Ultima (32 page)

In the Roman camp, time was recorded, by order of Quintus Fabius. From the beginning, the Romans had counted the cycle of the habitat's artificial days and nights, measuring the time they spent in this place.

It was a month before Ruminavi came again to the village, this time alone, in his deputy-prefect finery but without his squad of soldiers. And he sought out Mardina, who was walking with Clodia with firewood from the edge of the forest.

“You two,” he snapped. “Come with me. Now.” He headed out of the village, away from the line of the road, toward the largest of the local
tambos
. When they didn't follow him immediately, he glanced back over his shoulder. “Look, you trusted me last time, and you were saved, weren't you?”

Mardina called, “Saved from what?”

“Come
on
, hurry . . .”

As they had before, they hesitated for a heartbeat. Then they dumped their armfuls of firewood and ran after him.

They caught him up by the low fence that surrounded the
tambo.
The imperial storehouse was a sprawling structure that was the center of a complex of buildings, including an inn for travelers, a grander hotel for visiting imperial officials, and a small rail station. At the gate, in a wall of moon rock, Ruminavi produced documentation to prove his identity, vouched for the girls, and led them into the complex to the storehouse itself.

Before the storehouse, in a shaded corner out of sight of the main complex, stood a kind of stone plinth, only a hand's breadth high, its sides engraved with the faces of some fierce god. There were many such enigmatic structures dotted about this god-soaked artificial world, and Mardina would not have given this one much thought. But the prefect, she saw, was working a kind of key into a lock in the plinth's surface, which he'd brushed clear of dust.

Mardina repeated, “You saved us from what,
apu
?”

He grinned. “Well, when I've saved your life
again
I'll explain it all. The last sweep wasn't satisfactory, you see, in terms of tributes for the particular
mit'a
we had been assigned to collect. So the Inca's courtiers sent out the
awka kamayuq
parties again. And
that's
what I'm saving you from . . .” At last the key turned. “Ha! Done it.” He got to his feet, breathless, and grasped a handle set into the surface of the plinth. “Help me, you two. Look, here are more handles, there and there.”

Clodia asked, “Help you with what? What is this thing?”

“A door in the world . . .”

As the three of them heaved, the plinth toppled back—to reveal a steel-walled tunnel leading down into the ground, set with scuffed rungs. There was a smell of oil, the sharp tang of electricity.

“The underbelly of the world,” Ruminavi said admiringly, and he rapped a rung with one knuckle. “Which we call the
xibalba
, the underworld. Two centuries old, and still as sound as when it was built. And there's a lot of it, miles thick in some places. Down you go. I need to be last in, so I can lock us tight once more.”

Again Clodia and Mardina hesitated. Again they gave in, and followed his lead.

Mardina went first. “Just understand this,
apu.
I trust you only marginally more than I distrust you.”

“Understood.”

“And if any harm were to come to Clodia because of all this, her father will pull you apart like a spider in a condor's beak.”

“I don't doubt it—down you go, Clodia; hurry, they are close!—but it is harm to Clodia especially that I am trying to avert. Are you at the bottom? The light dazzles up here . . . Good. I'm on my way.”

He clambered briskly down the rungs, and pulled the lid closed. As the heavy plinth fell back in place, the lid slammed shut with an ominous clang. To seal it, Mardina saw that he turned a wheel rather than use his key—good, they had a way out of here, whatever Ruminavi did.

At the bottom of the shaft, Mardina found herself standing in a corridor dimly lit by fluorescent tubes, many of which had failed, creating islands of darkness. There were piles of litter here and there, heaps of tools, scraps of paper, a few discarded bits of clothing. The walls themselves were scuffed, dented and scarred, scratched with graffiti. It was a dismal prospect.

And the corridor seemed to run to infinity in either direction. Mardina felt Clodia's hand slip into hers.

Ruminavi heaved a sigh. “Well, we're safe now. Come on, there's a rest station just down here.” He led the way, his booted feet clattering on the bare metal floor, his voice echoing. “The troops and the assessors think I've gone to spy out the forest. I know how long they plan to be at this
ayllu
; I'll bring you back out when they are safely gone.”

They had to hurry to keep up with the
apu
. Mardina said, “Seems a good way to this rest station of yours.”

He snorted. “You're not wrong. But you've no idea how long this corridor runs.” He pointed. “All the way back to the Hurin Cuzco hub that way; all the way to the ocean
that
way. This is one of the main subsurface arteries—aside from the big vehicle access ways, that is. There are even some ways that pass under the ocean to the
cuntisuyu
. Here we are . . .”

