Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  He looked at her steadily. ‘If that’s what you want to believe, then it’s the truth. I’ll tell you this, Miss Brodsworth. You have done your country a disservice today. A great disservice.’

  Marcus and Imogen walked to the embankment, breathing in air that was fresh with barely a hint of soot. The security cordon had not yet been relaxed, but it was a relief to Imogen not to be surrounded by the usual crush of Londoners.

  They stared at the powerful lines of the quireme on the Thames. ‘I feel giddy,’ Imogen said. ‘It’s been such a long day.’

  The Roman glanced at Big Ben. ‘It isn’t yet three o’clock. Yet so much has happened. A shred of tobacco has unravelled a plot that might have toppled empires!’

  ‘I can’t believe we allowed him simply to walk away.’

  Marcus shrugged. ‘What else could we have done? He’s right; he and his conspirators will only refute everything, having destroyed the evidence. Let him go. With the British government’s fervent denials, I have at least a fighting chance of convincing Caesar that the death of his son was the action of a rogue element, and not worth going to war over.’

  ‘But there are surely other men like him in Britain, and the other powers. Men who long for war, for what they imagine is in their country’s interests.’

  ‘Yes. And he was right, you know, that the world is a precarious place. In Europe you have four empires, counting Britain, all jealous of their interests, all armed to the teeth. If this incident does not drive us to war, it seems more than likely that something will trigger it all.’

  Imogen tried to imagine an all-out European war fought with modern weapons, with immense guns and steel-hulled ships, and testudos crawling over the broken bodies of men. ‘That Chinaman who came wandering down the Silk Road has a lot to answer for.’

  He laughed. ‘But perhaps we would all have ended up in this situation even if he had stayed home. Fate is stronger than the will of any of us.’

  On impulse she grabbed his hand. ‘But if war is to come in the autumn, or in the winter, or the spring of next year, at least we have this summer’s day. Spend it with me, Marcus Helvidius.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Never more.’

  ‘I have duties,’ he said. ‘I will be missed—’

  ‘I know the city well enough. There are places they’ll never find us. Come on. I’ve had enough of being sensible!’

  Laughing, he let her pull him away. They hurried down the embankment, not quite running, until they had slipped through the cordon of British and Roman troops, and had lost themselves in the bustle of London.

  THE UNBLINKING EYE

  Under an empty night sky, the Inca ship stood proud before the old Roman bridge of Londres.

  Jenny and Alphonse pressed their way through grimy mobs. Both sixteen years old, as night closed in they had slipped away from the dreary ceremonial rehearsals at St Paul’s. They couldn’t resist escaping to mingle with the excited Festival crowds.

  And of course they had been drawn here, to the Viracocha, the most spectacular sight of all.

  Beside the Inca ship’s dazzling lines, even the domes, spires and pylons of the Festival, erected to mark the anniversary of the Frankish Conquest in this year of Our Lord Christus Ra 1966, looked shabby indeed. Her towering hull was made entirely of metal, clinkered in some seamless way that gave it flexibility, and the sails were llama wool, coloured as brilliantly as the Inca fashions that had been the talk of the Paris fashion houses this season.

  Jenny Cook was from a family of ship owners, and the very sight excited her. ‘Looking at her you can believe she has sailed from the other side of the world, even from the south—’

  ‘That’s blasphemy,’ Alphonse snapped. But he remembered himself and shrugged. What had been blasphemy a year ago, before the first Inca ships had come sailing north around the west coast of Africa, was common knowledge now, and the old reflexes did not apply.

  Jenny said, ‘Surely on such a craft those sails are only for show, or for trim. There must be some mighty engine buried in her guts – but where are the smoke stacks?’

  ‘Well, you and I are going to have months to find that out, Jenny. And where you see a pretty ship,’ he said more darkly, ‘I see a statement of power.’

