Ultima (14 page)

Ari said acutely, “I find myself deeply drawn to the question, in fact. Might there be evidence to be unturned concerning these strange phenomena in
my
world? Traces of lost histories. Like the anomalous carving on the tombstone of your mother, Penny, in that graveyard in Lutetia Parisiorum of which you spoke.”

His mention of that personal memory startled Penny. She had been open with Ari, mostly, about her experience of the reality-shifting they had all endured. Now she wondered if that had been wise, if she understood Ari and
his
agendas. She was aware that Marie, too, was looking increasingly uncomfortable.

“So have you found anything?”

“Not yet. But I'll keep looking.” He stared into her eyes. “That makes you uncomfortable. Why?” When there was no reply he went on, “I sometimes think you are fortunate that we Brikanti are not more curious about this phenomenon. We are not so
scientific
as you.” He pronounced the English word carefully. “We are cruder philosophers. Perhaps we are more prepared to accept the miraculous, the unexplained, than you are. Unexplained phenomena such as your own existence. We don't question; we just accept.”

“All save you.”

“All save me. But why are you wary of the question?” He turned on Marie. “And why do
you
recoil as we speak of these matters, Marie Golvin?”

“Because I can't sleep,” Marie blurted. “That's why. Is it so hard to understand?” Penny covered her hand with her own, but Marie pulled away. “Look—we saw billions put to the torch—everybody we knew, probably, whole worlds, Earth itself. And now here I am in this stupid place, trying to learn your dumb languages, doing this make-work job you've given me, and pretending I've got a future here. I don't even know if
your
Jesus died for me, or not.”

On the verge of tears, she seemed much younger than her twenty-seven years, and Penny longed to hug her, to reassure her. But Marie Golvin was an ISF officer, and that wouldn't do at all.

“I'm sorry,” said Marie now, getting herself under control. “Excuse me.” She stood and walked away.

“And I too am sorry,” Ari said to Penny. “For provoking that.”

“Not your fault,” Penny snapped. “Well, not entirely. You do keep prying.”

“You're lucky that others don't.”

“Maybe, but that doesn't help. It's survivor guilt, Ari. It's when you forget it all—when you are immersed in something, happy in yourself, enjoying what you're doing—and then you remember all that has been lost, and the guilt comes crashing down again. That's when it's worst. Marie's particularly vulnerable now she's away from the protection of Lex McGregor. The ISF, the military discipline, was her whole life. And then there's the hope.”

“Hope?”

“Of somehow, one day, finding a way back home, back to our timeline.”

“Ah.”

“It's entirely irrational, I think we all know that, but it's hard not to succumb. After all,
this
can never be home, for us. And it's harder for the young, I think. As the years go by.”

Ari said, “But Marie told me she was a Christian, in the tradition as it existed in your world. Just now she spoke of Jesu—
Jesus.
Should that not be a consolation? She says she wondered if, in crossing realities, she had undergone something like the Rapture. Are you aware of that?” He closed his eyes, remembering. “The text she recited to me was this: ‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.' From a letter to the Thessalonians. Such material does not exist in
our
Bible, not the authorized version, and nor does the legend of the Rapture. I think, you see, that Marie fears not that she has been taken up to heaven by God, but has been left behind in the desolation that remains—”

“You.”

Beth Eden Jones came stalking into the refectory, trailed by an anxious-looking Marie Golvin.

Ari and Penny stood to meet her.

Beth was wearing Brikanti costume, as they all were after two years here, tunic, trousers, leather boots, a light cloak. Though she looked heavy, she was evidently no longer pregnant, Penny saw immediately. And in her arms she cradled a bundle wrapped in blankets.

Penny said, “Beth? What the hell—is that what I think it is? You've had your baby? I'm sorry—I lost track of the date. I didn't hear any news . . .”

Ari stood silently, his face like thunder.

Beth stood before her husband, glaring at him, but she spoke to Penny. “Yes, Penny, this is my baby. By this
monster
.”

