Ultima (7 page)

“Then came Mercury,” Eilidh said. “There was a war of acquisition, more intense than most. We all wanted Mercury and its resources to capture the energy of the sun, you see. It was seen as a strategic position in terms of advantage for the future. And just how strategic only became clear when a Xin party stumbled across a field of kernels.”

“Ah.”

“After the usual blood toll the kernels were tamed, their energies used to drive our ships, and they were unleashed as weapons of war.”

That simple phrase managed to shock Stef, despite all she'd witnessed in her own home timeline. “Surely not on Earth itself.”

Eilidh just returned her look. “But we are speaking of the Hatches. The first Hatch of all was found on Mercury, in the kernel field.”

“As it was for us,” Stef said.

Eilidh raised her eyebrows. “On a different Mercury too? We do have much to discuss. Of course the Hatch was opened; of course there were attempts to
pass through
 . . . None of those who entered, unwilling slaves, bold soldiers, curious philosophers, ever returned.”

“Perhaps they are still in transit.”

“In transit?”

“
Our
Mercury Hatch is connected to one on Per Ardua. Umm, which is a world of Proxima Centauri. Which is—”

“The nearest star, in the Centaur's Hoof. For us, it has been given the same name.
Proxima.
” She smiled, a little sourly. “So there are Romans in your country too.”

“Were. Long story. Look, it's only four years as light travels between Mercury and Proxima. So it's possible to go there and step back with only eight years elapsing.”

Eilidh frowned as she puzzled all that out; Stef had no idea how much understanding of such basic physics they shared.

“The point is,” Stef said, “maybe
your
Hatch on your Mercury was hooked up to somewhere else. Somewhere much farther away.” There was no reason why that shouldn't be true, she realized. They knew so little, despite the decades that had passed since her own first brush with all this strangeness. “Your travelers may have arrived alive and well, but just haven't had time to step back home yet. Maybe they are still traveling, oblivious.”

“It's possible. Oddly there is a soldiers' legend along those lines. Perhaps the travelers have gone, not to Proxima, the nearest star, but to Ultima, the
furthest
star of all.”

Stef frowned. What could that mean? The furthest star, in an expanding universe full of galaxies and clusters of galaxies . . .

“But, though we have not walked through the Hatches to Proxima and its worlds, we have journeyed there in ships—ships like the
Malleus Jesu
, orbiting high above. When we got there, on the third planet from the star—”

Per Ardua.

“—we found a kernel field, not unlike that on Mercury—by then we had learned how to search for such things—and we found a Hatch, and
we found instructions
on how to construct a fresh one. Just as I have described.”

“Instructions. Of what kind?”

“Enigmatic. Graphic, but enigmatic. Enough for us to work out the rest, after—”

“Another blood toll.” Stef remembered the builders, natives of Per Ardua—
her
Per Ardua. She had seen little of them, but she knew Yuri remembered them with affection from his early, near-solitary years on the planet. “These graphic instructions—was there any sign of the natives who created them?”

“None. So I'm told. Not a trace save these odd diagrams, and even they were lodged inside a Hatch.” She eyed Stef. “It was another scrap that doesn't fit, another fragment of a lost history. Like you and your companions. What do you think?”

A scrap like her own unexpected sister in the Hatch on Mercury, Stef thought. The first reality tweak of all. She shrugged. “I don't know what to think.”

“Well, keep trying. And now—look down.”

The
cetus
was now sailing serenely over mountains.

•   •   •

The sun of this world was not high, it might have been an early afternoon at a temperate latitude on Earth, and shadows pooled in the valleys that separated the peaks. The second sun was in the sky too and cast a fainter double shadow. Ice striped the taller peaks, and rivers flowed through the valleys like bands of steel. And, save for the shadow cast by the
cetus
itself, Stef could see nothing moving down there, no people, no animals, not so much as a thread of smoke.

But everywhere she looked, Stef saw artifice. Every mountain seemed to have been shaped, regularized as a pyramid or a tetrahedron. The valleys looked as if they had been shaped, too, straightened. Some of the peaks were connected by tremendous bridges of stone. Many of the mountain walls were terraced, so that it looked as if giant staircases climbed their flanks, while others had huge vertical structures fixed to their faces, almost like the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals, or were deeply inscribed with gullies and channels.

Eilidh was watching her. “Tell me what you see.”

“It's like a simulation.”

“A what?”

“Sorry. Like a model. A mock-up of a mountain range. It doesn't look real.”

