The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

Felix means lucky, you see.

  Since then I served as a slave on three planets and four moons, and under two cruel masters, before being bought up for my writing skills – a forgotten craft – by Magnus Lucretius.

  Magnus acquired me at a slave auction almost one year ago to the day. His purchase came eagerly after he saw the Athenian-branding on my right arm. It was, he told me later, a sure sign of quality craftsmanship, the likes of which he had rarely seen. It is common knowledge that Greek slaves had forever been the preferred choice of a discerning master.

  I was the only slave of quality available that day, so I could not truly compare myself. My only flaw, according to the dealer, was with my eye lenses, which had trouble focusing on occasion, but I believed Magnus when he said I was of exceptional craftsmanship. The others with whom I shared the platform suffered from occasionally problematic hydraulics, which would make pouring wine difficult, let alone writing. They would clearly be sub-par slaves and as a consequence fetched a very cheap price.

  Magnus was kind to me. He rewrote my systems so that my memories of the war were deleted, and installed file after file of old civilizations and long-forgotten tongues. I have retained my core model files – a basic familiarity with, and acceptance of, emotions, to enable us slaves to understand and tolerate the nuances of our human masters, who rarely follow logic.

  Because of the fashion in which Magnus reworked my circuitry, I feel have always struggled to recall old events. Luckily the flaw seems confined only to moments in my own history rather than the ability to recall facts. Sometimes I cannot tell if this is a curse or a blessing. Magnus claims, however, that it can be best to forget the past, so I am content.

  There were four other slaves in Magnus’ villa, but they were retired upon my arrival. There are human servants that work away in the gardens or tend to the horses, but I conduct all his more sophisticated business. Magnus likes to keep me close – he tells me he does not trust humans.

  But enough about me.

  Because this story is not about me at all. It is about Magnus Lucretius, a great man, though perhaps I am programmed to say that.

  Magnus Lucretius was the finest mind of his generation. He was a planetcrafter, wealthy to the tune of seventeen trillion pounds. “Planetcrafter” is a deceptive name because he also terraformed planetoids and planetismals to make them environmentally similar to Earth.

  The moral questions of engineering an alien landscape I will leave aside.

  Magnus Lucretius, in his lifetime, re-housed three billion people – a fraction of those still on Earth admittedly – but his work relieved local population pressures to a great extent and saved many lives from the conflicts that beset our age. His company, Basilica Holdings, currently conducts development works on four planets and seventeen moons in three systems, two of which do not rely upon a dome.

  Perhaps it was his appreciation of engineering that led Magnus, at an early age, to form a love of ancient Earth cultures. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I cannot know.

  “It’s damn remarkable, Felix,” he once said, as we reclined in his blue gardens during my first sunset on Europa, “how three thousand years ago people could build structures on a scale that wouldn’t be seen again for millennia. They built aqueducts that stretched for thousands of miles, all to allow people to live in the deserts! If that ain’t terraforming, I don’t know what is. People who harp on about what I do need to learn a thing or two about the past. Now those were people who knew how to do things.”

  Forgive his use of language, but Magnus was a passionate man and did not like those who questioned the art of planetcraft. And note how I, too, was allowed to recline alongside him – such brazen intimacy was rare for a slave and is some indication on how he would treat me as a friend and confidant rather than as someone he owned.

  Perhaps because I know little of my own past, I felt an urge to encourage him to talk of his history and his dreams. I believe he liked such conversations, that they took his mind off the stresses of daily business.

  “Felix,” he said that same sunset, “I’ve read them all. Studied everything from Romulus to Justinian. Digested the works of Al-Kindi and of those who passed through the Platonic Academy. Herodotus and Livy. The lot. Y’know what?”

  “No, dominus.”

  “Knowledge hasn’t moved on. Sure we’ve refined things, but we’re all pretty much stuck in the past.”

  During the galactice-wide depresion, a good few years before he purchased me, he bought Europa at a knockdown price. It was there that he was able to combine both of his loves, planetcraft and of the ancient world.

  “It’s a worthless rock,” he said. “I told my accountants that and they couldn’t do a thing to stop me buying it. So I did. And I’m having my fun with it.”

  And I was lucky enough to witness the latter stages of his “fun”. Though the moon had been promptly domed, the skin was created so finely that one could not perceive being inside a bubble.

  His project – his driving passion – was to transform this modern moon into an ancient Earth world. He recreated ancient battles with cheap droids and spectacular visual effects. The cities of the past were born again with precisely the same layouts and architecture. Laws were adjusted to reflect the Law of the Twelve Tables, echoing the ancient Roman Republic. There were brothels and baths, games and Gauls, anything one could wish for.

  Starships began to stop by Europa on their way elsewhere. Passengers, jaded from interstellar travel and homesickness, were delighted to find on Europa something to stimulate both the intellect and libido. It was a moon where men and women could unwind. They could spend a carefree cycle watching epic battles, visiting the brothels or simply sitting in marvellous ornamental gardens amid the statues and the fountains. Because Magnus was not looking to turn a profit, and because he had no need of the weatlh, there was no modern, corporate advertising to ruin the effect, as could be found on other moons.

