Ultima (40 page)

“We build these Hatches—we Romans, and you Incas,” and he nodded at Inguill. “But we have no control over how they
work
, do we? Over what points they connect, how they take a traveler from this place to that, one world to the next. Any more than a trained ape shoveling coal into the maw of a steam engine has control over the layout of the track. Even Earthshine does not control this.”

And Stef knew he was right. In her own root reality, the Hatch at the substellar of Per Ardua had been linked to a Hatch on Mercury, not Mars. Maybe it still was, in some higher-order dimensionality. But for this trip, it was as if the points had been changed, the travelers rerouted . . .

Titus Valerius said, “The Dreamers
sent
Earthshine to this world, this place—if it is your Per Ardua or not—they could, presumably, have sent him anywhere. And they allowed us to follow. Yes—allowed! The Dreamers are like our old gods, before the light of Jesu filled the Empire—jealous gods who meddle endlessly in the affairs of humans. We have been brought here for a reason, even if we don't yet see it ourselves, fully.” Titus shook his huge head. “What we Romans do have is a sense of mission. Of purpose. As far as I'm concerned that mission remains to be fulfillled—and if the first step in doing that is to dig a latrine ditch, well, that was the first step in the winning of most of our provinces, I daresay, so let's get on with it. Just as soon as that tea brews. Well, I remember once on campaign—”

Everybody stopped listening. Beth passed around cups and began to ladle out her tea, which was boiling at last.

And Stef looked over at Inguill and Ari, who had barely said a word since arriving in this new reality.

In the heart of this world, as in a hundred billion others—

In the chthonic silence of an aged planet—

There was satisfaction.

The Dreamers understood little of the beings whose destinies they manipulated, little enough of the primary constructs of organic chemistry, let alone the second-order creature of silicon and metals that had been born in their industries, the creature that had done so much damage to the Dreaming. United in wider coherences themselves, they comprehended little of individuality, of identity.

It wasn't clear to the Dreamers if any of these creatures were truly intelligent at all.

So, to minimize the risk of a mistake, they had allowed the organic-chemistry creatures who had clustered around their silicon-metal leader to follow it to this place, this ultimate destination. Perhaps they were necessary to supplement its existence. Perhaps they even formed part of its intelligence, in some collective form. Perhaps this composite group could yet achieve an understanding beyond any individual, just as it was for the Dreamers.

In a sense, Titus Valerius was right. The group had been given a mission, of sorts, by the Dreamers. But it had not been compassion that had led the Dreamers to reunite this group on this world at this time: to bring Beth Eden Jones back into contact with her daughter, and the father of the child. It had not been manipulation on a human level. It had been more a question of imposing order. Of tidying up loose ends.

But time was short, and ever shorter.

And the Dream of the End Time was blossoming into actuality.

The new arrivals agreed to live to a clock and calendar based on what Beth had already set up—her twenty-four-hour cycle was some hours adrift of theirs, which they had brought from Yupanquisuyu. But that meant that they had to stay awake a few extra hours that first night, and then they slept uncomfortably on improvised beds, mostly under the canopy.

Beth, more used to the conditions of Per Ardua, was happy to lie out in the open. And, Stef wondered, maybe that helped her to adjust to this company, to get over the resentment she must feel at this sudden intrusion into the little world she had been constructing for herself—even if her own daughter had been among the intruders.

In the morning Beth served a breakfast of more tea and food from her stock: mostly potato, boiled and dried. The new arrivals ate hungrily but without relish, and Stef could see Beth was faintly embarrassed at not being able to offer them anything better, a totally illogical feeling but understandable.

Titus organized a party—himself, Clodia, Ari and Inguill—to extend that latrine ditch. “It has to be done!”

And Beth led Stef, Mardina and Chu bearing his pack with the ColU, on a short tour of her little homestead.

It was a well-chosen spot, Stef could see immediately. Beth had made her camp on top of a low rise, away from any obvious water courses; she'd have lived through all but the most monumental flooding events. But there was a stream for drinking water on the lower ground only a short distance away, and a forest clump on top of the rise that could provide fuel for burning and other materials. And Beth had put in a lot of work. In addition to her bubble shelter she had already started to construct lean-tos and tepees, supported by the sapling-like stems of young native trees, and with dead stems woven to create a kind of thatch. Under the lean-tos, and in holes in the ground, she'd built up a food store: the remains of the rations she'd brought through the Hatch, as well as wild food she'd gathered from the countryside. She was even building a kind of cart.

As they looked around the little compound, Stef was reminded that Beth Eden Jones was, after all, a pioneer, a daughter of pioneers, who had survived in this unearthly wilderness for decades. And Beth, apparently instinctively, had gone to work applying all the wisdom she'd acquired in those days—wisdom, Stef supposed, that had been entirely useless back on Earth, after she and her parents had returned through the Hatch to Mercury. It must have felt good to use those skills, to find purpose again.

Beth showed them her clocks.

