Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘But I come back to timing again, Proctor. Why now? Why the urgency? What terrible threat looms that makes you fear losing your precious texts just now? And there’s also the issue of the timing for the nation. We’re exhausted. We’ve just come out of a war that’s dragged on years.’

  ‘But that’s what makes this moment so opportune,’ Proctor Chivian said. ‘The Founders’ books tell of Isobel and Ferdinand, monarchs of Spain. In the year 1492 they concluded a war against the Muslim kingdoms of Spain, a war that had lasted centuries, and suddenly they were free to fund an even more bold adventure – to send Columbus across the ocean -’

  ‘I’m not Ferdinand,’ Thom snapped. ‘This isn’t Earth.’ He waved an arm at the sea, where a few of the Scatter’s closer islands could be seen as smudges on the horizon. ‘This is our home, our world – our time. This is what we’re interested in – the sea, our ships, trade, the empire we might build across the Scatter. Ask any Zeelander his or her dream for his country and I’ll wager he won’t mention Columbus, or the Founders.’

  ‘You’re thinking of the Lady Xaia’s ambitions,’ the Proctor said carefully.

  ‘Indeed. Which may be another reason you’re encouraging me to start digging up the turf before she gets back and exercises a veto on the whole thing.’

  ‘Sir, I assure you -’

  ‘I need to understand what’s so urgent about this vault, the Library. Have your man Jan Stanndish brief me. I want the whole truth, Proctor, and I don’t want any arrogant scholarly nonsense. If I don’t see why you need the Library it won’t get built. Oh, and include my son in the sessions. He seems to be getting on well with Stanndish, and it would be good experience for the lad, against the day when he might become Speaker in turn.’

  The Proctor bowed. ‘I’ll arrange it as soon as I can.’

  ‘I’m sure you will.’

  They walked on, avoiding the clumps of Purple that grew by the cliff edge, relishing the comparative cool of the air despite the tension between them.

  III

  It was May by the time the Cora led Xaia’s fleet to the coast of the Belt.

  Soon the temperate, light-drenched months of the coolsummer would be on the world, and the humans, animals and vegetation imported from Earth would flourish. Like other children of privileged families, and in preparation for a life at sea, Xaia had grown up with a clear understanding of the seasonal cycle on Earth II, as it sailed around its star - which the Founders, for their own mysterious reasons, had called 82 Eridani - with its axis of rotation neatly tipped over. Now, more than midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice in June, the north pole was nodding as if respectfully towards the central star, and even now, from Xaia’s mid-latitude location, the sun descended beneath the horizon for only an hour or so each day. But though the day was lengthening the temperatures were, on average, dropping. The sun did not climb so high in the sky as in the torrid months of April and May – and, so the Four Universities’ best scholars had taught Xaia, it was the sun’s height that determined its ability to heat the world.

  Certainly Xaia, looking out from the deck of the Cora at the unprepossessing shoreline of the Belt, was glad of the coming cool. It was a coast of broad valleys incised into a rustred plain, where little grew but the ubiquitous, and entirely useless, native Purple. It looked like a hot, dusty, arid land to trek over, and the cooler the air the better.

  Alecksandria, the port that served Ararat further inland, was built on the delta of a broad river, sluggish and red with silt. There was quite a bustling harbour, with ships from communities along the Belt’s long coast, as well as craft from the island nations of the Scatter - including a small flotilla of ships from Brython, evidently refugees from the Zeeland conquest.

  On landing, Xaia immediately sought out the local Zeelander envoy, a small, fussy, middle-aged man called Alain Jeffares, working alone out of a tiny, cluttered office. He was flustered when such a noble figure as Xaia walked in. But then Zeeland had only a nominal presence anywhere along the Belt coast; there wasn’t much trade, and only a few passengers, scholars and pilgrims who came to see Ararat, the almost sacred site of the Founders’ Landfall.

