Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  And he knew, under all the dancing around and the meaningless words, that she felt the same about him.

  He kept trying. ‘Just a little further and we’ll be there. Imagine the stories you can tell the other Sapphires -’

  ‘Oh, them.’ She pulled a face. Then her mood seemed to switch, abruptly. ‘I’ll do it!’ And she grabbed the rungs and began to climb.

  This was so sudden and impulsive she left him standing in surprise - and he wondered who was seducing who. But he scurried up the ladder after her, relishing the glimpses of a pert behind through the robe’s billowing folds.

  They soon came to the top of the ladder, and climbed onto a walkway, of roughened wooden slats set in basalt blocks. Brod had never been to the Navel before this Colloquy; he knew nothing of its treasures. Now he saw that the top of this cylindrical tower enclosed a kind of shallow dish perhaps a hundred paces across, a bowl coated by what looked like a thin, black layer of Slime.

  And they weren’t alone up here. Bulky animals were set out along one radius of the circular dish – he counted twenty of them, spaced a few paces apart. They were working their way around the bowl, the row of them sweeping around the dish like a clock hand; he saw that the outermost had to move faster than those nearer the centre to keep the line straight. And they were scraping up the Slime layer as they went, exposing a surface that gleamed like the wing of a mirror-bird. Big brutes, each coated in thick brown-black hair, snuffling and snorting and their squat legs working, he recognised them as tractors, with their big gouging jaws and spade-like multiple tails, used in the fields around Port Wilson for ploughing the fields and digging ditches. Whatever else he’d expected to find up here, it hadn’t been these mundane beasts! And it must have been quite a challenge, he thought, to get them up here in the first place.

  ‘You can see the whole island from here,’ Vala said, turning around, her gown billowing about her. ‘And the other islands beyond.’

  Brod glanced around indifferently. The Navel was a scrap of land in a sea like a burnished shield, one of a chain that stretched off to the west. There was really nothing special about the Navel – save that it sat precisely at Substellar, making it the holiest point on the whole planet, and the reason why tens of thousands of pilgrims made their way here every Great Year. So, despite the Navel’s smallness, isolation and poor harbours, the warehouses, hotels, restaurants, palaces and churches that served an industry of holiness lapped right up to the walls of this central complex of temples and towers.

  A bell chimed, marking the end of another eight-hour watch.

  ‘We ought to be getting back,’ Vala said nervously. ‘My brother will be looking for me.’

  That was Khilli, a brute of a man and even more possessive than her holy father. ‘Oh, but we only just got here. I don’t even understand what I’m looking at. What is this place?’

  ‘We call it the Eye of the Master Controller.’ She pointed. ‘People built the outer wall, and this walkway. But the core of the tower and the great dish is Substrate.’ A structure put in place before humans ever came here – or a piece of engineered reality underlying the ephemeral Sim forms, depending on your faith. ‘And at the end of every Great Year, when the tithe fleets call, we have the tractors peel off the Slime that encrusts the Eye, just as they’re doing now.’

  ‘And then what?’

  She squeezed his hand, playful. ‘You’ll have to wait until the end of the next watch to see! Although mucking about with the Eye is about as exciting as things get around here.’

  ‘Don’t Sapphires have any fun? We have a good time in Wilson. If you came away with me you’d see.’ Suddenly he wondered what he was saying – she was, after all, the daughter of Elios Speaker of Speakers! Again he wondered who was really in control here - and yet there was something in her manner, a mixture of innocence and coquettishness, that led him on helplessly.

  Now she said, ‘Fun? What kind of fun? Show me.’

  ‘All right.’ He looked around. ‘We have tractors back home. Sometimes we have a little fun with them.’ He stripped off his jacket, revealing a muscled torso creased by the scars of a life of fighting. ‘Hold my coat – and watch!’ He jumped down off the wall onto the surface of the Eye, and took an experimental step. On the bands of Slime the footing was good enough, though the Slime itself was unpleasantly slick and oily, but the mirrored surface beneath was as sheer as it looked. Hopping between the bands of Slime, he sprinted after the nearest tractor.

