Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Mardina clutched her baby, who stirred and gurgled. “Then there’s hope.”

  But Stef said gravely, “Only three. Remember? That was how he opened this conversation. Only three. Only three of us can do this, pass through the Hatch. Is that what you mean, Earthshine?”

  And suddenly the group seemed an enormous crowd: Mardina and her baby, sitting between Chu and her mother Beth; Titus with his daughter clutching his one good hand; Stef sitting alone—and the ColU and Earthshine, two artificial people. Seven of them, or nine, depending on your definition. Of whom only three could survive.

  “Why?” Mardina found her voice came out as a snarl. “Why only three?”

  Earthshine sighed. “I suspect it is simply because of the world we sit in. Per Ardua. The records show that the builders, using Hatches—”

  “Ah. I remember,” Beth said. “The builders did everything in threes. Their bodies had triple symmetries—three legs. They moved in groups of three, or threes of threes—nine, or twenty-seven.” She laughed, bitterly. “These Dreamers of yours can’t tell how many we are, Earthshine! They can’t tell the difference between us and builders!”

  “Which only shows how remote they are from us,” Earthshine said. “Yet they are trying to be—kind.”

  Titus growled, “And so we have the game before us—the battlefield set out, and we can’t change that. Three to go through, six to remain. And we must decide which three, right now.”

  Mardina saw people pull back, as if more shocked by that pronouncement than by Earthshine’s revelations. As for herself, she clutched her baby harder. The sting of hope in her chest was more painful than the despair.

  Stef looked small and frail, a blanket over her shoulders. But she said firmly, “Titus, it’s too soon. We have a little time left, time to think.”

  “No. In war I have seen similar situations. Some must die so the others can live. We decide this now, and we stick to the decision. Otherwise we will tear ourselves apart. Perhaps literally; we might destroy each other, fighting for a place. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

  “We would not do that,” Clodia said.

  “We might,” Stef said ruefully. She turned to Mardina. “You, Mardina, and the baby. If nobody else—you. You two are the future of this peculiar little extended family of ours. Of course you must live.”

  Mardina felt tears well. “But—”

  “No.” Titus held up his hand. “No arguments. Of course she is right; we would not be human if we chose otherwise.”

  The ColU said, “I am not human at all, and I concur. And as for myself and Earthshine, we should be ruled out. We are created beings, created to serve humanity. And how better can we serve humans now than by saving as many of you as we can? But I speak for myself. Earthshine, your origin is more complicated than mine—”

  “Oh, I’m staying right here,” Earthshine said. “I want to see the End Time firework display. Seventeen billion years in the making—I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” He seemed to think that over. “Ha! I made a joke.”

  “And I of course will stay,” Stef said. “I’ve done my Hatch-hopping, and I’m too old for babies. Too old even to babysit. And, yes, I admit I’m curious too about the End Time. An entirely novel physical phenomenon. We should work up an observation suite, Earthshine. Do some decent science. Perhaps there will be time to debunk a few theories before the lights go out.”

  “I look forward to it, Stef Kalinski.”

  Titus growled, “I, of course, will stay. After all, you would probably all be dead before the End Time anyhow if not for my organization and leadership.”

  Stef smiled. “I won’t deny that, Titus Valerius.”

  Clodia clutched her father, burying her head against his chest.

  “So,” Stef said now. “That leaves three candidates for one place.”

  Again there was a dismal silence as they shared looks. The remaining candidates were Beth, mother of Mardina. Chu Yuen, father of the baby. Clodia, who was younger than Mardina herself.

  Clodia spoke first. “It must be Chu,” she whispered. “The baby needs her father. And Mardina will need Chu’s strength and wisdom. Take Chu, not me.”

  Her father embraced her. “Good girl. We will be together. Romanitas to the end.”

