Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  But still, by the time the ship reached Airtree, its first destination, their youth was gone.

  II

  After the battle was done, the Speaker of Speakers paused by the small field hospital that tended to the wounded, and reassured the dying that death was not an end, merely a return to the frozen patterns of thoughts in the greater Memory of the Sim …

  ‘Earth III’, Chapter IX

  The starship Reality Dreams settled into orbit around Airtree.

  Shuttles, approved by the local authority, came up from the ground to transport down the passengers. Blocky winged craft powered by fission rockets for the ascent, and essentially gliders for the re-entry and landing, these were elderly, well-worn craft, beaten up by multiple flights to the edge of space. JaEm, who had devoted his life aboard the Reality Dreams to space engineering, looked faintly appalled at the sight of them.

  But LuSi knew this was what they had to expect. Airtree was ruled by a single government, as it had been through most of its history: a theocracy built around the cult of the Sim Controllers. The theocracy was rich, but its world was technologically backward, relatively.

  Even the slightly grander craft that was to transport Zaen SheLu, the Jennin PiRo, and their children LuSi and Jaem, plastered with heat-resistant tiles and holy symbols, was old and shabby and smelled faintly of urine. LuSi settled in grimly beside JaEm; nearly thirty years old now, and after fourteen years in the cavernous interior of the starship, she felt a twinge of apprehension as the shuttle parted from its lock with a rattle of opening latches.

  Before making their descent they completed a high-inclination orbital loop around the planet, and LuSi was able to make out the main features of this world, fixing them against the maps she had studied in the years before their arrival. Like Urthen, Airtree orbited close in to its sun, so that a single hemisphere faced the light. The illuminated face was a muddle of ocean and land, and LuSi could make out great concentric bands of vegetation types surrounding the subsolar point, green fading to brown or grey, swathes of forest or grasslands or crops, or even surviving scraps of native life, she supposed, adapted to the particular conditions of light and climate dictated by the unchanging altitude of the sun in the sky. The far side, perpetually dark, seemed wholly abandoned, although history texts told of how it had been partially colonised thanks to the reflected glow of some alien technology in space, an ancient gift smashed up by the Xaians.

  And above all this, LuSi saw Reality Dreams, patiently following its own orbit. The starship was an engineered asteroid, a bubble of glass and ice that shone green from within, like a tremendous jewel; it looked more like a small moon than a ship. It was a miracle of the ancient warp technology that had driven the ship between the stars that in flight this huge bulk was folded away out of spacetime into a higher dimension, so that only a warp bubble the size of a sand grain protruded into the mundane cosmic stratum. LuSi longed with all her heart to be back aboard the ship, with JaEm, in the home they had built together, with their work, their slates and models, their friends. But she knew, too, that that was a symptom of her long interstellar confinement; she was like a released prisoner longing to be locked up again.

  Light flared beyond the cabin windows, and the ride grew briefly bumpier, the air thickening, turbulent. When the plasma glow faded, the starry sky had been replaced by a violet blue, the stars were obscured, and the starship was lost to LuSi’s view. She reached out for JaEm’s hand.

  Speaker Tanz Vlov, sitting opposite them, observed this. This Airtree native, compact, shaven-headed, had been sent up in the shuttle to be their escort to the ground. Like many of his people, from a world of sterner gravity than Urthen, he was short by the standards LuSi was used to, but not exceptionally so. Despite his drab clerical garb he was a cheery, irreverent man who appeared about forty, but since anti-ageing treatments were available on this world, at least to the ruling elite, that was no real guide. Now Vlov smiled. ‘You look nostalgic.’ He spoke the Urthen tongue - or their own particular dialect of Anglish depending on how you classified it - well but with a heavy accent. ‘You miss your ship.’

  ‘It is our home,’ LuSi said. ‘Has been since we were both teenagers.’

  ‘Your home? You are married, yes? You have children?’

  ‘Not yet,’ JaEm said. ‘Perhaps in the next phase of the journey. Which will take another thirty years, nearly, to Windru.’

  Vlov whistled. ‘Thirty more years, in a big enclosed machine. Strange to think of it.’

