Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  Astiv dug a roll of photomoss out of his coat and draped it over the wall, and its soft glow enhanced the starlight. And they peered into the bowl of darkness contained within the tower’s cylindrical wall.

  Tripp said, ‘It does look like another Eye, doesn’t it?’ She knelt down. The bowl was coated with a black substance that crumbled as she touched it. ‘Slime – long dead and freeze-dried. Quite a thickness of it, though.’

  Vala jumped down into the bowl, her lack of caution making Tripp’s heart pound a little harder, and she began to rip up the Slime enthusiastically. The surface beneath was smooth and full of stars, a mirrored surface that looked at first glance as flawless as the one on the Navel.

  ‘Another mystery,’ Tripp murmured to Astiv. ‘Evidently Slime grew over the mirror. How? Where did it get the light to grow?’

  Astiv shrugged. ‘Why ask me? I just mind the horses. Seems to me you came all this way for answers -’

  ‘And all I found was more questions. All right, all right.’

  Vala was tearing up great swathes of the dead Slime. ‘Come on, you two, help me. This stuff’s easy to shift. We could get the mirror clear quickly, if we all work at it.’

  ‘Why?’ Astiv asked practically.

  ‘Well, why not?’

  Astiv grinned. ‘I do like that girl.’ He jumped down into the bowl, landed on his backside and slid in a great shower of black flakes. He got to his feet and began pulling away the Slime methodically, rolling it up like carpet and throwing it over the lip of the tower.

  With a sigh, Tripp herself stepped down, more cautiously, and joined in. The Slime was so old and desiccated it came away easily.

  ‘Tell me about the Slime,’ Vala said. ‘The fact that it lies on top of the tower means it came after the tower was built. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes. But the Slime itself has been here a long time.’

  ‘How long?’

  Maybe a very long time. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy, Venus Jenning had apparently said. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard … Or a battlefield. Maybe humans built their lives amid the relics of monumental wars long ago fought to a conclusion.

  ‘Look, we’ve got more than half clear now,’ Vala said. ‘I think it’s reflecting the starlight!’ She raised a handful of Slime dust in the air, and let it drift around her; it caught a sparking, misty beam, barely visible. ‘Come on, help me clear the rest …’

  Tripp heard a shout. Perhaps Astiv Pellt heard it too; he turned, frowning. But Tripp’s head was too full of marvellous, strange ideas to be concerned about that. With renewed eagerness, hungry to know what would happen next, she ripped into the remaining Slime with new determination.

  And she thought she saw a shadow beneath her, vaguely defined, as if cast by a source of diffuse light far above.

  XV

  A single carriage came rolling through the final pass to the monument, covered in canvas and grander than either of Tripp’s carts, and pulled by four weary-looking horses. It had a single driver, bundled in furs, and the way was lit by a strip of photomoss fixed to an arched frontage. It stopped some way short of Tripp’s carts, which weren’t even unpacked properly, such had been the haste of the others to climb the monument.

  Brod considered calling Tripp and the others, giving them some warning.

  Instead he walked forward, checking his weapons, the blade in one deep pocket, the musket in the other. His blood was pumping, his attention focussed, his spirits as high as they had been for many long watches. The challenge had come, and he relished it. Meeting challenges was what he was for; that was what he had inherited from the brave pioneers who had crossed space to come to this world - or had had programmed into him by the Sim Designers, depending on what you believed, and right now he didn’t care, because either way this was his moment.

  As he approached the wagon the driver didn’t dismount. Brod couldn’t even see his face, and the man, or woman, seemed determined not to react to his presence. Even the horses, breathing steam, showed more interest. But it was obvious he wasn’t to be challenged from that quarter.

  He walked around the wagon. It was sealed tight, the canvas pinned firmly in place, and he thought he could feel the warmth leaking from it. His enemy travelled in comfort, then.

  He was ready.

  He stood back from the wagon and bellowed. ‘Khilli! Khilli son of Elios! I am Brod son of Maryam! Come out here and meet me – or skulk in your cart like the coward you are! …’

  A flap pushed open at the back of the wagon, and two men clambered out. One was stocky, dark-clad, a blade already in his hand, his head covered by a hood. The other was taller, slimmer, moved more stiffly, and, though clad in a heavy cloak, he shivered at the stab of the Antistellar cold.

