‘I’m no girl -’
Again the coughing, but SheLu forced the words out. ‘The extinction was not all at once. It spread across this world in spasms. The pattern is just as if humanity had evolved on this world. Had developed the capability over hundreds, thousands of Years to compete with, eliminate, consume, other species. Had spread from landmass to landmass, island to island – spreading by ships on the ocean, most likely, it wouldn’t be like Urthen, like the worlds of the Bubble, where humanity fell suddenly from the sky. They would have pushed an extinction wave ahead of them wherever them went, an eerie forerunning of the story of human colonisation of the Bubble played out on the stage of a single world. But here, all of this occurred on a planet in which there was no alien life to push aside – the extinctions occurred within the Human Suite itself.’
‘Just as one would expect if this were the original world of mankind.’
‘Precisely. You understand at last.’
SheLu grunted, irritated. ‘Those are strong claims, mother. You will need strong evidence to back them up.’
‘That will come, that will come. To date, certainly, I have found nothing to contradict the hypothesis …’
Without warning, the swimmer in its tank lunged. That sleek body hurtled out of the water, and a small skull, an open mouth ringed with sharp teeth, strained at the women.
LuSi grabbed her mother and pulled her back. For an instant, as the creature reached the top of its arc, spraying water, its face was directly before LuSi’s: a low brow, small skull, clear blue eyes, a flattened nose, a very human mouth despite the sharp teeth, and long sleek hair washed back in a streamlined pattern. It was like a child’s face, LuSi thought, a malevolent, malformed child, a thing out of a nightmare.
She thought she saw bloody scraps of meat stuck in those sharp teeth. She remembered the classic folk definition of the Human Suite: whatever you can eat, or can eat you, is in the Suite. Hello, cousin, she thought.
Then the sleek, fat-laden body fell back into the tank. With a shudder of disgust LuSi pulled a lever to release the thing back into its world ocean.
There was a flare in the sky, a crack like thunder. Tanz’s shuttle, coming down from the moon.
And Zaen SheLu collapsed, almost falling into the tank, after the swimmer. LuSi yelled for help.
The shuttle, which had been modified for the special conditions of this water world, landed on the ocean surface on skis.
By the time the spaceplane had drawn up to the raft it was mid-morning, and the weather had closed in; a huge storm was crackling on the western horizon, and the black boiling clouds were coming ever closer.
SheLu, at her own insistence, was still out in the open, sitting in a chair bolted to the raft’s deck, facing the churning sea. She was hooked up to a medical support machine, connected by wires and tubes. A nurse stood by, a young man, who periodically gave her oxygen through a mask. Other crew were setting up a shelter to protect SheLu from the weather.
Tanz Vlov clambered off the shuttle and over a short gangplank onto the raft. Vlov was huddled up in a waterproof coat, and he walked with difficulty across the deck in the wind. He carried something, a small parcel, clutched against his chest.
LuSi waited for him in the shelter of one of the more substantial buildings on the raft’s back.
When Tanz joined LuSi he said, shouting over the storm, ‘I have something to show you.’
‘To show me?’
‘And your mother. Something from the moon …’ In the shelter of the building he shook his head, splashing drops of water. ‘By the Designers’ balls, the storms on this world are meaner than a Xaian with a grudge. Does it have to be this way?’
‘My mother says so. Something to do with the loss of weathering from the land …’
It was a question of nutrients, SheLu had said. Life in any ocean – at least, Human Suite life – needed certain nutrients, calcium, silicon, phosphorus. On a world with continents and islands - dry land, like Urthen - such nutrients could be provided by the weathering of the land, the washing away of crumbled rock into the sea. On this world, when the seas rose, that mechanism was lost, quite suddenly, and there must have been a mass extinction, on the drowning land, and then in the sea. But as the percentage of oxygen in the air diminished and carbon dioxide accumulated, so the air and ocean grew warmer, trapping heat energy from the sun. All that energy was expressed in tremendous storms. And the storms churned up deeplying sediments in the ocean, stirring up the nutrients needed for life.
‘So the great wheel turned once more. All living worlds seek balance,’ SheLu had said. ‘A mix of mass and energy flows that optimises the potential for life, to some degree. Here, on Urth I, when the land was drowned, there must have been extinctions. Even now the world may not be as fecund as it once was. But the storminess is one mechanism by which the great cycles of life are sustained. It’s not comfortable for us, but that’s a detail; this world, though it may have birthed mankind, is no longer for us …’
‘It’s a lovely idea,’ LuSi said now, with some regret, looking over at the still form of her mother. ‘Just a shame it means it has to rain the whole time.’