She'd set up a whole array of them, using sand and water dribbling through funnels woven from dead stems: improvised hourglasses, all running independently. And on a tree trunk nearby she was notching off the days. “I have two chronometers,” she said. “My wristwatch, and a timekeeper in the pack Earthshine gave me from his support unit. This homemade stuff is for backups for when the power eventually fails—”

“Timing will no longer be a problem,” the ColU said blandly. “I have internal chronometers, which—”

“Which will work until
you
run out of power,” Beth said firmly. “I did learn some basic disciplines from my ISF-lieutenant mother, ColU. You should know that. You always have backups.”

The ColU seemed to chuckle, to Stef's hearing. Since when had a farm robot learned to chuckle? It said now, “Just like old times, Beth Eden Jones.”

“Sure it is. I'm aiming for bigger barrels, smaller nozzles, that won't require refilling—oh, for several days, enough time for me to make decent excursions from this site without losing track of time.”

“Of course,” Mardina said, “you won't need all that now, Mother. Not now that we're all here. As long as there's one person to stay behind and tend the fire and change over the clocks and whatever—”

She was casually holding the hand of the silent Chu Yuen, Stef noticed. She risked a glance at Beth, who raised her eyebrows in response.
She's not letting that boy out of her sight, and to hell with doe-eyed Clodia.

Beth said breezily, “If I'd known a whole gang of you was going to turn up, I'd not have gone to all this trouble, would I? In the meantime, come see what else I've built.”

She seemed proud of the plots she'd cleared, and started to seed with crops of her own. “I may never get to see these potatoes and peas and whatnot become fully domesticated. But it's a start.”

“Of course,” the ColU said, “now that I am here to advise, we can make much faster progress.”

Beth fumed. “More advice? I was doing pretty well before you ever showed up, you clanking heap of—”

“The work's doing you good, Mother,” Mardina said quickly. “I haven't seen you look so fit in years. Or as slim.”

“Thanks,” Beth said drily.

“The crops are also going to be a useful winter larder,” Stef said, “in case Prox ever decides to let us down again.”

“A future winter is very unlikely,” the ColU murmured, peering from the slate on Chu's chest, its voice muffled by the fabric of the pack. “The Proxima Centauri in the sky above is rather different from the beast we knew, Colonel Kalinski. Much less irregular. And the incidence of flares must be a lot lower too.”

“I figured that,” Beth said. “But I took precautions even so.” She pointed to a stromatolite garden, a huddle of table-like forms glistening brown in the watery Prox light, only a hundred paces away. “I picked out a storm shelter to hide in—hacked away the carapace in advance. Of course we need to extend that so there's shelter for all of us. But . . .” She raised her face to the sky, the heavy bulk of Proxima directly overhead. “I don't know what's going on here. This
is
Per Ardua. But
why
is it so different from what I remember? Even the jonbar hinges didn't change Earth itself that much, aside from what humanity was able to do to it.”

“We are here to seek answers to such questions,” the ColU said. “That is true even of Earthshine. Especially true of him, even if his method of inquiry is somewhat destructive. Chu Yuen, would you please turn around? Pan the slate—let me see the sky, the landscape from this vantage . . . And, Beth Eden Jones, would you show me a handful of the soil you are so assiduously cultivating?”

“Why do you want to see that? Oh, very well.”

Stef watched the former slave swivel on the spot, slowly, even gracefully. And Mardina was watching him too. He was nineteen, twenty years old now. Having spent a few days with him, Stef knew that Chu Yuen was working to get his body in better physical condition, and he studied, too, reading from slates, generally alone. All this was in order better to serve the ColU, he said. Stef felt a kind of faint echo of lust of her own. If she could shave off a few decades, the Mardina-Clodia-Chu triangle could well become a quadrilateral . . .

Beth, her cupped hands holding a mass of soil, was grinning at Stef knowingly.

“Beth Eden Jones, please hold the soil up before the slate. That's it—ah! See that?”

Stef and Mardina closed in to see. Something was wriggling in the dark brown soil, pale and pink. It was an earthworm, Stef saw with a jolt of wonder. There could be nothing more mundane than such a thing, and yet here it was burrowing through the ground on a world of another star.

“This is no surprise,” the ColU said. “A potato from Earth needs soil from Earth, which is more than just dirt; soil is a complex and nutrient-rich structure in its own right. Do you remember, Beth Eden Jones, how my primary duty in the days of pioneering with your parents was to manufacture soil, using Per Arduan dirt as the basis?”

Beth laughed. “I remember we had to haul tons of it with us when we moved.”

“I even had a miniature womb in my lost body, within which earthworms and other necessary creatures could be grown from stem cells. Of course I used these facilities to buy us acceptance with the Romans, on the planet of Romulus.

“But I was designed for Per Ardua. That was then.
Now
look at what we find. A soil that is evidently neither Arduan nor terrestrial, a soil that is evidently capable, still, of supporting Arduan life, like the stems, and yet an earthworm that might have been airlifted from a Kansas farm wriggles through it without hindrance.”

