Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  “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.

  This small hub of industry and provision was set in the astounding panorama of Yupanquisuyu.

  As the Romans bickered around the shops, Mardina once more walked alone, away from the station. Though by now it was evidently full night in the habitat, it was not entirely dark; the residual glow seeping from the light pools was clear and white, but so faint that colors were washed out. It was like the moonlight of Terra, Mardina thought, and no doubt that was by deliberate design. She could make out the sleeping landscape all around her, the terraces and fields. A little way ahead, though, the country began to break up into hills and valleys that were lakes of shadows. They would be descending soon, then, to lower country, and thicker air.

  And to the left and right, the uplift of the landscape was easily visible, even in the night. The ColU had told her that a round world with the curvature of this cylinder would have a horizon only a mile away, compared to three miles on Terra. So, well within a mile, she could see the land tipping up, the trees and houses visibly tilted toward her. And the rise went on and on—there was no horizon, only the mist of distance—until the land became a tremendous slope, bearing rivers and lakes at impossible angles. Soon the detail was lost in darkness, and in the thickness of the faintly misty air. But then, as she raised her eyes further, she saw the roof of the world, an inverted landscape glowing with pinpricks of light. It looked like the dark side of a world as seen from space, with threads of roads and the spark of towns clearly visible beyond its own layer of air and clouds. At this altitude the air was so clear it was as if she were looking through a vacuum.

  The apu joined her. He was chewing some kind of processed green leaf; he offered her some, but, moving subtly away from him, she declined. He said, “Quite a sight if you’re not used to it. And even if you are, it astounds you sometimes.”

  “It doesn’t look like the other side of a cylinder. It’s like another world suspended over this one.”

  The ColU murmured in her ear, “That’s natural. The human eye was evolved for spying threats and opportunities in the horizontal plain, and so vertical perceptions are distorted—”

  “Hush,” she murmured.

  Ruminavi looked at her quizzically.

  She said, “I can see we’ll be coming down from the puna soon.”

  “Yes. Which is why they put this chuclla here. The last stop before the descent. A place to acclimatize to the thinner air, if you’re coming the other way.”

  “And the land below . . .”

  “It’s a kind of coastal strip. The rivers pour down off the puna and spread out, and you have sprawling valleys, immense deltas. Very fertile country, nothing but farmers and fishers. They grow peppers, maize. Should take us half the time we traveled already to cross.”

  “Five more hours? And then what? You said a coastal strip. The coast of what?”

  “Why, of the ocean. Goes all the way around the waist of the world.” He pointed to the sky, in the direction they’d been traveling, the direction he and his soldiers called east. “You can see it at night sometimes. Spectacular by day, of course. We’ll be crossing by the time the sun comes up.”

  “Crossing it?”

  “It’s spanned by bridges, for the railway, other traffic. We’ll go rattling across it without even slowing down.”

  “How long to cross the ocean?”

  “Oh, it’ll be getting dark again by the time we reach the eastern shore.”

  The times, the distances, were crushing her imagination. Fifteen, twenty hours more, and she would still be traveling within the belly of the artifact. “And beyond the ocean?”

  “Ah, then we come to the antisuyu. The eastern country, all of this side of the ocean being the western, the cuntisuyu. And if you went on all the way to the eastern hub, it would be another fifteen hours.”

  “But we won’t be going that far.”

  “Oh, no. Only five, six hours to home. My home and yours.”

  “Which is? What’s it like?”

  “Jungle. Hacha hacha. You’ll see.” He grinned, his teeth white in the pale light. He held out his leaves again. “You sure you won’t have some of this coca? Makes life a lot easier to bear . . .”

  She shook her head, and once more backed away from him. He followed, ineffectual, evidently drawn to her but, thankfully, lacking the courage or guile to do anything about it.

  43

  On Per Ardua, that first “night” after Beth and Earthshine came through the Hatch, it rained for twelve hours solid.

  The sound of the rain on the tough fabric of her shelter was almost reassuring, for Beth. Almost like a memory of her own childhood, when, as her family had tracked the migration of the builders and their mobile lake her mother had called the jilla, they had stayed in structures that were seldom much more permanent than this.