  Jennin PiRo leaned forward, past his son. ‘It shouldn’t be strange. Not to you. This world is the capital of the Creed of the Sim! You’re a Speaker, senior in the faith. You believe that everything is an artefact – even the physical world, even the stars, all a dream stored in some vast machine’s frozen Memory. What is life in a starship but a metaphor for that? It should seem familiar to you …’

  LuSi was used to this kind of goading from the Jennin. Vlov’s reaction seemed to be a commonsense one; he winked at her, and grinned. ‘Of course nothing is real. But the Sim Controllers created us for a purpose, a purpose expressed through how we live our lives. And we must live those lives as if it were all real. What else is there to do?’

  LuSi’s mother, meanwhile, was entirely uninterested in the conversation. SheLu was dressed in her own world’s version of clerical garb, the plain steel-grey robe of a Zaen, a priest of the Sim, and her hair, while not shaven close, was cut short and neat. She was in her sixties now but her ageing treatments had preserved her at around thirty; seeing her in the unfamiliar light of this new world, LuSi saw how her skin was just a little too taut, her eyes a little too clear.

  She peered out of the small window beside her seat, as the shuttle banked and turned in the air. In the ocean beneath was an island, the largest of a chain, a speck of land directly under the suspended star. The shuttle dipped low over this, heading north towards the shore of a continent called Seba, where they would make landfall.

  ‘And that is the island you call the Navel?’

  Vlov didn’t need to look to see. ‘At the Substellar, yes. Just like Urthen, from what I hear, our world huddles close to its sun, which is a small, cool star – as stars go, anyhow. But at least it is a star! I can’t imagine living in a sky full of a big fat gassy bag of a planet …’

  ‘There is a monument,’ murmured SheLu. ‘On the island. But it is a mighty wreck.’

  So it was, LuSi saw, when she got a chance to look. The island seen from above was a scarred mass of docks, dwellings, temples and pathways, all centred on a tremendous pillar – a pillar that was smashed, melted in places, with great fallen blocks larger than some of the buildings at its feet.

  ‘The work of the Xaian Normalisation,’ SheLu guessed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vlov. ‘Once it was called the Eye. The monument itself was Substrate. Which is what we call the relics of an older technology found by humans on this world when they arrived.’

  JaEm asked, ‘Older?’

  His father said dryly, ‘Alien.’

  ‘We had nothing which could scar it, break it. We could build on top of it, or around it, and so we did. It is said that the Xaians used a starship drive to dismantle such features, here, at the Antistellar, at the Poles, even in orbit.’

  SheLu shuddered. ‘Warp technology brought to a planet’s surface. What barbarism.’

  ‘Before the Xaians came, the monument was dedicated to the veneration of the Sim Controllers.’

  ‘But if that’s so,’ PiRo said, ‘why would the Controllers not simply reverse the damage and restore the monument? It would take only a Word, after all.’

  Vlov, unperturbed, just grinned. ‘But the pilgrims continue to come here even so. Perhaps the wreckage adds another layer of lustre, of romance. The Controllers don’t need to fix it, you see. It works fine just as it is.’

  PiRo stared at him, and laughed. ‘There you have it, Zaen SheLu. Why do we never see any signs that the Controllers intervene in their Sim? Bec
ause they choose not to. A perfectly closed and irrefutable argument!’

  ‘If you say so,’ SheLu murmured, indifferent. LuSi thought she heard her mother mutter prayers to the Controllers as the shuttle began its final approach.

  Much of this world chimed with echoes of LuSi’s home planet.

  They landed near the shore of a continent called Seba, which in Urthen lore was the name of one of the giants who built the Ark. The landing facility was close to a city called New Denv, a name not so terribly far from Denva, the legendary home of the Sim Designers. Then they were transported to the largest coastal town, near the southern coast of Seba, called Port Wils. It stood on a mighty river of the same name. The name Wils was like a half-remembered fragment of the story of the Son of the giants who had extracted the Ship’s Law from the Will, the semi-incarnate purpose of the Designers themselves.