The rest station was basic, a few scuffed benches, cupboards empty of any trace of food save a few crumbs, a spigot that dispensed warm water, a
quipu
hanging from a nail—maybe it was a work schedule. A single light overhead made everything seem washed out, dead; Ruminavi seemed even more wormlike than usual. But if this was some kind of trap, she and Clodia had walked right into it, Mardina reminded herself.

Mardina and Clodia sat uncomfortably, nervously, side by side. Mardina asked, “What is this place,
apu
?”

“Can't you guess? Maintenance—that's what all this is for. The hull of the Yupanquisuyu is riddled with tunnels and access ports, and the tremendous equipment needed to keep the world working.”

Clodia stared. “What kind of equipment?”

“Machines that do all the things a planet will do for you for free. Consider rainfall on the hub mountains. Every drop that falls dislodges a speck of rock. In time the mountains are worn away, and all their substance washes into the sea. On the world you call
Terra
, all that eroded silt is compressed and heated and passed in great currents beneath the surface, until it is thrust back up to the surface, as lava from a volcano, as a stupendous new mountain of granite. And so on, all entirely natural, the very mountains rebuilt. Here, the rock would just wear away, and the ocean would clog up, huge deltas spreading out from the
cuntisuyu
and
antisuyu
rivers until they met in the middle—if we let it happen. And so we have machines to gather the eroded waste, and ducts to pipe it back to the mountaintops, and sculpting machines to spray out new rock layers . . . That kind of thing.” He smiled. “The architect of this world allowed himself to be called Viracocha, who is our creator god. But he was not Viracocha—or rather, the man alone was not the god, but we
all
are, all the generations since who have labored to keep the world working.”

Mardina tried to imagine it. “So the whole of the hull of this great ship is embedded with vast machines to maintain the world.”

“That's the idea.”

“And where there are machines to maintain the world, there must be people to maintain the machines.”

“Hence the hatches—there are access ways near most of the larger
tambos
. Maintaining the infrastructure machinery is a
mit'a
obligation, though we do use
yanakunas
for the more dangerous and unpleasant work. Cleaning out the great ocean-floor silt ducts, for instance—that's a great eater of humanity. Or the
antis
. They aren't much use for anything else in terms of the
mit'a
, save the
capacocha
of course.”

Mardina didn't know what he meant by that:
capacocha.

He smiled at them. “I'll tell you a secret. We're planning to use your own people in the undermachinery, eventually. Well, you were miners of ice moons, or you say you were; you are used to working with complex machinery in tight spaces. And you look strong, able to endure. We haven't done this yet because we still don't quite trust you. We don't want rats in the foundations of the palace, so to speak.”

Clodia said, “The
antis
. Who you say are no use for anything—”

“I suppose that's unfair. They harvest certain plants and animals for us that grow wild in their forest. They are fine archers, and that can be useful. And in their way, I'm told, they help maintain the health of their forest. All that burning and cutting they do is itself part of a greater cycle.”

“They worship Jesu,” Clodia said. “As we do.”

His smile returned. “Ah, yes! You noticed that, did you? The slave god on His cross. They picked it up from you Romans, of course: those of your ancestors who once crossed the ocean to come to our country, to the
antisuyu
jungle
.
The Romans were successful for a while; they built their coastal cities and explored the river valleys. But then they, or at least your government and its legions, withdrew from our lands, leaving only relics, survivors. When our own expansion into the
antisuyu
came some centuries later, we learned a great deal about the lands across the sea from the babbling of the degenerate descendants of the colonists, before we took them as
yanakunas
or otherwise absorbed them. But the
antis
had encountered those wretches first, in their forest—and with the
antis
they did leave a more lasting legacy, which is the worship of your slave god. Perhaps it is a consolation for them now, as they endure their miserable lives in the jungle.”

Mardina glanced at Clodia. “Or perhaps it motivates them to help others. Help on which you relied the first time you saved us from the
mit'a
party,
apu
.”

“Well, perhaps.”

“But you still haven't told us what it is you so bravely saved us from.”

“Well, more specifically, it is Clodia. You are the exact right age, and your pale color, and your beauty, child, make you a perfect tribute offering.”

Clodia looked confused and scared. “An offering for what?”

“The
capacocha
is part of the
mit'a
tribute, to the Sapa Inca. A special tribute—a gift of children. And if your child is chosen, you must give up her or him gladly, and sing songs of thanks and celebration when the end comes.”

“I don't understand. What would the Sapa Inca want with me?”