  But no matter how familiar this environment felt to her, Beth was painfully aware that she was alone here, save for an artificial being that seemed to be becoming increasingly remote—even if he was, in some sense, her grandfather. “And that’s even before he drives off over the horizon,” she mutter
ed.

  “I’m sorry?” Earthshine sat on an inflated mattress beside her, with a convincing-looking representation of a silver survival blanket over his shoulders.

  Over a small fire—the first she’d built here since she’d left for Mercury, all those years ago—she was making soup, of stock she’d brought with her in her pack, and local potatoes briskly peeled and diced and added for bulk. Plus, she had boiled a pot of Roman tea. She had flashlights and a storm lantern, but in the unending daylight of Per Ardua, enough light leaked through the half-open door flap of the tent for her to see to work.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just rambling. I keep thinking I haven’t slept yet, not since the Hatch.”

  “But it’s only been a few hours,” Earthshine said gently. “We’ve seen a lot, learned a lot. It just seems longer.”

  “Maybe. Only half a day, but you’re already planning to light out of here, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged, and sipped a virtual bowl of tea. “I see no reason to hang around here any longer than it takes the support unit to make itself ready to travel.”

  “Where?”

  “The only logical destination on a planet like this.”

  “The antistellar?”

  “Of course.”

  “Which means a trek across the dark side,” she said.

  “You are free to come with me,” he said evenly. “There is no rush; we can make preparations. You could even ride on the support unit if you wish. We could rig up some kind of seat.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Alternatively, you are free to stay here, or go where you wish. I will donate some components from the support unit, if you choose that course. A kit: basic environment sensors, food analyzers, a medical package to supplement the first aid available from your suit.” He passed his fingers through the fabric of her sleeve, wincing as he did so. “Remember, I won’t need it.”

  “I lived off the land here once, with my family, and I can do it again.” She did a double take. “Our family.”

  He didn’t respond to that.

  “Why are you going to the antistellar?”

  “In search of answers.”

  “Answers to what? What’s wrong with being right here?”

  He clenched a fist. “This is all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I smashed Mars to make them listen to me—to us, to humanity.”

  “You mean the deep bugs in the rocks.”

  “The Dreamers, yes. As I call them. Our puppet masters, or so I’m coming to believe. They have been disturbing our worlds, trashing our histories, wrecking our painstakingly assembled civilizations with impunity. Well, no more! I made them listen. I made them respond.”

  “Their answer was the Hatch on Mars.”

  “Yes. A Hatch which brought us here. But this isn’t good enough. Not a good enough answer.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “This is Proxima! Oh, I can’t deny it, Beth—it must be, a Proxima somehow old and withered, but . . . Proxima, the nearest star. But I wanted to be taken to Ultima, the furthest star of all our legends—or the equivalent for the Dreamers. The place where the answers are—the place where I’ll learn at last why it is they do what they do. And,” he said darkly, “maybe I will stop them. Maybe I can still be Heimdall to their subterranean Loki . . . Yes, I forced an answer out of them. A response, at least. But it’s not enough. So I will put them to the question again.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. When I get to the antistellar I’ll figure it out.”

  She thought that over. “Somehow I feel you’re wrong. I don’t know how or why . . . They brought you here. Maybe the answer you seek is right here, and you just aren’t seeing it.”

  “That’s possible. But even if so, it can’t do any harm to go search some more, can it?”

  “A lot of people thought you should be stopped from pursuing your ambitions. That was always true, all the way back to your early days on Earth, wasn’t it? Even before you became—”

  “What I am now? When I was merely Robert Braemann, bona fide human being, and busy breaking the law to save the world? Or at least that’s the ‘I,’ of the nine of me, who interests you. And then I became Earthshine, a Core AI, one of three rogue minds, once again breaking humanity’s laws to save it. And again, they never forgave us. Now here I am alone, trying to save—”

  “The world? Which world?”

  “All the worlds, maybe. I don’t know.” He was silent a while; the rain continued to hiss on broad Arduan leaves. “Do you think you will come with me? I ask for purely practical reasons. The timescale, the preparations—”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she said curtly. “We only just got here . . . I like it here, even if it isn’t what I quite remember. I like the day side anyhow. I don’t know if I want to go into endless night, so cold I’ll need to wear a spacesuit.”

  “But,” he said gently, “you also aren’t sure if you want to be alone.”