  “She’s right,” Beth said impulsively to Chu Yuen. “Of course it must be you. You’re the father. You’re a good man, Chu. And you’re much stronger than I ever could be—”

  Mardina broke down completely now. With her baby in her arms she stumbled over to Beth. “No! Mother, I can’t be without you.”

  “Yes, you can.” Beth took her by the shoulders, and held her, looking into her daughter’s face. “You can do this. You must—you will. My father, Yuri, used to speak of doors he passed through in his life. He fell asleep on Earth, woke up on Mars, and wound up on Per Ardua, light-years from home and a century out of his time. Just another door opening, he would say. You go through it and deal with what you find.”

  “When he died,” the ColU said, “he said the same thing, even at the end. I was with him, in deep space . . . Just another door, he said.”

  Mardina gasped, “But what about you? Mother, what about you?”

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. I won’t be alone.”

  “You will not,” the ColU said. “Just as I attended your father’s death, Beth Eden Jones, so I was there at your birth. I will be honored to have your company now.”

  Stef let out a deep breath. “I admit, right now I could use a hug. But I’ll wait my turn. So, Earthshine, you got your news out, and the decision is made.”

  “And we have a lot of work to do,” Earthshine said gravely.

  74

  Time ran down quickly after that.

  Stef Kalinski found herself counting down landmarks. Things she’d never see again, or do again. A last shower, in the crude lash-up they’d set up at one end of the dome. A last dinner with the group. The last time she flossed what was left of her teeth . . .

  Suddenly it was the final time there would ever be a tomorrow.

  They had taken to sleeping in separate little huddles around the dome, Chu with Mardina and the baby, Titus close to his daughter. That last night, by unspoken consent, they pulled their sleeping gear together in a rough circle close to Earthshine’s static installation. The last nine, including Earthshine and the ColU, alone on this world—perhaps the last humans in the universe—gathered together in a dome illuminated by low-level lights, and the sunset glow of Andromeda.

  Stef surprised herself by sleeping pretty well, for an old buzzard, she told herself. It was almost a comfort to be woken a couple of times by the baby’s demands to be fed, and the murmuring of Beth as she helped her daughter. Stef smiled in the dark. Poor Mardina still had her duties to perform, end of the world or not. Who would be a mother?

  Actually Stef would, right now.

  When she woke, there were only hours left.

  • • •

  In the dome morning, after a subdued breakfast, the first order of the day was to get Chu, Mardina and the baby installed in the Hatch.

  Earthshine had created a protective sphere, like the one in which he’d encased his probe to the End Time: a thick heat-absorbent shell that, he believed, had kept the probe functioning for fractions of a nanosecond, while Ari Guthfrithson and Inguill had been immediately destroyed. Maybe it could help now, in this new transition—and the ColU had agreed that it could do no harm.

  The shell, scaled up to take humans, was like a big smooth egg, the cross-section of its shell thick—it had taken a squad of fabricators some time to construct. It looked scary, the threat it embodied was scary, and Mardina and Chu looked suitably anxious as they wriggled their way into the tight interior, with their packs of tools and clothes and food and water and baby stuff—even pressure suits, improvised from the Mar
s gear Beth had brought with her. With all that stuff crammed in, there was barely room to move. But the young family would just sit out the remaining time in the shell. Earthshine said it was confident the Dreamers would take care of their destiny from that point on; no more need for palm prints in indentations in doors.

  Then it was time to seal the shell, and close up the Hatch. Time for Beth to say goodbye to her daughter, the others to lose their friends.

  Stef had always had a feeling she was going to have trouble getting through this part of the day without making a fool of herself, and so she said her farewell with a quick hug of Chu and Mardina, a last stroke of the baby’s smooth and untroubled forehead. Then she took herself away from the sundered family.

  She set off around the dome, on a last round of chores. She checked the lights and heating that excluded the Per Arduan farside cold and dark, preserving the banks of green growing things they cultivated here.

  And she found Clodia.