“You would be treated very well—like an Inca, or his heir, yourself. You would see Hanan Cuzco! You would eat the finest food, drink the finest beers—”

Mardina saw it.
“She would be killed,”
she said. “That's the
capacocha
, isn't it? The sacrifice of children.”

He spread his hands. “It is the ancient way. You would be preserved . . . Your beauty would never be lost, or forgotten.”

“And this is what you saved me from.” Clodia sounded more bewildered than scared. “Why?”

Now Mardina scowled. “If you're expecting some kind of payment in return for this,
apu
—”

He seemed hurt by the suggestion. “Oh, it's nothing like that.” He looked at Clodia sadly. “I have a variety of motives. One is simple pity. You are so young, and so new to this world. It seems wrong to snatch you out of it so suddenly! And then there is Inguill.”

“The
quipucamayoc
?” Mardina asked. “What does she have to do with it?”

“She doesn't want you Romans . . .
disturbed
. Not yet. She doesn't want you rising up in rebellion, for instance, because we took your prettiest child.”

“Why not?”

“Well, she hasn't told me. And probably for reasons you would not yet understand. But I don't believe she's finished with you yet.” He fished a watch out of his pocket, a crude affair of knotted string and steel springs. “Still not safe for you up there. Would you like some more water?”

It took some weeks, carefully counted out by Beth in the unchanging light of Proxima, for Earthshine to make himself ready for the journey to the antistellar.

Beth packed up too, in the end. She decided she would accompany him for at least some of the route he had picked out for himself—a route based, he said, on maps of the Per Ardua she had known, and which he hoped would still have some usefulness here, wherever
here
actually was.

But she always intended to come back, alone if need be, back to the substellar, and the starshine. She'd be able to retrace her steps; she was sure of that. And her own gear, the shelter and other survival gear, even her Mars pressure suit, were light enough for her to carry, unaided by the support unit. After all, the substellar was surely as comfortable a location to live as she'd find anywhere on the planet. And if anybody else showed up on this world—well, they'd probably make their way to the substellar as the most obvious geographical meeting point, even if they didn't just come through the substellar Hatch in the first place.

Earthshine did have his support unit complete a survey of the substellar site before they left, purely for completeness, Beth thought. The unit sampled the soil for traces of metals or other exotic materials, and ran sonar and geophysical surveys of the area in search of deeper traces of habitation.

And, after an unpromising start, it found something. Though the surface layers were bare of artifacts or structure, there was scarring in the bedrock, traces of deep foundations, large underground chambers cut into the rock and long since collapsed. All this was buried under more recent layers of gravel and soil.

Earthshine showed her the results on a slate. “Look at the design,” he said. “The architecture, what you can make out of it. We, from the UN-China continuity, built in circles, rectangles . . .”

The buried remains were more like overlapping ellipses, Beth thought, connected by curving threads of long-imploded corridors.

“Once there must have been a considerable community here. Of course they would come here to the substellar;
everybody
comes here. It's all gone from above ground, any toxins or radioactive debris or the like long washed away, the remnant building stone shattered to dust by the weather. But it would take an ice age to scrub away these relics in the bedrock. And Per Ardua doesn't have ice ages, not the way Earth does, with glaciers and ice caps grinding their way across the landscape.”

“These traces could be very ancient, then.”

“Unimaginably,” Earthshine said heavily.

“Then they can't be human.”

“Why not? Humans have been here, surely, whatever the distortion of history. You pointed out that somebody must have brought the potatoes.”

“Yes, but people first got to Per Ardua only a few years before I was born.”

“That was in the old continuity, in the UN-China history.” He glanced up at Proxima. “And you're assuming we traveled sideways in time, so to speak, as well as across space.”

Sideways in time?
What other way was there to travel? She asked him what he meant by that, but he wouldn't elaborate.

After that, Earthshine turned his back on the substellar. It was clear he wasn't interested in human endeavor here, however enigmatic or ancient. All he cared about was his ongoing dialogue, or undeclared war, with the beings he called the Dreamers.

And to pursue that, he had to get to the antistellar. That was his obsession, and nothing was to be allowed to distract him.

•   •   •

When they departed at last, Beth left behind a note, pinned under a rock on top of the Hatch emplacement. Just her name, the date they'd arrived here in various forms of calendar, and an indication of where they'd gone. You never knew what, or who, might turn up.

And so they marched, heading roughly southwest. Earthshine said they were mirroring a farside journey made by her own father with Stef Kalinski long ago, before they had disappeared into a Hatch
they
had found at the antistellar.

