Ultima (29 page)

Quintus held her gaze. “We are at your mercy.”

“You are, aren't you? But you have muscle, and evident discipline of a sort. This is a big craft and we are always short of muscle and discipline—especially if it can be applied to the jobs nobody else wants. Very well. I will let you live. I'll send you to the
antisuyu
.” Inguill grinned coldly. “You don't know what that is, do you? In the
antisuyu
you will be far from my sight. Indeed you will be far from this place, which is the only way out of this habitat. And a deeper contrast to Rome, and indeed your ice moon, could hardly be imagined. But you won't be out of my thoughts, believe me. You are a conundrum, Quintus Fabius, and it is evident to me that, to say the least, you are not telling me the whole truth.” She pushed her face close to his. “I don't like you, and you owe me your life. Never forget that.”

Quintus did not reply.

She backed off. “In anticipation of the decision, I brought this man.” She indicated the other clerkish man next to her. “His name is Ruminavi, and he is the
tocrico apu
of the region to which you will be sent—which contains the
ayllu
to which you will be attached, among others.” She looked at their empty faces. “Do you understand any of this? You are in Tawantinsuyu, the Empire of the Four Quarters—the earth and the sky, and east and west here in the habitat, the
antisuyu
and
cuntisuyu
. Under the Sapa Inca each quarter is controlled by an
apu
, a prefect, and under him or her are twenty-two
tocrico apus . . .
Oh! You will learn.

“Now Ruminavi will escort you to your transports to the
antisuyu
. Do what the
tocrico apu
says, and your local
curaca
, work hard and don't cause trouble, and you might survive a little while. Oh, and you will give up any weapons you are still concealing. No weapons in Yupanquisuyu, save for the troops and other designated officials.”

There was grumbling in the ranks at this, but Quintus said quietly in thick rural Latin, “Lads, we'll find weapons as we need them, or steal them, make them. That's always been my plan.”

The ColU said, “Make sure they don't confiscate
me
. Tell them I am an idol. Or a piece of medical equipment. Or a scrap from the farmed moon, a sentimental souvenir . . .”

But the men had fallen silent.

Mardina turned, and saw that a door at the far end of the chamber had opened, to reveal the interior of the habitat for the first time. A tube of cloud, brightly illuminated, stretching to infinity.

“By Jupiter and Jesu,” muttered Fabius. “Into what have you delivered us, Collius?”

•   •   •

As the Romaoi filed toward the internal transport, one of Inguill's soldiers approached her, holding a block of metal. “Found this,
quipucamayoc
. No idea how one of them smuggled this through the cleansing area. And then managed to drop it on the other side . . .”

Inguill took the piece. It was a kind of belt buckle, she saw, intricately shaped, and stamped with square, ugly Latin lettering that she had to pick out:

LEGIO XC VICTRIX

Ruminavi, who was a fussy little man with none of the evident intellect of Inguill, said they would be transported in some kind of carriage to their new home—Mardina imagined something like an elevator car—indeed they would ride in a series of such transports; the carriages would not take all of them at once.

So the Romans were roughly divided into groups of a dozen or less. Quintus, with Titus's help, made sure the men were in their
contubernium
tent groups as far as possible, with somebody relatively sensible in charge of each. The legionaries grumbled and moaned as they formed a queue, hanging weightless in the air—a line that would take them into a chamber of wonders, Mardina realized, but soldiers always grumbled whatever you did for them.

When it was her turn, Mardina followed Quintus and Chu and a handful of Romans, and passed through a portal into a box of glass, a box riding on upright rails, which in turn were attached to a tremendous vertical wall that stretched above and below her, as far as she could see. Behind her in this glass box, Ruminavi the
apu
settled on a seat, surrounded by a handful of spidery axis warriors, and the Romans crowded in. And ahead of her . . .

She recoiled from the view, closing her eyes. She heard a kind of moaning, high-pitched, like a frightened animal. She thought it might be Chu Yuen, the slave, more intelligent than the average legionary and therefore more capable of wonder, and horror. She hoped it wasn't herself.

“Look down,” the ColU said now, from the security of its lodging in Chu's backpack. “Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson, listen to me. Don't look ahead, or up—don't look at the wall to which we are fixed—just
look straight down
.”

Mardina opened her eyes and looked. And, through the transparent floor, she saw what looked like Terra as seen from low orbit, a slice of sprawling landscape, washed-out green and gray under scattered clouds, and with stretches of water that glistened in the sunlight like polished Roman shields. “This isn't so bad,” she said with relief.