  “Do you want me to come? After all, it was you who brought me through the Hatch with you.”

  “I didn’t force you.”

  “Do you really think of us as family, Earthshine? I know my father’s father is only one of you, one of the nine minds . . . Do you think of him as your son?”

  “Of course I do. I always did the best I could for him—myself and his mother.”

  “Which included shoving him into a cryo freezer for a century, and ultimately killing him?”

  He sighed. “We were working at the margins of the law. We were trying to save him. We thought that perhaps in a century he at least would be able to live his life out of our shadow. We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.”

  “Did you love him? Do you love us now?”

  He smiled. “A part of me does. That’s the best answer I can give you. I’m sorry. Humans aren’t meant to be like this, you see. Like me. Identity, consciousness, isn’t meant to be something you can pour from one container to another, and meld with others as if mixing a cocktail. So you’ll find my reactions are always going to be—off. But at least I’m here, with you, today. Which is all, in the end, you can ask of anyone.”

  She smiled back. “That’s true. I feel an atavistic urge to hug you, Granddad.”

  “I urge you not to try. I think the rain is stopping. I will go check on the progress of my support unit.”

  “And I,” she said, stretching and yawning, “think I’ll take a nap. Don’t wake me when you come in.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  • • •

  In the warm, moist air of the Arduan substellar, she slept as well as she had for years. And for an unknown time too, under the unmoving face of Proxima. Whatever the unanswered questions, whatever the reservations she might have, she was home; she could feel it. Alone or not.

  Even if she missed her daughter, Mardina, with a savage ache, as if a steel cable were attached to her belly, dragging her back to Mars.

  When she glanced out of the shelter, she saw Earthshine standing over his support unit as it slowly reassembled itself for the journey.

  44

  The Romans were brought to a wide, flat clearing cut into the rain forest.

  Here they were to farm, they were told.

  They would grow maize, corn, wheat, rice, coca, and the ubiquitous potato, which the Incas called papas. There were no animals to raise, no sheep, goats, cattle—no llamas—though, they were told, some animals ran wild in the hacha hacha, the jungle. But they were expected to raise some more exotic and unfamiliar crops, gaudy flowers, strange fungi and lichen, that the ColU speculated were the source of mind-altering potions—psychoactive drugs, he told Mardina, evidently a feature of Inca culture in any timeline.


  So the work began.

  • • •

  The land had to be kept open by regular burnings at the perimeter of the clearing. And the labor of keeping the land drained would always be considerable. It was poor, the soil thin, but not so bad that it was unworkable. The Romans fertilized their patch, mostly with ash from the burned rain forest perimeter, or the dung and bones of the animals that ran wild in the rain forest, notably rodents that could be the size of sheep. The work was hard but bearable.

  There were people here already, of course.

  They had joined an ayllu, a kind of clan, a loosely bound group of families, some of whom had some kind of relationship with each other, some of whom didn’t. The people were friendly enough, however, Mardina found. It seemed to be the Inca way to move people around their box of an empire, from place to place, from near to far—sometimes across the toroid of an ocean from one “continent” to the other, from the puna and river deltas of the west, the cuntisuyu, to the rain forest–choked eastern half of the habitat, the antisuyu. All this was no doubt intended to ensure continued control, of the kind that quipucamayoc Inguill had talked about on the Romans’ first arrival here. If you didn’t stay long in a place, you couldn’t set down roots, couldn’t establish loyalties—your only long-term relationship was with the Sapa Inca, the Only Emperor, and his officials, not with the strangers around you.

  But a consequence of the system was that people were used to strangers moving in—strangers they called mitmaqcuna, colonists. So while everybody had their property, and a plot of land to work, and, more important, they all had some kind of status in their society, they weren’t so territorial that they excluded the Romans and their companions.

  The Romans, however, did not own this land; that was made clear from the start—and nor did anybody of the ayllu, and none of them ever would. The Sapa Inca owned everything. The people were not slaves—as was proven by the fact that there were actual slaves, called yanakuna, to be seen throughout this place. The Romans were to be mitimacs, which meant something like “taxpayers.” They were entitled to keep the produce they raised, save for a proportion that they had to hand over to be stored in the big tambos, the state-owned storehouses that studded the countryside. This was part of the mit’a, the tax obligations of every citizen.