Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  Also as part of their mit’a they were expected to contribute a proportion of their labor directly to the services of the state. This might mean creating or maintaining military equipment such as quilted armor, boots, blankets—never any weapons—or field rations of dried potatoes or maize, all to be stored in specialized warehouses called colcas, for the use of the army. It might mean laboring to support the big pukaras, fortresses of stone with spiral terraces winding around their inner cores of buildings: a design that reminded Mardina of huge snails squatting in the countryside. It might mean working on projects for the common good such as the regular forest clearance, or scraping clear the dust and algae that gathered with time on the habitat’s huge Inti windows, or maintaining the capac nans, the long, straight roads and rail tracks that threaded through the forest, and the chucllas, the waystations that studded their length.

  And the mit’a obligation might even mean serving in the military, although it was clear that the beefy, tough-looking, well-disciplined Romans weren’t trusted enough for that, not yet.

  All of this was organized on a global scale by a hierarchy of officials, beginning with the ayllu’s local leader, the curaca—an imposing, reasonable-looking man called Pascac, who was the leader of ten families, and reminded Mardina a little of Quintus Fabius—and up through the Deputy Prefect Ruminavi, the tocrico apu, who in turn reported to one of two apus, the prefects each of whom ran one of the two great “continents” of the habitat, west or east. And then the command chain reached up to the court of the Sapa Inca in the two hub Cuzcos, including the quipucamayocs like Inguill, and the colcacamayocs, keepers of records and stores respectively.

  The legionaries grumbled at the lack of freedom. And about the lack of money, the lack of shops and stores where you could buy things, from beer and wine to fine clothes and other luxuries, and not least, prostitutes. But then, this wasn’t an economy that ran on money. And there was some tension in the very beginning, when the local curaca decreed that the Romans could not use permanently any of the small wooden houses that made up the core of the small township inhabited by the people of the ayllu, but must construct their own. But legionaries always grumbled, whatever you tried to get them to do.

  And Quintus Fabius once more proved he was a more than competent leader. In fact he seemed to relish the challenge of the situation.

  On the very first night in the antisuyu, Quintus had the legionaries construct the rudiments of a marching camp, with a rectangular perimeter wall of dirt and timber with rounded corners, and ditches for drainage and latrines, and the start, at least, of permanent structures inside: a training ground, a principia for the centurion, barracks blocks and storehouses. It was a lot smaller than would have been built by a full legion on the march, of course. There were fewer than fifty men here, a little more than half a full century in the Roman system. Nevertheless, Mardina thought, as a demonstration of Roman competence and adaptability, it clearly impressed the locals. And right from the beginning of their time here the exercise reassured the legionaries that—whatever else might become of them, whatever this strange place was, and Mardina suspected some of them were pretty puzzled about that—they were still Romans, still legionaries, and all they had learned over years of training and experience still counted for something.

  And Quintus was very careful that the legionaries preserve and respect a huaca, a local shrine—little more than a heap of stones—that happened to fall within the domain they were given to set up their camp.

  • • •

  Soon they had their fields laid out and plowed. It was hard work. The lack of draft animals, and a paucity of machines away from the richest ayllus, meant there was a reliance on human muscle. But for all they grumbled, Romans were used to hard work.

  There seemed to be no seasons here, as far as Mardina could tell from interrogating baffled locals, though she supposed a cycle of shorter and longer days, a “winter” created by selectively closing some of the light pools, could have easily been designed in. But then, much of the Incas’ original empire on Terra had been tropical, where seasonal differences were small. This did mean that growing cycles, and the labor of farming, continued around the year; you didn’t have to wait for spring.

  Yet life wasn’t all work. They might have to pay the mit’a, but the legionaries soon learned they didn’t have to go hungry. If you fancied a supplement to your vegetable-based diet, you could always go hunting in the rain forest, where there seemed to be no restrictions on what you took as long as you were reasonably frugal about it. There were big rodents, which the ColU called guinea pigs, that provided some satisfying meat, even if they were an easy kill. Smaller versions ran around some of the villages.

  The lack of alcohol was one enduring problem. It seemed to Mardina that the local people didn’t drink, in favor of taking drugs and potions of various kinds. Chicha, the local maize beer, was officially used only in religious ceremonies. After a time Quintus turned a blind eye to the illicit brewing of beer.

  As for the drugs, the most common was coca, the production of which was part of the mit’a obligation. But you could grow it anywhere—it grew wild in the forest—and everybody seemed to chew it, from quite young children up to toothless grandmothers. Some of the legionaries tried it, taking it in bundles of pressed leaves with lime, and a few took to it; they said it made them feel stronger, sharper, more alert, and even immune to pain. Medicus Michael officially disapproved, saying that the coca was making your brain lie to you about the state of your body.

  With time, the villagers started to invite the Romans to join in feasts to celebrate their various baffling divinities. The adults passed around the coca, smoked or drank various other exotic substances, played their noisy pan pipes, and danced what Mardina, who did not partake, was assured were expressions of expanded inner sensation, but looked like a drunken shambles to her. The children would hang lanterns in the trees, and everybody would sing through the night, and other communities would join in until it seemed as if the whole habitat was echoing to the sound of human voices.