  Brod drew his musket and his blade, a stabbing-sword that was shorter than his opponent’s, and stepped forward. ‘Khilli. I’m flattered you came all this way.’

  Khilli pushed his hood back to expose a shaven head, and a scar on his cheek that was livid even by the light of the stars. ‘Don’t be. I came to clean the world of a stain, kidnapper, rapist. Since you wouldn’t stand and fight before.’

  ‘I fled from your army, not from you – and I saved your sister from you, animal. And besides – here I am now, standing alone. Or have you brought your daddy to back you up?’

  The other man slipped his own hood back from his shaven head. It was Elios, Speaker of Speakers, as Brod had suspected. ‘I have come only to observe.’ Elios sounded tired, almost wistful.

  But Brod cared little for the Speaker’s mood. ‘To observe what, the death of your son?’

  ‘The conclusion of this, Brod. This strange affair that began the whole diameter of the world away. At least it will end here.’

  ‘And somebody’s going to die,’ Khilli said. ‘Then when my forces arrive we will tear down yon monument, as it should have been demolished long ago, and leave the world with only a single righteous focus of worship – the Navel.’

  There was a flare of light from above, bright enough to be dazzling. Brod glanced towards the monument, distracted.

  And in that instant Khilli hurled himself forward. Brod raised his musket, but Khilli’s blade flashed, slicing away the musket before it could be fired, and taking two joints of Brod’s trigger finger with it. Brod cried out, and blood pumped; he staggered backward, out of Khilli’s reach, and curled his fist into a ball to try to staunch the bleeding.

  Khilli stood back, laughing. ‘One encounter, one blow and you have already lost your main weapon, and the use of your good hand. Give it up, rapist. Kneel before me and suck on my sword. I’ll be quick – you’ll hardly notice it’s inside you -’

  Brod sneered. ‘That’s what all your lovers say.’

  And he charged, right shoulder first, his blade raised in his left hand. As he rammed into Khilli he smelled meat and blood and sweat and grease. The man was knocked back, skidding on the icy rock underfoot, and Brod brought his own blade swinging down. But Khilli went with the skid, let himself fall and rolled, and Brod’s blade slammed harmlessly on the ground.

  Khilli swept his blade in turn, and Brod had to jump to avoid his legs being taken out below the knees. But Khilli was on his feet even as Brod landed, and they closed again. Brod raised his blade, two-handed now, but Khilli raised his own fists to meet Brod’s, over their heads.

  Again they were still, locked together, face to face. The strange light was bright now, coming from above, whatever it was, as they strained to bring the blades down. Brod could see Khilli’s face clearly, every stitch-mark in that scar, every blackened pore on his cheeks. ‘By all that’s holy,’ Brod said, ‘the Sim Designers made you ugly.’

  ‘Then let my ugly features be the last thing you see before I send you back to Memory.’ He spat in Brod’s face, and lunged.

  And Brod, his right arm weakening, could not resist him. He gave way. The two blades swept down and slammed against the ground, and both
shattered. Khilli lowered his head and butted Brod in the mouth, and Brod felt teeth shatter. He staggered back, and a shove in the chest sent him flying to the ground.

  Khilli straddled him, a dagger held up in both gloved hands. ‘Goodbye, rapist.’ He straightened up, tensing for the lunge.

  And he convulsed, a look of shock on his face, his mouth wide, his eyes staring. He looked down at Brod, and blood spilled from his mouth. His hands loosened, and he dropped his knife harmlessly. Then he fell back, like a toppling tree.

  Elios stood motionless, a blood-stained dagger in his hand, a spatter of his son’s ichor on his cloak. He considered the fallen Khilli, apparently without emotion. Then he turned to Brod. ‘You could not have won. He wore armour under his cloak. A coward’s defence, really. But I have seen him dress and undress; I remembered the chinks, the gaps.’ He held up the knife, looked at its bloody blade, then dropped it to the ground beside Brod. It landed on the frozen rock with a bell-like chime.