  Still, she was faintly surprised that Jeffares had had no contact from the local government, not so much as a polite query about the fleet anchored offshore. Jeffares said the Belt was governed by a quilt of independent city-states. But the cities were scattered wide across a nearly empty continent. Alliances among them came and went, and trade continued fitfully; disputes occasionally flared over tariffs or protectionist policies, but he wasn’t aware there had ever been a major war here. There was nothing like the empire-building that had gone on in the Scatter, either by native city-states or by the island nations of the Scatter, some of whom had sent over tentative expeditions. You could knock over one city-state, but the rest of the Belt was barely affected by it. The government of Alecksandria, evidently seeking a quiet life, simply ignored Xaia’s presence, and her warriors, hoping she’d pass on quickly.

  ‘Nothing worth fighting over,’ Teif sneered. ‘Told you.’

  That was all going to change, Xaia assured Jeffares. She left behind a couple of officers to begin the process of sequestering the refugee Brythonic vessels. And she instructed the little envoy to assemble a caravan to take her and her companions inland to Ararat.

  They stayed one night in a grand inn on the outskirts of the port. Named the Founders’ Rest, it had wooden carvings of all fifteen of the legendary star travellers in a long panel over its frontage. In her honour, Xaia was lodged in the Thomas Windrup suite. She was quickly getting the impression of the importance of the Founder mythos to this place.

  She slept badly, nursing her healing arm.

  By morning Jeffares had assembled a caravan big enough to carry Xaia, Manda, Teif, and fifty tough warriors. While Xaia’s carriage was drawn by grand, high-stepping warhorses, each of them taller at the shoulder than a man, the rest were pulled by squat, solid-looking bullocks.

  The caravan left the port by a dusty road into the interior. For kilometres the city’s rats plagued the caravan, burly creatures the size of small dogs that nipped at the legs of the bullocks. Jeffares beat them off with the flat of a rusty sword. ‘A plague from Earth,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I believe they’ve been kept off most of the Scatter islands.’

  ‘Certainly from Zeeland,’ Teif said. ‘I’ve never seen such beasts.’

  ‘Something to do with the lower gravity here,’ Jeffares said. ‘Animals can grow taller for a given bone mass, but the air is thinner, so smaller animals can’t function so well. Earth rats grew bigger on Earth II. So the Founders said.’

  Even after one day on the Belt Xaia was growing tired of hearing about the Founders.

  The road to Ararat was well laid if rutted; evidently this was a trail frequently followed. But the Belt countryside was unprepossessing. The road cut across a plain of crimson dust littered with broken rock, with only worn hills to alleviate the monotony of the horizon. Xaia had no interest in geology, but she gathered an impression that this was an old country, at least compared to some of the Scatter islands, like Zeeland with its steep volcanic mountains.

  Between the sparse human communities little grew, a few scraps of green in grass banks and cactuses, although the Purple flourished everywhere, in banks and reefs. For sport, Manda had her driver run her carriage through the Purple banks, and laughed as the bullocks’ hooves smashed the heaped-up stuff down to its component spores.

  The journey was blessedly short. The Belt was a north-south neck of land only a few hundred kilometres wide; no west-to-east journey was long. And Ararat, as it loomed over the horizon, was astonishing.

  As large as any city on Zeeland, it was a town of stone as red as the plain on which it stood, though even from a distance Xaia could see a glimmer of green on rooftops and walls. It was watered by another wide, sluggish river, and drew power with huge, slowly turning wheels. What was extraordinary about the town w
as its plan. It was lenticular, narrow east to west and long north to south, and surrounded by stout walls in a teardrop shape.

  ‘It’s like a ship,’ Manda called from her own carriage. ‘A ship of stone, with its prow to the south and stern to the north …’

  ‘What is this, envoy?’ Xaia asked Jeffares. ‘Some kind of artistry to draw in the pilgrims?’

  ‘Hardly,’ the envoy said. ‘The wall is entirely functional.’ He glanced at the sky, the elevation of the sun. ‘You’ll probably see for yourself in a day or two.’

  ‘Then we’ll wait.’

  As they approached the city they passed through a hinterland of farms, where the remains of winter crops, cabbages and cauliflowers, stuck rotting out of the ploughed fields. There were no buildings here, just the fields. When Manda asked where the farmers were, and why a summer crop had not yet been sown, envoy Jeffares just shrugged. ‘Wait and see.’