“Here at the axis of the habitat we are over two hundred miles above this landscape. For that is the radius of this cylinder. The view here is just as if you were in a spacecraft, orbiting.”

“It seems almost normal, in the sunlight. Except—”

“
What
sunlight?” the ColU said. “I know. There are breaks in the habitat's tremendous walls. Pools that admit what must be reflected sunlight, to illuminate this enclosed environment—surely indirectly reflected, so that the radiation shielding is not compromised. There is one below us and not far ahead—you can look up now, just a little farther . . .”

The sunlight pool glared under the clouds, like a city on fire. It was an eerie, beautiful sight.

Ruminavi said, “We call them the windows of Inti. For Inti is our sun god, you see.”

The transport suddenly lurched into motion, heading down the face of the wall on its rails. The passengers were jerked into the air, like pebbles in a dropped helmet, Mardina thought, and forced to grab onto whatever handholds they could reach. Already some of the legionaries looked as if they wanted to throw up.

Ruminavi, safe in his seat, looked on with a malicious grin. “Keep tight hold. The acceleration will be high. We'll be covering a lot of your Roman miles every hour by the time we hit the atmosphere. Of course by then you'll be feeling the spin weight . . .” He laughed out loud. “Not so tough now, you Romans, are you? Just like your ancestors who begged on their knees to Tiso Inca's generals to spare their city from the Fist.”

Quintus Fabius glared at him.

“All right,” the ColU said now. “Look down again, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. And look up. Look at the wall itself, down which we are climbing . . .”

It was more than a wall, she saw now, it was an engineered cliff face, crusted with structures, blocks and domes and pyramids—all essentially constructed of steel, Mardina thought, but ornately painted, even faced with stone and bound by steel straps.
Structures—
that was the wrong word. She saw lights gleam from within, doorways opening: these were buildings, inhabited by people. At the axial point itself a tremendous tower sprouted straight out from the wall, built of stone blocks of some kind: a stepped pyramid, skinny and enormously long. And in one place she saw a gang of workers, in pressure suits, tethered to handholds fixed to the wall, engaged in the construction of something new. A living, changing place then, a vertical town, stuck to this wall. And the rails on which the transport ran cut through all this clutter in a dead straight line before plunging down into the clouds far below.

Mardina uttered a silent prayer. “It is a city in the sky.”

“No,” said the ColU. “A city
above
the sky. We are in a near vacuum here, Mardina. The air will only become significantly dense perhaps twenty miles above the ground—I mean, the cylindrical hull. This habitat, four hundred and fifty miles in diameter, essentially contains a vacuum, with a thin layer of air plastered over its inner surface, kept there by the spin gravity.”

“A vast city in the vacuum. Why's it here?”

The
apu
snorted. “Why do you think? This is Hanan Cuzco, home of the Inca himself, and his family and heirs and closest advisers. The greatest marvel in Yupanquisuyu, outshining even that dump Hurin Cuzco at the eastern pole. The
mitimacs
are kept out by all this lovely vacuum. Why, a war could be raging down there on the ground and we'd never know about it up here.”

“‘We,' Ruminavi?” said Quintus. “But you don't live here, do you? It was my understanding that you're coming with us, all the way to this grubby
antisuyu
, where you live.”

Ruminavi scowled. “Yes, and let's see how long your Roman arrogance lasts in my jungle, you posturing clown.”

Mardina looked again at the compartment's rear wall, the relatively comforting vision of a riveted metal wall flying up past her face.
Hundreds of miles
of metal, of steel and rivets . . . “All right, Collius. I think I'm ready for the next stage.”

“Very well. Stay upright, feet down toward the ground—so to speak. When we are farther from the axis the spin gravity will become stronger and
pull
you down. Now look straight ahead, lift your face slowly . . .”

If she had been in orbit around Terra, at this altitude the curve of the world would be apparent; she would find a horizon in every direction she looked. But here it was different. Here, when she lifted her head, she saw the panorama below her, of rivers and hills and inland seas and what looked like farms, what looked like cities, extending directly ahead, the details becoming a compressed blur with distance, until at last she saw only a band of air glowing with the illumination of the light pools. There was no sense of curvature—not if she looked straight ahead. But if she looked away from that axis, the landscape
curved up
, rising to either side and joining over her head to form a tube of smeared light, green and blue and gray. It was as if she were holding up a rolled-up map, she thought, and peering through it at a distant source of light.