  Vala called. ‘Father! Is that you? Father – oh, Brod!’

  Brod, fallen, cradling his hand, could not turn to see her. He tried to speak, but he spat blood and bits of broken tooth onto a ground that was bright beneath him – bright and sparkling with light, reflected from scraps of ice.

  Vala ran up, her hood pulled back. As she took in the scene, the fallen Brod, her father, the corpse of Khilli, her face was wide with shock – and, just for a moment, Brod saw her brother in her, his face at the moment of his death at the hands of his father. Then she fell to her knees and cradled Brod’s head.

  ‘Ow! Careful – my teeth.’

  ‘Sorry. Oh, and your hand! I must bandage it before you bleed out.’ She dug in a pocket and pulled out a scarf, and wrapped it around his hand. She seemed reluctant even to look at Khilli. ‘My brother -’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Brod said.

  Elios, awkwardly, reached down and touched her shoulder. ‘It’s over, my child. Many things will change now. Nothing will be the same …’

  ‘You have that right, Speaker.’ Tripp came lumbering up, with Astiv in her wake. Tripp glanced around at the fallen Khilli, the wounded Brod, the blood-stained Elios. ‘Whatever happened here – oh! How limited, how petty we humans are, slaying each other in the light of that!’ And she pointed up.

  Brod glanced up, shading his eyes to see for the first time the brightening, pinkish-white light that bathed the scene. It was like the Star, he thought, or a scrap of it, somehow flung into the sky above the Antistellar. But since the Star was on the far side of the world, that of course, was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  Vala stroked his brow. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? And we did it, when we cleared away the Slime – or so Tripp thinks.’

  ‘There’s a mirror,’ Tripp said. ‘A Substrate mirror, hanging in space. Orbiting up there, all these hundreds of millions of Great Years. Seen by Venus Jenning and Helen Gray, apparently, who spotted orbital architecture around this world – and it seems to have a twin in the sky over the Navel, perhaps a lens to deflect the light rather than to gather it. Controlled from this tower on the ground, it seems, by reflected starlight, in as simple a way as possible – the builders planned for the long term, planned for a system that would keep on working even if their own children forgot what it was! But they didn’t plan for the Slime, which wiped out the builders’ children, and covered over their grand mirrors, feeding on the very light that it was blocking out. And when the mirror in the sky turned away, the world turned colder, and the Slime itself died, but froze in place. And so things stayed, for uncounted millions of Great Years – until now.’

  ‘It will warm the world,’ Vala said, full of wonder. ‘Think of it, Brod! Tripp says the mirror gathers up the warmth of the Star and throws it back at this Darkside, and lights it up. Not all of it, not at once –’

  ‘But enough to melt this ice cap, I’ll wager,’ Tripp said, her face raised to the light in the sky. ‘Once it let life spread over this Darkside – the life we saw frozen, dead. Now the light comes again, enough to allow the green things to grow – and people to live here permanently on Darkside. It’s as if we discovered a whole new planet.’

  Astiv grunted, sceptical. ‘Maybe. If so, it’s thanks to the engineering of those long dead Substrate builders. We haven’t done anything to shout about.’

  Vala had seemed distracted, with the sudden presence of her father, Brod’s injuries, the miraculous light in the sky. But now it was as if she remembered Khilli. She released Brod, went to her brother’s body, and touched his cheek with her fingers, as if wondering. ‘He came to save me, I suppose, as he saw it. And it’s finished up like this.’ She looked up at her father. ‘But I won’t go back with you, despite his sacrifice.’

  Elios had not moved. Now he stepped closer to Brod, and indicated the knife that still lay on the ground, out of Vala’s sight. He murmured, ‘Pick it up. Let her think you killed him. It will be better that way …’

  ‘She’s no fool. The truth will come out.’

  He sighed. ‘If it does I will have to deal with that. Especially if she is to become my successor, as Speaker – for in spite of her protestations, that is her fate now.’

  Brod stared. ‘You can think of such matters, at a time like this?’