  Vala called down, agitated. ‘Brod – oh, Brod! What are you doing? You’ll get us into terrible trouble!’

  He just grinned back. As he reached the beast he jumped, slapping the tractor’s rump with both hands, did a back-flip, and landed with both feet on the animal’s double spine. The moment of landing was always the trickiest, and he flailed as he shed his momentum, but then he stood proud. The beast lumbered on, indifferent, and he could feel the complex motion imparted by its six limbs, and the ripple of the banks of muscles under its tough hide. He whooped, and looked back at Vala.

  She squealed, and clapped and jumped like a child. He imagined her telling this story to the other Sapphires, pretty virgins like herself gathered like flowers in a breeze.

  But then a voice like a volcano’s rumble came echoing up from below the walls. ‘Vala? Vala! You’re supposed to be at the tithe accounting. Vala, where are you? If I find out you’ve been fooling around with that idiot sailor again …’

  It was Khilli, the evil brother. Vala looked down, anxious.

  Brod back-flipped off the tractor, and hurried back to her. ‘You should go,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ Yet she did not move.

  And they kissed. Afterwards he was never sure who made the first move.

  II

  ‘Vala! Vala! …’

  As she waited for the Polar woman, Tripp, to visit her, Maryam listened to the stentorian voice of Khilli echoing through the streets of the Navel’s crowded township. Son of the Speaker of Speakers, brother of the most beautiful of all the current crop of Sapphires, and a brute of a man in his own right, Khilli was capable of causing a great deal of trouble if you got in his way, Maryam suspected. And she hoped beyond hope that her son Brod had nothing to do with the strange absence of Vala.

  In the meantime she awaited her visitor. For their private talks, Tripp the Polar would naturally come to Maryam’s suite, rather than the other way around. Maryam and Brod hailed from Port Wilson, one of the principal embarkation points on the south coast of Seba, the continent that dominated the northern hemisphere. From the point of view of the Speakers Wilson was essential not just for the tithes it provided itself but as a conduit through which flowed much of the wealth of the scattered communities of the continent. So Maryam had been given an apartment of several rooms in an upper level of this Seventh Palace of the Sim Designers, laden with fine furniture and with banks of photomoss lighting every dark corner. From here she had a grand view of the Navel in all its crowded complexity, and the flat light of the Star beat down on the world from its eerie position directly above her.

  Whereas Tripp was just a Polar, a woman hailing from the edge of the endless shadow of Darkside. So she was stuck in some room deep inside the carcass of the Palace, a windowless, airless, lightless cell with a bathroom you had to share.

  And, as the woman arrived and bustled into the room, there was something dark about Tripp herself, Maryam thought.

  After a formal greeting the Polar unbuttoned her heavy coat, slumped in a chair, and accepted a glass of wine. Tripp was short, compact, muscular – it was said that it was better to be short and round if you had to withstand the insidious cold of the Pole – and she wore a heavy coat of tractor-fur lined with sheep’s wool. Aged about forty, maybe ten Great Years younger than Maryam herself, she had a round, weather-beaten face, grey-black hair pulled back from a high forehead, and a customarily stern expression. Maryam didn’t actually know much about her personally – she’d heard hints of husbands back hom
e, of children. Tripp was too serious a person to make small talk with.

  She had a leather packet which she opened, and spread documents of some kind over a small table expensively carved from solid basalt. She had to move a bowl of apples out of the way to make room. Maryam glanced at the papers, not very interested; they were clearly old – or looked old – torn, fragmented, yellowed, and stained with various fluids. Some were covered with close-printed text in an archaic language, and others bore enigmatic diagrams.

  ‘You look as if you’re having a bad watch,’ Maryam essayed, as they sat together.

  ‘Aren’t you? The negotiations over the tithe levels get worse every Great Year …’

  A Great Year was twenty-four small-years, each of which lasted for forty-five watches – the time it took Earth III to circle its Star. And as Maryam grew older, the interval between these Colloquies, at which tithe levels were set and reset, seemed to get shorter every time.