  Jenny, as a scion of a prominent merchant family, was to be among the party of friends and tutors who would accompany sixteen-year-old Prince Alphonse during his years-long stay in Cuzco, capital of the Inca. Alphonse had a sense of adventure, even of fun. But as the second son of the Emperor Charlemagne XXXII he saw the world differently from Jenny.

  She protested, ‘Oh, you’re too suspicious, Alphonse. Why, they say there are whole continents out there we know nothing about! Why should the Inca care about the Frankish empire?’

  ‘Perhaps they have conceived an ambition to own us as we own you Anglais.’

  Jenny prickled. However, she had learned some diplomacy in her time at court. ‘Well, I can’t agree with you, and that’s that,’ she said.

  Suddenly a flight of Inca air machines swept overhead like soaring silver birds, following the line of the river, their lights blazing against the darkling night. The crowds ducked and gasped, some of them crossing themselves in awe. After all, the Viracocha was only a ship, and the empires of Europe had ships. But none of them, not even the Ottomans, had machines that could fly.

  ‘You see?’ Alphonse muttered. ‘What is that but a naked demonstration of Inca might? And I’ll tell you something, those metal birds don’t scare me half as much as other machines I’ve seen. Such as a box that can talk to other boxes a world away – they call it a farspeaker – I don’t pretend to understand how it works; they gave one to my father’s office so I can talk to him from Cuzco. What else have they got that they haven’t shown us? Well, come on,’ he said, plucking her arm. ‘We’re going to be late for Atahualpa’s ceremony.’

  Jenny followed reluctantly.

  She watched the flying machines until they had passed out of sight, heading west up the river. When their lights had gone the night sky was revealed, cloudless and moonless, utterly dark, with no planets visible, an infinite emptiness. As if in response the gas lanterns of Londres burned brighter, defiant.

  The Inca caravan was drawn up before the face of St Paul’s. As grandees passed into the building, attendants fed the llamas that had borne the colourful litters. You never saw the Inca use a wheel; they relied for their transport on such means as these haughty, exotic beasts.

  Inside the cathedral, Jenny and Alphonse hastily found their places in the procession, just as it began to pass grandly along the cramped candlelit aisles, led by servants who carried the Orb of the Unblinking Eye. These were followed by George Darwin, archbishop of Londres, who chattered nervously to Atahualpa, commander of the Viracocha and emissary of Huayna Capac XIII, Emperor of the Inca. In the long tail of the procession were representatives from all the great empires of Europe: the Danes, the Germans, the Muscovites, even the Ottomans, grandly bejewelled Muslims in this Christian church. They marched to the gentle playing of Galilean lutes, an ensemble supplied by the Germans. It was remarkable to think, Jenny reflected, that if the Inca had come sailing out of the south three hundred years ago, they would have been met by ambassadors from much the same combination of powers. Though there had always been border disputes and even wars, the political map of Europe had changed little since the Ottoman capture of Vienna had marked the westernmost point of the march of Islam.

  But the Inca towered over the European nobility. They wore woollen suits dyed scarlet and electric blue, colours brighter than the cathedral’s stained glass. Most of the Inca wore face masks as defence against the ‘herd diseases’ they insultingly claimed infested Europe. The effect was to make these imposing figures even more enigmatic, for the only expression you could see was in their black eyes.

  Jenny, at Alphonse’s
side and mixed in with some of the Inca party, was only a few rows back from Atahualpa and Darwin, and she could clearly hear every word they said as they conversed.

  ‘My own family has a long association with this church,’ the bishop said. ‘My ancestor Charles Darwin was a country parson who, dedicated to his theology, rose to become Dean here. But the site is much older. The Anglais built the first Christian chapel on this site in the year of Christus Ra 604. After the Conquest, the Frankish emperors were most generous in endowing this magnificent building in our humble, remote city …’

  As the interpreter translated this, Atahualpa murmured some reply in Quechua, and the two of them laughed softly.

  One of the Inca party, walking beside Jenny, was a boy about her age. He wore an Inca costume like the rest, but without a face mask. He whispered in passable Frankish, ‘The emissary’s being a bit rude about your church. He says it’s a sandstone heap he wouldn’t use to stable his llamas.’

