Ultima (13 page)

Read Ultima Online

Authors: Stephen Baxter

BOOK: Ultima
9.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

“It did. What are you suggesting?”

“Let me take the ColU through this ship's systems. With you, Michael, and the
remiges
.”

The ColU said, “Colonel Kalinski, I would not advise—”

She buried the slate in her tunic so the ColU could not be heard. “We'll find a way to
upgrade
. Does that translate? We'll improve the output of the farms. My God, it can't be so hard; it's probably no better than medieval down there. We'll improve the water filtration and reclamation. Show you how to clean up the air better.”

Michael was frowning, unsure. “You mean you could make the
Malleus
better able to support a larger population of crew. And that way you would have us spare the slaves.”

“That's the idea.”

He shook his head. “Romans are suspicious of innovation, Stef.”

“Well, they can't be that suspicious, or they wouldn't have put their money into Brikanti starships like this, would they? And that centurion of yours strikes me as an imaginative man.” She was stretching the truth there, but at least Quintus hadn't gone running and screaming when two strangers and a robot from an alternate history had come wandering through his brand new Hatch. “Suppose the
Malleus Jesu
were to return, not just with its mission at Romulus completed, but new and improved—a prototype for a new wave of starships to come? What if he were able to present
that
to his own commanders? Romans might not like innovation. What about opportunity, staring them in the face?”

Titus and Michael looked at her, and at each other.

“We must talk this over,” Michael said. “Before the
optio
first of all.”

“I agree,” said Titus.

Michael waggled a finger at her. “And don't start meddling before you've got specific approval from the centurion—and the
trierarchus
, come to that. Or we'll all be for the Brikanti long jump.”

Which, Stef had already gathered, meant being thrown out of an airlock.

Titus growled, “But first let's do what we came for and find your slave boy, Stef Kalinski, if he's still alive.” He leered at her. “And what then? Will you come with me down into the pen, and confront these dying maggots you insist on saving?”

She couldn't meet his gaze.

15

AD 2215; AUC 2968

When Ari Guthfrithson walked into her classroom, Penny Kalinski was trying to teach the children of ancient Britons and Vikings about the contingency of history.

She looked down at her notes on the desk before her, silently cursing the need to read her own handwritten scrawl in this world without computers, cursing the inadequacy of her antique pair of reading glasses to cope with the slow drift of her eyesight. Two years after arriving here, aged seventy-one, there were still some things she couldn't get used to. And she tried not to let the
druidh
put her off her stride.

But now Ari settled into a place at the back of the class beside Marie Golvin, once a bridge crew member on board the ISF ship
Tatania
, and now a teacher here at Penny's Academy. Marie was a figure from Penny's old past, constantly reassuring.

“The Mongols, then,” Penny said. She checked her notes. “It is the late twentieth century.” The thirteenth in Penny's history. The Brikanti, like the Romans, used the old Julian calendar, applying crude leap-year corrections as the centuries passed—and, like the Romans, the Brikanti counted their years since the founding of Rome. It had taken some effort for the newcomers to match their own Gregorian-calendar dates to those in use here. “The Mongols, under their rapacious but visionary khans, have exploded from the steppe and have rampaged into the eastern provinces of the Empire, tearing through Pannonia and Noricum and even Rhaetia. They besiege and destroy town after town. They are
exterminating
Romans. And, who knows? If they cannot be stopped, they may turn on Italia, even reach Rome itself. The legacy of centuries of civilization would be lost, the statues smashed, the books burned, the churches plundered. Perhaps Rome and the Empire could never rise again, even if the Mongol horde could someday be driven out.

“And to the east it is no better. An equally ferocious horde, under generals of equal genius, is tearing its way into the soft belly of the Xin dominion. They don't seek territory, these are not empire builders like the Caesars; they seek nothing but booty, and land to pasture their horses, and women and girls to bear their children.”

Her pupils were no older than twelve years old, and their eyes widened at that last detail. But Brikanti was not a prissy culture. And nor had it been much of a stretch for Penny, a woman, to be effectively running this Academy; women had freedom and power here compared to many other cultures—even those less barbaric than the Mongols.

“There was a moment, then, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, when the future of civilization itself, the very
idea
of it, was under threat. The European plains might now be inhabited by nothing but the horses of illiterate herdsmen, grazing grass growing in the rubble of ruined cities . . .”