  Tripp was evidently distracted by Khilli’s continued bellowing. ‘Vala! Vala!’

  ‘And the aggressive attitude of the Speakerhood is increasingly dismaying,’ Tripp said. ‘The young man you hear in the streets below, calling for his sister, is himself a son of the Speaker of Speakers.’

  ‘I know -’

  ‘Khilli to me symbolises the increasing dominance the Speakers are asserting, and not too subtly - the Speakers and their craven allies, who scuttle to obey in return for the waiving of a few tithes.’

  ‘Wealth breeds power, which accrues more wealth.’

  ‘Yes. And I suspect if we knew more about humanity’s history, we’d recognise that as an old, old story.’ Tripp grinned fiercely, showing browned teeth. ‘At least you in Wilson are now finding out what it’s like to be at the mercy of the Speakers, as we at the Pole have been for generations. We rely for our very survival on the trade the Speakers control. The metals and other minerals we mine pay for our tithes, and for the food imports we need to survive -’

  Maryam nodded curtly, and glanced around. ‘My staff relayed something of your proposals to me.’ The Polars had been floating a suggestion to cut out the Speakerhood by negotiating a covert but direct trading deal between Wilson and the Pole. Aside from the direct benefit to the Polars, they argued that such openness would lead to a rapid growth in the planetary economy, after its strangling by the Speakers’ control. Maryam said softly, ‘I’m never sure who’s listening, here in this palace. It’s best not to go into details here. Plenty of my companions are fearful of the wrath of the Speakers, and of the Controllers.’

  Tripp snorted. ‘More fool them. By indulging in such superstitions they are doing the Speakers’ work for them. As if they are forging the bars of their own cages.’

  Maryam was irritated, as she often was, by the smug, strange Polars with their arrogance and certitude. ‘It may be a mere set of “beliefs” to you, that we live in a Simulated reality. The fact is, it is the foundation of a religion of global reach and power. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting in this Palace dedicated to the Controllers’ worship, would we?’ She riffled through the pages on the table between them. ‘And are these more pages of the “Venus Document” you’ve been trying to buy up?’

  ‘Those that aren’t forgeries, good enough to fool me.’

  ‘Aren’t you being contradictory? It seems to me that by seeking out these things you’re tacitly admitting the historical existence of Helen Gray, whose life story is a key part of the entire legend.’

  Tripp looked irritated in her turn. ‘We don’t deny all of the standard account of the past. You have to consider our myths and legends as source material, to be handled sceptically.

  ‘We do believe that Helen Gray, and Wilson Argent and Jeb Holden, all existed. It’s just that we don’t believe they were created out of thin air, along with the Thirty-Seven Children, by any Sim Designers. They all came here in some kind of ship, from another world – from Earth I, maybe, or Earth II. A ship of space. Helen, Wilson and Jeb were the only adults. We believe they fought – and my opinion is Wilson and Jeb fought over Helen, the only woman, as simple as that, and never mind more fanciful theories – and killed each other off a mere three Great Years after landing, and left the Thirty-Seven to grow up unsupervised, and fend for themselves as best they could. And we are all their children, a thousand Great Years later. That in itself is a remarkable story.’

  ‘But if that’s so, where does the legend of the Sim Controllers come from?’

  ‘Probably from half-memories of a space mission the Children grew up barely remembering, and never understood! There are pages in the Venus Document that hint at a kind of madness among the crew of that ship – locked up for decades, whole generations living and dying in a metal prison. Some of them came to believe that it was all a hoax and they were being watched, the way you might watch a mirror-bird in a cage.’ She waved a hand. ‘And so this tremendous layered theology, this edifice of power and wealth – all of it came out of a child’s bad dream! We’re lucky that before she died Helen Gray managed to set down a kind of story of her world, and the trip she’d taken. She called it the Venus Document – we think Venus was a companion on the ship. The Document was seen as heretical from the age of the first Speakers. It was locked away, copied, broken up so its imagery could be used as fine art, burned, forged … We suspect only fragments remain. But those fragments, when sifted, are enough to prove -’

  ‘To the satisfaction of you Polars, at least -’

  ‘- that this world is real. It’s no Simulation. And that humans came here, somehow, from somewhere else.’

