Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  Brod concentrated on the practicalities, such as ensuring the stocky Polar ponies did not drag them all into some stinking, bubbling pool of lethal mud.

  As the watches wore by in the endless dark they all became subdued. But Brod in particular felt a deepening disappointment, that could shade into despair – as if he had set himself on the wrong road, a path he could not now turn off.

  His relationship with Vala, or the lack of one, was surely the key to that. What had really united them had always been the physical stuff, the sex. Even on the long haul to the Pole they had been able to enjoy each other. But there was no chance of that now. Even when they found themselves alone, tucked up in one of the carts while Tripp and Astiv took the other, they rarely felt like exposing enough flesh to the cold to make any meaningful contact. And, Brod knew, the estrangement between them went deeper than that. Vala just didn’t show any interest in him any more. Whereas he missed home desperately, she was fascinated by the newness of the world she was discovering. Out of place, he was sunk in misery; her mind, which had been locked up in her role as a Sapphire, was opening like a flower.

  The idea that the whole jaunt beyond the Pole might be futile nagged at him too. Yes, they were off to explore the Antistellar, and that had always been Tripp’s goal. But they were also supposed to be fleeing Khilli. Was it really plausible that even such an obsessive as Khilli would pursue them beyond the Terminator? Were they fleeing phantoms?

  These were questions that didn’t seem to occur to the others. So he developed a habit of trying to find a scrap of high ground, every few watches, and looking back the way they had come, seeking signs of pursuit. He borrowed Tripp’s pocket telescope to help with the seeing. He found nothing, in one vigil after another. He wondered if he was wasting his time, even in this, but at least to stand watch made him feel useful.

  Then, as he stood alone in the deep dark cold, he saw a light, a pinpoint, like a star but fallen to the ground, crawling slowly but steadily across the landscape. He said nothing to the others. But after that he doubled the frequency of his watches.

  And he dug his weapons out from the depths of their stores. He tried firing his muskets, seeing if the cold affected the powder or the guns’ mechanisms. And he practiced using sword and spear, club and knife, while swathed in his heavy Darkside clothing.

  XIII

  ‘“The Galaxy is old …”’

  Sitting alone in his son’s carriage, comfortable in a lightweight simulacrum of the Left Hand Seat, Elios, Speaker of Speakers, was warm despite the chill darkness inside, with his blazing iron stove and cocooned by walls lined with padded tapestries. The light from the photomoss strips was bright enough for him to read. And, as he preferred, he read aloud, his finger following the spidery, much-copied text, trying to pick out meaning from a string of archaic words, many of which he was entirely unfamiliar with.

  ‘“As the Galaxy formed from a vast, spinning cloud of dust and gas and ice, embedded in a greater pocket of dark matter, the first stars congealed like frost. In the primordial cloud there wasn’t much of anything except hydrogen and helium, the elements that had emerged from the Big Bang. Those first stars, mostly crowded in the Galaxy’s centre, were monsters. They raced through fusion chain reactions and detonated in supernovas, spewing out metals and carbon and oxygen and the other heavy elements necessary for life – at any rate, life like ours. The supernovas in turn set off a wave of starmaking in the regions outside the core, and those second stars were enriched by the products of the first …”’

  The heavy drapes that covered the entrance to the carriage were pushed aside, and Khilli shoved his way in. He was a bundle of black fur, bold, stern. Without a word he began to drag his outer clothing off. Beneath, he wore armour of polished leather reinforced with metal plates – not the warmest combination, and an outfit that had at first seemed excessively cautious to Elios, given how far they were from any likely foe, but he had come to understand that Khilli feared a treacherous back-stabbing from among his own ranks.

  Elios clutched his papers to his chest and waved a hand at his son. ‘Oh, shut that flap, in the name of the Designers; you’re letting out all the heat – as usual.’

  Khilli pushed closed the flap, but he snarled, ‘Still lying around reading, are you? You might feel warmer if you got off your leathery arse and did some work.’