Ari stared back. He said in a kind of growl, “Not here, woman. Not now.”

“Then where, if not before my friends? Shall I go back to your home, your family, and wait until the next time you try to kill her?”

Heads turned around the refectory.

Penny said sharply, “Beth. Whatever the hell you're talking about—come on, sit down.” She put her arm around Beth's shoulder, and could feel her trembling, could see the stain of tears around her eyes. She looked a lot older than her thirty-eight years, old and drained. But she complied, sitting at the table, which still bore the remains of their meal. Penny said, “You too, Ari—don't loom over her like that. Beth, do you want anything? A drink—”

“Nothing.” Beth's eyes and Ari's were locked still.

Penny sat down and glanced up at Marie. “Bring some water. Umm, and some hot milk.”

Marie hurried away.

Penny put her hand on Beth's arm and leaned forward to see. The baby, at least, was sleeping peacefully, its face a crumple. “Oh, Beth. It's beautiful.”

“She. She's a girl. She's called Mardina.”

“After your mother.” Penny looked up at Ari, whose face showed nothing but hostility. “I don't understand anything of this. What's wrong? Is she not healthy?”

“The baby is fine,” Ari said coldly. “But she was—unintended.”

“They don't hold with women my age having kids,” Beth said. “The Brikanti. It's a rough and ready rule. You can understand why; they fly warships in space but their medicine is medieval.”

“But you got pregnant anyway.”

“It was an accident. Yes, I got pregnant. I was told it would be all right, that the baby would be accepted.”

“You probably misunderstood,” Ari said. “You misheard the nuances. I told you there would have to be a trial—”

“They exposed her,” Beth said to Penny. “While I slept.”

Penny was bewildered. “They
what
?”

“They
took
her, Ari's family, the women. Took her from me. They stripped away her blankets, and put her on the roof of the house, naked. She would be allowed to live, you see, if she survived the exposure. And if
he
chose to bring her in. It was to be his choice, not mine.”

Penny turned on Ari. “That seems unnecessarily brutal.”

He managed to smile, self-deprecating. “It's not the time for a history lesson. You may blame the Romans from whom we borrowed the custom. The rule is indeed—what did you say?—
rough and ready.
Better a few healthy children are lost, than that society is burdened with the weak—”

Beth snapped, “The father gets to choose to save her, or not. Not the mother. Most mothers will have families to back them up—sometimes
they
take the child, though the mother can't see her again. But I had no one to help me.
And he chose to abandon her
.”

Ari shook his head. “All of this was unplanned. Most men in my position would have done the same.”

“But you found out, Beth,” Penny prompted.

“I busted out of that damn house where they were keeping me,” Beth said. “I got up on the roof, and saved my baby, and I came straight here, where I knew you would be. I wonder how many laws I broke doing
that
. Will you prosecute me, scholar? Will I be thrown in jail, or mutilated, or executed, or whatever else you do to disobedient mothers?”

Ari shook his head again. “No, no. There are always exceptions. You will be welcome in my home, with my family—with the baby—”

“Not after this.” She turned to Penny with a look of pleading. “Let me stay here. With you.”

“Of course you can stay,” Penny said immediately.

Ari stood. “This changes nothing. This Academy is here at my discretion. In a sense you are still under my roof—”

“They stay,” Penny said firmly, “with us.”

“And the future? As the child has needs, as she grows?”

Penny sighed. “We'll deal with that when we come to it. I think it's best if you go now, Ari Guthfrithson.”

He stood still for a moment, clenching one fist. Then he stalked away, almost colliding with Marie Golvin as she approached with a tray of drinks.

Stef watched him go. “I thought I understood him. I thought we communicated, as scholars.
Druidh.
But now—”

“You don't know him at all,” Beth said. “I didn't. These people aren't like us, Stef. Not even Ari. Not even the man I thought I loved, who fathered my child.
Especially
not him.”