  The Roman girl was carrying cans of water, and packets of plant food synthesized by Earthshine, some for the potatoes and beets and other terrestrial imports, some for the Arduan plants. As she worked her way along the rows of young eye-leaves, Stef saw that Clodia was smiling.

  Stef joined her. “This place is pretty neat and tidy.”

  “That’s my father for you. He’s been preparing for the end of the world like it is an inspection by Centurion Quintus Fabius.”

  Stef laughed.

  “Meanwhile,” Clodia said, “I don’t see why these should go hungry. Even today.”

  “No indeed. Look, the eye-leaves are turning to follow you.”

  “They always do. Every day. I make sure I don’t walk too fast, so they can track me.”

  “Considerate. And you always smile at them?”

  Clodia shrugged, as if embarrassed. “Why not? I never saw a builder, only pictures of them. But I see those eyes looking at me, and I don’t know what kind of mind lies behind them. I never knew anybody who didn’t feel better for being smiled at, did you?”

  “I suppose not . . .”

  Stef was aware of time passing. They had all said resolutely that they didn’t want a countdown, but on this last day Stef couldn’t help have at least a rudimentary sense of the hour. And she knew—

  A horn sounded, a signal Earthshine had insisted on.

  “Come on. Let’s get back to your father.”

  • • •

  Once again the group gathered beside Earthshine’s spidery enclosure. A fire had been lit, though it wasn’t cold in the dome; its crackling was comforting, and a bowl of water was bubbling to the boil.

  Titus was squatting on a bench, with a mug of what looked like beer in his one hand. Stef knew he had been experimenting with home brewing; he said that all legionaries learned such skills on long marches away from home. Stef herself had assiduously avoided any contact with the stuff.

  Clodia helped herself to a mug of tea and went to sit by her father, on blankets at his feet, and cuddled up against his legs. Now Stef could see Clodia’s eyes were puffy, her cheeks streaked, as if she’d been crying. Stef cursed herself for not noticing before. Crying over what, the coming end for her father, the loss of her own military dreams? If so, at least she seemed calm now. That was the gardening, Stef thought. Nothing calmed you quite so much as cultivating your garden. Even when it didn’t have eyes to look back at you.

  Beth was sitting alone, wrapped in a blanket—no, not alone, Stef realized; she was close to the winking unit of the ColU, her friend from childhood. Beth had seemed unable to move far from the Hatch since it had been closed over Mardina and Chu and Gwen. Stef found it hard to blame her, and nobody was of a mind to force her away. But now Beth was clutching a kind of crude doll to her chest: Mister Sticks, a toy from her own childhood, made for her by the ColU when it still had a body and manipulator arms to do it. This copy had been made from dry Arduan stems by Clodia, under the ColU’s strict instructions.

  Stef poured out two mugs of tea, and carried them over to Beth. “May I join you?”

  “Why not?” Beth’s voice was bleak, empty. But she responded reflexively when Stef handed her the tea, moved along her bench a little, and let Stef sit down. Stef pulled a blanket over her own shoulders, and reached under layers of cloth until she found Beth’s hand.

  “So we are all here,” Earthshine said. “I take it you don’t want a countdown—”

  Titus snapped, “No, we do not!”

  “Very well. But, Stef, you may wish to have your slate to hand.”

  “Damn.” She’d forgotten about that. Just as they’d decided, she and the ColU and Earthshine were going to keep monitoring the science of this event, as long as they could. She had to rummage under her blanket in her capacious pockets until she found the slate, dug it out and wiped its surface clean of bits of lint with a corner of her blanket. Here was another survivor, she thought, another relic of a different universe. She wondered where she’d first picked it up. Mars? The moon? Never imagining that it would still be here with her now, in such a place, in such a time.

  The screen lit up with displays: simple counts, graphics. She scanned the material quickly, immediately understanding the most basic implication. “There’s a radiation surge. It’s already started, then.” She felt dismay at the first real physical proof of the end: that it was real after all, just as Earthshine had predicted, despite all their efforts to believe otherwise.

