Ultima (19 page)

They were guided into a very Roman reception room, all couches and tapestries and a mosaic floor, and servants scuttling around under the direction of a provincial official, a short, pompous-looking man in a crisp white toga.

And here were the strangers, standing together in an uncomfortable huddle, Penny thought. The group was dominated by a big man wearing breast armor and a thick military buckle. At his side were a couple more Roman military types, looking out of place in this rather fussy formal room, along with a middle-aged woman in the costume of a Brikanti, and an older man in a rather more practical-looking toga.

And there stood a boy, maybe eighteen/nineteen years old, with Asiatic features, a little plump, with some kind of well-padded pack on his back. He wore a drab tunic, and what looked like an ISF-issue slate rested on his chest, suspended from a chain around his neck. He was barefoot. Penny immediately guessed he was a slave. Jiang seemed drawn to the boy, who was perhaps a fellow Xin.

To Penny, all this was background. To her there was only one presence in the room. She stepped forward, Jiang at her side.

Their eyes locked, Penny and Stef Kalinski faced each other.

“My God,” Penny said at last, speaking English. “I never thought—”

“Nor I, believe me,” Stef said fervently. “I went through a Hatch to Proxima Centauri to get away from you. And then even farther, to a star that turned out to be nine light-years away. Only to be picked up by these alternate Romans and brought back home, to this.”

“And in Paris again.” Penny tried to smile, and failed. “Do you remember, all those years ago?”

“Our mother's grave. How could I forget? But I'm kind of surprised
you
can still remember.” Stef walked around Penny, eyeing her. “So this is my future. I feel like Dorian Grey.”

“I'm not that old. I'm eighty-nine now, Stef. Whereas you—”

“Am a youthful seventy, thanks to a lot of Hatch-hopping and relativistic time dilation.”

“Whatever we are, we are no longer twins, at least.”

Stef grinned malevolently. “Good. And, seeing you standing there with that damn stick, I feel like I somehow won.”

“And I,” said Penny tiredly, “feel like I'm too old to care. I wish you no harm, Stef. I never did.”

“No. It was your sudden eruption into existence when I opened that damn Hatch on Mercury that did the harm.”

“When
we
opened it . . . Oh, it's all so long ago.”

The big Roman approached them, walking slowly, nonthreatening. He said gently, in gruff Latin, “Colonel Stef Kalinski.
Druidh
Penny Kalinski. Though you are twins, it pleases me it is so easy to tell you apart.”

Stef said softly, “I hope your Latin's up to scratch, sis. The Romans don't speak anything else.”

Penny nodded. “Quite right too—umm, Centurion?”

“Indeed. I am Centurion Quintus Fabius, commander of the mission of the
Malleus Jesu
. These others you see here are members of my crew—my
optio
, Gnaeus Junius, my
trierarchus
the Brikanti Movena, Michael, our
medicus
. Oh, and the slave bears the remnant of Collius, your speaking machine.”

Penny stared at the boy.

“Ordinarily at the end of a mission our crew would be dispersed, returned to our legion's
collegia
for induction, leave and reassignment. Instead we have been given the unusual task of caring for the strangers we found on a planet of the distant star Romulus, at least until more formal arrangements can be made.”

Penny barked laughter. “I'm becoming used to the bureaucracies of empires. You mean, until your government and the Brikanti can come up with some category to file us away in.”

He grinned. “Well, I'm no clerk, lady, but I see the truth in what you say. But we welcome the task. You see the big man over there, with one hand? He is a legionary, a veteran; he is called Titus Valerius. For five years he has been the protector of the slave who carries Collius. It is a task he fulfills with joy. Of course the alternative for him would have been to remain with the permanent
colonia
under that distant star . . .”

“Collius? ColU?” Beth pushed her way between them and made her way to the slave boy, who stood passively, head lowered, eyes downcast—a gesture Penny had learned to recognize, and hate. Beth cupped his chin and raised his head. “Why, you're not much older than my Mardina, are you? What is your name?”

The boy glanced at Titus Valerius, who growled, “Answer the lady. You're not in any trouble.”