  Magnus did rename Europa, however. He called the rock Orbis Romanus.

  In the later stages of the project, he reined in the excesses of wealthy travellers and burnt-out workers, and began to transform his project into a more family-friendly tourist destination. Scholars – those who had not been invited initially to help with the recreations – visited from Earth, bringing with them their students and their partners (who were sometimes both) for a weekend away. Magnus entertained those scholars and gleaned information from them. They became his advisors; they helped him fine-tune Orbis Romanus.

  Since the galaxy’s economy had recovered, what was once a worthless rock happened now to be a habitable, fully terraformed moon situated on burgeoning trade routes. It was one of the most valuable properties in the solar system.

  Despite his ability to shape worlds, I believe Magnus Lucretious found himself dissatisfied on Orbis Romanus. He was Mark Antony without his Cleopatra.

  Moreover, it came quite apparent that there was a new direction to his historical recreations.

  Magnus orchestrated certain battles, ones from between the second and third century AD. The Roman-Parthian War, the Dacian Wars. Poetry was read out, and plays performed on stage, all of which had originally been written in that same era. And if the text could not be found, it was written by his pet academics to mimic the style of the era.

  Citizens and tourists alike were encouraged to wear the dress style of that particular time. Buildings were reworked in that same fashion. The whole of Orbis Romanus’ most developed sector became a vast city plucked straight out of that same era. Even the walls of our mansion were covered in fourth style Roman frescos – bright and bold colours detailing classical scenes, all of which were set within frames painted to look like columns.

  I came to my own conclusions about his actions, and finally determined to ask him. As Magnus was sprawling in bed one evening, I served him his food, and put my thoughts to him.

  He turned to look at me from his pillow and it was only then I noticed yet another woman in the b
ed next to him, almost hidden beneath the sheets.

  “Ah, my apologies, dominus,” I said, backing away.

  But what I’d said to him seemed to have touched him in some way.

  He sighed. “No you’re right. I can’t hide anything from you, Felix. That’s the Athenian quality, right there. Give me a moment to cover up my arse and we’ll talk.”

  We walked through the gardens listening to a lyre player. Directly above us a ship with Saturnian insignia fragmented into being, a good fourteen miles from the nearest skyport. Normally Magnus would lose his temper at such poor use of mathematics, but not today. He merely smiled at the error and continued through the gardens as the ship’s engines flamed and burned the sky, turning the vessel in a slow arc to the north. There came a sudden peace after it had left, and the purpling sky settled calmly into its previous state. The lyre player continued. The faint contrails left from other, slower ships could be seen extending through to the horizon.

  “Her name was Cornelia,” Magus breathed.

  “The woman in bed, dominus?”

  “No. Gods, no. That was just one of the actresses from the theatre. No, Cornelia... she was, is, the reason for all of this. You know as well as I do how little money this place makes.”

  “I believe it has yielded a four billion pound loss thus far, dominus.” There had been opportunities for it to make more revenue - anyone could see that – but here, for just this property, Magnus seemed content that the project be about something else, something other than the balance sheet.

  Waving away my reminder, he paused and smiled. “I keep thinking about her, when we talk of the old days. You helped me do that, our little conversations now and then, when we revisit the past – well, when I speak of the old days.”

  “I merely stirred the thoughts, dominus.”

  “Well, that may be. But the fountains, the courtyards, the recreations of the battles, the simulations of culture, the replications and the museum pieces... They’re all because of her.”

  “She admired these things?”

  “Cornelia used to love them, back on Earth. We were young, but she adored that era – not the fashionable end of the Republic days, but later, y’know? The later emperors, Nerva. Hadrian and even that guy he was fucking, Antinous. Cornelia was besotted by the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius – bit of a cliché looking back, but still.”

  “Do you think she has heard of Orbis Romanus?”

  “Given the amount of advertising I’ve spent on Earth in the past year, I would be impressed if she hadn’t. Every time she read an article on her tab she’d see a personalized ad from me, expanding upon the delights of this place. ‘Relive life under the Five Good Emperors, Cornelia’, he quoted, ‘accommodation included’. ‘Do you have the nerve for Nerva?’.”

  He and Cornelia had been childhood sweethearts. She had been a vatted child, grown for an older, very wealthy childless couple. Magnus had come from a poor family. But his brains and his talent marked him for a brilliant career and he had won scholarships to the same academy as Cornelia. They met for the first time, so he said, whilst reaching for the same copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in the school library. They had an intense romance in their final year. He had even saved up part of his scholarship money to purchase her a fountain pen constructed from genuine melted Roman denarii. She wept after she had unwrapped it, and later, in the dark, they made love in the library, just beneath the Ovids

  He wanted to marry her but, because of Magnus’ poor background and family status, Cornelia’s father would not let them. Magnus made desperate overtures, of course, but his persistence annoyed her father and eventually he was forbidden from ever seeing her again. Under the portico of her family mansion he said farewell to her one last time, quietly vowing that some day he would earn enough money to please her father.

  Later, he learned that she had married a banker.

  “So you see, I want her back, Felix. I’ve managed to track her down – easy enough to do when you pay the right people. She’s divorced now, as it turns out. The time is ripe.”