  ‘But this affair has always been about the longer term. That is why I had to stop Khilli. He has changed our world, thanks to his campaign of conquest – united it, in a sense, under the Shuttle Flag. And now we have this, as Tripp said, like a whole new world to conquer. Who knows what wonders will follow?’ He raised his face to the reflected sunlight. ‘But Khilli wished to replace me. He’d have destroyed me to do it, in the end – and destroyed the faith, and then the world. You are more like him than I am; you must understand how it would have been. So I had to deal with him – and this was my one chance, this one last moment of weakness as he made his dash for vengeance, when I had him alone, before he gathered his loyal troops around him once more.’

  ‘And you took that chance.’

  ‘I had no choice. Surely you see that …’

  Brod heard Vala weeping softly. Tripp went to her.

  Elios, his face raised, was murmuring softly.

  ‘What are those words, Speaker?’

  ‘A prayer to the Sim Controllers. A prayer for forgiveness.’ He closed his eyes, and the pinkish light bathed his face.

  Earth I

  I

  If we expected to come out here and join in some kind of bustling Galactic culture, it ain’t going to happen. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard …

  Ark, Chapter 91

  LuSi and JaEm, laughing, hand in hand, ran down the concrete slope into the tremendous dish of the starship construction yard. Huge structures stood here, inert and silent today, cranes and manipulators and giant trucks, portable fusion plants, fuel tanks frosted with glittering ice. LuSi knew that what had been constructed here, immense sculptures of metal and ceramic and monomolecular carbon, had been grander still, before being hoisted into orbit around Urthen and assembled into the delicate, gravity-vulnerable superstructure of a starship, itself a transformed asteroid.

  A ship that was going to take LuSi away to the stars.

  But not today, she told herself, not for a few Days more, she wasn’t going to lose JaEm and his warm touch, not today. And a few Days was a long time for a fourteen-year-old. On they ran, seeking a quiet place amid the silent machines.

  And even at this moment LuSi had an unwelcome sense of perspective, the kind of perspective JaEm’s father, the scholar Jennin PiRo, had tried to beat into her thick skull, in his words. The yard, a crater dug into the ground, was too big, too big even for the monumental machines they built here. And why was that? Because it hadn’t been constructed to build mere human starships. It hadn’t been built by humans at all, as far as anybody could tell, but by an alien culture, star-faring, long-vanished. Why should it be so? It was an illogic in the Sim, the J
ennin protested, in the Backstory, the received history of the universe and the human story within it. Unless the Sim’s Designers and Controllers were insane, why build in a feature like this that had nothing to do with mankind - it made no sense! Couldn’t LuSi see that? …

  Unfortunately she could, and it crowded into her head even now, even as they reached the shadow of a tremendous truck, found a sheltered spot behind one huge tyre out of the wind, and, laughing, sat side by side. Their breath steamed and mingled before them. They kissed, for the first time that day. And when JaEm slid his hand inside her coat, and she could feel his warmth, his strength.

  Their shared warmth was a defiance of the cold of the day. The Ember hung above them, above the scattered clouds, in the sky from which it never moved. Its broad face was like a fading fire, mottled with huge dark spots. All LuSi’s short life the spots had been gathering, and the Jennins and other scholars predicted gloomily that the world was heading for another Ember-winter. Well, LuSi couldn’t remember the last Ember-winter, it had been over hundreds of Years before she was born. The only warmth she cared about was in JaEm’s lips, his hands, the firm body she could feel under his clothing. Yet she was soon to be taken away from this scrap of warmth too, and flung between the cold stars. All because of her mother and her hateful, self-imposed ‘mission’ …

  JaEm could sense her distraction. He hugged her, then sat back. He was sensitive that way, more so than she was. One reason she loved him, she supposed, though they had not yet used such loaded words out loud.

  He asked, ‘What are you thinking about? Not about leaving? We shouldn’t waste the time we’ve got left thinking about that.’

  ‘No, not that,’ she lied. ‘I was thinking about your father, if you must know. His lectures. The shipyards are one of his “classic” examples of Sim flaws.’

  ‘I suppose I’ve had more practice in shutting him out of my head than you have.’ He kissed her again, delicately. ‘Do you think we’re all in a Sim?’