Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  Maryam sat back. ‘So this is what you’re planning? Some kind of trek to the Antistellar? Surely it’s impossible. The bitter cold of Darkside -’

  ‘There has been a significant volcanic eruption this Great Year, far to the south.’

  ‘We know. We heard it! Half the dust and ash on the planet seemed to wash out on top of Port Wilson.’

  ‘That will have helped heat the air, globally … It may be that because of the volcano’s gift of warmth an expedition soon would have the best chance of succeeding in many Great Years.’

  ‘And you want us to help? How? With funding, manpower, ships?’

  ‘All of those things. And you understand why we want to cut the Speakers out of this? If we do find something at the Antistellar -’

  ‘You would possess a sacred site - grounds to challenge their hegemony.’ She glanced around, uneasily remembering that they might be overheard.

  ‘There you have it. It’s only the bare bones of a scheme for now, but … You Wilsonians are adventurers.’

  ‘We’re often called worse than that.’

  ‘You often behave worse than that. If anybody can do this, you could – with us.’

  ‘Flattery won’t help.’

  ‘Then what will?’

  ‘Time.’ Maryam dropped her apple core on the table, and stood. ‘Time to think.’

  ‘Very well.’ Tripp stood, brushing down her cloak. ‘I’ll take my leave. I will see you at the Opening of the Eye at the end of the Colloquy. Perhaps we can talk further …’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  As her visitor left, Maryam turned away and looked out on the city. The light had closed in a little; the clouds were thickening, and there was a grey haze of volcanic dust in the air. Yet the Star hung as still as ever, directly over her head. Looking up at its mighty face, glimpsed through the clouds, she saw how it was pocked with spots like disease scars, and its flesh crawled with electrical storms, like lightning.

  Tripp’s ideas swirled in her head. The thought of crossing the Terminator and travelling all the way through the dark to the precise antipode of this place was an intriguing one – yet scary, for how would it be to have the whole thickness of the planet between her and this sole source of warmth and light?

  But from the city there rose up distant shouting, a pealing bell, and the crack of what sounded like a gunshot – fuelled, no doubt, by powder from the Pole. Her thoughts returned to the grubbier plane of politics, trade, power and influence. There was another watch of talks to get through before the Opening of the Eye, the ceremony that would end the formal part of this Tithe Colloquy.

  And Brod was still missing, she reminded herself, her son and the Sapphire girl. She hoped beyond hope that that was just a coincidence.

  She shook herself, turned, and went to wash and change, and ready herself for the final sessions.

  III

  The watch bells sounded. The Tithe Colloquy was over for another Great Year.

  Elios, Speaker of Speakers, led his attendants and the Colloquy’s senior delegates out of the Tenth Temple where they had been meeting and up wide ceremonial staircases, every step carved laboriously out of pink basalt, towards the roof of this building where, like most of the island’s grander structures, it abutted the great Substrate pillar that contained the Eye. The rest followed in silence, or speaking only quietly.

  Maryam, with growing unease, walked with the others - hoping that none of them had spotted, as she had, the bright red handkerchief dropped beside the stair, for it belonged to her son Brod, who had now been missing for more than a whole watch, as had the Speaker’s daughter Vala.

  They emerged onto the roof, and crossed a carved platform towards the central tower - a structure several times a person’s height, a human-built shell of basalt blocks that cradled the enigmatic Substrate tower known as the Eye. Smoke curled above it, evidently coming from several fires.

  At the tower, the dignitaries in their cloaks and robes and other finery had to line up to climb the ladders of rungs set into the wall. Few had any difficulty with the climb.

  ‘Good strong Polar steel,’ Tripp murmured to Maryam. ‘And good strong folk too. We’re a robust breed, you know, Maryam. Helen Gray says we all weigh more here than we would where she came from, and so over the generations we’ve all grown stocky as a result …’

  Maryam found this sort of talk irritating. ‘How can a person weigh more or less, in one place or another? I sometimes wonder if you really can discriminate children’s stories from any semblance of reality.’

  Tripp just laughed.