Tanz glanced at SheLu. ‘She’s declining, right?’
‘Very quickly. Her systems are failing, from her eyesight to her heart. The medics are running around in a panic, but they’ve never seen anything like this before. We’re lucky to have that guy – his name’s Stabil – he once did some voluntary work in a shanty town back home, where they couldn’t afford anti-ageing; at least he’s used to the manifestations of old age. But he’s not so keen to be out in this weather.’
‘Neither am I. And neither are you,’ Tanz said acutely. ‘But you’re here for her, right?’
LuSi shrugged. ‘She may not have long. She insists on staying out here, even if it’s ending up costing her life. I resent it all, more than I can say,’ she flared now. ‘My whole life’s been pulled to pieces because of her ambition. She doesn’t fear death, by the way. It’s the Creed. She believes she will merely be returning to Memory. That’s what she tells me, anyhow. But now that’s she’s actually dying -’
‘You need to be near her.’
‘Not need. Duty. In case there’s anything more she wants to say.’
‘Umm. Or if there’s anything more you want to say to her.’ And he held up his package.
Wrapped in a thermal blanket, she saw it was small, the size of a data slate maybe, evidently rectangular but curved, like a fragment of hull plate maybe.
‘Less of the mystery, Vlov. What is this?’
‘We had a look around. Up on the moon. Nobody expected to find anything except geology, not on a rock ball like that. The expeditions were really to give the crew some time out of the ship. Recreation rather than serious exploration. But -’
‘You found something,’ she guessed wildly. ‘Human traces.’
‘Six sites with human traces, yes. All on the near side. A few more robotic. I say “robots”; there was no sign of real artificial intelligence. Gadgets, really. It was all incredibly primitive. I mean, chemical rockets for propulsion! They could only have come from within this system. This world, presumably.’
‘Six sites.’
‘There was a major impact in the centre of the near side, quite recently. A lot of splashed debris, rays; all the sites were covered over to an extent. And then you’ve got ten thousand Years of micrometeorite rain on top of that. It would take a team of archaeologists to reconstruct it all.’
‘But the explorers were humans, from this world.’
‘Oh, yes. And this world must have been the first. That’s what the moon evidence indicates. We checked the databases; nowhere else in the Bubble has human technology fallen back to levels as primitive as this. This was the world where humans rose, the first place they set out from, riding rockets that must have been little more than flying fuel tanks,’ and he shuddered. ‘Your mother must be right. And we found this, at one of the sites. Strapp
ed to what looked like a lander leg.’ He handed her his parcel.
She unwrapped it carefully. The object was a plaque, engraved steel, pitted by micro-impacts, the images and lettering clear.
Tanz pointed. ‘These two circles here. We think they’re maps of this world.’
‘Yes.’ In fact LuSi recognised the continents from SheLu’s mapping. Here they were, two hemispheres side by side. ‘This was how the world must have looked before it drowned. My mother, you know, thinks that “Denva”, the headquarters of the Sim Designers, must correspond to a city on this world, long drowned. A speck on one of these continents, perhaps on higher ground. And this lettering -’
‘It’s very archaic, but we were able to reconstruct some of it. We can even make out some of the words. Your mother would be able to work this through better than we could, but this looks like proto-Anglish to us. I mean, the theoretically predicted root language from which all the tongues of the Bubble are derived. And some of these words look like terms the linguists have reconstructed by working their way back down the family tree of languages. Very common terms, and so enduring. Look: “Here.” “Men.” “Foot.” “Peace.” Actually we’re not sure of the meaning of that last one.’
‘“Earth,” it says. Urth?’
‘Maybe. Some of it we’ll probably never reconstruct. What was a “Nix-on”? …’
The storm was abating now. As the weather lifted, SheLu seemed to wake, to stir. She moaned, lifted her head, raised a bony hand.
‘I need to go to her,’ LuSi said.
‘I know.’
He accompanied her as she walked across the deck, to her mother.
LuSi cradled the plaque against her chest. The bit of ancient steel smelled faintly of burning, as the patina of a surface exposed to vacuum for thousands of Years reacted with the oxygen in the air. ‘My mother wanted some crucial, convincing bit of proof,’ she said. ‘Either that mankind did not originate on this world. Or -’
‘Or that we did. It will probably never be possible to prove that beyond doubt. Well, not without Years of undersea archaeology. But for the layman -’
‘This plaque will be pretty convincing.’
They slowed as they neared SheLu.
