Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe (2 page)

II

Come home, Xaia Windru.
 

The words floated unbidden into the head of Thom Robell as he walked with Proctor Chivian to the edge of the cliff by the sea. Thom’s aides walked discreetly beside them, bearing broad, light parasols. They were trailed by more Proctors and parliamentary officials. A little way away Maxx, Thom’s fourteen-year-old son, walked with Jan Stanndish, the elderly yet spry scholar who seemed to have put the idea of the Library into the Proctors’ heads. Thom kept his eye on Maxx, who had a habit of straying out of the shade of the parasols and into the searing sunlight.

Proctor Chivian took a breath of the air off the sea. About forty, a few years older than Thom, he was a big man, handsome, imposing in his white formal robes. His nostrils flared wide. ‘The air is refreshing. Almost cool.’

‘It blows in over the sea,’ Thom said. He stepped closer to the cliff edge. Here the grass grew sparse, a green import from Earth, and the native Purple had a chance to flourish, clumps of it like fungi. When he kicked it with his toe the clumps broke up into smaller units that rolled or blew away. ‘About the breeze - can you see, it’s forced up by the cliff face and arrives at us relatively cool. This is the most pleasant walk in the Speaker’s estate and as cool a place as you’ll find anywhere in a hotspring or hotfall. Certainly better than Orklund, a kilometre inland, even in the most robust stone buildings. But I still wouldn’t be out without a parasol.’ But if Xaia was here, she would no doubt be setting a disastrous example to Maxx by wandering boldly into the light.
 

Proctor Chivian was nothing if not an astute reader of people, and he seemed to sense that Thom was thinking of his wife. ‘I am sure the Lady Xaia’s expedition to the Belt will go as planned. And who knows what will be learned?’

Thom’s feelings had been a swirl of contradiction since a handful of Xaia’s ships had come home, bearing Brythonic hostages, booty, wounded, a few children born during the long campaign – and the news that Xaia was going on to the Belt. ‘Frankly I wish she chose home, and me and her son, over more adventure.’

‘We must cherish the Lady for her boldness,’ Chivian said smoothly. ‘And if I may say so boldness is what is required now, of all of us.’

Thom sighed. Once again, and none too subtly, the Proctor was wrenching the conversation around to the subject of his Library. ‘Your timing is poor, Proctor, I have to say, regarding our personal situation.’

The Proctor raised cultivated eyebrows. ‘But not regarding the Library project as a whole.’ He glanced up to the overhead sun, visible through the heavy fabric of the parasols. ‘Soon the hotspring will pass, and we will enter the long months of the coolsummer. Temperate warmth and twenty-four hours of daylight - ideal for making a start on the building work. Our schedules show that the vault may actually be ready before the hotfall to receive the Books, even if the aboveground building is barely started.’

‘Ah, the One Hundred and Eight Books of the Founders.’ A record of information dumped from a failing memory store brought from Earth, Books containing everything the Founders had believed was essential for their descendants to know about their world, and the history of the remote planet from which they had had to flee. Since then the Books had been patiently transcribed by generations of scholars at the Four Universities of Zeeland, under the control of the Proctors.

‘The Library will ensure the Founders’ wisdom is preserved forever, regardless of human failings or other calamities. What greater tribute could we pay to the Founders’ memory? What greater tragedy could there be than if those Books, our last link to the home world, were lost?’

‘Oh, spare me the sales pitch, Proctor,’ Thom snapped. ‘You know as well as I do that there are more ways of preserving the Books than exhausting the treasury’s coffers building a vault. You could simply make multiple copies, for a start.’

‘Ah, but who would verify the authenticity of those copies? Soon the true texts would be lost in a welter of error and fraud -’

‘And your own power, as holders of the unique texts, would be lost. Yes, yes.’ He began to grow angry, and wondered if the Proctor would dare make this kind of approach if Xaia were here, armour on her chest and pistol at her waist.
 

The Proctor backed off. ‘We are both realists. We both have personal motives to achieve. That is how the world works. But I am sincere. The Founders were heroes who crossed space from one world, dying, and came to another, this one, and their bravery gave us life – all of us, literally. They were greater than us -’
 

‘Not literally.’

‘Speaker?’