AD 2227; AUC 2980

“ColU, I thought Quintus Fabius was a pompous ass from the moment he came strutting down from that airship.”

“He is a good commander, Yuri Eden. But as he hails from what is still regarded as an outer province of the Empire, he has to be more Roman than the Romans.”

“So he's got a chip on his shoulder. Boo hoo. Actually he reminded me of that other pompous ass Lex McGregor . . . I'm sorry. Kind of lost my way there.”

“Relax, Yuri Eden. Breathe the oxygen.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Do you remember what we were talking about? I am here to witness your final testament.”

“Always busy, eh, ColU? Look, just talk to me. I've had enough of my own miserable life for now. You're the nearest thing I've got to a friend on this tub—you and Stef, but you were there first, right?”

“Even if I was an instrument of the ISF, the organization that stranded you against your will on an alien world.”

“Well, there is that. No hard feelings, eh? And don't tell me I need to rest. I'll soon be enjoying the long sleep, drifting between the stars in a Roman sarcophagus. Fine way to go, actually.”

“You are aware that I did quietly suggest to the
optio
that that would be the best course of action regarding the disposal of your body, and indeed Colonel Kalinski's if it came to that. As opposed to depositing your corpses in the recycling tanks.”

“Don't spare my feelings, will you?”

“After all, we hail from another timeline. Your bodies may contain pathogens exotic to this reality. And both of your bodies contain foreign elements, even dental work, for example, which might be harmful in the ship's food chain.”

“Ha! Oh, don't make me laugh, ColU. Now I have an image of my false teeth chewing their way out of some fat legionary's gut.”

“Well, you don't wear false teeth, Yuri Eden. But the image is an amusing one.”

“Don't laugh too hard.”

“Do you wish me to call the
medicus
again? Michael did say that if—”

“Oh, don't fuss, ColU. If I want the damn quack, I'll call him. It's only been palliative care, and you know that as well as I do. He can treat the actual condition no better than you can. But with that suite of drugs he has, all those psychoactive substances from the South American jungles, he can play my level of pain like a fiddle . . . You know, I sometimes wonder if I haven't carried these damn passengers all my life.”

“That's possible, actually, Yuri Eden. Your body has been exposed to a series of extraordinary environments. This is your second journey through interstellar space. You spent decades on Per Ardua, a planet of a flare star. Before that, you spent some time under a dome on Mars, a world lacking a thick atmosphere, an ozone layer. Even before that, a journey across interplanetary space from Earth to Mars.”

“Also I passed through Hatches. Three times.”

“Indeed. And before all
that
you spent a century in a casket, buried in a vault in Antarctica with a thousand others. The casualty rates from cancers of various sorts of survivors of that process—”

“We called it ‘freezer burn.' So the parents who put me on ice and stuffed me in a hole—”

“Surely they sought to send you to a better time, Yuri Eden.”

“And now, it turns out, after all I've survived, it will be the damn cryo that kills me off in the end. Oh, the irony.”

“I am only speculating, Yuri Eden.”

“I know, buddy. I don't take it personally.”

“It is to be regretted that more advanced medicine is not available. I hope to help the ship's navigators devise a medical scanner to emulate the functions of the slate I used to diagnose your condition.”

“The navigators? Oh, your Arab buddies, in their observation blisters . . .”

“This vessel navigates by the stars, by astronomical observations made by the Arab teams.”

“These Arab buddies of yours sound like they are as advanced as anybody else in this timeline.”

“It would seem so. Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilization, the
dar-al Islam
, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of interfaith conflict in Europe—no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.”

“And the Arabs are the best astronomers.”

“They are. Yuri Eden, I hope you will have the chance to see their observation blisters. There is an atmosphere of calm—of learning, of reverence. They are like college study rooms, or religious sanctuaries. Indeed, one of them is dedicated as a mosque.