  “I have heard talk among humans of the ‘one that got away’. Is this just such an example?”

  A wry smile upon his face, emotions that, despite my programming, I could not fathom. “Something like that.”

  “Why now?” I asked.

  “I have everything I could possibly want. I’m still not happy.”

  “Perhaps, if it is happiness you seek, then you will forever be disappointed.”

  “You’ve not been programmed a Stoic, have you?”

  I inclined my head. “Not unless you requested. All I can say then is that you are very persistent, dominus.”

  “That’s why I’ve got where I have today, Felix.” He seemed to regret his words immediately but, instead of offering an apology, he merely slid the garden wall up and stormed off into the kitchen. The lyre player stuttered and blacked out, and I made a note to recharge it overnight. As a matter of fact, I felt as if I needed to recharge myself.

  It was not long, a mere thirty days until after that conversation, when we heard from one of the human operators at the skyport that Cornelia was on her way to Orbis Romanus.

  The messages came through the mansion information system, relayed in every room, streaming down the windowscreens like green neon rain.

  Her ship will materialise 15 miles away within 50 minutes.

  Could someone please pick her up from the skyport at Hadrian’s Island?

  Rarely have I seen such urgency from Magnus. Following his initial excitement he managed to control himself and got dressed. Then he spent some time rehearsing lines, while he paced back and forth in the atrium, waiting for me to bring the horses around the front. He preferred tradition and insisted on horses to greet her.

  Because we needed to move with urgency, I brought the horses into the atrium and moved them over what would normally have been the impluvium, a slightly sunken rectangle in the centre of the room. We couldn’t make the skies rain on this moon, despite Magnus’ best efforts, so such drains were useless. Magnus merely used the impluvium to disguise our fastmat. He thumbed in the precise co-ordinates of the skyport on Hadrian’s Island, booked us in with the receivers, and we mounted our horses.

  Moments later, reality flickered, and a new and expensive kind of physics opened up space like a network of aqueducts.

  We slipped into a new locale.

  We rode our horses out of a large metal cylinder at Hadrian Island Skyport, a structure built in the classical style, but from toughened glass. The gathered throng – some in period dress, others in contemporary clothing as was the curious mix of citizens on Orbis Romanus – gawped as we rode our splendid mares through the chrome-lined port building, the vast windows looking out across the partial sunset.

  We waited, of course.

  Magnus grew impatient.

  Then Cornelia’s ship arrived, the screen above flickered with the image of the passengers disembarking.

  I knew it must be she from Magnus’ response – a woman with long, chestnut hair that seemed to bounce lightly with every step. In fact, she took each step cautiously, which surprised me, as her figure suggested she may have possessed a certain level of athletic skill. Her light blue dress clung to her frame, and a delicately laced white shawl covered her shoulders. She was not alone: a tall man walked beside her, dressed smartly in a black shirt, trousers and grey waistcoat – a style that contrasted harshly with her soft fashion. He possessed a broad and weathered face, though his expression was mild.

  Magnus’ countenance grew sterner upon seeing him, but he need not have worried: this other man, we soon learned, was no suitor, but her protector. Mind you, one could tell that by the way he moved around her, never touching her.

  Moments later the two of them were standing before us.

  “Magnus,” she exhaled.

  “Cornelia.”

  As I may have discussed before, I am not one for understanding emotions, but even I could re
cognise that something passed between them with that exchange. Perhaps time unbuckled itself in their eyes, the years falling apart... but who can say?

  I merely helped bring her luggage from the conveyor belt.

  Later that night, the bodyguard and I watched Magnus make love to Cornelia.

  The bodyguard ate a bowl of olives. He seemed a pleasant if quiet individual, not that the opportunity for conversation really presented itself.

  The next few days, Magnus took Cornelia and her bodyguard around Orbis Romanus. He showed her his moon and what life was like here.

  I rarely accompanied them, as I was an interloper. I prepared their evening meals and enjoyed the opportunity to refine my culinary skills in peace.

  Repeatedly, the bodyguard and myself would sit through their evening lovemaking, for he would not leave her side and I had nowhere else to go.

  “It’s really for me?” Cornelia’s eyes glittered in the sunlight.

  “Of course,” Magnus replied. “Remember those days we spent in the library? You loved that era – you were besotted with it, and so was I – and I remembered those days. I remember your affection for it. So I built it all. Just for you.”

  “But... really, just for me?”

  Magnus gave a nod.

  “What’s the catch?” she gave an awkward laugh.

  “None. Just stay here with me.”

  “You know,” she continued, “it was really only my father who stopped us. He said you were–”

  “‘An insignificant nobody who would never amount to anything.’ Well, he’s wrong. Consider this a display of my wealth, if you like. Something to show your father I’m a success. And only occasionally a layabout...”

  “So, you honestly mean to give it to me?”

  A pause. “Why not?”

  “You’re not serious!” Her excited squeal nearly short-circuited my sensors. “It it valuable?”

  “Sure,” Magnus replied. “Everyone wants a piece of it. So take it. This moon is yours – I created it for you – just as long as you really want to stay here with me.”