  The local people would always look strange to a Roman or Brikanti eye, Mardina supposed. The men wore brilliantly colored blanket-like tunics, and the women skirts and striped shawls and much treasured silver medallions. But they grew tall and healthy. Sickness was rare here. The medicus opined that most diseases had been deliberately excluded when the habitat was built, and it was kept that way by quarantine procedures of the kind the legionaries had had to submit to on arrival. And, if you ignored the forest-bird feathers that habitually adorned the black hair of the men, and the peculiar black felt hats with wide brims that the women sported, the people could be very attractive, with almost a Roman look to their strong features.

  On the other hand, Mardina supposed, to these legionaries exiled by a jonbar hinge from their wives and families and all they knew, almost any woman would be attractive.

  One by one, the legionaries began to form relationships with the women of the village. The Sapa Inca’s own clan was polygamous—although it was said that the true heirs to the empire were always born of the closest family of all, of the Inca marrying a favored sister—but the villagers, at least here in the wilds of the antisuyu, were ferociously monogamous. Quintus said only that he was pleased how few of these new loves, relatively speaking, were already married, and how few passion-fueled disputes he was having to resolve.

  But he did have to mediate conversations with the legionaries and the local leaders about birth control. Contraceptives were free at the tambos, and so were abortions, though Mardina got the sense that the operations could be risky; such was the state of medicine here. Your choice about having children was up to you, but the population size was carefully monitored by the imperial authorities, and if the average birth rate of an ayllu went above two children per couple without the appropriate licenses, there would be, it seemed, penalties to pay.

  Even though many of the y
ounger local men watched Mardina, or spoke to her, or tried to bring her into the narcotics-fueled dances, she kept to herself. Some attention she got wasn’t so welcome, such as from the tocrico apu Ruminavi. She soon learned from local gossip that he was a married man with kids as old as she was, but he didn’t seem able to keep his eyes off her, and Clodia, when she visited.

  For now she kept everybody at bay.

  “I’m just not ready for it,” she confided once to Clodia, daughter of Titus Valerius, as they patiently weeded their way through a field of maize. Clodia was still just fifteen, but she and Mardina were closest in age in the Roman party, and the only two young women.

  Clodia was more wide-eyed about the local boys. “What about that Quizo?”

  “The one who always wears the hummingbird feathers?”

  “That’s the one. I’d be ready for him any day of the week . . .”

  Mardina playfully ruffled her hair. “Sure you would, and in a few years you’ll eat him alive. But for now—it’s different for you, Clodia. At least you’ve still got your father here.”

  “Ha! The big boss of me. Well, you can keep him . . .”

  Mardina said patiently, “It’s just that we’ve all been through so much. We passed through the jonbar hinge. We lost everything we knew. And even before that, I knew that my own mother was from another world again, from before another jonbar hinge, and how strange is that? Now, here we are in this strange place where nobody speaks Brikanti or Latin, and nobody’s heard of Jesu or Julius Caesar . . .”

  “Well, I like it here,” Clodia said defiantly. “I always liked living in camp when we were at Romulus, and I wanted to train as a legionary. Now there’s nobody to tell me I can’t.”

  Mardina grinned. “Well, good for you. For me, it’s just that I need to find myself here first, that’s all. Before getting lost in Quizo.”

  “Very wise,” Clodia said gravely. “You take your time. But can we talk a bit more about his eyes first?”

  • • •

  Quintus didn’t hesitate to remind the Romans all of their true purpose here: to survive, to remember their comrades still aboard the Malleus Jesu, and to amass stores to enable them to escape someday, if they chose—or maybe to knock the Sapa Inca off his throne someday, so the men dreamed over their beer.

  And, though they had had to give up any weapons at the entry hub, Quintus began quietly to have the men make their own: spears of fire-hardened wood, clubs. He negotiated with local artisans, metalworkers, for spear points. Soon there was quiet talk of getting hold of bladed weapons, swords and knives. All this was paid for in kind, usually with a squad of legionaries carrying out some brute-force task—and all beneath the notice, hopefully, of the tax assessors.

  But for all the long-term scheming of Quintus Fabius and his senior men, for all the mutterings of the ColU about Earthshine and Hatches and jonbar hinges, the longer Mardina stayed here, and the more she got used to the rhythms of Inca life, the more settled she felt. The more secure. Maybe the sheer fact of getting back a routine, some basic order in her life—after that chaotic period after leaving Terra—was good for her. But the longer she stayed, the more embedded she felt in this strange but stable society.

  All the Roman party saw the benefit of the Inca system about fifty days after their arrival in the antisuyu. There was a crisis; one of the big Inti windows was scarred by a meteorite strike, and had to be covered over with a tremendous steel lid while repairs were effected. That meant that a kind of night fell over a swath of countryside in the region of the habitat opposite the damaged window. Crops failed, and rain forest trees quickly started to die back. The state system, however, swung into action, and some of the legionaries, recruited for the effort, described what they saw. From all around the local area, the tambos were opened, and mit’a workers, supervised by the military, rushed to bring relief to the stricken province.