Beth was wide-eyed, looking down at the worm with new understanding. “You know, when I was digging my fields I forked over these things without even thinking about it. Yet here they are.”

“Colonel Kalinski, how long do you think it would take for earthworms to permeate the continents of Per Ardua? How long for the two ecologies to mesh in this way?”

“I'm a physicist,” Stef said, faintly baffled. “Not a biologist. A hell of a long time, I'm guessing.”

Beth said, “A lot more than the few decades since humans first got here—the few decades I remember anyhow.”

Stef said slowly, “In previous jumps through the Hatches—previous jonbar hinges—we jumped from location to location, maybe reality to reality, but without a jump in
time
. Correct? That's aside from lightspeed delays. If you took the Hatch from Mercury to Per Ardua, it was like a teleport from world to world, with a signal taking four light-years to get to its destination—so you'd emerge four years later.”

“And when we passed through the jonbar hinges,” the ColU said, “save for lightspeed delays, as you say, as near as I could determine the calendars always synchronized. Given some common starting event like the founding of Rome, we could always synchronize our chronologies—”

“Have we crossed through time, then?”
Mardina asked, a little wildly. “Is that what you're saying? Are we off in some future?
How far?
What would happen if we tried to go back through the Hatch? And—why should it be this way?”

“I have only tentative answers to those questions,” the ColU said gently. “We must wait to learn more.”

“OK,” Beth said. “Then come and learn about this . . .”

•   •   •

She led them farther away from her camp, down a slope toward the narrow, fast-flowing stream that provided her fresh water. Here, by the stream bank and in the water, stems grew more thickly.

Beth paddled out into water that lapped over her boots, and knelt to touch a broken stem, almost tenderly. “One reason I came back to the substellar to live is because Earth life seems to prosper best here. Well, the stuff I could see—I wasn't searching for earthworms. And I needed that, of course, to survive, the food crops. But if you go farther out there are stretches that could be the Ardua we used to know, Stef, ColU. Stem banks and Arduan forests and stromatolites.
But there are no builders
. Not a trace of them. No middens and dams . . . No kites. None of the complex forms we saw when I was growing up—hell, that helped us survive.”

“No more Mister Sticks,” said the ColU gently.

“What happened to it all, ColU?”

Stef asked, “Could it have been another jonbar hinge? I was there when you were debriefed, remember, Beth. When you first came through the Hatch to Mercury. You'd seen evidence of a much higher civilization constructed by the builders.”

“Yes. We found a map, a parchment in a Hatch. A global canal network—”

“None of which you saw evidence of on the ground, or which subsequent human exploration turned up. Wiped out by a hinge, maybe. Is it possible that's happened again, ColU?”

“Unlikely. We've seen that the jonbar hinges tend to redirect the destiny of an intelligent species, rather than eliminate it altogether.”

“You mean,” Beth said sourly, “they're made into better Hatch builders. Just as happened with humans, whatever the cultural cost.”

“Precisely. Of course it's not a neat process. The builders
we
saw seemed to have fallen away from that capability, somewhere in their own past. But I think what we're seeing here is not the product of a jonbar hinge but—”

“The result of time,” Stef said, looking around, beginning to understand. “And worlds too, the framework for life, change with time. I'm being slow here, slow to pick up your hints, ColU. I am, or was, a physicist—not an astrophysicist, but I ought to be able to think about huge spans in time, as they did.

“With time—a
lot
of time—as dwarf stars like Proxima age, they settle down. Become more quiescent. Planets too lose their inner heat. Volcanism, tectonic shifts tend to seize up. Per Ardua was a pretty active place when we knew it, Beth, and Prox helped too by serving up star winters, flares. But now, it's evidently much more quiescent. A quieter world under a quieter sky. And on a quiet world—”

“You can live a quiet life,” the ColU said. “Beth Eden Jones, a big brain is expensive, energetically. On a more static Per Ardua, such luxuries have long since been evolved out. They just weren't needed any more, you see? Instead all you need to do is find a sunny rock, spread out your photosynthesizing leaves, and bask forevermore.”

Beth stared around. “So that's what became of the builders? If they devolved—broke back down to the stems they were made of—how long would that take?”

“So,” Stef said, “we come back to time again, ColU. And a hell of a lot of it, it seems.”

“A clock is ticking,” the ColU said now. “I saw this when I was able to study the universe, aboard the
Malleus Jesu
, in the gulf between the stars. Echoes in the sky, of past events and future.”

“What clock?” asked Stef, growing exasperated. “What events?”

“Beth Eden Jones, you have done a fine job of survival here. But our mission is to do more than survive. We must find Earthshine—while we still have time to do so. And I can't see the sky from here. Not in this permanent day. I must see the sky, I must . . .”

“Why?” Stef snapped.

“Because
that
is my ticking clock.”