Even as she spoke, concentrating on each still-unfamiliar Brikanti word, she was aware of the grandeur of the setting.

Her two dozen students, all children of the wealthy Eboraki merchants who were able to afford the fees she charged, sat in neat rows under the looming conical roof of this schoolhouse. Brand new, and commissioned with the help of Ari himself for the purpose of her Academy—which she had dedicated to Saint Jonbar, who she claimed to Ari was a powerful figure in her own lost version of Christianity—it actually had the feel of great age. It was a roundhouse, like a relic of the European Iron Age of her own history. But the long trunks of the frame, gathered into a stout cone over her head, had been brought across the Atlantic from Canada, which in this history was a province of the Brikanti federation—an expensive import, but for many centuries no trees in Pritanike had been allowed to grow so tall before being cut down for use. The trunks had been set up on a base of concrete, and brilliant fluorescent strip lights were suspended from the apex of the house: to Penny it was a strange mixture of ancient and modern technologies.

In this setting, two years after her arrival aboard the
Ukelwydd
, she had established her Academy, whose principal purposes were to teach math and science—especially her own subject, physics, which was far in advance of anything known here. But she had insisted to Ari that she include classes like this, on wider aspects of culture. She said the goal was to educate herself in this new course of history. Ari had bought it; he had come from a wide-ranging educational background himself.

But she suspected that Ari believed she had a deeper agenda. After all, two years on, Ari was still one of only a handful of Brikanti to know that she came from a different historical background—and, she thought, one of even fewer who actually believed the reality of it all. But, suspicious as he was, he had allowed her to go ahead with these side projects. Penny wondered if Beth Eden Jones had had something to do with that—maybe she'd used a little pillow talk. And she was, after all, carrying Ari's baby . . .

And here he was now, sitting at the back of her class like some school inspector, a half-smile playing on his lips as she lectured these children about the possibility of counterfactuals. Well, he was right to be suspicious. Of course she had an agenda. Of course she was playing a long game. Saint Jonbar, indeed!

She focused on her students, on the Mongols.

“So everything hung in the balance. All history might have been changed. But that did not happen. Does anybody know—”

There were some shout-outs, but a forest of hands was raised more politely, as she'd patiently taught them. This was a warrior culture after all; they did have Vikings in their ancestry. At the beginning, Marie had said she was lucky the students didn't try to attract her attention by throwing axes at her head.

She picked out a student at random. “Yes, Freydis?”

The girl stood up. “The great Roman Emperor Constantius XI sent an embassy to the Xin empress, and persuaded her to join forces and attack the Mongols.” She sat down just as sharply.

“Yes. That's essentially right. Except that it was actually the other way around . . .” That history-changing bit of statecraft, an alliance between bitter rivals that had probably saved two empires, had been initiated by strategic geniuses in the Xin court. But Roman historians, propagandists all, had from that moment given the credit to Constantius. The Brikanti, for all their stated rivalry with Rome, were in some ways in awe of the mighty Empire that had once come so close to destroying them, and had allowed their own view of history to be dazzled by such lies.

“But the point is that because the two rulers
were
able to put aside their own suspicion and ambition, the Mongols were defeated. Without that, everything would have been different. That's what I want you to take away from this lesson today . . . Yes, Freydis.”

The girl stood again. “Maybe it's like when Queen Kartimandia told the Caesar to attack Germania and not Pritanike. If she
hadn't
done that . . .”

Her face shone with the excitement of discovery, of finding a new idea, a whole new way of thinking. Penny was no natural teacher, and at seventy-one years old she was finding the daily classroom routine a grind. But at such moments, when a spark was lit in a young imagination, she could see why people would teach.

But Freydis's contribution hadn't gone down well with her classmates; there was laughter and catcalls. “Yes, Freydis, and you'd be speaking Latin now!”

“So would you,” Freydis snapped back.

“All right, all right.” Penny stood, holding up her hands. “That's enough for now. Time to break for lunch—”

The room turned into a near riot as the students grabbed their stuff and jumped up from their benches. Marie Golvin yelled with parade-ground lungs, “Back here in one hour for relativistic navigation!”

Ari Guthfrithson, with quiet dignity, let the tide of youngsters wash past him. Then, when the room was empty, he walked toward Penny, clapping his hands. “Skillfully done. And all delivered in correct Brikanti, halting and with an exotic accent as it is. I do continue to wonder
why
, you know, you pepper their brains with such ideas, the fragility of history. It wasn't the stated purpose of the Academy, after all.”

