Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  In the absence of gravity her feeble old-lady arms had enough strength to push out of the couch. For a few seconds she drifted in the warm air, relishing the absence of weight. Her cabin was small, she was never more than an arm’s length from a wall, and every surface was studded with handholds. It was easy to float over into the small closet that served as her bathroom. The freedom of movement was delicious, marred only by a twinge of arthritic pain in her joints. But in a mirror she saw that her hair had come loose and formed a cloud of fuzzy gray around her head. “Oh, for God’s sake—” She pulled back rogue strands and tucked them into a knot.

  She was presentable by the time there was a knock at the door.

  Trierarchus Kerys was waiting for her, comfortably hovering in the air. Kerys was around fifty now, solid, competent, smiling, her hair a tangle of black and gray. And, twelve years after she had commanded this ship when it had collected the Tatania and its castaway crew, Kerys had become a friend to Penny Kalinski. She said now, “I thought you would like an escort to the observation cabin. The druidh waits for you there. It will take us some hours to switch over from deep space operations to landing mode; he suggested you might like to view Mars, and what has become of it, before we land.”

  After all these years, Penny’s Brikanti was now pretty good. Her Latin wasn’t too bad either, but she was never going to master Xin, despite the patient years poor Jiang had put into trying to teach her. So she understood every word Kerys had said, and picked up the unspoken implications. She meant, Earthshine’s Mars.

  “Yes, I would like that. And I’m honored that the trierarchus herself came to escort me.”

  “You’re an honored guest. As I’ve been telling you since we left Terra. Here, take my arm.”

  They began to move cautiously along the corridor, with Kerys pulling herself from handhold to handhold.

  “I’m always amazed how much larger a space seems without gravity,” Penny said. “But the earliest astronauts reported that. I mean, the space travelers in my home timeline . . .” As the years had gone by she found it increasingly difficult to keep those two tangled histories separate in her head. “But I don’t understand why you’ve all made such a fuss of me all the way here.”

  “Well, Penny Kalinski, partly it is because you are a companion of Earthshine. This mission was mounted specifically to bring you to him, as he requested.”

  “And Earthshine’s a power in the land now. In your land. What Earthshine wants, Earthshine gets . . .”

  “But,” Kerys said confidentially, “and I haven’t told you until now, it’s also because you got my nephews through your Academy.”

  “I remember them. Olaf and Thorberg.”

  “Yes. Their father’s a Dane, and their blood is as wild as his. But you got them to sit down for five years of study.”

  “They were a handful, those two. What are they doing now?”

  “Navy, both of them. Best place for them. Here we are.”

  She gently guided Penny through an open door and into a room dominated by a large picture window, beyond which an orange-brown landscape slid by. This was the observation cabin, where once, Penny remembered, she had watched a new Earth approach. Terra, Terra, a world transformed by the legacy of a different history. Now Mars scrolled past this same window, a landscape of craters and canyons and mountains and dust, magnificent, alien, forbidding. But this was not the Mars she had once known, not the Mars she had left behind—she could see that immediately—for this Mars had been engineered, over centuries. What a remarkable thought that was—how extraordinary it was that she should be here, seeing this, even so many years after the jonbar hinge.

  And Ari Guthfrithson was here, watching her reaction.

  Penny had known he was on the ship, but she had spent the few days of the flight from Earth avoiding him. Now she ignored him while she let Kerys guide her to a handhold.

  Then, safely anchored, she faced Ari. “You’re not aging well.”

  Ari was in his forties now, growing portly, gray, his face pinched. He laughed, harshly. “Well, neither are you, you old crone.”

  “Thanks.”

  He turned to face the planet. “Look at my Mars! This is what you can do with kernel technology, and a dream . . .”

  Visionaries from her own Earth would have recognized much of what was being done, she thought. In this reality, the engineers had been doing their best to bring Mars to life, even with its own resources, long before Earthshine and his Ceres scheme had arrived. Kernel energy beams melted ice from the polar caps and poured it into tremendous canals burned into the plains of the Vastitas Borealis to the north, and through the ancient, cratered highlands of the south, Terra Sirenum, Aonia Terra, Noachis Terra, Terra Cimmeria, features with their own Latin or Xin or Brikanti names in this reality. At lower latitudes, deep aquifers were being broken open to release yet more water. The ship passed over the Valles Marineris, the great canyon system become an enclosed sea. For now all this water was frozen over, the ice white against the rusted colors of Mars. But, around the curve of the world, the great blisters of the Tharsis volcanoes, Olympus Mons among them, were being cracked and gouged and stirred in the hope of triggering eruptions from those long-dormant giants, which might belch ash and greenhouse gases to thicken the sparse air.

  And already city lights burned in the night side.

  A Mars with thick air and cities and brimming canals! A nineteenth-century fantasy back where Penny had come from, made reality here. Maybe, she wondered sometimes, her commanders had been too cautious in their use of the great, unexpected benison of the kernels. So much more could have been done with that magical torrent of energy—as long as you didn’t care about the consequences for what you were reshaping.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ari said.

  “Do you?”

  “That this is not the Mars you left behind in that other history of yours. Well, it’s true. But soon it will not be the Mars that was here when you arrived.”