“My name is Chu Yuen, lady.”

“Collius? You mean the ColU? You're really carrying around the ColU in your backpack?”

“What's left of me,” came a mournful voice from the backpack.

Beth's face lit up. “ColU—it is you! Oh, I could hug you. But if all that's left of you is in that backpack—”

“Yuri Eden saved my processor unit and memory store. My interfacing is provided by slate technology. I am afraid I am not very huggable.”

“Maybe I should hug this slave of yours.”

“Please, Beth Eden Jones. Not in front of the Romans. Did I hear you mention a Mardina?”

“Yes. My daughter, named after my mother. Mardina—come here.”

Mardina came up, but with every expression of reluctance, and Penny, still feeling bruised from her own encounter with the complicated past, could only sympathize.

The ColU said, “Chu Yuen. Please turn a little to the right.”

The boy obeyed, and Penny observed how he stuck his chest out as he did so, tilting the slate. That was evidently how the ColU “saw” the world.

“Mardina,” the ColU said gravely. “I'm pleased to meet you. You have your grandmother's name, and something of her looks.”

“I never knew her.” Mardina looked wildly at her mother. “I feel like I'm talking into thin air, talking to a ghost!”

“Lieutenant Mardina Jones was a brave and strong human being, and I would be honored to talk to you about her.”

“Don't bother,” Mardina snarled back.

Beth said hurriedly, “It's all right, ColU. It's difficult for her.”

“I understand,” the ColU said gently. “Beth, as for your father, Yuri Eden . . .”

Stef walked up to Beth and took her hand. “You know that we went through the Hatch to Romulus together. Yuri and I. Just the two of us, and the ColU—the surviving bit of it. But—”

“He hasn't made it home, has he?”

“His illness seemed to have been caused by his century in cryo suspension. ‘Freezer burn,' he called it. I'm sorry, Beth.”

The ColU said, “I was with him in his last hours. I can tell you as much about that as you wish. Beth Eden Jones, he made me promise to find you. And so I have. And he instructed me to make sure you understand that, under his will as drawn up under Roman law, I am now your property, Beth.”

Penny could see that Beth was holding back tears. She hobbled forward on her stick. “Well, I for one have done enough standing for one day. And my throat's as dry as the dust of Luna.”

With a glance at the provincial official, Quintus Fabius stepped forward, hands held wide, generously. “Let me be your host.”

•   •   •

The Romans showed remarkable sensitivity toward the gathered survivors of the UN-China Culture, Penny thought. They were allowed space and time to talk, to get over the shock of meeting.

But in the end they had to get down to business.

“Earthshine,” Stef said simply. “That's the top and bottom of it. Earthshine.”

Quintus Fabius said, “
Earthshine
. If I understand you, this is the—machine—that you brought with you from your old world, and is now on Mars—”

Kerys said, “I have had years to get used to these ideas, Centurion. You've had days. And
I
barely understand it. We'll have to let them talk this through. And then, I suspect, we're going to have to make our superiors understand too.”

“I look forward to that,
nauarchus
,” he said drily. “Very well—Earthshine. Tell me why we must discuss this.”

“For one thing,” Penny said, “he is the reason we are here. I mean, we are survivors of the jonbar-hinge event, the destruction of the worlds of our own timeline . . .”

Quintus looked helplessly at Kerys. “Do they always talk like this?”

“I'm afraid so.”

The ColU said, “The jonbar hinge came with a great surge of energy, when the UN-China war erupted, and the kernels on Mercury were opened by the Nail, the Chinese missile . . . Perhaps such a surge, involving kernels, is necessary to create a hinge. Meanwhile, you, Stef, were with Yuri and myself in a Hatch, en route to Romulus-Remus. And you, Beth, Penny, were with Lex McGregor, fleeing the solar system behind a bank of kernels.”

Stef said, “You're suggesting that somehow the kernels, the Hatches, preserved us.”

