—to make it right? Just as the builders always did. Maybe we’ve got more in common with them than people ever understood.”

  “Even if we’re running out of time,” Stef said.

  “But that was always true, I suppose,” Beth said. “Time for people, for worlds, for the stars. You just have to do the best you can in the here and now.”

  Mardina hugged her baby. “But it all seems so solid. So real, so detailed. That big old galaxy sprawling across the sky. The way Gwen’s hair feels when I brush it. It’s hard to believe . . .”

  Beth waited for her to finish.

  “If I don’t speak the name of this thing, it still feels like it isn’t real. Does that make any sense?”

  The ColU spoke to them now, whispering in their earphones. “It makes plenty of sense, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. The power of names: probably one of the oldest human superstitions, going back to the birth of language itself. To deny a name is to deny a thing reality. And yet now it is time to name names. I am sorry to disturb you. Earthshine is ready for us . . .”

  • • •

  Once more they gathered around Earthshine’s support unit, under its spidery tree of extensors, his connection with the dirt and rock of Per Ardua and the legions of Dreaming bugs that infested it. They sat on heaps of blankets, and low benches made from the remains of the ramshackle sled Ari and Inguill had towed here.

  In the crib Titus had made, Gwen wriggled and gurgled, half asleep and content for now.

  “Only three,” Earthshine said.

  Titus frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Call it a headline. A key point. A summary, perhaps. For all that I myself have human origins, for all I infested the human world for decades, I still find myself clumsy when delivering ambiguous news. But if you remember this in what follows, it may help. Only three.”

  Titus growled, “No doubt you’ve brought us here to speak of what’s to become of us.”

  “And how we must respond, yes. You know that we have only a few days left, now. And there are preparations we must make.”

  Only a few days. A few days, before Mardina would have to lose Gwen. She felt as if a pugio were twisting up her guts at the thought of it.

  And Titus laughed sourly. “What preparations? Myself, I plan to get blind drunk, and sleep through the twilight of the gods—”

  “You will not,” snapped Clodia. Sitting behind him, she grabbed his hand. “You’ll be right here with me, Father; that’s where you’ll be.”

  Titus seemed to calm quickly, as if suddenly remembering he wasn’t trying to motivate a bunch of recalcitrant legionaries. “Of course I will, child.” He wrapped his stump of an arm around her shoulders. “Of course I will.”

  Stef said now, “But Titus asked a good question, Earthshine. What meaningful preparations can we make? I think it’s time to stop being enigmatic. Tell us straight what’s on your mind.” She scowled. “Or is this some cruel trick?”

  “No,” he said earnestly. “Not a trick. It is a sliver of hope. Listen, please. We have discussed this many times. You do understand what is to happen? This universe—and all those near it in the multiverse, near in probability space—this universe will intersect a boundary, the edge of the multiverse itself. In essence, time will cease. The End Time—that is a literal description.”

  The ColU unit was sitting on a blanket, an honorary human among humans. It said, “Imagine that the whole of this world is a simulation, supported in the memory banks of some vast computer—the way Earthshine can project a simulation of a human body. When the boundary comes it will be as if that simulation is frozen. Paused. You would not feel anything. But your stories would be ended, as cleanly as if you had paused some projected virtual show, and never restarted it, leaving the characters in limbo.”

  “Except,” Earthshine said, “we know it won’t be as simple as that. It won’t be a perfectly sharp cutoff. Everything in nature is uncertain—everything is smeared. And so will be the multiverse boundary.”

  Stef said, “Which is why the kernels work. They are wormholes connecting us to the boundary, and what we find there is a huge outpouring of energy.”

  “That’s it,” Earthshine said. “Every particle in the universe follows a world line, a kind of graph threaded through space-time. And every world line, every particle, must end at the multiverse boundary. In that way it’s like an event horizon—like the edge of a black hole, but a black hole absorbs. This is like a tremendous mirror, or a furnace, if you like, where every last grain of creation will be thermalized—burned up as heat energy. And as the energies of all the terminating particles pile up there, indeed are reflected back, there will be a last infernal carnival of creation, as that energy nucleates into new particles, which will immediately be swept over by the advancing boundary . . .”

  The ColU said now, “These huge energies have already had an influence on our universe, observable effects. These were distortions I detected in the cosmic background radiation, as if our universe is recoiling from what is to become of it. That was how I was able to calculate the timing of this event, roughly, long before we got here.”

  Earthshine said, “The important point now is that the boundary is smeared, just a little. The destruction it brings will not be quite instantaneous. And that gives us a sliver of an opportunity—”

  “No,
” Beth said, suddenly understanding. “The Dreamers. It’s given the Dreamers an opportunity, to help us.”

  “You understand, Beth Eden Jones,” the ColU said. “You always did have a good intuition about Hatches.”

  Mardina frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Hatch,” Beth said, and she took Mardina’s hands. “Remember? After Ari and Inguill went through, and Earthshine’s probe. After we opened it again, the Hatch had changed. It’s just like the first Hatch I ever saw, with my father, at the substellar. Buried in the jungle. Grooves appeared in its surface. I was the first to understand—they were grooves to hold the bodies of builders. And when the builders climbed into the grooves, it was like putting a key in a lock. You see?”

  “Ah,” Titus said. “And now, in the doorway, when our Hatch was opened up for Ari and Inguill—recesses for hands. Human hands.”

  “I think the Dreamers are telling us something,” Earthshine said. “On some level they know we’re here. I always have the impression that they can’t see us clearly—they don’t understand us, or our nature, or not sufficiently. But they know we’re here.”

  Beth said eagerly, “Yes, that’s it. They’re saying we can go through the Hatch. Through to—”

  “The past,” Earthshine said gravely. “It must be someplace else in space, some other world, another history. But it has to be the past, from this point, for there’s no future. And there is plenty of past to choose from. Seventeen billion years of it . . .”

  Chu frowned. “How could you even know where you were? In space or time.”

  “Good question,” Earthshine said. “If the travelers remain on Per Ardua, perhaps we could prepare maps of the stars, at different epochs. Even of the position and size of Andromeda. But if you translate through space as well as time . . . Well, these are details. The journey is the thing.”