“In space, Muslims were always drawn to astronomy because of the need to find reliably the position of Earth, and therefore Mecca, for the purposes of daily prayers. But the Arabs have gone much further. They have fine optical telescopes, but also spectroscopes to analyze the light—though no image capture more advanced than wet-chemistry photography. And they have made a suite of discoveries, of more or less relevance to the mission of the
Malleus Jesu.
Of course, a kernel ship under heavy acceleration, like this one, is a rather noisy platform. And they have to compensate for relativistic distortion, so close do we travel to the speed of light. They have sophisticated rule-of-thumb mathematics to achieve this, without, again, having the underlying theory . . .

“Yuri Eden, the Arabs allowed me to peruse their libraries. They have painstakingly compiled good maps of the cosmic background radiation, the relic glow of the Big Bang—not that they have the cosmological theories to describe it that way.

“And they seek out life-bearing planets, among the stars we pass. Targets for future missions like this one. Living worlds have certain characteristics. On Earth, for instance, the atmosphere holds oxygen and methane, reactive gases that if left to themselves would combine with other substances—iron ore in the rocks would rust—and be lost to the air. But it is the action of life that replenishes those reservoirs. Another kind of biosphere would produce other kinds of traces. Sometimes you can tell there's life simply from color changes, visible from space. Early Earth was probably predominantly purple, on the sea coasts anyhow . . .”

“All this you found in their libraries? With Chu Yuen as your search engine. Ha! I imagine poor Chu getting pretty tired turning pages—”

“Usually it's unraveling scrolls. But, yes, it can be like that . . . One striking observation, Yuri Eden, is that many worlds the Arabs have observed are not living, but
dead
: once life-bearing, but evidently killed off, at least at the surface. And in some cases, recently. You can tell this from remote observations. If all life on Earth were ended suddenly, the decomposition of a glut of corpses would dump ethane into the air, in great quantities. Without the water cycle mediated by the plants, there would be a rapid heating spike. And so on. All this can be observed from afar. Yuri Eden, the Arabs have made many such discoveries.”

“What could kill off whole worlds? War?”

“Perhaps, Yuri Eden.”

“And with who knows what history-tweaking strangeness to follow? If our experience is any precedent.”

“One can only speculate. Of course the Arabs also search for kernels. Worlds laden with them, targets for future Hatch-building expeditions. Again there are certain characteristic signatures you can spot from afar. They have even begun to map the distribution of kernel-bearing worlds, and Hatches, across this part of the Galaxy. Their maps are difficult to decipher, in fact: not maps as we know them but more itineraries, lists of distances and directions between locations . . . It appears that there is a kind of network. A certain percentage of kernel worlds are concentrated toward the center of the Galaxy. As if whatever initiated this process originated deeper in the Galaxy, and the network of Hatch-building has been heading out to the outer reaches ever since.”

“Hm. What's different about the center of the Galaxy?”

“It is older, in a sense. The Galaxy is like a vast factory for manufacturing stars from interstellar dust and gas. Star-making started close to the center, and is spreading out to the periphery. It is thought that toward the center there may be habitable worlds born a billion years before the Earth.”

“So the Hatches may have been started off by some ancient intelligence, lurking on one of these old, old worlds . . .”

“The Arabs' observations would fit that, Yuri Eden.”

“But what's it all for? Do you ever get the feeling we're missing the big picture here, ColU? All the strangeness—the kernels, the Hatches, the dumping of whole histories . . . Maybe this is my South American drugs talking.”

“Mostly we are too busy trying to survive to think too deeply about such matters, Yuri Eden.”

“And also too busy riding these various gift horses to look them too closely in the mouth. The kernels are just too damn useful . . . But we do ask such questions—or at least you do, ColU.”

“I try. My mission has always been to nurture the humanity around me—to nurture you and your family, Yuri Eden. By doing that I must consider the wider questions of which you speak. I must consider the future. And some of what I have learned about the future disturbs me.”