The ColU said, “Yes. I think Earthshine moved us to where he wanted us to be, like chess pieces on a board, Colonel Kalinski. At least the key pieces. Consider. Who survived the jonbar hinge? Earthshine himself. And his son, Yuri Eden. Or at least, the son of Robert Braemann, one of the input personalities that became Earthshine. And his granddaughter, Beth Eden Jones. Everybody Earthshine might have cared about personally—”

Mardina turned on her mother. “His son? His granddaughter? What new horror is this? That thing on Mars—are you telling me that it's somehow my great-grandfather? Mother—
did you know
?”

Beth sighed. “I knew. He told me his name on the
Tatania
, as we fled from the moon. And my father, Yuri, told me
his
true name before we parted, on Mercury. And when I put the two together—”

“You never told me?”

“You've spent your life rejecting your past, Mardina. Are you saying you would have wanted to know?”

Quintus Fabius leaned forward. “I can see why this is difficult for you all. This talk of the past—but now we must speak of the future. Collius, tell us of the ice ball, the world you Brikanti call Höd. And the observations we have been making of Earthshine's activities.”

Penny frowned. “‘We'? Who's ‘we,' the Empire?”

“No. We of the
Malleus Jesu
,” the ColU said. “Academician, during the journey back I was privileged to work with the ship's team of navigators and observers. They are Muslims, mostly Arab. A product of a high civilization, though one subsumed within the Roman system in this timeline.”

“I'm guessing you had them observe Ceres,” Penny prompted.

The ColU said, “I had a feeling that the tracking of the object, and the projection of its future motion, might be beyond observers on Earth. Especially given the erratic pattern of the kernel-bank burns they are applying.
You
can't be sure where it's heading. I, however—”

Beth laughed. “With your superior computational powers, you know exactly what's going on. You always were conceited, ColU.”

“Liu Tao once said to me that, for a farm machine, I have ideas above my station. And I replied by pointing out that a sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming—”

“Get to the point!” Quintus was almost shouting now. “Where is this ice block heading, O engine of glass?”

“Toward an impact on Mars,”
Penny said tiredly. “Am I right, ColU? Not a close approach; a grazing encounter with the atmosphere—”

“I'm afraid you are correct, Penelope Kalinski.”

Stef nodded dumbly. “Very well. But why? What is he intending to achieve?”

“I can think of only dire and destructive possibilities,” the ColU said.

Quintus and Kerys shared grim glances. Kerys said, “And whatever else he does achieve, he'll probably trigger a war, in the Skull of Ymir as on Terra.”

Quintus turned to the slave. “What can we do, Collius? Can we stop this?”

“Time is short,” the ColU whispered. “It is fortuitous we arrived back here in time to observe this, let alone intervene. I would suggest that only Earthshine himself can stop the collision—if he wills it.”

Stef said, “Then we have to go there. To Mars.”

Penny said, “Why should he even speak to us?”

“Maybe not to
us
. Which is why we must all go. Beth, Mardina—I know how difficult this is going to be for you—but you're his family. If the ColU is right, he's already saved you once. Maybe he'll listen to you again. If there's even a chance of averting this . . .”

Beth looked away, and Penny saw how closed-up she became, as, not for the first time in Beth's life, those around her plotted to manipulate her and her daughter. Penny said gently, “Just think about it, Beth. The consequences of all this. We did bring this creature into this reality. We have to try.”

Stef said briskly, “But we'll have to get to Mars first. How are we going to do that?”

“In my ship,” said Quintus Fabius firmly. “I am serious,” he said in response to their surprised expressions. “The
Malleus
needs reprovisioning, but the crew have yet to be dispersed, and it stands ready to fly. My legionaries will squawk, but the journey would be short and the bonuses handsome, I imagine. I could have you all on Mars in days . . .
if
we can arrange suitable clearances quickly,” and he glanced significantly at the shocked-looking provincial official.

Penny frowned. “Where is this ship of yours? In orbit, on the moon—”

“About five kilometers north of here,” Stef said drily. “This is a culture where they land interstellar spacecraft at city airports.”

“I wish I could say you get used to such things,” Penny said to her. “But you don't.”

Mardina was looking around at them as they spoke, mouth open, obviously amazed by all she'd heard—overwhelmed perhaps. “Well, then, let's all fly off to Mars, and find out the truth.”