  This was where the system of constantly storing excess produce paid off: this was the point of all the organization, Mardina started to see. In a way it was a distillation of the Roman system in her own history, the bargain an empire made with the nations and populations it subdued: submit to me, and I will keep you safe. Under the Incas’ almost obsessively tight control, you might have little freedom of movement, freedom of choice. But you never went hungry, thirsty, you never went cold, there was medical care when you needed it. And when disaster struck at one part of the imperial body, the rest rushed to help it recover.

  But she also glimpsed what happened when things went wrong. In this empire of occupation and exploitation, the most common “crime” was an attempt to evade the mit’a tax obligations. It was a chill moment when the tax assessors came, and worked through their records, manipulating their quipus with one hand. Some, it was said, could work the stringed gadgets with their toes. They saw all and recorded all. And the perpetrators of crime, after arbitrary hearings before the tocrico apu, could be taken away from the ayllu for punishment, out of sight.

  Observing all this, in the camp Quintus Fabius enacted his own regime of discipline and punishment, intending not to let a single one of his legionaries fall foul of the Inca authorities.

  Worse yet, however, for many families was the forcible recruitment of the young. There was a kind of ongoing recruitment drive for off-habitat workers, who would man the asteroid mines or crew kernel-powered freighters. But there was a demand for recruits for service at the Cuzcos, or at another of the great imperial establishments—and the servants chosen were always the prettiest children, those with the sweetest nature. This service was compulsory, not volunteered like other professions.

  This was an empire in which everything, including you, was owned by the Sapa Inca. In fundamental ways it was far less free than even the Roman Empire had been, back on Terra.

  Even so, Mardina could see how the great machinery of state worked to sustain its citizens. She wouldn’t hesitate to grab back her own freedom if she ever got the chance. But no doubt there had been worse empires in human history—worse times and places to be alive, even if you weren’t the Sapa Inca himself.

  And then there was the sheer wonder of living here, in this tremendous building in space.

  There was weather. There could be days more brilliant than any summer’s day she had known in Brikanti—hotter than Rome, said Quintus Fabius, even before it was a hole in the ground. Or there could be rain, even storms. The tocrico apu claimed that these were all under the control of vast engines commanded by the Sapa Inca’s advisers, but the locals, salvaging their ruined crops after one sudden hailstorm, were skeptical about that.

  On warm, clear nights, Mardina liked to sleep outside, if she could, sometimes with Clodia at her side, safe within the walls of a community that was slowly taking on the look of an Inca village embedded in a Roman marching camp. And they would look up at the “sky.” Of course, there were no stars to be seen here. There were very few aircraft, even. The only craft operating above the ground were the government-controlled “Condors” that passed along the axis region of the habitat, in the vacuum.

  But the tremendous metal shell above was an inverted world, hanging above them, crowded with endlessly fascinating detail—even if the seeing through this lowland air was poor compared to how it had been on the high puna. The Inti windows glowed like pale linear moons, and Mardina could make out the blackness of forest, the pale silver of rivers and lakes. All this was cut through by the sharp lines of rail tracks and roads, connecting communities that glowed almost starlike against the background.

  And sometimes, she and Clodia thought, they could make out shapes framed by those tangled lines. They were like figures traced out of the dense antisuyu forest up there by some tremendous scalpel. There was a bird, there was a spider, there a crouching human. Maybe it was just Mardina’s eyes seeking patterns where none existed, the way the ancients had always seen animals and gods among the meaningless scatter of
the stars of the night sky. Or maybe it was deliberate, a touch of uncharacteristic artistry in the huge functional architecture of this artificial world.

  And if that was true, maybe there were similar etchings on her side of the world, great portraits hundreds of miles in extent, yet meticulously planned. Maybe from the point of view of some witness sleeping in the open on the other side of the world, lying there pinned by the spin of the cylinder, she was a speck lost in the eye of a spider, or the claw of a bird. Somehow it was a comforting thought to be so enclosed by humanity. Sometimes Mardina wondered if she would eventually forget the wildness of the outside, of the stars.

  But there was wildness enough inside the habitat, in the dense green of the rain forest jungle that circled the ayllu village. The deep hacha hacha, where the antis lived.

  45

  Mardina and Clodia had their first encounter with the antis on the day the strange mit’a tax assessment party came to call.

  Unusually this was led by Ruminavi, tocrico apu, the Deputy Prefect himself. He arrived with the various inspectors and assessors with their quipus, and the tax collectors with their hand-drawn carts for the produce and samples they would take away—and a larger than usual contingent of soldiers in their woollen tunics and plumed helmets of steel-reinforced cane, and their armor of quilted cotton over steel plate, all decorated with scraps of gold and silver. Their only weapons were blades, whips, slings; just as in the space-going ships of the lost Roman Empire, projectile weapons and explosives were excluded from the interior of the habitat.

  Mardina and Clodia, coming in from the field, recognized none of these men. Almost all the Inca soldiers, the awka kamayuq, were part-timers raised from the provinces, from ayllus like Mardina’s own community, with only a very small core standing army of specialists. But it was the practice to deploy soldiers from one province in operations in others, not their own homeland.