  Elios pursed his lips, but otherwise did not react. This kind of arrogant cheek was all too typical now. The boy was becoming too aggressive, too independent; he would have to be dealt with, ultimately. But not now – not here. ‘I take it from your relative good temper that all is going well.’

  ‘It could be worse.’ Khilli sat on a couch, and rummaged for food, a flagon of beer. ‘Two ponies lost in the last three-watch. One man down – fell into one of those poison lakes. The next peel-off is due in ten more watches. We’re on schedule …’

  Elios was sure that this was the truth. Despite the gathering tension between them, the Speaker of Speakers had felt able to relax in the growing competence of his son’s generalship.

  It had already been a remarkable achievement for Khilli to deliver enough physical force to the Pole of the world to intimidate the inhabitants of that remote place. With none too subtle threats Khilli had been able to force the Polars to hand over the provisions he needed for his ongoing pursuit, notably wagons and a whole herd of their sturdy cold-resistant ponies. And with their antique sketch maps, scraps fascinating to Elios, the elders had been able to show Khilli the likely route Tripp would take, following the rift valley to the equator of Darkside.

  Khilli had planned his mission with ruthless competence. Not for him a risky dash with a couple of carriages and a few sacks of salted meat – but he understood from the beginning that his strategy of foraging and thieving his way across the landscape would not work on Darkside. So, enlisting his father’s help with the numbers, he planned an elaborate sequence of deliveries and stages, like several expeditions folded into one. Having established his route, he sent carriages off early to make supply drops. Then, when he was ready to depart, he took a fleet of carriages with him, all laden with provisions, all in support of a key core force. At preplanned stages a number of these carriages would ‘peel off’, in the language he and his officers developed, to dash back to the Pole leaving the survivors laden with fresh supplies. And, so far, it was working. Khilli had enough fat in his budget to cover losses to hazards like the strange mineral fields of the rift valley; even one fully laden wagon wrecked in a crevasse in a salt lake had not stopped him.

  And Elios, having stood atop the Substrate monument the Polars called the Pivot to peer up at wheeling stars forever invisible from the Navel, could not resist the temptation to come with his son. The Speaker of Speakers had, after all, pretensions to rule the whole world. He had seen enough during his expedition to the Pole to accept that he knew far too little of the planet he lived on to justify any such claim. How could he turn away from glimpsing its hidden side? When would he get another chance – or any Speaker in the future, come to that?

  So, while Khilli tended to his men with his noisy mixture of boisterous encouragement and ostentatious punishment, and while the soldiers complained of the cold and the food and their aching feet and their piles, Elios studied the strange chimneys of discoloured rock that lined the steaming mud pools, and wondered at the transient ocean that must have deposited these lakes of abandoned salt, and he watched the stars turn overhead.

  And he had brought with him fragments of the past.

  Following a thread of curiosity provoked by the Polars’ maps, he had ordered the elders to show him any more documents they had relating to the earliest times. The elders had been reluctant, but in the end they produced pages that seemed to complement the scraps Elios had seen of the document that had come to be known as Helen Gray’s ‘Venus Document’. Despite Khilli’s ever-present aggression the elders would not let these fragments out of their sight, but they did allow Elios’s clerks to
transcribe copies hurriedly.

  Now Khilli, with his mouth stuffed full of horsemeat pie, snatched a page from his father’s hand, and read slowly, his voice muffled by the food. ‘“So you have this zone of intense activity in the centre of the Galaxy, and a wave of starmaking washing outwards, with metals and other heavy elements borne on the shock front. That starbirth wave finally broke over the sun’s region maybe five billion years ago. But Sol is out in the boondocks, and we were born late …”’ He glared at his father. ‘What is this garbage?’

  Elios took the page back delicately. ‘It’s supposedly a record, written down by Helen Gray, of a conversation she remembered with a woman called Venus Jenning, who never descended to this world, but who had used her voyage through space to study the worlds and the stars, and coming to certain conclusions.’

  ‘And what’s a “year”?’

  ‘The same as a Great Year – I think.’