  ‘Charming,’ Jenny whispered back.

  ‘Well, you haven’t seen his llamas.’

  Jenny had to cover her face to keep from giggling. She got a glare from Alphonse, and recovered her composure.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the boy. He was dark-skinned, with a mop of short-cut, tightly curled black hair. The spiral tattoo on his left cheek made him look a little severe, until he smiled, showing bright teeth. ‘My name’s – well, it’s complicated, and the Inca never get it right. You can call me Dreamer.’

  ‘Hello, Dreamer,’ she whispered. ‘I’m Jenny Cook.’

  ‘Pretty name.’

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, is it really? You’re not Inca, are you?’

  ‘No, I just travel with them. They like to move us around, their subject peoples. I’m from the South Land …’

  But she didn’t know where that was, and the procession had paused again as the emissary and the archbishop stopped to inspect the great altar, and Jenny and Dreamer fell silent.

  Atahualpa said to Darwin, ‘I am intrigued by the god of this church. Christus Ra? He is a god who is two gods.’

  ‘In a sense …’ Darwin spoke rapidly of the career of Christ. Long before His birth the Romans had conquered Egypt, but had suffered a sort of reverse religious takeover; their pantheon had seemed flimsy before the power and sheer logic of the Egyptians’ ancient and enduring faith in their sun-god. After all the sun was the only point of stability in a sky populated by chaotic planets, mankind’s only defence against the infinite dark. Who could argue against its worship? This was the religious background into which Jesus had been born. Centuries after Christ’s execution, when His cult was adopted as the empire’s official religion, the bishops and imperial theologians had made a formal identification of Christ with Ra, a unity that had outlasted the empire itself.

  Atahualpa expressed mild interest in this. He said the worship of the sun was a global phenomenon. The Inca’s own sun god was called Inti. Perhaps Inti and Christ-Ra were mere manifestations of the same primal figure …

  The leaders moved on, and the procession followed.

  ‘“Cook”,’ Dreamer whispered. He was evidently more interested in Jenny than in theology. ‘That’s a funny sort of name. Not Frankish, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it has an Anglais root. My family are Anglais, from the north of Grande-Bretagne.’

  ‘You must be rich. You’ve got to be either royal or rich to be in this procession, right?’

  She smiled. ‘Rich enough. I’m at court as part of my education. My grandfathers have been in the coal trade since our ancestor founded the business two hundred years ago. He was called James Cook. My father’s called James too. It’s a mucky business, but lucrative.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Those Watt engines I see everywhere eat enough coal, don’t they?’

  ‘So what do your family do?’

  He said simply, ‘We serve the Inca.’

  The procession reached a chapel dedicated to Isaac Newton, the renowned alchemist and theologian who had developed a conclusive proof of the age of the Earth. Here they prayed to their respective gods, the Inca prostrating themselves before Inti, and the Christians kneeling to Christ.

  And the Inca servants came forward with their Orb of the Unblinking Eye. It was a sphere of some translucent white material, half as tall as a man; the servants carried it in a rope netting, and set it down on a wooden cradle before the statue of Newton himself.

  Atahualpa turned and faced the procession. He may have smiled; his face mask creased. He said through his interpreter: ‘Once it was our practice to plant our temples in the chapels of those we sought to vanquish. Now I place this gift from my emperor, this symbol of our greatest god, in the finest church in this province.’ And, Jenny knew, other Inca parties were handing over similar orbs in all the great capitals of Europe. ‘Once we would move peoples about, whole populations, to cut them away from their roots, and so control them. Now we welcome the children of your princes and merchants, while leaving our own children in your cities, so that we may each learn the culture and the ways of the other.’ He gestured to Alphonse.

  The prince bowed, but he muttered through his teeth, ‘And get hold of a nice set of hostages.’

  ‘Hush,’ Jenny murmured.