  “It will be Earthshine’s Mars.”

  “Yes. That god you brought into our reality is remaking a world. Höd—Ceres—is on its way, spiraling closer with every revolution around the sun. Just now it is . . .” He thought about it, glanced at Mars for orientation, and pointed to his right. “That way. An object visible to the naked eye, from the Martian ground.”

  “Why are you here, Ari? What do you want of me?”

  “You’re going to speak to Earthshine.”

  “That’s obvious. He summoned me. Although I don’t know what he wants of me.”

  “I knew you would not listen to me, if I had approached you on Terra, or during the flight. It is only now as we prepare to descend that I feel able to speak to you—to make you listen—only now that I can impress on you the urgency of what I ask.”

  Penny glanced at Kerys; the trierarchus, tethered to a support bar by one hand, looked on impassively. “Kerys, do you know what this is all about?”

  “Leave me out of it. I do know Ari went to the top—to Dumnona itself, the headquarters of the Navy—he pulled a lot of strings to be allowed a berth on this mission.”

  “And all for this one moment, Penny Kalinski,” Ari said.

  “For what? What do you want, druidh?”

  “It’s simple enough. You will talk to Earthshine. Listen to what he says. Repeat it to me when you return—or if not to me, to the trierarchus, to Dumnona, anybody. Find out what he truly intends, and tell us.”

  “You know what he intends. To terraform Mars, to make Mars live.”

  “That’s what he tells us. I’m convinced there’s something else. Something hidden. We will be landing you there,” and he pointed to the Hellas basin. “We call this Hel. Earthshine has established some kind of habitat here, at the deepest point of the deepest basin on Mars. That is where his personal processing-support unit is now situated. Why the
re? We don’t know. And he has an establishment a few hundred miles to the north.”

  In what Penny’s culture had known as Syrtis Major. “Yes?”

  “From the way you have described your own career, I would think you would be familiar with such a place. Penny Kalinski, as far as we can tell from the radiations being released, that is a laboratory where kernels themselves are being studied. Your specialty. Now, why would Earthshine need to delve into the physics of the kernels if, as he claims, his priority is the vivifying of Mars?” He smiled coldly. “Perhaps he will ask you to work there alongside him. Perhaps you will write more ‘papers’ for the ‘journals’ read by the learned people of your world—”

  Penny snapped back, “Oh, give it a rest, you manipulative bore. How’s your wife, Ari?”

  “I have no wife,” he said neutrally.

  “Fine. Then how’s your daughter?”

  “Mardina’s ten years old now, and she despises me. I see her once a year, and that’s by a court order I had to have drawn up.”

  “So she should despise you. What do you want from her, or her mother? Forgiveness?”

  “I’d settle for understanding. I meant everything for the best, for everybody. Yes, including Mardina!” Suddenly he looked lost, vulnerable. “Couldn’t you tell her that for me?”

  But now the trierarchus drifted between Penny and the druidh, and led him away. And a few minutes later a junior crew member found Penny and told her she needed to prepare for a landing, on Mars.

  20

  As seen from the crude rover that bounced Penny over the surface from the landed Ukelwydd, Earthshine’s base on Mars was an array of glass boxes with their faces tipped toward the sun, low and pale in the northern sky of Hellas—“Hel.” For Penny, the base was a nagging reminder of something she’d seen before.

  The rover docked neatly with a port, and she made her way through an airlock with the assistance of a couple of young women in the rough uniforms of the Brikanti Navy. Then she was led through offices filled with pallid Martian light. In the gentle one-third gravity she was able to walk with no more support than a stick.

  They arrived in a wide, airy room, and Penny paused to inspect it, leaning on her stick. At its center was a single desk, behind which sat a man in some kind of business suit, indistinct in Penny’s rheumy vision despite the relatively bright light. The desk overlooked a pond, a smooth surface crossed by languid low-gravity waves, and reflecting the faun sky. Again memory nagged.

  She was allowed to walk forward alone, her footsteps silent on a thick swath of carpet, a subdued brown to match the Martian color suite. To get to the desk she had to hobble around that central pond, which was glassed over and filled only with a kind of purplish scum, she saw; there were no plants, no fish.

  As she neared the desk, the man stood gracefully. Tall, dressed in a sober business suit and collarless shirt, he might have been fifty. On his lapel he wore a brooch, a stone disc carved with concentric grooves. He was Earthshine, of course.

  “Please,” he said in his cultured British accent. “Sit down. Would you like a drink? Coffee, water—you always liked soda, as I recall.”

  “When I was eleven years old, maybe. I’ll take a water, thank you.” She lowered herself stiffly into a chair before the desk.

  Earthshine tapped the desk surface, which opened to allow a small shelf to rise up bearing a bottle of water, a glass. “I’m afraid you’ll have to pour it yourself.”

  “I know.”

  He sat, fingers steepled, regarding her. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “Not given the logic of our past relationship, and the nature of your own personality. Clearly you are as curious as ever. But I would not have compelled you to come. Could not have.”

  “I’m starting to remember all this. Well, mostly. That carpet should be—blue?”