  Maybe all this did reflect some common origin, of a star-scattered mankind, LuSi wondered. Or maybe it was all an artefact of the great cultural smearing-out delivered by the Xaian Normalisation in the course of its hugely destructive rampage across the Bubble. Or maybe it really was an artefact of the world’s nature as a simulation, with these common elements being used and reused by the Designers on one world after another – their signatures, some speculated. One thing was sure; all this needed a deeper explanation than Jaem’s father’s austere but supremely rational notions of evolutionary convergence.

  After a voyage of fourteen years, the plan was to spend only perhaps twenty Days here – or, in the local argot, sixty watches, each of which was almost precisely one-third of a Day. This had been negotiated in advance, in communications between the ship in its final sublight approach and the Speakerhood authorities here at Port Wils. Though they had come so far, a few Days, it seemed, were all that was required for the Speaker of Speakers to make her decision concerning SheLu’s requests for support of her ongoing expedition in search of the origins of mankind within the greater Simulation.

  While the Zaen and the Jennin, priest and scholar, met with various minor functionaries in advance of their meeting with the Speaker of Speakers, JaEm and LuSi tentatively explored Port Wils, under the avuncular guidance of Speaker Tanz Lvov. The priorities of the Speakerhood here soon became apparent. It was on Airtree, so it was said, in lost, semi-legendary times before the wave of destruction that was the Xaian Normalisation, that the cult of the Sim had first arisen – or perhaps, others said, it was a legacy of the Ark as it had passed this world. And in the generations since then, the Speakerhood at Port Wils had made sure that it remained the hub of the faith – and therefore the destination of interstellar pilgrimages, from across all the human worlds where the faith had taken hold. All those worshippers, and all their tithes, flowed into Airtree, and specifically to Seba, and across Seba to Port Wils, gateway to the Navel itself. The Speakerhood was a vast, efficient, and highly profitable organisation, and to the senior administrators a passing starship was a mere distraction.

  ‘No wonder they are so backward technologically,’ JaEm said to LuSi as they wandered the crowded streets.

  ‘Not completely,’ LuSi said. ‘The Speakers seem to have access to anti-ageing technologies just as good as ours, if not better. And their kitchens -’

  ‘Yes, but you know what I mean. Those surface-to-orbit shuttles might have come off the Ark itself. I don’t believe there’s a starship construction yard in the whole system.’

  ‘But there doesn’t need to be,’ LuSi said gently. ‘The starships come here.’

  ‘Yes. Stuffed with money!’

  Beneath the surface of this bustling human city, itself millennia old, they came across traces of older habitations. The ancient alien material called the Substrate wasn’t restricted to the monument on the Navel, and nor had it all been eradicated by the Xaians. Here and there it persisted, as fragments of walls or foundations set out to linear or circular plans, apparently as unweathered and enduring as when their unknown builders had abandoned them, and built over by coarser human materials, bricks, concrete, steel and glass. And then, in cracks in the sidewalks, at the corners of neglected gardens, they would glimpse scraps of a different kind of life, unimposing mats and films of a black-green tint. The natives, Tanz Vlov told them, called this the Slime. It too had been here long before humans arrived, and the Human Suite had pushed it disregarded into the corners of its own world.

  Yet it persisted, LuSi thought, yet it persisted, like the Substrate, a hint of a deeper meaning to this world, like so many others, a meaning beneath the froth of human history. And that was true whether all of this was a dream of some electronic Memory or not.

  The party from the Reality Dreams was called at length to a meeting with the Speaker of Speakers in a lavish building called the First Temple, set at the heart of Port Wils. They were kept waiting, not for long, in a kind of anteroom, where they were served drinks in cut-glass goblets borne on silver trays by silent junior clerics. Even this waiting room was tall, airy, thickly carpeted and every scrap of wall surface was covered by paintings, tapestries, and ornate designs – some of them holographic, so that when you turned your head this way and that different aspects of reality were presented, presumably a representation of the nature of the Simulation that was the core of the faith.