  Atahualpa said, ‘Let this globe shine for all eternity as a symbol of our friendship, united under the Unblinking Eye of the One Sun.’ He clapped his hands.

  And the orb lit up, casting a steady pearl-like glow over the grimy statuary of the chapel. The Europeans applauded helplessly.

  Jenny stared, amazed. She could see no power supply, no tank of gas; and the light didn’t flicker like the flame of a candle or a lamp, but burned as steady as the sun itself.

  With the ceremony over, the procession began to break up. Jenny turned to the boy, Dreamer. ‘Are you sailing on the Viracocha?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me. The emissary has one more appointment, a ride on a Watt-engine train to some place called Bataille—’

  ‘That’s where the Frankish army defeated the Anglais back in 1066.’

  ‘Yes. And then we sail.’

  ‘And then we sail,’ Jenny said, fearful, excited, gazing into the dark, playful eyes of this boy from the other side of the world, a boy whose land didn’t exist even in her imagination.

  Alphonse glared at them, brooding.

  The dignitaries were still talking, with stiff politeness. Atahualpa seemed intrigued by Newton’s determination of the Earth’s age. ‘And how did this Newton achieve his result? A study of the rocks, of living things, of the sky? I did not know such sciences were so advanced here.’

  But when Archbishop Darwin explained that Newton’s calculations had been based on records of births and deaths in a holy book, and that his conclusion was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, Atahualpa’s laughter was gusty, echoing from the walls of the cramped chapel.

  Alphonse’s party, with Jenny and his other companions and with Archbishop Darwin attached as a moral guardian, boarded the Inca ship.

  The Viracocha, Jenny learned, was named after a creator god and cultural hero of the Inca. It was as extraordinary inside as out, a floating palace of wide corridors and vast state rooms that glowed with a pale, steady light. The Frankish and Anglais were allowed to stay on deck as the great woollen sails were unfurled and the ship pulled away from Londres, which sprawled over the banks of its river in heaps of smoky industry. Jenny looked for her family’s ships in the docks; she was going to be away from home for years, and the parting from her mother had been tearful.

  But before the ship had left the estuary of the Tamise, the guests were ordered below deck, and the hatches were locked and sealed. There weren’t even any windows in the ship’s sleek hull. Their Inca hosts wanted to save a remarkable surprise for them, they said, a surprise revealed to every crew who crossed the equator,
but not until then.

  And they were all, even Alphonse, put through a programme of inoculation, injected with various potions and their bodies bathed with a prickly light. The Inca doctors said this was to weed out their ‘herd diseases’. All the Europeans resented this, though Darwin marvelled at the medicinal technology on display.

  At least the Inca’s faces were visible, however, now that they had discarded their masks. They were a proud-looking people with jet black hair, dark skin, and noses that would have been called Roman in Europe. None of the crew were particularly friendly. They wouldn’t speak Frankish or Anglais, and they looked on the Europeans with a kind of amused contempt. This infuriated Alphonse, for he was used to looking on others in precisely that way.

  Still, the ship’s sights were spectacular. Jenny was shown the great smelly hold where the llamas were kept during the journey. And she was shown around an engine room. Jenny’s family ran steam scows, and she had expected Watt engines, heavy, clunky, soot-coated iron monsters. The Viracocha’s engine room was a pristine white-walled hall inhabited by sleek metal shapes. The air was filled with a soft humming, and there was a sharp smell in the air that reminded her of the seashore. The smooth sculptures didn’t even look like engines to Jenny, and whatever principle they worked on had nothing to do with steam evidently. So much for her father’s fond hopes of selling coal to the mighty Inca empire!

  Despite such marvels, Jenny chafed at her confinement below decks. What made it worse was that she saw little of her friends. Alphonse was whisked off to a programme of study of Inca culture and science, mediated by Darwin. And in his free time he monopolised Dreamer for private language classes; he wanted to learn as much Quechua as he could manage, for he did not trust the Inca.

  This irritated Jenny more than she was prepared to admit, for the times she relished most of all were the snatched moments she spent with Dreamer.