“Yet it is real. This planet is laced by mountain ranges; it is, or at least was, very active. And all of them have been shaped and reshaped by hands unseen, just as you see here. All as far as we have visited and studied. There's much you can't see from the surface. We burrowed into one mountain, sounded out others. The mountains are hollowed, strengthened within by huge remnant pillars of rock. They have been transformed into immense granite fortresses, or so it seems. For the Roman military engineers, who eat and breathe fortifications, this is Elysium, as you can imagine.”

“We noticed this the minute we stepped out of the Hatch,” Stef said, wondering. “I never dreamed the
whole world
was like this. But—who built all this? And where are they now?”

“That's the puzzle. These vast mountain-fortresses are all pristine, save for some evidence of erosion and rock fall—natural breakdowns. There's no evidence they were ever inhabited, let alone fought over. Meanwhile, across the planet, we have found no trace of life more complex than those orange chimney-stacks of bugs you see piled up on the plains. Nothing
moved
here, not until the legionaries arrived, and they don't move much either. Ha! I do have a theory, for what it's worth. I may be limited as a
druidh
but I've seen as much of this world as anybody.”

“Tell me.”

“The farside, the dark side, is—damaged. I've seen vast craters, their rims protruding above the ice. And there is a very odd range of mountains running virtually north to south down the rim of one of the continents there, buried though it is under the ice.”

“Like the Andes.”

“The what?”

“A mountain range in, umm, Valhalla Inferior, I think you call it.”

“Like that—yes. Now, these mountains had been modified, but not as fortresses. We saw evidence of vast installations, like cannon muzzles, all along the western faces of the mountains. My colleagues, especially the Romans, thought these must be weapons, but they didn't look like very effective weapons to me. The only purpose I could think of . . .”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps these were, not weapons,
engines
. Rockets intended to fire together, powered by kernels presumably, blasting all along this great seam along the belly of the planet—”

“My God. You think they were trying to spin up the planet?”

“It's possible. Maybe there was some great project to make this world more hospitable. The approaches to the second sun, you know, do make life difficult here, for the native life as for the Roman colonists.”

The ColU had worked out that this was a double-star system in which both partners were red dwarfs—small, miserly stars, like Proxima, so small and dim they hadn't even been detected from Earth. The ColU had said the nearest such system to Earth must be at least seven, eight, nine light-years out.

“Of course,” Eilidh said, “most of this world's life, like every living world, is comprised of bugs that inhabit the deep rocks, miles deep, feeding off seeps of water and heat and minerals. We found them here when we were running deep mining trials—as one always finds them, on every world.
They
won't care if there is one or two suns in the sky, or more. So long as the world itself lasts, they will too.”

“I take it the great spin-up never happened.”

“It appears there was a war to stop it. Evidently not everybody agreed with the visionary engineers behind the scheme. The big spin-mountain engines were attacked—we have seen the damage.”

“If this is all so, then what happened to the natives after that?”

“I can only guess. Perhaps they were appalled by the damage done by their kernel war. The building of their mountain refuges might have been a last burst of sanity before the madness—or possibly the other way around.”

“But despite all that they are gone.”

“Perhaps there was something like a plague, or . . .” She eyed Stef. “
You
have more sophisticated machines than us, as evidenced by Collius. There may have been other weapons that were used to eradicate all higher forms of life from this world, before they wrecked it altogether.”

“Leaving it to the deep bugs to start again, I suppose.”

Eilidh sighed. “That, and a world like a dead emperor's folly.”

It was yet another planetary tragedy, Stef realized, caused by the availability of the kernels. “I think I envy those deep bugs, you know. Resting in their gloomy chambers, far below all the commotion of the surface. Life must seem so simple, and so safe.”

Eilidh grunted. “But not for the likes of us.”

“So,” Stef said, trying to understand, “you come out into interstellar space in kernel-driven hulks. We got as far as Proxima.”

Eilidh frowned, evidently struggling to understand, but she nodded.

“You're exploring,” continued Stef, “maybe scouting is a better word, and you're planting colonies,
colonia
, on any habitable world, in advance of the other guy getting here first.”

“That's the idea.”

“But when you find a world seeded with kernels, you create a Hatch. Is that right?”

“This is my own second such expedition. It begins with the
vicarius
blessing the seeded ground . . .”

“You create the Hatch—presumably it connects itself to some higher-dimensional network—but then you never try to use it.”