Before Penny had to answer, Marie Golvin, who had been collecting up scrolls and paper scraps from around the room, joined them. “Will you have lunch with us,
druidh
? Nothing exciting, I'm afraid.”

“I'd be honored. And that was a neat deflection, by the way, Lieutenant Golvin.” It had taken him some time to memorize the term for Golvin's ISF rank. “Well, shall we walk?”

16

The Academy of Saint Jonbar had been established on the edge of Eboraki, away from the crowded ancient core of the city, in what Penny might have called an outer suburb. The refectory where they would eat, though attached to the Academy, was a short walk out of the campus and toward town.

The main schoolhouse was one of a cluster of such buildings, all brand new roundhouses, which included a gymnasium, a library, an arts center, a small clinic, a workshop for pottery, metalwork and other crafts, and a Christian chapel. The buildings were arranged in neat rows, like the city itself aligned not north-south but on a northeast to southwest axis, the direction of the solstice sunrise and sunset, following Brikanti tradition. There was a grassy playing field, and a kind of parade ground where some of the students, cadets in the armed forces of the Brikanti, could practice marching, and wage mock battles with swords and even blank-loaded firearms. But all this was set in an oak grove, one of a number studded around the city, the tree a symbol of ancient
druidh
wisdom.

Penny and Marie had together designed this complex, with advice from Ari and other locals, and all paid for by money Ari had managed to extract from Navy contingency funds—the military-college aspect had been part of the price they'd had to pay for that. To Penny, even now, it looked like a museum piece, like a reconstruction of some Iron Age village rather than a brand-new, living, breathing facility for young people.

Of course those few students who went on to become full
druidh
wouldn't be so young when they finished. Ari, for instance, had gone through a few years of general education, including history, geography and philosophy, followed by
twenty
years of specialist study in law, politics, and mathematics and astronomy. Nowadays this was a literate culture, but Ari had told Penny that the old preliteracy tradition of memory training, the recall of long passages, was still used to develop the mind. Mathematics was particularly strong here. Penny herself had supervised classes of young children learning to reproduce the outlines of mistletoe seeds using the arcs of circles, carefully drawn with compasses and pens. It was easy to see, given such beginnings, how the Brikanti grew up to be such fine astronomers and interstellar navigators: from the geometry of a mistletoe seed to the trajectory of a starship.

The principal town of Eboraki was evidently a more ancient community than the Roman-planted towns in Gaul and Germania, and the older traditions of Celtic architecture and town planning lingered on, not obliterated by later Roman developments as in Penny's timeline. A grid pattern of roads of gravel and crushed rock separated houses of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, all surrounded by a monumental wall, outside which lay cemeteries and funeral pyres. The higher ground in the center of the city—in Penny's world dominated by a cathedral that had stood on the site of a demolished
principia
, headquarters of a Roman legion—did bear the remains of a two-thousand-year-old fort, but here it had been a Brikanti-built bastion, a relic of the days when continental invasions had been feared and experienced.
This
Britain, for better or worse, had never been severed from its own past by a Roman sword.

Studying this new history with her students, Penny had come to understand how much harm the Brikanti and their continental cousins, who Penny had grown up knowing as the Celts, had suffered at the hands of the Romans. Once the Celtic nations had prospered across Europe from Britain to the Danube, but the Romans' empire-building expansion had driven them back. Though Britain, in this history, had remained independent of Rome, elsewhere the Celts had been crushed. When Caesar had invaded Gaul—a prosperous, settled and literate country of a population of eight million—he had slaughtered one million and enslaved another million. One detail particularly remembered by Brikanti historians was that Caesar had severed the hands of rebels, so they could not gather their harvest. This history was not well-known in Penny's timeline. Here, it had never been forgotten.

And Brikanti had grown traditions of its own. This was no empire; it was a federation of nations, and a democracy, of sorts, with traditions inherited from both its British and Scandinavian forebears. That old fort on the hill was now the seat of the Althing, an assembly with representatives of Brikanti holdings around the world, and the most powerful single individual was not a hereditary emperor but an elected
logsogumadr
, a law-speaker.