“Maybe the drugs are hitting me again. Or else they're wearing off. Run that by me again. The future?”

“
I have seen it in the sky
, Yuri Eden. I told you that the Arab astronomers have carefully observed the background radiation from the Big Bang. That radiation, and distortions in it—ripples, distortions, nonhomogeneities, polarization—carries a great deal of information about the wider structure of the universe. After all, it has permeated the whole cosmos from the beginning. For instance, our cosmologists looked for evidence of other universes than our own. An interaction of two universes, a collision in some higher dimension, might leave echoes in the background, tremendous circles in the sky. But I, studying the Arab records with a depth of understanding that they cannot share, have seen . . . something else.”

“What? The suspense is killing me, and I'm already dying.”

“I apologize, Yuri Eden. I believe I have seen evidence of superluminal events. Faster-than-light phenomena.”

“What the
hell
are you talking about now? Warp drive? Some kind of super-starship? A higher civilization?”

“Not that. Not on that scale. Much bigger. Please listen, Yuri Eden. In relativity theory, you know that nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. That was Einstein's most fundamental discovery. Even a transition through a Hatch, say from Mercury to Per Ardua, by whatever unknown mechanism enables such transitions, is marginally slower than lightspeed. But there is a get-out clause in the physics.”

“Go on.”

“Nothing can travel
through space-time
faster than light. But space-time is a substance, of a kind; it has structure. It can be distorted . . . Yuri Eden, waves can propagate in space-time itself. And they
can
travel faster than light. The theoreticians have wondered if such warps could be used to carry ships at superluminal speeds.”

“Beating light by surfing space-time waves . . .”

“That's the idea, Yuri Eden. We never achieved a warp drive. But warp waves, as described by the theory, would emit certain kinds of exotic radiations. Even if we could never create them, we thought we could detect them.

“Yuri Eden, I think I have seen the traces of warp ripples in the cosmic background radiation. Not small, contained signals, as you would associate with a starship. These are relics of events on a tremendous scale. By which I mean billions of light-years wide, events spanning the universe.”

“Larger than galaxies—”

“Larger than superclusters of galaxies.”

“Nurse! I think my drip's come loose.”

“I apologize, Yuri Eden. I will discuss all this with Colonel Kalinski; perhaps she will be able to make it clearer. But, you see, I am struggling to grasp the hypothesis I am formulating.”

“What hypothesis?”

“Imagine that in the future there is a—cataclysm. A tremendously violent event of some kind, spanning space—spanning the entire universe. This event is so energetic that among its effects are ripples in space-time, tremendous waves—”

“Ah. Warp waves, which can travel back in time.”

“Yes, Yuri Eden. I believe that—in these faint traces of structure in the cosmic background reaction, visible to the Arab astronomers in the silence of their observation capsules—I am witnessing a kind of foreshadowing, echoes traveling back in time . . .”

“Echoes from the future. But echoes of what, ColU?”

“Something terrible.”

“Umm. Well, you're not given to exaggeration, ColU.”

“Are you falling asleep, Yuri Eden?”

“Not just yet. All this talk of calamity in the future. You know, ColU, I don't fear dying. In fact, I feel like I died already, a number of times. All those doors I had to pass through, from my own time to the future, from Mars to Per Ardua . . .”

“It will just be another door, Yuri Eden.”

“I know, my friend. I know. But I do fear for those I love. Listen— I want you to find Beth, if you can.”

“I know. You asked me this before. But, Yuri Eden, she may not exist, in this new reality. She may have been left behind.”

“Maybe. But maybe not. I know Mardina—or knew her. If there was a way to save Beth, she'd have found it.”

“I always flattered myself that I was close to Beth Eden Jones.”

“You were the kindly monster who made her toy builders with those manipulator arms of yours. Remember Mister Sticks? Find her, ColU. And whoever she's with now. Tell her you're her property now. And help her, as best you can. Because I can't, you see. I can't help her anymore.”