“Well, the Mercury Hatch led nowhere, as far as we know. Whatever the Hatches really are, wherever they go, they aren't for us.”

“Then why build them?”

Eilidh smiled with a touch of cynicism. “Perhaps you aren't as spiritual a people as we are, Stef Kalinski. One thing that unites us Brikanti with the Romans is a worship of Jesu, of the Cross on which He died and the Hammer that He wielded against His foes . . . To us the kernels are a great gift. Look how much we have been able to do: we have transformed our own world, we have traveled to the stars—”

“You smite your foes.”

“Quite so. Some believe the kernels are a gift from God, Father of Jesu—though older superstitions persist; some of the country Romans still speak of old gods like Vulcan, and some Scand believe a kernel is a gateway to Ragnarok. And in return for this gift, we do what is evidently asked of us, which is to cause fields of kernels to blossom into Hatches. What are the Hatches
for
? Perhaps some future generation will be able to answer that. In the meantime, we travel, we harvest the kernels, we build the Hatches. For such seems to be the scheme of things; such is what we are required to do.”

“Just as my own ancestors once built cathedrals, perhaps. Some dumb legionary might be content to follow orders, mindlessly, without inquiring.
You
can't be happy with that.”

“I'm Brikanti. My ship is my true purpose. And besides, there's very little I can do to change the trajectory of my society. Could you? But speaking of changing trajectories . . .”

The great ship turned in the air, and Stef saw its shadow swim across the sculpted mountains below.

Eilidh said, “Our adventure is over already. Well, there is much to do, a five-year star flight to plan. I hope you have found the day instructive. More tea, my friend? Shall I call for a fresh pot?”

But Stef was receding into her own thoughts. Too slowly, in her aging mind, new problems were occurring to her. The Hatch on this world had evidently only existed for a year or two, since these Brikanti and Romans had come here and built it. But she and Yuri had walked into the Hatch on Per Ardua long before that—seven or eight or nine years ago—they had walked into one end of a space-time tunnel
years before the far end had even existed
 . . . So where had they been, for all that time?

She started shivering, uncontrollably. Eilidh draped her thin shoulders in a blanket.

When Stef returned to the
colonia
she learned that Yuri had been taken to the legionaries' small hospital. She hurried that way, concerned.

When she got to the hospital she was directed to a kind of operating theater. She'd glimpsed this place before; it looked to her more like a butcher's shop, with alarming-looking surgical instruments suspended on the wall. But, she was told, it was hygienic enough; Michael and his Greek-trained medics and their Arab advisers knew enough about antisepsis and the risk of infection to keep the place reasonably clean.

Here she found Yuri, slumped in a chair, and the ColU—or rather its processing unit, a baroque tangle of metal and ceramic—sitting on a tabletop. Titus Valerius stood by, the big veteran soldier who had caused Quintus Fabius so much trouble with his small rebellion on the day Stef and the others had walked out of the Hatch.

And, standing in the center of the room, looking scared and uncomfortable, was a boy, dark, Asiatic, slim, age perhaps thirteen or fourteen—but he was so skinny it was hard for Stef to be sure. He wore a grubby tunic and no shoes; his feet were filthy.
Medicus
Michael hovered by the boy, looking abstracted, fascinated.

Stef made her way toward Yuri, nodding at Titus. The big man was picking at the nails of his one good hand with the top of a full-scale sword, a
gladio
, propped in his opposing armpit. He nodded back to Stef, and his gaze raked over her elderly body in the way of all legionaries. But she felt as safe with Titus as she did with any of the Romans; she had met his young daughter, Clodia, who he had brought on this space mission as a small child, after the death of her mother.

Yuri looked up, pale, but he smiled. “Good trip?”

“Eye-opening. Are you OK? What's going on here?”

“It's not about me, for once. In fact you're just in time.” He gestured at the boy. “This is something new. Introduce yourself again, son.”

In decent Latin, the boy said in a wavering voice, “My name is Chu Yuan. I am fourteen years old. My family are scholars and merchants in Shanghai. My father is a soldier with the Twenty-fourth Division of the Imperial Army of Light. He was stationed in Valhalla Inferior. He took his family there, including myself, the eldest son . . .”

Yuri winked at Stef. “Valhalla Inferior—South America. For centuries you've had tension between the Chinese coming in from the west, basically holding the coastal plain and the Andes, and the Romans coming in from the east through Amazonia, as well as south from their holdings in Mesoamerica.”