  When it was her turn Maryam climbed easily up the ladder, and followed dignitaries from halfway across the world along the walkway at the top of the wall. It turned out that the smoke came from fires burning in pots of oil, attended by black-robed acolytes, and it hung over the Eye like a cloud, shading it from the Star above.

  And the Eye itself was now revealed to her for the first time. Cleaned of greasy Slime, it gleamed, a curved bowl of a mirror, shining and perfect – and, if Tripp was right, perhaps of tremendous age.

  Elios, tall, his head clean-shaven, climbed a podium to a small stage set up at one point of the circular wall. His aides stood along the wall at intervals beside him, acolytes and lay servants of the Speakerhood. Among these stood the Sapphires, the dedicated virgins of the temple – beautiful, almost shining in their white robes, and each standing beside a cage filled with birds whose wings glistened as they stirred.

  ‘Mirror-birds,’ Tripp murmured to Maryam. ‘Another gift from the Pole …’

  But Maryam was busy counting the Sapphires. There were eleven of them – and there should have been twelve, and she saw an unattended bird cage, and uneasy-looking officials glancing nervously around. Well they might have been nervous, for the missing girl was Vala, and gone as long as her own son had been gone, and Maryam was starting to feel very worried indeed.

  Elios spoke now, his voice carrying across the Eye’s gleaming surface. ‘I, Elios son of Elios, Speaker of Speakers and forty-first occupant of the Left Hand Seat, welcome you all to this place. As you know we hold our Tithe Colloquy every Great Year, which is twenty-four of the years of Earth III as measured by the astronomers, and which matches the Duty Cycles of the Controllers who watch over the Simulation which envelops and sustains us all. And now, with another Great Year of Simulated life having been granted to us all, let us give thanks - and let the Controllers’ Eye open!’ He brought his hand down with a sharp chop.

  The acolytes doused their fires with buckets of water, and the smoke began to clear. The Sapphire girls, the eleven who were present, opened their cages, and mirror-birds rattled into the air, their wings gleaming; confused by the smoke they wheeled and darted, cawing softly.

  But there was a murmur, and a disturbance worked its way along the circular wall. ‘Out of my way – out of my way, you cretin!’

  ‘Khilli,’ murmured Tripp. ‘And he doesn’t look happy.’

  Maryam saw Elios’s son approach his father. Khilli turned, a broad, powerful man dressed entirely in black, with his massive fists bunched, his face clenched in a glare. ‘Gone! She’s gone! Vala – he took her away on that ship of his, the Wilsonian tub, back across the sea. He took her! Wilsonians! Maryam, mother of Brod! Where are you? You have some explaining to do.’

  Tripp tugged Maryam back into the crowd. ‘It may be better to be discreet for a while …’

  The smoke cleared, and the pale pink-white light of the Star fell on the Eye in beams, dead vertical and shining in the smoky air. Where they struck the mirror they were reflected to a perfect focus, high above their heads.

  ‘It must be parabolic to make a focus like that,’ Tripp murmured. ‘This is my fourth Colloquy, but the first time I’ve been invited up here … What a display.’ She leaned back and lifted her head, and gasped. ‘And – oh, look! Up in the sky!’

  Maryam, squinting up, saw a kind of shadow form against the broad face of the Star, something in
the sky, grey and translucent, and rippling with obviously artificial patterns, like waves.

  ‘More Substrate!’ said Tripp. ‘I told you Helen and the others saw orbital structures. Perhaps whatever is up there is somehow controlled by this “Eye”. But what can it have been for? …’

  The mirror-birds, fluttering and cawing, were drawn up along the reflected beams by their natural affinity for light. One by one, as they reached the focus, they flew into brilliance and were extinguished in a crisping of flame.

  IV

  Tripp the Polar found Brod outside Port Wilson, ploughing a hilltop. It was nearly half a Great Year after the debacle of the last Tithe Colloquy on the Navel – and nearly as long since the allies of the Speakers had laid siege to Port Wilson, in the war spat that had flared up after Brod’s abduction of Vala the Sapphire.