  The envoy negotiated their entry through a broad metal gate set flush in the shaped wall. The gate guards, armed with comically inadequate-looking pikes, spoke a variant of the Anglish that was spoken across the Scatter, but laced with rich dialect words. Xaia was irritated to find they had to pay an entry fee.

  As the envoy argued, Xaia got out of her carriage and walked to the wall. Close up it was still more impressive, stretching three metres above Xaia’s head, and its smooth curve extended to right and left as far as she could see.

  Teif ran a finger along the lines between blocks at his chest height. ‘These blocks haven’t been shaped by human hands. Look at these scratches, the wear. The stone is worn smooth.’

  Looking more closely, they saw that the odd pattern of wear extended up for metres above their heads; above that height a rougher surface cast a speckle of shadows in the light of the sun. Manda murmured, ‘I wonder what storm did this shaping.’

  Teif said, ‘What storm stops above head height?’

  And as they spoke Xaia heard a rumble, like thunder, or the firing of distant guns. When she looked to the north she saw a faint band of cloud on the horizon, an orange-brown stripe. A dust storm, perhaps.

  Jeffares, his negotiations concluded, led the way through the gate. Once inside the walls Xaia found herself in a city of cramped, cobbled streets and mean-looking stone housing that was broken by broad stretches of open ground where crops grew, wheat and maize. The people here were crammed in; the rutted, muddy track along which the envoy led them was flanked by dirty children who came out to stare, and resentful-looking adults, and fat, wheezing pigs that rooted in the muck. Xaia wondered why the people lived squashed up in here – why not go colonise the farmland outside? This evidently wasn’t a continent plagued by war, and there seemed no reason to huddle within these walls.

  At the heart of the city a much more impressive building loomed out of the huddle of housing. Long in plan, decorated with crenellations and statues, it was almost like the Christian cathedral in Zeeland, but oddly shaped. This was, of course, the Shrine of the Shuttle. Taller buildings, some topped with green, gathered around this focus. The envoy said this was the centre of Ararat’s government; these towers housed ministries and agencies, and the clerks and cleaners and cooks who serviced them.

  Jeffares led them to the city’s best hotel, one of the stone spires, once again named for the Founders. As the envoy negotiated with more guards and handed over more Zeeland dollars, Xaia found herself growing impatient.

  Teif, always sensitive to her moods, touched her arm. ‘Are you all right, Lady?’

  ‘I feel locked in. Walls and riddles. Teif, why have I added months to my journey to come to this museum? What is there for me here?’

  He raised eyebrows like thickets. ‘Do you need me to say “I told you so”?’

  She pulled the envoy away from his negotiations. ‘Jeffares – oh, don’t quake so, man. Take me to the Shuttle. I’m far more interested in that than where Teif will be entertaining his whores tonight.’

  ‘Of course. This way. Please …’ But the envoy, even when flustered, was efficient; he hastily left one of Teif’s officers behind to finish the negotiations at the hotel, and sent another scurrying ahead to make sure the Shuttle keepers were ready to receive Zeeland royalty.

  The Shuttle’s Shrine was only a short walk from the hotel. Within, beneath an impressive vaulted roof, the interior was brightly lit by electric bulbs of pinkish glass, perhaps blown from the rusty sand outside. They were met by a curator – ‘Keeper Chan Hil at your service’ – a young, smooth-faced man who babbled about waiving the usual pilgrims’ tithes for the co-Speaker of far Zeeland. Flapping, intelligent-looking but evidently nervous, and dressed in a cloak embroidered with stars and planets, he nevertheless had the presence of mind to pocket the cash bribe Jeffares slipped him. ‘This way to the viewing gallery – the best site to see the historic relic …’

  Xaia had never had much interest in the endless memorialising of the Founders that monopolised so much of society’s energy in Zeeland and elsewhere. Nevertheless she found her heart pounding as she followed the curator up a flight of steps cut into the inner stone wall; here she was in the presence of history.