  “In a sense, yes,” said the ColU. “Already we’re seeing high-energy radiation, heavy nuclei—rather like cosmic rays. A flood of it coming backward in time. And pretty bad for your health, by the way.”

  She had to laugh. “What, we’d all be dead of radiation poisoning in a year? Remind me not to renew my life insurance.”

  “It’s going to ramp up from here. Soon we’ll be seeing exotic nuclei, elements nobody ever saw before—or named. Stef Kalinski, you’ll be the greatest discoverer of exotic physics that ever lived.”

  “Yeah . . . So how are you feeling, ColU? Do you understand what is about to happen to you?”

  “Yes, Stef Kalinski. I am to be turned off at zero.”

  “Well, that’s close enough.”

  “It may be easier for artificial intelligences to understand than humans, organic creatures, in fact. The possibility that consciousness may terminate, suddenly: anybody fitted with an off switch knows all about that.”

  Beth stroked its shell. “Good luck, ColU. And thank you.”

  “Thank you for loving me,” the ColU said, to Stef’s surprise.

  The dome lights flickered once, twice, and failed.

  Even Stef’s slate went down. She patted its surface, and set it aside. The end of science.

  The ColU said, “That’s probably the radiation. Earthshine and I have hardened power units. We should keep functioning a little longer.”

  Now the only glow came from the sky, from the sprawl of Andromeda—a tremendous galaxy doomed to destruction just as was her own feeble frame, Stef thought. Her friends were shapes in the dark around her. And as her eyes adjusted Stef began to see the stars above.

  Earthshine whispered, “The wolves that have always chased day and night through the sky are catching them at last . . .”

  Under the blanket, Beth’s fingers tightened on Stef’s.

  Stef heard Titus take a long, satisfying draft of his beer. Then he said, “You know, this reminds me of a time on campaign when . . .”

  75

  Earthshine’s protective egg broke open around them, just as it was supposed to, dumping Mardina, Chu and the baby on the floor of the Hatch pit, with all their bits of gear.

  But the Hatch lid was open above them. Looking up, Mardina saw a slice of what looked like the roof of a dome—higher, more solid-looking than the one Earthshine had built.

  Mardina clutched her baby and star
ed at Chu. “Alive,” she whispered.

  “Alive. But where?”

  “Or rather, when?”

  Gwen, half asleep, yawned hugely.

  “Come on,” Mardina said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They had a lightweight, fold-up ladder fabricated by Earthshine for just this instance. They dug it out of the baggage and the shell shards littering the pit, quickly set it up against the wall, and Chu scrambled up. He didn’t look around, Mardina saw; he had eyes only for his family, still in the pit. He reached down. “Pass her up.”

  Mardina took a couple of steps up the ladder, and then, clumsily, passed up the bundle that was Gwen. They fumbled the handover, making Gwen squirm and grumble, and they laughed.

  “Look at us,” said Mardina. “Two idiots, traveling in time.”

  “But we’re here.”

  “That we are.”

  Once Chu had Gwen safely in his arms, Mardina scrambled quickly out of the pit herself, and took back the baby.

  Then they stood together and faced a new world.

  They stood on a smoothly finished floor of neatly interlocking tiles. Over their heads soared that dome, and now that she could see it fully, Mardina could make out its scale; it was indeed much wider, taller than Earthshine’s improvised tent. There were smaller buildings, structures under the dome, banks of machinery, some kind of towering monument at the very center of the dome—there was a smell of industry, of electricity, and all of it brilliantly lit by suspended fluorescent lamps.

  In this first moment, clutching the baby, Mardina could take in none of the detail. She looked up at the sky, which was easily visible through the dome.

  “No Andromeda,” said Chu. “A starry sky. And look . . .”

  There was one very brilliant pair of stars, close to the zenith.

  Mardina raised herself on the balls of her feet, rocked up and down. “How does the gravity seem to you?”