  ‘But it was no abduction,’ Brod said. He straightened up, sweating hard despite what felt like a cool watch to Tripp. He was one of dozens of men and women labouring with hand-held hoes and ploughs in this roughly marked out field. Coated with mud like the others, he’d been difficult to find. ‘She wanted it as much as me. More, maybe. No matter what the Speaker of Speakers says, or his tractor-spawned son Khilli. Sometimes I think …’

  ‘What?’ Tripp was closer in age to Brod’s mother than to Brod himself. It was wickedly funny to see this big strutting soldier boy put to work in a field, and so evidently confused. ‘Tell me, Brod. What do you think?’

  ‘Sometimes I think she was in control the whole time.’ His handsome face, streaked with dirt, twisted as he forced out the admission. ‘Sometimes I think she played me to get what she wanted.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘Not to be a Sapphire, of course. Not to be a living religious token totally dominated by her father and brother. You know, not only are they supposed to stay celibate, those girls aren’t even allowed to speak for whole Great Years at a time. Wouldn’t you want to get away?’

  ‘I suppose. So she got what she wanted?’

  ‘Yes. And I got this.’ He waved a hand at the field.

  They were standing on a hillside high over Port Wilson, and the view, south towards the sea and north inland, was rather magnificent, Tripp thought. This part of the coast was craggy and folded, a relic of ancient tectonic events; the hills crowded close, giving way to a sheer cliff face that fell away to the sea. Here the river Wilson forced its way to the sea, and the port had been established in its estuary, where a deep natural harbour had been enhanced by a long, enclosing sea wall. To east and west the land quickly rose up to become cliff faces, but even here people lived, in houses built on terraces. To the south lay the sea, with the Navel somewhere far over the horizon. The huge Star hung over this mid-latitude location, with the faintest tinge of pink in its light.

  And Tripp could see the ships of the holy armada gathered in a loose multiple arc around the harbour, effectively blockading the trade on which Port Wilson had made its fortune – and putting a stop to the raids and petty wars indulged in by headstrong young men like Brod. Meanwhile, to the north, Tripp could see the rising smoke of the fires of Khilli’s besieging army.

  It was remarkable that though this tremendous force on land and sea was entirely under the control of Elios and Khilli, the Speakers had not had to pay a fraction of a credit towards its assembly and provisioning. This was a war being fought by the allies of the Speakers on the promise of rewards from the Sim Controllers, the reduction of tithes, perhaps a little plunder, and in the longer term permanent commercial advantage.

  And in the middle of it all was Brod, the cause of all the trouble, leaning on a hoe.

  ‘The siege is evidently working, then,’ Tripp essayed.

  ‘Well, you can see that. We always imported most of our food. The Speakers cut that off. So here we are trying to grow potatoes on this cruddy hill. We haven’t even got enough tractors to do the work, and the army took all the horses -’

  ‘Which is why you’re breaking your back up here.’

  ‘I spend more time chasing off the rabbits than farming. Whichever Designer came up with those little bastards needs a good kicking.’ Miserably he wiped muddy sweat from his brow. ‘The top families have got to “show an example”, my mother says.’

  Tripp glanced around theatrically. ‘No sign of Vala, however.’

  Brod raised an eyebrow, and looked away.

  Tripp said, ‘Well, maybe enough blood has been spilled. And the disruption this fight is causing is harmful, even for neutrals. All over the continent people are going short. Most of our trade comes through Wilson, you know. There are other ports, other trade routes, but -’

  ‘Which is why my mother asked you to come to try and broker some kind of truce.’

  ‘And why I just spent a fortune bribing my way through Khilli’s cordon. Look, I’ll go down into town and see what your mother has to say.’ She gathered her cloak around her. ‘But, Brod – the deal might involve you giving up Vala. That’s what this is all about, after all.’

  ‘I won’t give her up,’ he said sternly. But his face softened. ‘And besides, she probably wouldn’t go.’ He turned back to his work.

  V

  ‘Oh, Tripp, of course she was in control all along.’