Like his wife, Thom was impatient with such blanket praise for the Founders, who had, after all, merely been human. ‘I mean, in physical size at least.’ He nodded at the parasol bearers, tall men and women with chests like barrels. ‘I’m told that if we could be transported to Earth, we would tower over the people there. If there are any survivors.’

‘The gravity on this world is less than Earth’s. We grow tall.’ The Proctor shrugged. ‘As sunflowers grow tall in the right soil. Nothing more.’

‘And we remember Earth in our bodies, our language. We share the names of their months -’
 

‘Folk wisdom counts for little, sir,’ the Proctor insisted with a scholarly sternness. ‘Not compared to what is recorded in the Books. Earth II lacks resources common on Earth, such as oil, coal, uranium, even metals to turn our poor iron swords into steel, like the Orbs around your neck. Where they crossed space, we sail in wooden ships and fire gunpowder weapons at each other. This is a more difficult world on which to build a high technological civilisation. If we are ever to achieve what the Founders did, if we are ever to scale such heights again – if we are ever to overcome the impoverishment of this world - we must build on their wisdom. And we must never forget them. The Library is a way, our way, to do that.’

‘But I come back to timing again, Proctor. Why now? Why the urgency? What terrible threat looms that makes you fear losing your precious texts
just now
? And there’s also the issue of the timing for the nation. We’re exhausted. We’ve just come out of a war that’s dragged on years.’

‘But that’s what makes this moment so opportune,’ Proctor Chivian said. ‘The Founders’ books tell of Isobel and Ferdinand, monarchs of Spain. In the year 1492 they concluded a war against the Muslim kingdoms of Spain, a war that had lasted
centuries
, and suddenly they were free to fund an even more bold adventure – to send Columbus across the ocean -’

‘I’m not Ferdinand,’ Thom snapped. ‘This isn’t Earth.’ He waved an arm at the sea, where a few of the Scatter’s closer islands could be seen as smudges on the horizon. ‘This is our home, our world – our time. This is what we’re interested in – the sea, our ships, trade, the empire we might build across the Scatter. Ask any Zeelander his or her dream for his country and I’ll wager he won’t mention Columbus, or the Founders.’

‘You’re thinking of the Lady Xaia’s ambitions,’ the Proctor said carefully.

‘Indeed. Which may be another reason you’re encouraging me to start digging up the turf before she gets back and exercises a veto on the whole thing.’

‘Sir, I assure you -’

‘I need to understand what’s so urgent about this vault, the Library. Have your man Jan Stanndish brief me. I want the whole truth, Proctor, and I don’t want any arrogant scholarly nonsense. If I don’t see why you need the Library it won’t get built. Oh, and include my son in the sessions. He seems to be getting on well with Stanndish, and it would be good experience for the lad, against the day when he might become Speaker in turn.’

The Proctor bowed. ‘I’ll arrange it as soon as I can.’

‘I’m sure you will.’

They walked on, avoiding the clumps of Purple that grew by the cliff edge, relishing the comparative cool of the air despite the tension between them.

III

It was May by the time the
Cora
led Xaia’s fleet to the coast of the Belt.
 

Soon the temperate, light-drenched months of the coolsummer would be on the world, and the humans, animals and vegetation imported from Earth would flourish. Like other children of privileged families, and in preparation for a life at sea, Xaia had grown up with a clear understanding of the seasonal cycle on Earth II, as it sailed around its star - which the Founders, for their own mysterious reasons, had called 82 Eridani - with its axis of rotation neatly tipped over. Now, more than midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice in June, the north pole was nodding as if respectfully towards the central star, and even now, from Xaia’s mid-latitude location, the sun descended beneath the horizon for only an hour or so each day. But though the day was lengthening the temperatures were, on average, dropping. The sun did not climb so high in the sky as in the torrid months of April and May – and, so the Four Universities’ best scholars had taught Xaia, it was the sun’s height that determined its ability to heat the world.
 

Certainly Xaia, looking out from the deck of the
Cora
at the unprepossessing shoreline of the Belt, was glad of the coming cool. It was a coast of broad valleys incised into a rust-red plain, where little grew but the ubiquitous, and entirely useless, native Purple. It looked like a hot, dusty, arid land to trek over, and the cooler the air the better.