Far away, at least, it was all a comforting abstraction. But then she let her gaze wander back down the length of the tube, back to her position, and she looked up over her head at a great roof of land, plastered with inverted mountains and patchwork farms and even
rivers
, pinned there by a spin weight she could not yet feel. She felt her heart hammering, her breath growing shallow.

The ColU said, “Easy, Mardina. Chu Yuen—hold her hand.”

The touch of the former slave's flesh was comforting. But, glancing to her side, she saw that Chu had his own eyes clamped shut.

She laughed.

“Are you all right, Mardina?”

“Yes, Collius. A folded world. What magnificence. What arrogance. What madness!”

“Quite. Yet here we are. Chu Yuen? What do you think?”

“That I miss the stars,” the slave said. “But I am now, however,
standing
on the floor of this box.”

He was right. Mardina hadn't noticed. She was light as a feather still, but when she jumped, she drifted back down.

Ruminavi said, “Some way to go yet before we descend into the clouds. But we are already a tenth of the way there, and so you have a tenth your weight. We carry no refreshments, save water from that spigot over there . . .”

Mardina glanced around the transport, aware of her companions for the first time in a while. As their weight returned, the legionaries were pulling off their boots and settling down on their cloaks and blankets. Titus Valerius was playing knucklebones, or trying to, complaining loudly about the way the pieces rolled in the low weight. The
medicus
was huddled in a corner, obviously trying not to look terrified. One of the soldiers seemed to be taking a nap.

While the tube world unfolded all around them.

It took two hours of descent before the transport compartment finally plunged down into the thicker clouds—although by now the blueness of the high air was visible beyond the walls.

Two hours
: it was that fact alone, that this evidently high-speed transport had taken a whole two hours to cross a radius of one hub of this tremendous cylinder, that drove home to Mardina the sheer scale of the structure she was entering. It was already hundreds of miles back to the port where she had entered this habitat; it would not be rapid to travel anywhere in this great volume. At least now her weight felt comfortingly normal, even though the descent was not finished yet.

And when they passed through the high cloud layer, abruptly Mardina found herself looking down on mountains. Mountains that lapped up against the hub wall like a wave of rock breaking against the steel, mountains with ice clinging to their upper peaks and slopes, and glaciers spilling down their flanks.

The rail diverged from the wall now, though the transport box tipped up to stay vertical, and suddenly Mardina found herself skimming down an icebound slope of rock and frost-shattered scree. The landscape itself, at the foot of these mountains, was still far below.

“This feels almost normal,” she said.

Ruminavi grunted. “Until you remember there is a big band of these mountains all the way around the base of the hub wall.”

The ColU said, “Yes, of course—a mountain chain over a thousand miles long, like the mountains of Valhalla Inferior: South America, where the ancestors of these Incas arose. Folded up into a band!”

“And all fake,” Ruminavi said, grinning, trying to provoke a reaction—to awe them, Mardina realized. “Hollow! Built by engineers, shaped by artists! And inside the mountains there are big engines that circulate air and water and even stone, gravel and sand from the ocean.”

Mardina asked, “What ocean? Never mind.”

“But look out at the spectacle . . .”

Abruptly the transport descended beneath the snow line, and now sped over bare rock. The view was giddy, with green-clad precipices falling away to the valleys of turbulent rivers below and those towering ice-clad peaks above, clawing at the metal face of the hub. Spectacular bridges spanned some of the gorges. And looking out now Mardina could see that some of the mountain's face had been leveled into terraces, where people toiled; there were huts, fields, smoke rising from fires into the thin air. These were the first inhabitants of the cylinder they had seen since the hub.

“Potato farmers,” the ColU said. “Just as in the Andes in the time of the Incas.
Our
Incas. There they farmed all the way up to the snow line.”

Ruminavi frowned at the unfamiliar names. But he said, “Just as in the old country, we built mountains here as residences for our gods. The country is littered with shrines.”

“Yes, the Incas came from the highlands,” Mardina said. “I remember that from my own history, of what the Xin and the Romans found when they fought over Valhalla Inferior. There had been a mighty empire spanning the continent, but armed only with bronze swords and armor of leather . . .”

“Just as the Europeans of my UN-China Culture discovered,” the ColU said. “And destroyed. Here, however, the Incas evidently prospered. They destroyed Rome, they went out into space, and they brought their culture with them—indeed, they re-created it. Andean mountains, built of lunar rock perhaps.

