And Brikanti had grown traditions of its own. This was no empire; it was a federation of nations, and a democracy, of sorts, with traditions inherited from both its British and Scandinavian forebears. That old fort on the hill was now the seat of the Althing, an assembly with representatives of Brikanti holdings around the world, and the most powerful single individual was not a hereditary emperor but an elected logsogumadr, a law-speaker.
But this was a world that had been industrialized for centuries, a process that had proceeded without conscience or compensation. So, even on a bright midsummer day like today, a pall of smog hung over the city. No trees survived in Eboraki, save in the carefully preserved oak groves. In this capital people dressed brightly, in embroidered cloaks over colorfully striped tunics and leggings, adorned with beads of blue glass or amber, and with torcs of steel or silver at their necks. But they routinely wore face masks and goggles to keep the muck out of their eyes and lungs, and life expectancy in a culture capable of sending ships to the planets was shockingly low. Nobody here, of course, could imagine things could be different. It was when Penny was least busy, when she walked in the city looking at the children coughing into their filthy masks, that she most acutely missed the world she had left behind.
And yet, as the months had passed, to walk these streets at the times of solstice, midsummer and midwinter, with the low sun of morning or evening suspended over the streets and filling the city with light, had pleased her in ways she would have found hard to describe.
• • •
The meals in the small refectory were prepared by students as part of their education, under the supervision of a few townspeople. The fare, served at rough-hewn wooden tables, was traditional Brikanti, meat-heavy, laden with butter and vegetable sauces and served with slabs of gritty bread—although Roman fare was also available, cheese, olives. Rice and potatoes were expensive foreign luxuries, even in the Brikanti capital. All the Tatania crew had had problems with this diet, mostly from a lack of roughage. But Penny had learned not to try to change some things, such as the Brikanti habit of serving meals, even to very young children, with watered-down mead or beer. Or the habit of eating your food with the knife you wore at your belt.
Still, the meat, a richly stewed beef, was tender and tasty, and for a while they ate without speaking.
At length Ari said, picking up the conversation where they’d left off, “You don’t need to thank me for visiting. For one thing it’s my job; I’m expected to report to the Navy funding body who provided the cash for all this. For another it’s a pleasure to see how you’re getting on. I sometimes feel as if I connect you all, the crew of the Tatania.”
“We are all rather scattered,” Penny admitted.
“But that’s not a bad thing. It shows you’re finding places in a society that must be very strange to you. How’s Jiang, by the way?”
“Doing fine. Our house is comfortable. You know that he is working at the college; he gives classes in kernel engineering, among other topics.”
“I can understand he will be finding it a particular challenge here. We like to believe we are world citizens, we Brikanti. In fact it is very rare to see a Xin face, even here in Eboraki, the capital.”
Marie Golvin said, “Well, he wouldn’t call himself Xin, but the point’s taken. He doesn’t go out much.”
“He’ll be fine,” Penny assured her. “And so’s General McGregor, we hear.”
“I saw him recently,” Ari said. “Lecturing junior officers on the command and control techniques of your International Space Fleet.” Through his smooth Brikanti, it was odd to hear him break into English. “He’s very impressive.”
“He always has been. And I’ve known him since he was seventeen years old,” Penny said, feeling a little wistful.
Ari watched her sharply. “That’s true in one of the reality strands you inhabited, so I hear. In the other—”
“Yes, yes. In the other it was my twin sister who knew him—save she wasn’t a twin, for I didn’t exist at all. Whatever. I always knew Lex would land on his feet, wherever he ended up.”
“You can see he wishes he could shed three decades and fly with the youngsters. To battle the Xin for the treasures of the Tears of Ymir!”
“That sounds like Lex, all right. He’s visited us a few times. He’s most struck by the special relativity we teach here. In our reality, so he says, he always struggled with math. Here, you had no relativity theory. But you did have the kernels, and you discovered relativity experimentally, by driving your kernel ships up against the light barrier, and finding out the hard way that the clocks slow and the relativistic mass piles up.”
Marie said, “I heard of engineers being executed because they couldn’t make their ships travel faster than light.”
“That was the Romans and the Xin, not us,” Ari said. “And the stories are apocryphal anyhow.”
Penny mopped up her vegetable stew with her rubbery bread. “And Beth? How is your new wife, Ari?”
He smiled, but Penny sensed reserve. “Well, you understand that she is not formally my wife, since she had no family to give her away . . . She is fine.”