Alecksandria, the port that served Ararat further inland, was built on the delta of a broad river, sluggish and red with silt. There was quite a bustling harbour, with ships from communities along the Belt’s long coast, as well as craft from the island nations of the Scatter - including a small flotilla of ships from Brython, evidently refugees from the Zeeland conquest.
 

On landing, Xaia immediately sought out the local Zeelander envoy, a small, fussy, middle-aged man called Alain Jeffares, working alone out of a tiny, cluttered office. He was flustered when such a noble figure as Xaia walked in. But then Zeeland had only a nominal presence anywhere along the Belt coast; there wasn’t much trade, and only a few passengers, scholars and pilgrims who came to see Ararat, the almost sacred site of the Founders’ Landfall.

Still, she was faintly surprised that Jeffares had had no contact from the local government, not so much as a polite query about the fleet anchored offshore. Jeffares said the Belt was governed by a quilt of independent city-states. But the cities were scattered wide across a nearly empty continent. Alliances among them came and went, and trade continued fitfully; disputes occasionally flared over tariffs or protectionist policies, but he wasn’t aware there had ever been a major war here. There was nothing like the empire-building that had gone on in the Scatter, either by native city-states or by the island nations of the Scatter, some of whom had sent over tentative expeditions. You could knock over one city-state, but the rest of the Belt was barely affected by it. The government of Alecksandria, evidently seeking a quiet life, simply ignored Xaia’s presence, and her warriors, hoping she’d pass on quickly.

‘Nothing worth fighting over,’ Teif sneered. ‘Told you.’
 

That was all going to change, Xaia assured Jeffares. She left behind a couple of officers to begin the process of sequestering the refugee Brythonic vessels. And she instructed the little envoy to assemble a caravan to take her and her companions inland to Ararat.

They stayed one night in a grand inn on the outskirts of the port. Named the Founders’ Rest, it had wooden carvings of all fifteen of the legendary star travellers in a long panel over its frontage. In her honour, Xaia was lodged in the Thomas Windrup suite. She was quickly getting the impression of the importance of the Founder mythos to this place.

She slept badly, nursing her healing arm.

By morning Jeffares had assembled a caravan big enough to carry Xaia, Manda, Teif, and fifty tough warriors. While Xaia’s carriage was drawn by grand, high-stepping warhorses, each of them taller at the shoulder than a man, the rest were pulled by squat, solid-looking bullocks.
 

The caravan left the port by a dusty road into the interior. For kilometres the city’s rats plagued the caravan, burly creatures the size of small dogs that nipped at the legs of the bullocks. Jeffares beat them off with the flat of a rusty sword. ‘A plague from Earth,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I believe they’ve been kept off most of the Scatter islands.’

‘Certainly from Zeeland,’ Teif said. ‘I’ve never seen such beasts.’

‘Something to do with the lower gravity here,’ Jeffares said. ‘Animals can grow taller for a given bone mass, but the air is thinner, so smaller animals can’t function so well. Earth rats grew bigger on Earth II. So the Founders said.’

Even after one day on the Belt Xaia was growing tired of hearing about the Founders.

The road to Ararat was well laid if rutted; evidently this was a trail frequently followed. But the Belt countryside was unprepossessing. The road cut across a plain of crimson dust littered with broken rock, with only worn hills to alleviate the monotony of the horizon. Xaia had no interest in geology, but she gathered an impression that this was an old country, at least compared to some of the Scatter islands, like Zeeland with its steep volcanic mountains.
 

Between the sparse human communities little grew, a few scraps of green in grass banks and cactuses, although the Purple flourished everywhere, in banks and reefs. For sport, Manda had her driver run her carriage through the Purple banks, and laughed as the bullocks’ hooves smashed the heaped-up stuff down to its component spores.

The journey was blessedly short. The Belt was a north-south neck of land only a few hundred kilometres wide; no west-to-east journey was long. And Ararat, as it loomed over the horizon, was astonishing.
 

As large as any city on Zeeland, it was a town of stone as red as the plain on which it stood, though even from a distance Xaia could see a glimmer of green on rooftops and walls. It was watered by another wide, sluggish river, and drew power with huge, slowly turning wheels. What was extraordinary about the town was its plan. It was lenticular, narrow east to west and long north to south, and surrounded by stout walls in a teardrop shape.