  Khilli scoffed. ‘Doesn’t matter anyhow. All fairy stories.’

  ‘Maybe. Just listen … “The Galaxy’s starmaking peak was billions of years earlier. Most stars capable of bearing planets with complex life are older than Sol, an average of two billion years older. That’s maybe four times as long as it has been since multicellular life emerged on Earth. Perhaps this is why we see no signs of extant intelligence. They were most likely to emerge billions of years before us.”’

  Khilli frowned. ‘What’s a billion?’

  ‘A lot. “Whatever, after a billion years, they’re nothing like us, and they’re not here …”’

  Khilli twisted his face. ‘What difference does any of this make to us?’

  Elios put down the pages. ‘It’s clear we forgot, as a people, almost everything we once knew about this world, and any others that might exist. Maybe Tripp and the rest of the Polars are right to try to preserve this stuff.’ He returned his son’s glare. ‘Knowledge is power. If we let the knowledge that’s hinted at in these scraps fall into somebody else’s hands, we might regret it.’

  Khilli sneered, took a knife from a sheath at his waist, and ostentatiously began to polish it. ‘This is power.’

  ‘But that blade was made by some Polar metal-worker! I think you’re making my point, in your thuggish way.’

  ‘Oh, am I? Here’s another point to make, then. You, the Speaker of Speakers, are indulging in heresy by going on about Helen Gray and journeys into space. None of this is real, remember? Everything we see is an artefact of the Designers’ plans. We understand only what they need us to understand. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to believe?’

  Elios frowned, facing him. ‘Listen, son - nobody intelligent enough to observe the world around them, and educated enough to interpret it, can fail to have doubts about our Creed, or at least our understanding of it – and there’s the paradox, that the most educated and intelligent of all are to be found among the Speakers, at the heart of the faith. In my position it’s perfectly reasonable to believe two things at once. I can firmly believe in the validity of my religion, while at the same time opening my eyes to the reality of its contradictions. That may seem cynical to you, but I could scarcely wield the power I do without seeing the limits of the faith I administer – or, you could say more respectably, those aspects of it we have yet to understand. And power is what it’s all about, isn’t it? If you observe me, you’ll find there’s plenty for you to learn.’

  Somewhat to Elios’s surprise, Khilli nodded. ‘Oh, I know, father. I listen to you, and I learn, believe me. After all, I have to learn from you if I’m eventually to take your place, haven’t I? Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve had my eye on one of the whores we brought from the Pole …’

  He pushed his way out of the carriage, and the cold air ruffled the sheets of Helen’s journal, and his father was left open-mouthed with shock.

  XIV

  The ice cap that straddled the Antistellar point was smooth and all but featureless – an abstraction, a perfect plain under the wheeling stars.

  Wearing their spiked shoes the horses made good time over this surface, huffing, panting and snorting, their breath steaming in the still, frigid air. There was little loose snow. Tripp said she thought precipitation must be low here, and that the ice was very old. And, near the centre of the cap, the ice was stable, intact and worn smooth by the wind, unlike the broken and crumpled landscape they had seen at the rim of the cap, where glaciers calved and shattered.

  But it was a numbing, empty landscape to cross. It was almost a relief for Brod when his gaze was caught by a crevasse, and he was able to shout a warning and change their course – to do something.

  As they approached the Antistellar, Tripp had to refine her navigation. Now she used instruments of wood, steel and glass that she used to measure the stars’ trajectories, and so work out precisely where she was.

  Soon they came upon the mountain range she had promised, blocky lumps of granite that protruded roughly from the ice, their grey flanks carved by glaciers and streaked white with ice. This range itself spanned hundreds of kilometres, but Tripp was growing confident that her stellar navigation, and she led them through passes in search of her goal. When they paused for sleep watches, Brod found it comforting to be surrounded by the mountains’ silent, brooding flanks, rather than to be sat out exposed on the tabletop-smooth ice plain. At least there was cover if – when – Khilli came calling.