Penny and Marie shared a glance.
Marie said, “That’s all you have to say? How’s the baby? She’s overdue, isn’t she?”
He seemed to consider his words carefully. “We are dealing with the challenge of the birth in our own way.”
Penny frowned. “‘Challenge’? What’s challenging about it? Your medicine is pretty good when it comes to childbirth. I checked it over myself when Beth said she was pregnant, and I had Earthshine consult too. Her age would always be an issue; she is thirty-eight now . . . Why is this a challenge?”
“This is a private matter,” he said coldly, his pale face empty. Suddenly he had never seemed more alien to Penny, more foreign.
“But—”
“Instead, let us talk of Earthshine. It is he who has made the most dramatic entry into our society, as I’m sure you know. Even if his true nature is carefully kept a secret. As far as most people know he is simply another survivor of a ship of mysterious origin.
“And he seems to be attempting superhuman feats. You must know that he is now at Höd.” The Brikanti name for Ceres. “He intends, with the party of supporters he has gathered around him, to move on to Mars. In a way this fulfills the promise of the images he showed us when we first encountered you: the great buildings on the Mars of your reality. But here, he claims, he will achieve much more.”
Penny grunted. “I often thought he’d have made a great salesman. If only of himself.”
“He intends”—Ari mimed a shove with his upraised hand—“to push Höd out of its track around the sun, and make it sail to Mars.” He looked at them. “This is what he claims. I have performed my own estimates of the problem, the energies required. Do you think this is achievable?”
Penny, startled, looked at Marie.
Marie said, “With a hefty enough booster, any such feat is possible. And this society is knee-deep in kernels, which have been used in ways we never dared . . . Yes, I would say it is possible.”
“Earthshine claims he will do this to deliver to Mars raw materials that planet lacks. Water, other compounds, some metals perhaps. He intends, he says, to rebuild Mars.”
Penny said to Marie in English, “Terraforming. I bet that’s what he means. These people have no conception of such schemes, since they don’t even have a word for ‘ecology.’”
Ari frowned. “I cannot understand what you are saying.”
“I apologize,” said Marie formally. “In our reality there were grand plans to remake Mars into a world like the Earth. Maybe other worlds too, Venus, Titan—umm, the largest moon of Augustus. But on Mars it would mean importing a lot of volatiles—the kind of stuff Ceres, Höd, is made of.” She looked at Penny doubtfully. “I guess it could be made to work. I
f Ceres could be brought into Martian orbit—”
“That would take a heck of a lot of delta-vee.”
“Yes. But then you could break it up slowly, drop the material you need into the air, with Ceres itself as a construction shack.”
Penny nodded. “I do know there was evidence on Earth, our Earth, of major climate disturbances caused by impacts of comets or asteroids. Fifty-five million years back, a spike in the carbon dioxide levels—doubled in a single year. So the idea is not implausible.”
Ari listened carefully, picking through the technical language. “Hairy stars and the Tears of Ymir, falling to Terra—and now to Mars. So do you think Earthshine is sincere? Perhaps we should be wary. He is proposing to deploy large energies, to move huge masses around the planetary system—our planetary system.” He grimaced. “If he is allowed to wield such energies, your artificial man would be as powerful as a god.”
Penny said, “So he was before, in our reality. But here’s what you have to understand, Ari. Earthshine and his brothers, the Core AIs, were significant powers on our Earth. But, like gods, they always had their own agenda. An agenda that might or might not coincide with the interests of mankind . . . And whatever Earthshine says about Höd now, we’ll have to remember that here too his own deep agenda comes first.”
“Very well. And what might that ‘deep agenda’ now be?”
“We’ve no way of knowing.”
“I recall the talk of your ‘impossible sister,’ Penelope Kalinski. Earthshine was fascinated by that. You’ve said so yourself. He detected this—unraveling of history—before he and you witnessed it on a much larger scale. Prescient, don’t you think? Wouldn’t he pursue such an interest here?”
Sure he would, she thought. It was odd to think that even now she and the rest of the Tatania crew were still dependent on Earthshine, for the translator gadgets he had provided them all with, and regularly downloaded updates of vocabulary and grammar. And she did remember how obsessive he had seemed about the interference in human history by an agency unknown, right back to the beginning of her own involvement with him, going back more than three decades of her complicated life: I am everywhere. And I am starting to hear your footsteps, you Hatch-makers. I can hear the grass grow. And I can hear you . . .
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.
17
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.”<
br />
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.”
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