But this was a world that had been industrialized for centuries, a process that had proceeded without conscience or compensation. So, even on a bright midsummer day like today, a pall of smog hung over the city. No trees survived in Eboraki, save in the carefully preserved oak groves. In this capital people dressed brightly, in embroidered cloaks over colorfully striped tunics and leggings, adorned with beads of blue glass or amber, and with torcs of steel or silver at their necks. But they routinely wore face masks and goggles to keep the muck out of their eyes and lungs, and life expectancy in a culture capable of sending ships to the planets was shockingly low. Nobody here, of course, could imagine things could be different. It was when Penny was least busy, when she walked in the city looking at the children coughing into their filthy masks, that she most acutely missed the world she had left behind.

And yet, as the months had passed, to walk these streets at the times of solstice, midsummer and midwinter, with the low sun of morning or evening suspended over the streets and filling the city with light, had pleased her in ways she would have found hard to describe.

•   •   •

The meals in the small refectory were prepared by students as part of their education, under the supervision of a few townspeople. The fare, served at rough-hewn wooden tables, was traditional Brikanti, meat-heavy, laden with butter and vegetable sauces and served with slabs of gritty bread—although Roman fare was also available, cheese, olives. Rice and potatoes were expensive foreign luxuries, even in the Brikanti capital. All the
Tatania
crew had had problems with this diet, mostly from a lack of roughage. But Penny had learned not to try to change some things, such as the Brikanti habit of serving meals, even to very young children, with watered-down mead or beer. Or the habit of eating your food with the knife you wore at your belt.

Still, the meat, a richly stewed beef, was tender and tasty, and for a while they ate without speaking.

At length Ari said, picking up the conversation where they'd left off, “You don't need to thank me for visiting. For one thing it's my job; I'm expected to report to the Navy funding body who provided the cash for all this. For another it's a pleasure to see how you're getting on. I sometimes feel as if I connect you all, the crew of the
Tatania
.”

“We are all rather scattered,” Penny admitted.

“But that's not a bad thing. It shows you're finding places in a society that must be very strange to you. How's Jiang, by the way?”

“Doing fine. Our house is comfortable. You know that he is working at the college; he gives classes in kernel engineering, among other topics.”

“I can understand he will be finding it a particular challenge here. We like to believe we are world citizens, we Brikanti. In fact it is very rare to see a Xin face, even here in Eboraki, the capital.”

Marie Golvin said, “Well, he wouldn't call himself Xin, but the point's taken. He doesn't go out much.”

“He'll be fine,” Penny assured her. “And so's General McGregor, we hear.”

“I saw him recently,” Ari said. “Lecturing junior officers on the command and control techniques of your
International Space Fleet
.” Through his smooth Brikanti, it was odd to hear him break into English. “He's very impressive.”

“He always has been. And I've known him since he was seventeen years old,” Penny said, feeling a little wistful.

Ari watched her sharply. “That's true in one of the reality strands you inhabited, so I hear. In the other—”

“Yes, yes. In the other it was my twin sister who knew him—save she wasn't a twin, for I didn't exist at all. Whatever. I always knew Lex would land on his feet, wherever he ended up.”

“You can see he wishes he could shed three decades and fly with the youngsters. To battle the Xin for the treasures of the Tears of Ymir!”

“That sounds like Lex, all right. He's visited us a few times. He's most struck by the special relativity we teach here. In our reality, so he says, he always struggled with math. Here, you had no relativity theory. But you did have the kernels, and you
discovered
relativity experimentally, by driving your kernel ships up against the light barrier, and finding out the hard way that the clocks slow and the relativistic mass piles up.”

Marie said, “I heard of engineers being executed because they couldn't make their ships travel faster than light.”

“That was the Romans and the Xin, not us,” Ari said. “And the stories are apocryphal anyhow.”

Penny mopped up her vegetable stew with her rubbery bread. “And Beth? How is your new wife, Ari?”

He smiled, but Penny sensed reserve. “Well, you understand that she is not formally my wife, since she had no family to give her away . . . She is fine.”

Penny and Marie shared a glance.

Marie said, “That's all you have to say? How's the baby? She's overdue, isn't she?”

He seemed to consider his words carefully. “We are dealing with the challenge of the birth in our own way.”

Penny frowned. “‘Challenge'? What's challenging about it? Your medicine is pretty good when it comes to childbirth. I checked it over myself when Beth said she was pregnant, and I had Earthshine consult too. Her age would always be an issue; she is thirty-eight now . . . Why is this a challenge?”