  At length they were called into another vast, ornate room, but LuSi was impressed by a kind of working office set out at the centre of the room, an island of furniture in a sea of carpet, one large desk surrounded by chairs, smaller desks, blocks of filing cabinets and slate racks. A woman in a purple robe sat behind the desk, working at papers; this was the Speaker of Speakers herself, a woman of an ancient local family, called Kira Elos. She did not look up.

  The starship passengers were led to seats before her desk. Attendants fluttered back and forth, carrying slates and papers, murmuring to each other and to the Speaker of Speakers.

  LuSi noticed, standing in one corner, a curious cage, of some fine silvery mesh, taller than she was. Light from the sun, which was overhead at this location, was reflected from a bank of mirrors into the cage, where a kind of tree grew, tall, spindly. Birds with silvery, mirrored wings fluttered around the tree, catching the light and reflecting its glow onto its trunk, which shone in return.

  At last Kira Elos looked up. ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting. You have come far to visit me.’ She spoke what sounded like comprehensible Anglish to LuSi, but translators stood by discreetly, to aid the conversation.

  Jennin PiRo said smoothly, ‘But we know that other pilgrims come from much further away yet. Thank you for your time and attention, Speaker of Speakers …’

  He calmly introduced the party, one by one. The Speaker in turn introduced some of her staff. The names did not seem important to LuSi, and she made no attempt to memorise them.

  She was distracted by the tree in the cage. Every so often blinds would furl and unfurl, apparently automatically, so that the pattern of light falling on the cage changed, and the mirror-wing birds would flutter and fly, adjusting their position in response to the changing light.

  The Speaker of Speakers noticed her watching. ‘Distracting, isn’t it? And charming.’

  ‘I’m sorry -’

  ‘Don’t apologise. You’re right to be intrigued. There are few of these specimens left on this world – by which I mean the trees and the birds, for they form a symbiotic partnership, you see. The birds bring the tree light, and it feeds them in turn.’

  ‘But the light comes at a low angle,’ JaEm said. ‘Artificially, thanks to these mirrors.’

  The Speaker nodded. ‘True. From which you deduce?’

  Jennin PiRo jumped in with the answer, and LuSi knew how much that irritated JaEm. ‘That this is a native of high latitudes – lands close to the terminator between day and permanent night. Where the sun is always low.’

  ‘Correct. But the mirror forests are almost gone, now, eradicated to make room for variants of wheat and rice and other crops we have developed to be tolerant o
f the poor light conditions.’

  SheLu nodded. ‘It is a common observation, demonstrable by archaeology, that a mass extinction of any native life follows the successful settlement of any world by humans. It is logical; the new life must supplant the old, if it is not to be pushed back.’

  The Speaker smiled. ‘I understand that. But even so, it is a miracle the birds survived.’

  She said that once this world had been full of animals and plants that seemed to have been designed, by some vanished precursor inhabitants – maybe the Substrate builders, maybe not – to serve as tools, or engines. There had been tractor beasts and tunnel-building moles and ‘photomoss’, a life form that collected useful energy from the sunlight.

  ‘All of these were exterminated by the Xaians. But the birds were spared, whether by intention or accident we are unsure – they are after all hard to trap. One strand of our theological thinking suggests that the Xaians were actually carrying out the will of the Controllers in their great extirpation. Perhaps the Sim had drifted from its parameters and needed cleansing. And so perhaps the birds’ continuing existence is somehow heretical.’

  LuSi, staring at the birds and their tree, could not believe anything so intricately exquisite could possibly be regarded as wrong, in any value system.

  The Speaker of Speakers considered SheLu. ‘Of course, Zaen, the Xaians’ enthusiastic destruction must have complicated your quest to trace the origin of mankind.’

  ‘If such a single origin exists at all,’ PiRo put in.

  SheLu smiled. ‘Actually it makes it more interesting, intellectually. A challenge, set for us by the Controllers themselves, perhaps, to test the minds they have given us … Not even the Xaians could extirpate everything about human culture. It’s a commonplace that the human worlds share common concepts. Measures of time, for instance, like the Days and Years we use on Urthen – or the watches you use here. Each watch is about a third of on of our Days; your Great Year is three hundred and sixty of our Days, which is about the same as our Year. And so on. All this might derive from some primal source.’