  Maryam had a fine apartment set on a ledge cut into the cliffside, connected by a scary-looking rock staircase to galleries and other apartments. Picture windows let in the light of the Star and overlooked the harbour, but the apartment was far enough out of town that even when the windows were thrown open any noise was only a remote murmur. Not that the harbour was bustling now, Tripp saw, as she gazed out. Ships were crowded within the sea wall, but many of them had evidently been stuck there for a long time; all were empty of crews and cargo, and some had been stripped for resources for the starving port, their sails for their cloth, their crude steam engines perhaps for some agricultural or military use, even their wooden decks and hulls for timber.

  Overlooking all this, Maryam patiently watered flowers in a window box, and spoke about Vala the Sapphire.

  ‘She was always in charge. I could tell from the moment I met her – which wasn’t until after, as you will recall, Brod had “abducted” her and we were already in this terrible mess, with Elios spitting fire and Khilli rampaging like a rogue bull. Brod was obviously besotted with her, and he still is – and I think she’s attracted to him, maybe even loves him.’ She smiled wistfully, and ran a hand over her short-cropped, grey-blond hair, and for a moment she looked like a mother, rather than an elder of a city under siege. ‘You’ve seen Brod. What’s not to love? But Vala has been playing him for half a Great Year already. Vala is scheming, manipulative, sharp as a nail, and she was obviously ready to grasp the first opportunity that came along to escape the doom of becoming a Sapphire.’

  ‘She is her father’s daughter,’ Tripp said. ‘At the Pole we say that Elios is the toughest occupant of the Left Hand Seat in living memory. It would be surprising if she didn’t share some of his qualities.’

  ‘So she escaped, into the protection of one of the strongest states on Seba – us. She probably foresaw her father’s rage, and her brother’s. But I don’t think she imagined she’d provoke a war, an invasion of Seba under the Shuttle Banner, a siege that’s already lasted half a Great Year nearly – and hundreds dead. All because of her. But it isn’t about her, of course.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Maryam set down her watering can. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, Tripp? Some tea?’ She clapped her hands. ‘And won’t you take your coat off?’

  ‘I already did,’ Tripp said, somewhat chagrined, as she sat a little awkwardly on an overstuffed sofa. ‘We Polars wear a lot of layers.’

  ‘Of course.’ A boy appeared, listened to Maryam’s request for tea, and scooted off. ‘It will just be nettle tea, I’m afraid; the rationing has put an end to so many of the finer things …’

  ‘We were speaking of the causes of the war.’

  Maryam sighed. ‘
So we were. Look - the Speakers have clearly used the “abduction” of Vala as a pretext for launching this assault, on land and sea. Quite disproportionate to any offence – and quite unnecessary, incidentally. A little diplomatic and theological pressure would have been quite enough to make most of our citizens hand the girl over.’ The boy returned with a jug of tea and two cups. He set his tray on a small occasional table and poured.

  ‘But of course the Speakers have other goals. They have always acted against any power they believed had even the slightest chance of becoming a threat to their hegemony. We Wilsonians have worked hard, the last few generations, and have got to the point where we control much of the trade along the south coast of Seba, and between Seba and the Navel. The Speakers benefit, but we skim off a fair share. So we’re a challenge to the Speakers, and they’ve probably been looking for some way to slap us down for a long time. And by long, I mean perhaps centuries – you don’t get to be a theocracy that’s already survived a thousand Great Years without thinking in the long term. But the way they’ve done it is ingenious.’

  ‘By forging an alliance of your enemies.’

  ‘Enemies – trading partners – it’s hard to tell the difference at times! We’re a vigorous young nation, Tripp, and we can play rough with our neighbours. It’s all in pursuit of trade, of course, but I suppose if you’ve been on the receiving end of one of our sieges or raids you’ll probably bear a grudge.

  ‘And into this seething arena of power politics and revenge walks my Brod! What an opportunity he, aided and abetted by the fair Vala, has offered those wizened old men around the Left Hand Seat. So you have a romantic war of rescue and revenge. But the irony is, it isn’t really Brod’s fault. As we’ve said, Vala was never a helpless abductee.’

  Tripp nodded, sipping her tea. ‘Which is why you sent for me.’

  ‘Yes – and thank you for coming all this way. I suspect we have a common interest. Obviously we want some kind of settlement of this conflict, without further cost in lives and trade. And you have your own trading targets to meet -’