“This is a private matter,” he said coldly, his pale face empty. Suddenly he had never seemed more alien to Penny, more foreign.

“But—”

“Instead, let us talk of Earthshine. It is he who has made the most dramatic entry into our society, as I'm sure you know. Even if his true nature is carefully kept a secret. As far as most people know he is simply another survivor of a ship of mysterious origin.

“And he seems to be attempting superhuman feats. You must know that he is now at Höd.” The Brikanti name for Ceres. “He intends, with the party of supporters he has gathered around him, to move on to Mars. In a way this fulfills the promise of the images he showed us when we first encountered you: the great buildings on the Mars of your reality. But here, he claims, he will achieve much more.”

Penny grunted. “I often thought he'd have made a great salesman. If only of himself.”

“He intends”—Ari mimed a shove with his upraised hand—“to push Höd out of its track around the sun, and make it sail to Mars.” He looked at them. “This is what he claims. I have performed my own estimates of the problem, the energies required. Do you think this is achievable?”

Penny, startled, looked at Marie.

Marie said, “With a hefty enough booster, any such feat is possible. And this society is knee-deep in kernels, which have been used in ways we never dared . . . Yes, I would say it is possible.”

“Earthshine claims he will do this to deliver to Mars raw materials that planet lacks. Water, other compounds, some metals perhaps. He intends, he says, to rebuild Mars.”

Penny said to Marie in English, “Terraforming. I bet that's what he means. These people have no conception of such schemes, since they don't even have a word for ‘ecology.'”

Ari frowned. “I cannot understand what you are saying.”

“I apologize,” said Marie formally. “In our reality there were grand plans to remake Mars into a world like the Earth. Maybe other worlds too, Venus, Titan—umm, the largest moon of Augustus. But on Mars it would mean importing a lot of volatiles—the kind of stuff Ceres, Höd, is made of.” She looked at Penny doubtfully. “I guess it could be made to work. If Ceres could be brought into Martian orbit—”

“That would take a heck of a lot of delta-vee.”

“Yes. But then you could break it up slowly, drop the material you need into the air, with Ceres itself as a construction shack.”

Penny nodded. “I do know there was evidence on Earth, our Earth, of major climate disturbances caused by impacts of comets or asteroids. Fifty-five million years back, a spike in the carbon dioxide levels—doubled in a single year. So the idea is not implausible.”

Ari listened carefully, picking through the technical language. “Hairy stars and the Tears of Ymir, falling to Terra—and now to Mars. So do you think Earthshine is sincere? Perhaps we should be wary. He is proposing to deploy large energies, to move huge masses around the planetary system—
our
planetary system.” He grimaced. “If he is allowed to wield such energies, your artificial man would be as powerful as a god.”

Penny said, “So he was before, in our reality. But here's what you have to understand, Ari. Earthshine and his brothers, the Core AIs, were significant powers on our Earth. But, like gods, they always had their own agenda. An agenda that might or might not coincide with the interests of mankind . . . And whatever Earthshine says about Höd now, we'll have to remember that here too his own deep agenda comes first.”

“Very well. And what might that ‘deep agenda' now be?”

“We've no way of knowing.”

“I recall the talk of your ‘impossible sister,' Penelope Kalinski. Earthshine was fascinated by that. You've said so yourself. He detected this—unraveling of history—before he and you witnessed it on a much larger scale. Prescient, don't you think? Wouldn't he pursue such an interest here?”

Sure he would, she thought. It was odd to think that even now she and the rest of the
Tatania
crew were still dependent on Earthshine, for the translator gadgets he had provided them all with, and regularly downloaded updates of vocabulary and grammar. And she did remember how obsessive he had seemed about the interference in human history by an agency unknown, right back to the beginning of her own involvement with him, going back more than three decades of her complicated life:
I am everywhere. And I am starting to hear your footsteps, you Hatch-makers. I can hear the grass grow. And I can hear you . . .

Other books

Dorothy Eden by American Heiress
Blood and Sand by Matthew James
Poor Butterfly by Stuart M. Kaminsky
Short Straw Bride by Dallas Schulze
Fusion by Rose, Imogen
Waiting for Autumn by Scott Blum
The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer
White Cloud Retreat by Dianne Harman