  ‘I thought you Polars were rationalists.’

  ‘Well, we have to be. We think the fact that we have to mine for a living has made us deeper natural philosophers than you farmers. We’re favoured for astronomy, too; from here you rarely even see the lesser stars beyond the Star. We like to believe we rediscovered science.’

  ‘Yet you accept the authority of a long-dead and semi-mythical figure like Helen Gray!’

  Tripp pushed away the pages crossly. ‘Not just that, woman! Anybody who looks around at this world we live in – really looks – will see that humans don’t belong here. There are whole layers of life here, Maryam, one laid atop another, as immiscible as oil and water! We humans and our trees and grass and cows and sheep are latecomers. Before we came you had the tractors and the tunnel-moles and the mirror-birds, animals which seem to have been engineered to do specific jobs, engineered and then abandoned. The Slime seems to be a bacterial life form which may be a true native of this planet. And under all that you have the Substrate, as it’s called, relics that may be older than life itself, or anyhow the kinds of life we see now. The tractors and even the Slime are like our kind of life, relying on carbon and water and nitrogen – if we hadn’t forgotten everything Helen knew, we could probably say how alike. But we can’t eat the tractors, and the tractors can’t eat the Slime – that fact alone proves we’re different! – even if we’re from the same wider family, and we have some interesting ideas about that.’

  Maryam tried to provoke her. ‘The Speakers say the Substrate buildings are elements of the vast Sim chamber that generates the world.’

  ‘Phooey. They are clearly relics of some culture that was here long before we humans arrived. And yet they were drawn to the same pivotal locations we were, for surely the geometry of the planet hasn’t changed. This, in fact, is what I came to talk to you about. We’ve another proposal for you to consider.’

  Maryam felt faintly uneasy, wondering what was coming.

  Tripp picked an apple out of the bowl on the table. ‘Earth III orbits close to its Star, which is small and cool – according to Helen – compared to other stars in the sky.’ She made the apple orbit her fist, turning it steadily. ‘The world is locked, and turns so that a single hemisphere always faces the Star.’

  ‘That’s elementary -’

  ‘Yes. But because of that elementary fact, our world is blessed with a certain number of uniqu
e locations. The Substellar point – right here. The Poles, for our world does have an axis about which it turns, even if the rotation is locked – or at least our north Pole, for there is only ocean at the south Pole. The Equator – especially those points on the Terminator, east and west, standing between dark and light. All these places the builders of the Substrate visited, for surely they were as attracted by their geometric significance as we are. There are hints in Helen’s document that the ship’s crew found structures at geometric points off the planet as well as on it – places of orbital stability … All this was built a long, long time ago. You can tell that by the rock layers that have formed over some of the structures. As much as a billion Great Years ago, perhaps.’

  In an effort to regain control of the conversation, Maryam took the apple off her and bit into it. ‘Fascinating. So what is your proposal?’

  Tripp smiled. ‘from my list of significant points, here in this static little system of ours, I omitted one.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Antistellar. The point which is precisely opposite the Navel, the Substellar, on the other side of the world – the point at the heart of Darkside.’

  ‘There’s nothing there but ice.’

  ‘Maybe. We know nothing about it save mentions in Helen’s record – a record many dispute as authentic.’ She leaned forward. ‘But what is surely true is that the Substrate builders must have gone there. And surely they built something there. Perhaps we Polars, we burrowing miners, will be able to understand it. Perhaps we’ll be able to use it. And there’s the matter of scientific curiosity, which Helen Gray counsels us to cultivate. Who knows what we might learn, about the world and ourselves? And anyhow it’s surely better we get to it before it occurs to the Speakers to go there.’