  At last they came to a gallery. Xaia noted that the wall before them was lined with collecting boxes. And from an elevation of perhaps twenty metres they looked down on the Shuttle. It was like a bird, Xaia thought immediately, a fat and ungainly bird, white above, black below, sitting on open orange ground, with a rutted scraping in the dirt stretching off behind it. There were words painted on its side, in a blocky, graceless script: UNITED STATES. Xaia had no idea what that meant.

  ‘Its windows are like eyes,’ Manda said, evidently uneasy. ‘I can’t look away.’

  ‘It’s an authentic Founder artefact,’ Teif murmured. ‘The first I ever saw save for the Speaker’s Fourteen Orbs. Made by human hands on Earth. That’s what’s giving me the shakes.’

  ‘You must imagine it,’ Chan Hil said, evidently launching into a standard speech. ‘On the day of Landfall, nearly four centuries ago, this Shrine wasn’t here, nor the city of Ararat. The Shuttle detached from the Ark and fell onto an empty land – empty save for the dust and the Purple. As it rolled to a halt its wheels scratched ruts in the virgin dirt – and that track, recreated from the Founders’ photographs, extends off beyond this chamber, and is set under glass in the rooms beyond where you can view it. It is said that Cora Robles, your own husband’s ancestor, Speaker, was the first to touch the ground of Earth II –’

  ‘By now she’s everybody’s ancestor,’ Xaia murmured. ‘Why the collection boxes?’

  Chan spread his hands apologetically. ‘It is not cheap to maintain this historic vehicle.’

  Manda asked, ‘I’ll swear that tail plane faces the wrong way … It’s preserved just as it landed, is it?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Chan said. ‘The Shuttle was ingeniously designed to be taken apart, to provide the Founders, the first colonists, with raw materials for their first shelters. This was the founding of Ararat, the first city on the planet, built from the material of the Shuttle itself. In later generations these components, scattered among a hundred homes, were painstakingly traced, gathered together and reassembled.’

  ‘And you got it all back, did you?’ Teif asked.

  ‘Almost all of it.’

  Xaia asked, ‘And you’re sure you recreated the ship exactly where it landed?’

  Chan’s mouth opened and closed. ‘Almost sure. Would you like to go aboard? You can see the Founders’ couches, and try the lavatory …’

  Manda shook her head. ‘Why, when they had all the world to choose from, would they come here? To the middle of this desiccated continent. It would have made much more sense to land on one of the Scatter’s bigger islands.’

  Chan Hil said brightly, ‘The Founders were scientists. They believed that the Belt offered the widest range of land habitats reachable without a sea crossing – the coasts, the riverine environments, the poles. They wanted to learn as much as they could abou
t their new world while their instruments and electronic archives lasted. It was to be a legacy for us, for future generations. And they achieved a great deal. They did explore the Scatter, and even visited the Frysby, all within the first couple of generations …’

  ‘But it’s all ossified now, hasn’t it?’ Teif snapped.

  Xaia frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When the Founders’ grandchildren turned away from studying a planet to building a world, when history began, the ancestors of these people in Ararat stayed put.’ He spat on the dusty floor of the balcony. ‘With all the initiative and wanderlust gone, here they still are where the Shuttle came down, milking pilgrims and scholars for a chance to see these cobbled-together remains.’

  ‘I’m not here for the Founders, or their works,’ Xaia muttered. She turned to Chan. ‘I’m looking for the City of the Living Dead.’

  Chan’s eyes widened. ‘Wow.’ It was a dialect word Xaia had never heard before. ‘The Founders searched for that. Or rather, for traces of the intelligent culture that evidently once inhabited this world, traces besides the ruins on Little Jamaica, and the Reef.’

  Xaia frowned. ‘The Reef? What’s that?’

  ‘More ruins, to the north of here, surveyed by the Founders … But just ruins. If you want to find where the Dead went, Lady, you will have to go far beyond that.’

  ‘Then that’s how it will be,’ Xaia said grimly. ‘But this Reef sounds the place to start.’

  Teif asked, ‘How far, exactly?’

  Chan said, ‘About a thousand kilometres.’