“Inguill called this habitat Yupanquisuyu, which means the Country of Yupanqui. And Cusi Yupanqui, at least in my Culture's timeline, was the man who truly established the Inca empire. He conquered vast swaths of territory, and established the empire's legal, military and social structures. Yupanqui was their Alexander the Great, and it is as if this vast habitat is called ‘Alexandria.' So Yupanqui must have lived here too, in this reality; the histories must have been roughly consistent until that point—though, evidently, Rome survived to be defeated. I need to see the
quipus
, you know.”

“The what?”

“The frame of strings that
quipucamayoc
Inguill carried. That was, and evidently still is, the way the Incas kept their records. Somewhere in this artifact there must be a library, banks of knotted strings telling the story of this empire all the way back to Yupanqui himself. If only I could see it . . .”

Quintus Fabius had been listening. He said drily, “I'll see what can be arranged, Collius. In the meantime it seems to me that this box of glass is slowing.”

•   •   •

In the last moments, the transport entered another, lower bank of clouds that blanketed a green-tinged landscape.

Instructed by Ruminavi, the passengers picked up their gear and lined up by a side door. The axis warriors from the hub, fragile-looking in gravity, remained carefully strapped into their couches, but they kept the blunt muzzles of their ugly-looking weapons trained on the Romans. Meanwhile, waiting outside the door was another squad of soldiers to take over their supervision, heftier-looking types, their clothing gaudy, their dark faces stern and suspicious.

Mardina could see it would be just a short walk to the next transport, which was a kind of carriage on rails, one of a series, pulled by a heavy engine at the front. The rails of the track swept down the flank of the mountain.

“Ah,” the ColU said as he was carried out by Chu, “another railway system. A universal, it seems, across the timelines, common to all engineering cultures. Quintus, please ask Ruminavi what powers it—what is the motive force behind the engine?”

It took some moments of interrogation before the answer was extracted from the
apu
, and at that Quintus had to flatter him to make him brag about the mighty achievements of the Incas. The train, which he called a caravan, ran on the
capac nans
, the roads of the gods, which spanned this habitat from end to end. Ruminavi said the engine, which had a name something like “llama,” was powered by a
warak'a
, derived from an old Quechua word for “sling”—and which turned out to be the Inca term for a kernel . . .

But Mardina, as she stepped out of the carriage, stopped paying attention to mere words. This steep mountainside was choked with green and swathed in mist, the moisture dripping from the crowding vegetation. The air was damp and fresh—but thin, hard to breathe, and she had a sense of altitude. Above her head, patchy clouds obscured her view of the higher mountains, which lifted islands of green into the air, like offerings. And beside the path that led to the railway, flowers bloomed in thick clusters with vivid colors, yellow, orange and purple, and tiny birds worked the flowers, flashes of brilliant blue.

The
apu
was watching her. He seemed to be admiring her show of interest, at least in comparison to the soldiers who stamped along the trail, already complaining about the state of their feet in a full gravity. “Cloud forest,” he told her, a term that took some translating by the ColU.

“And I suppose there's a big band of this too all around the rim of the world.”

“That's how it's designed. Come. It gets even prettier farther down.” But he smiled at her a little too intensely, as if drinking in every detail of her face, her skin.

Mardina drew away and walked back to her group.

•   •   •

Once aboard the train they had to wait a full hour before it was ready to pull away.

There were many coaches bearing passengers, but the legionaries were herded into rougher carts evidently intended for freight. The legionaries grumbled as they settled down, complained about the thinness of the air, the food grudgingly supplied by Inca troops—fruit, meat, water—supplemented by biscuits and other rations they'd brought in their packs from the
Malleus
. And, as soldiers always did whenever they got the chance, they tried to sleep.

Meanwhile more trains came rolling into the hub station from the habitat interior, laden with goods, foodstuffs, timber. The ColU speculated that some of these goods must be meant for export from the habitat, perhaps to other space colonies, as well as supplying the big hub city.

At last the train pulled away.

At first the descent was alarmingly steep and rapid. Looking ahead, sitting on a wooden bench and with her head resting against a window, Mardina saw that they soon descended below the level of the cloud forest and into more open air. Now they emerged from the last foothills of the mountains and came to a flat plain—flat at least in the direction of travel—marred by ranges of low hills and gouged by the valleys of sluggish rivers. This land was the
puna
, the prefect said. The great plain itself was uninspiring, Mardina thought, as they sped across it, nothing but grass and shrubs on arid land. But if Mardina looked sideways she could distinctly see the upward curve of the landscape, as if she was traveling through some tremendous valley. Sparks of artificial light and palls of smoke on those sloping walls must mark townships, and she saw the iron glint of rail tracks and roads.