  “That would hardly fit with the Martian background.”

  “And with a huge Universal Engineering Inc. logo. And Sir Michael King sitting behind that desk, not you.”

  “It is to be hoped Sir Michael survived the war, in his bunker under Paris.”

  “It seems unlikely. Even if that version of Paris actually exists anymore.”

  “Quite so. I have tried to recreate the conditions as you remember them from your first visit to the UEI corporate headquarters—”

  “Solstice, Canada. Many years ago. The first time we met. I was summoned there with my sister.”

  “Although,” Earthshine said carefully, “since that event came before the great sundering of your own personal history, she would say she went there alone.”

  “And the pond,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “Weren’t there some kind of stunt gen-enged carp in there? Whereas now there is just scum.”

  “Actually the probe contains something much more exotic than an engineered fish or two. Martians,” he said sepulchrally. “Real-life indigenous Martians, extracted from mine shafts and other workings.”

  That took her by surprise. “Really? Bugs from the deep rock?”

  “That’s the idea. In fact, in our reality the Chinese discovered them, in the process of excavating water as part of their own terraforming efforts. The specimens I have inspected appear the same as the Chinese discoveries—the pivoting of history made no difference to them. The samples in the pond are real, by the way, though much of the rest of this environment—”

  “Is no more real than you. You are just as I remember, at least,” she said. “Right down to that odd brooch on your lapel. Which is just like the chunk of carved concrete, the plaque, you were careful to ship aboard the Tatania, isn’t it? I always wondered what the significance of that was.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait. “My goal with this virtual presentation has been to emphasize our shared past. How much we have in common.”

  “Well, you’ve done that. But that’s as far as it goes. You’re just as you were then,” she went on. “Whereas—look at me. Withered.”

  “You have done well to survive a dozen years here, after all the traumas of your earlier life, and the inadequacy of medicine and health care in this new reality, despite all my own proselytizing—”

  “You mean, selling the data you stole from the memory of the Tatania. Lex never forgave you for that, you know.”

  “I know,” he said indifferently. “And now it’s too late to apologize.”

  “Good old Lex. At least he died well—eighty years old and throwing himself into the site of that tanker crash on the moon, on Luna. The Brikanti built a statue to him.”

  Earthshine laughed. “Good for General McGregor. He’d have loved that. And of the others?”

  “Jiang has stayed with me, at the Academy. Sadly he’s still not accepted more widely, in Brikanti society. You can’t overcome centuries of xenophobia with a cultured smile—not here, at least. Two of the surviving crew of the Tatania work with me there also. They married, in fact, Marie Golvin and Rajeev Kapur.”

  “I did hear. I sent a gift . . . And what of Beth, and her child?”

  “Mardina. Growing now, ten years old. Doing fine. Beth’s forty-eight now, and Mardina makes her feel her age, I think. They’re living independently, but I keep an eye on them. Beth’s estranged from Ari Guthfrithson—the father. Beth does make enemies and then clings to them, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do know.”

  Penny was puzzled by that response. “Why would she have a grudge against you?”

  “Because of something I told her. It was just as we fled the inner solar system in the Tatania—just as the light wavefront from the kernel detonations overtook us, in fact.”

  “I don’t understand. What did you tell her?”

  “My name. Or one of them.” He said no more, and looked at her steadily.

  “All right. Then is that why you a
sked me here? As a way to get through to Beth? Funnily enough, Ari asked me to do the same thing for him. What am I, a UN mediator?”

  “Partly that, yes, for Beth’s sake. And partly because I want you to understand what it is I am doing here, Penny. At least begin to see what it is I am exploring.”

  “Why me?”

  He laughed. “You are the only specialist in kernel physics in this universe.”

  “Ah. And you have a kernel test laboratory up on the higher ground to the north, don’t you?”

  “Also you are one of a handful of survivors who lived through the history change.” He grinned. “The ‘jonbar hinge.’” I enjoyed your little joke, in the name of your Academy. And of course you endured an earlier jonbar hinge in your own life.”

  She always had to remember, she told herself, that everything that Earthshine did was about advancing his own agenda, not hers; she was a tool here, a pawn. But he did know a hell of a lot about her. She said carefully, “What exactly do you want of me, Earthshine? The truth now.”

  “There may come a time when we will have to flee this place. As we fled Earth—our Earth.”

  She frowned. “Why? What would make that necessary?”

  “And if that comes,” he said patiently, “I want you to ensure that Beth is ready, with Mardina, that they come away with me.”

  “That’s what you’re proposing to purchase from me, in return for a few dribbles of information. A promise. Is that the deal?”

  He smiled. “If you want to put it like that. Of course your own life might be saved too. Call that a sweetener.”

  She sighed. “What are you up to, Earthshine, you old monster?”

  He grinned. “I’m trying to talk to the Martians. Come. I’ll show you.”

  • • •

  They stood together over the pond.

  “As I said, most of what you see here is a virtual representation. Not real. But this, I assure you, is real. Samples of life from the deep rocks of Mars, retrieved with great care, brought to this place in conditions of high pressure, heat, salinity, anoxia—lethal for you and me, balmy for these bugs, our cousins.”