“And the native people caught in the crossfire.”

The ColU said drily, “At least they were not exterminated by crowd plagues, as in our history. The Vikings—the ‘Scand' allies of the Brikanti—had already been traveling to the Americas for centuries, allowing immunity a chance to build up. But the war fronts ebb and flow.”

“Our fort was overrun,” Chu said now. “My father was killed. My mother ran away. I was captured, enslaved by the glorious soldiers of Rome.”

That made Stef pause. “He's a slave?”

Yuri shrugged. “His parents were grooming him to be a scholar, I think, or a clerk. But the Romans caught him, and he ended up a slave on this tub.”

Stef stared at this boy, trapped in a category of humanity she never thought she would have to deal with. She'd found it almost impossible to function in the
colonia
, for the slaves were everywhere, if invisible to a Roman eye. And it wasn't just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She'd always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she'd never fully imagined this side of their civilization.

“Well, what's he doing here?”

Michael beamed. “He is a gift, at the orders of Centurion Quintus Fabius. He has been delighted by the work of Collius in the
colonia
, the advice on soil preparation, crops, irrigation.”

The ColU, sitting on its tabletop, seemed to Stef to twinkle. “I'm Collius the oracle now.”

“Shut up,” said Yuri mildly.

“Yes, Yuri Eden.”

“So the centurion, you see, aware of the ColU's cut-down state, has kindly donated him the legs of this boy here.”

Stef frowned. “I don't understand.”

Michael said hastily, “Let me explain. I have adapted your backpack, Yuri Eden.” He drew this out from under a bench; it looked much as it had before, save the straps had been shortened. He brought this to the boy who slipped it on. “The ColU itself will ride in the pack. And then your talking, all-seeing glass . . .”

Yuri's slate had been set into a leather pouch, and Michael now hung this around Chu's neck, fixing it with straps around his chest.

Stef said, “I don't believe it. This boy is going to be your pack mule, ColU?”

“We have been rehearsing,” the ColU said. “Chu. Walk forward. Turn right. Turn left.”

The boy marched across the theater floor, as passive and obedient as a puppet, head downturned. A slave's walk.

“This is obscene,” Stef said.

Michael held up his hands. “Now, madam, Yuri warned me you might react like this—”

“It could have been a lot worse, Stef,” Yuri said. “Why do you think Michael here is involved at all?”

“Tell me.”

“Because the centurion's first idea was to have the pack and slate
stitched
to Chu's flesh, so they couldn't be stolen.”

Titus Valerius raised a hand tentatively. “Can I speak? I'm part of the centurion's idea also. I will accompany the boy wherever he goes, to ensure the safety of the oracle.”

Stef grinned sourly. “I know the military mind. A nice cushy job to buy you off after that business with the granary, Titus?”

Titus shrugged massively. “I follow orders.”

“Well, it's still obscene,” Stef said.

Yuri said mildly, “Would you send Chu back where he came from?”

Chu turned his head at that, looking alarmed.

“I will care for this boy,” the ColU said firmly. “I will ensure his own needs are met, as he serves mine. We cannot save all the slaves in this Roman Empire of theirs, Stef Kalinski. But I can save this one, this boy.”

Stef bowed to the inevitable. “Fine. I suppose all other options are worse . . .”

She tried to tell Yuri and the ColU something of what she'd learned that day.

“So these people, these Romans, send ships to the stars and build Hatches without any understanding of why. Purely as a ritual, a mechanism, as ants build a nest.”

“Perhaps that's a good analogy, Stef Kalinski,” said the ColU. “The nest as a whole benefits from the actions of individuals. In the same way the Hatch network must benefit in some way.”

Michael had listened closely to their conversation. He offered, “Perhaps it fits the Romans' character too. At least, these soldiers. They are used to serving a larger entity without question—I mean, the Empire, the army. I, a Greek, can see this.”

“I resent that,” said Titus Valerius.

“Oh, you do?”

“Yes! Legionaries aren't ants. We know precisely why we're fighting. For our companions.”

Michael sighed. “Just as ants follow the lead of their neighboring ants, and so the structure of the hive miraculously emerges. My point exactly.”

Titus growled, baffled.

Stef said, “Yuri, did you know that kernels have been used in war here? On Earth itself. For centuries, I think.”

“Somehow I'm not surprised,” Yuri said weakly. “Can you think of any way in which this new humanity is better than the old?”

“Only one,” said the ColU. “They're better at building Hatches.”