  And at last, a full fifteen watches after entering the mountain range, Tripp led them through one last pass, and they all knew, unmistakeably, that they had reached the Substellar point. Cradled by the mountains that stood tall and silent around it, the monument, clear of ice, was mounted on a stubby hillock that looked as if it had been deliberately shaved off to provide a platform.

  Tripp could not bear to wait a moment, to have a single hour’s rest, before hurrying ahead to inspect her discovery. Astiv Pellt insisted on coming with her, much to Tripp’s annoyance. ‘Don’t fuss, man!’ And Vala was just as eager as Tripp was. Astiv made her promise to proceed with proper care; it would be absurd to fall and break her neck a dozen paces short of the discovery of the age.

  And if Vala, Tripp and Astiv were all going ahead, that left only Brod to tend the horses. That suited him; he wasn’t much interested in monuments, and was more concerned with watching their backs.

  But Tripp approached him with some embarrassment. ‘You’ve come all this way,’ she said. ‘I do know what young men are like – the bragging they do – how they like to be first to the target. In at the kill, so to speak.’

  ‘I can wait. The monument’s been there a long time. It will still be there next watch.’

  She grinned. ‘Of course it will.’ That duty done, she gave in to her own eagerness and hurried off.

  The hillock’s walls were steep and glinted with ice in the starlight. Vala had already begun her ascent.

  And before Tripp reached the slope she passed Astiv, coming the other way. ‘Ladder,’ he said shortly.

  Once Tripp had begun the climb, only maybe thirty metres to the broad summit of the hillock, she found the slopes were slick with ice and eroded, but they were rough enough that climbing them wasn’t too difficult as long as she took care where she placed her feet and hands. At last she stood on the hillock’s flattened top – and it was flat, she saw immediately, dead level, more like a frozen pool than anything made of rock. Obviously artificial.

  Vala was waiting for her here, smiling from ear to ear. The girl held out a mittened hand to Tripp. Then, hand in hand, they approached the Antistellar monument. It was a cylinder, set on the hillock and tapering slightly as it rose over their heads.

  Vala breathed, ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘I -’ Tripp waved her hands. ‘It’s wonderful. It’s magnificent. We found it! Yet it’s just like the structure at the Substellar, if you stripped away all the human clutter there, and indeed at the Pole. Maybe I was hoping for something a bit more spectacular.’ Which would have seemed a fitting reward for undertaking such a
journey, a full half-circumference of the whole world since the Navel – but that was a petty thought, and unscientific.

  ‘Do you think there might be another Eye in the top? Another mirror, like on the Navel?’

  ‘I don’t know. As soon as Astiv shows up with the ladder we can go see.’

  ‘I suppose it really is the same size as the others.’ Vala strode forward to the column, touched its surface reverently with one mittened hand, and began to pace around it boldly. ‘One, two, three …’

  Tripp smiled, pleased. She’d been trying to imbue scientific instincts into the girl since they had met, and she had perceived a raw intellect under all the vanity and silliness. Measure – always measure! She walked up to the monument herself, and began to count out her own paces, moving clockwise while Vala went anticlockwise.

  The silent stars watched as they walked and counted. By the time they had done, they found their counts differed by only a couple of paces, easily explained by their differing lengths of stride, and they promised to measure it properly later.

  ‘But, yes,’ Vala concluded, ‘it has the same dimensions as the Eye tower, and the Pivot.’

  ‘Here comes Astiv with his ladder.’

  It took only a moment for them to set up the fold-out wooden ladder and prop it against the tower’s side. Without asking permission Vala immediately leapt onto it and began to clamber up, a bundle of dark fur, her legs working vigorously. Tripp glanced at Astiv, and shrugged. More cautiously, the two of them followed the girl.

  They found Vala standing at the lip of a bowl of darkness. Tripp stepped off the ladder and stood with Astiv, their breaths steaming as they panted after the climb in their heavy coats.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Vala said. ‘The edge here is rough, but it’s not as secure as the wooden path we laid around our Eye.’