Tanz was studying her. ‘You’re thinking of not giving it to her, aren’t you? But this may be your only chance to show her, to validate what she’s done.’
‘I know,’ LuSi said. The conflict in her head was almost paralysing her; it was physically hard to keep walking towards her mother, at the water’s edge. ‘But – what if she is validated? What will that do to humanity? I’ve come to believe Jennin PiRo was right, you know. And not just because he was JaEm’s father. The idea that humanity was born on a hundred worlds, scattered among the stars, is – healthy. Healthier than this, the idea that we all stem from this one place, this dead and diseased world that rejected us. Even if it is the kind of Backstory a Sim Designer might dream up.’
‘This isn’t the only evidence, LuSi. There is all the archaeology buried under this global ocean.’
‘Which will take generations to recover, even if this place is ever visited again. By which time we may be in a healthier state, culturally.’
‘And the plaque’s not the only relic, up on the moon.’
‘I could order the stuff on the moon destroyed. Couldn’t I? As soon as my mother is dead, I will be in command of the mission’s objectives.’
‘You could.’ Tanz seemed more intrigued than offended. ‘Then you would be like the Xaians. So it would be argued. It is said their first action was to destroy the Books of the Founders, their own carefully preserved records of humanity’s arrival on Windru. And they went on from there, on world after world. History judges the Xaians as criminals.’
‘One day, history may thank me. Let’s leave this place to the swimmers – it’s their world now. We belong to the stars, to the uncounted worlds that birthed us. You see, if we do identify this planet as the mother, we’ll never be able to break away from her.’
Tanz raised an eyebrow. ‘Which mother are you talking about?’
‘Don’t try to analyse me.’
‘Hmm. You know, in the Temples we are taught that almost every human action is fundamentally driven by personal motives. Not by a desire to venerate some Designer, not by some grand vision of the benefit of mankind as a whole, or whatever. I think you want to punish your mother by denying her this final victory.’
She didn’t feel like arguing with him. ‘Call it a side benefit, then.’
‘LuSi? …’
With the plaque held behind her back, she hurried to SheLu’s side. ‘Mother? I’m here.’
SheLu raised a hand, and LuSi took it. ‘I’m sorry, child.’ Her eyes were misty globes, grey as the world ocean, and as unseeing.
‘Sorry for what?’
‘For dragging you across the stars … I was so sure, so sure.’
‘Try to be calm …’
‘Here’s another thought,’ Tanz murmured in her ear. ‘There’s more than just humanity in this universe of ours. You know that. The Galaxy is full of antique mysteries that we’ll surely have to face some day. If you do destroy the truth about our own origins, will that not diminish our ability to cope with those unknowable challenges?’
‘I’ll leave the future to those who live in it,’ LuSi snarled.
‘LuSi?’
‘Yes, mother, I’m here.’
‘I was right, wasn’t I? About Urth I. I was right. And it makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?’
LuSi didn’t reply. Still holding her mother’s hand, she knelt to the raft’s deck, leaned over, and let the steel plaque slip out of her hands. It passed out of sight in a heartbeat, falling silently into the sea.
V
Once, just once, as Venus Jenning floated in the dark of the Ark’s cupola, she picked up a strange signal. It appeared to be coherent, like a beam from a microwave laser. She used her spaceborne telescopes to triangulate the signal, determining that it wasn’t anywhere close. And she passed it through filters to render it into audio. It sounded cold and clear, a trumpet note, far off in the Galactic night.
If it was a signal it wasn’t human at all.
She listened for two years. She never heard it again.
Ark, Chapter 93
Also by Stephen Baxter
Xeelee Sequence
Raft
Timelike Infinity
Flux
Ring
Vacuum Diagrams (collection)
Anti-Ice
The Time Ships
NASA Trilogy
Voyage
Titan
Moonseed
The Light of Other Days (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Manifold Trilogy
Manifold: Time
Manifold: Space
Manifold: Origin
Phase Space (collection)
Destiny’s Children Trilogy
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent (collection)
Mammoth Trilogy
Silverhair
Longtusk
Icebones
Evolution
A Time Odyssey (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
The H-Bomb Girl
Time’s Tapestry
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
Flood
Ark
Northland Trilogy
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice
The Long Earth (with Terry Pratchett)
The Long Earth
The Long War
The Long Mars
Proxima
Ultima
Nonfiction
Deep Future
Omegatropic
Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of
Deep Time
The Science of Avatar
Title
Introduction
Earth II
Earth III
Earth I
Other works by Stephen Baxter
Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe Page 19