And there were people everywhere, farming the land in great fields and on terraces. The buildings they lived in were unassuming hut-like structures, although the larger townships featured complexes of massive warehouses that the
apu
said were
tambos
, imperial facilities for storing food. Every so often they saw a larger structure yet, compounds surrounded by walls with multiple terraces like huge steps. These were
pukaras
; they were obvious fortresses. Their walls were of a rough, dark stone that the ColU speculated might be rock from the dismantled moon.

But some features of the landscape were less recognizable, to a Brikanti eye. At rail junctions and springs, even on particular outcroppings of rock, there were small shrines that the Incas called
huacas
, with carved idols, poles, cairns, hanks of human hair—once, even what looked like a mummified human hand. It was as if the landscape was permeated by the presence of gods and spirits. Away from the sparse human settlements it was as if nothing existed on this eerie plane but the train on its track, and the markers of the gods.

Quintus had a conversation with the
apu
, steadily interrogating the little official about the nature of the world.

The ColU summarized this for Mardina. “This engineered landscape, the
puna
, is the equivalent of what was called the
altiplano
in my Culture. In Valhalla Inferior, this was a plain of tremendous extent, very amenable to cultivation. And
high
, two miles or more above the level of the ocean. Just as it seems to be here, judging by the thinness of the air. Again, they re-create their culture from Terra.”

“But there's so
much
of it,” Mardina said. “It's crushing. And what is it
for
? All these people laboring away, this gigantic engine they live in . . .”

Quintus joined them. “The
apu
is not a discreet man. Given a little flattery, he has explained to me the essential purposes of this monster, this Yupanquisuyu.

“It is the hub of a system of exploitation and expansion and control that spans sun, moons and planets—the Empire of the Four Quarters. The vast fertile expanses of the habitat feed the miners and engineers who work the worlds and moons across the solar system. The habitat is a source of people too, people to be trained up to mine those moons. And, as well, it is a recruiting pool for soldiers to fight the occasional necessary war—these days wars against internal rebels, since the Inca empire seems to span the whole planetary system. Oh, and the habitat supports the enormous establishment that sustains the Sapa Inca himself, son of the sun. Well, one must be
seen
to be wealthy and in control, mustn't one? Our Caesars always knew that. Hanan Cuzco, his ghastly city in the airlessness of the hub, is the Sapa Inca's Capitoline Hill . . .”

“And there is one more objective,” the ColU murmured. “One more purpose all this serves.”

Quintus nodded. “They have star vessels. Bigger than our
Malleus
, it seems, but no more advanced. They have many of them, in great fleets, which for more than a century, says the
apu
, have been swarming out to the stars, and—”

“Building Hatches,” Mardina breathed.

“So it seems. On a far greater scale than
we
ever did.”

The ColU murmured, “And so it goes. Whatever the merits of this Culture compared to any other, we can say one thing: it is better at building Hatches. As if it has been designed to serve the needs of those who would desire such a thing. And just as we would expect, given our prior experiences of jonbar hinges.”

Quintus grunted. “Apparently so. But I would suggest we set aside such cosmic mysteries for now and focus on the needs of the present, which will be challenging enough.”

•   •   •

It turned out to be ten hours before the first stop—ten hours in fact before they reached the end of the
altiplano
. Since the ColU estimated that the train, running without a break, was averaging sixty Roman miles an hour, that gave Mardina another impression of the sheer scale of this artifact into whose interior she was busy tunneling.

When the train finally slowed, night was falling across Yupanquisuyu. Mardina supposed they must fortuitously have been brought to the hub from space in the early morning. She wondered vaguely how the mirror mechanisms worked behind the Inti windows, deflecting away the unending sunlight to emulate nightfall.

They got out at a waystation, which Ruminavi called a
chuclla.
Here there was a kind of refectory, and a place to wash, and shops where you could obtain food or even fresh clothes, and dormitory blocks—but the
apu
said they would not stay long before the train resumed its journey, with a fresh crew; they could sleep on the train, or not. Anyhow, the grumbling legionaries had none of the credit tokens you needed to buy stuff at the shops. The Inca soldiers laughed at their frustration.