Earthshine walked tirelessly, of course, and as he had offered, they had rigged up a seat for Beth to ride on the support unit. But she mostly refused to use it. She wanted the exercise; she wanted to toughen herself up. If she was in for a solitary life on Per Ardua, it would pay to be in good condition. And also she didn't want to get carried too far and too fast; she wanted to stay inside a reasonable walk-back limit as long as she could. So she walked, though Earthshine displayed a very authentic-seeming impatience to make faster progress.

At first they followed the valley of a river, flowing radially away from that central point. Per Ardua's basic climate cycle was that water that had evaporated from across the hemisphere was drawn into the substellar low, rained out there, and then returned to the wider landscapes via rivers like this one. An additional cycle worked at the terminator, the band of shadow that separated the day side from the night; more rain fell from the cooling air there, to spill back toward the warmth of the starlit side.

And as they moved out from the substellar point, following the river, the landscape gradually changed. The substellar itself was at the summit of a tremendous blister of raised land, a frozen rocky tide lifted by Proxima, directly above. Per Ardua was in fact egg-shaped, if only subtly, as the tide raised a similar bulge at the antistellar point on the far side. So they descended from this upland to a broader plain, broken by eroded hills and cut through by more river valleys following radii out from the substellar center.

The nature of the vegetation changed too. The relatively lush but open forest of the substellar gave way to a more static landscape, much of it covered by tremendous leaves that blanketed the ground: a miserly gathering of all the light that poured down from a star that was still almost overhead. Beth realized that the more turbulent weather at the substellar itself must drive some change—storms would topple trees and clear the ground—and this passive light-guzzling strategy wouldn't work there. And Beth remembered too that on
her
Per Ardua some ground-cover “plants” like these had in fact been “kites,” flying beings, in a sedentary phase. But not here, not now; she saw no sign that these were anything other than vegetables, clinging to the ground as stationary and stately as stromatolites.

Indeed, as she walked, she saw no sign of the kind of “animal” life that had once been common here—not that the distinction between animals and plant life here had been quite the same as on Earth—no kites, no builders, no fish-analogues in the rivers. Nothing but plants and stromatolites and simpler organisms like lichen, competing for the light. The silence of the world was profound, broken only by the wind, the occasional hiss of rain, and their own voices.

And yet they saw more traces of humanity, or at least of the world humans came from. More splashes of the brilliant green of Earth's version of photosynthesis, standing out against the darker hues of Arduan life. These were mostly what looked like much-evolved versions of food plants, potatoes, yams, beets, soya beans, even peas and grapevines, and what looked like laver, a descendant of a genetically engineered seaweed, choking water courses. Earthshine speculated that, untended, these survivors had reverted to something like their original wild forms—the tubers of the potatoes, for instance, were much reduced from the bloated varieties favored by humans. Beth carefully selected samples to enhance her stores.

Survivors: that was what they were, terrestrial stock clinging on amid the native life of this world. And yet Beth thought she saw a kind of silent cooperation going on here. In the flood plain of one river, terrestrial potatoes covered ground that looked too damp for most Arduan life, but Arduan stems sprouted in ground consolidated by the potatoes' roots. In an isolated forest copse she found terrestrial vines growing up the trunk-stems of Arduan trees. And so on. Even if there had been animals, the herbivores from each domain of life couldn't have digested samples from the other; the biochemistry, coming from a common stock, was similar but not identical. But perhaps, she thought, the dissimilar forms of life were evolving deeper ways to cooperate. Just as she and her virtual grandfather were two more dissimilar life-forms finding ways to get along.

That came to an end a couple of weeks into the walk, with two hundred kilometers covered. It was when she saw her own shadow starting to stretch before her on the ground, meaning that Proxima was no longer overhead but was beginning to set, that she realized she'd come far enough.

•   •   •

The parting, once she'd separated out her gear, was awkward. Almost jokey.

“At least you'll know where to find me,” said Earthshine.

“And you me.” She forced a smile. “Even if we couldn't be farther apart on this planet. Literally.”

“That's true,” he said gravely. “Especially taking into account the tidal bulges. When I get the chance I intend to establish some kind of communication system. Small satellites perhaps. You have comms gear—”

“In the pack you've given me, the slates. I know.”

They stood in stiff silence.

“Goodbye, then,” Earthshine said.

“Goodbye.”

He made a show of climbing aboard his carriage, his support unit on its recently fabricated wheels, and off he went, at last accelerating up to the speeds he'd wanted to make in the first place. It somehow comforted her to know that he was continuing to support his human virtual form.

Then she turned away, and began the long walk back, alone.