Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Or from the passage of the Xaians,’ PiRo said.

  ‘Perhaps. But then humans share sleep cycles that seem to have no relation to the natural periods of any of the settled worlds, though they do roughly correlate to a Day. No Xaian army could have imposed that.

  ‘And then there are our languages,’ SheLu went on patiently. ‘We all seem to speak a version of what we of Urthen call Anglish. Languages of separated groups always diverge; we have observed this on our own world. But if our tongues did derive from some common root brought on the Ark, then the most frequently used terms would be those that endured with the least changes, and so would remain common across the worlds. Words like “we”, “my”, “our”.’ She glanced at the cage. ‘“Tree.” “Bird.” “Speaker”, even, for positions of authority.’

  LuSi saw how the translators looked surprised at the obvious comprehensibility of these words.

  ‘And language, you see,’ SheLu said now, ‘is much harder to eradicate than mere physical trappings. Just as a faith, like the Creed of the Sim, is harder to demolish than a mere temple of stone – or even a Substrate monument. It is possible, I believe, to trace the first spread of mankind across the stars through family trees of languages and their relations to each other. We can even see traces in these family trees of the passage of the Xaians, and their brief empire. My analysis suggests, by the way, that Airtree was one of the earliest worlds settled.’

  The Speaker nodded. ‘I think I understand your logic. Though I had always thought that our pretension to be an old world was mere snobbery … We have some scholars, you know, who speculate that “Airtree”, the name for our world, is some derivation of “urth” and “three”. Both among your primal words, I imagine.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘And “Urthen”,’ JaEm said, suddenly intrigued.

  The Speaker said, ‘Perhaps the name for mankind’s first world is buried in such names. “Urth?” But some worlds’ names are probably more recent invention.’

  SheLu said, ‘Like “Windru”, named for a ruling dynasty of that world, yes.’

  ‘What about your “Urthen”, though? Urth … ten? That seems tenuous.’

  JaEm said, ‘You know, a starship engineer might suggest the real root is “Urth n”. The “n” stands for an unknown number. Perhaps by then the settlers had lost count.’

  ‘Or perhaps the name is some kind of black joke. And perhaps we should think of the primal world you seek as Urth I.’ The Speaker pulled her lip. ‘This is all fascinating. Suggestive rather than conclusive, however.’

  ‘Of course,’ conceded SheLu.

  ‘But it is by following such leads that you hope to identify mankind’s primal world? If it exists,’ she added, with a nod to PiRo.

  ‘That is my strategy. Given the fragments of legend we have, I anticipate we will find an oceanic world. The flooded planet from which mankind had to flee …’

  Elos studied papers on her desk. ‘One would think such a world would be at the centre of the Bubble. The root from which we spread, in three dimensions. Instead you are seeking to go to the edge of human space – beyond Windru, in fact, the Xaians’ world, the most densely populated world at one extreme of our domain of colonisation.’

  ‘That is plausible,’ SheLu said, ‘given a model of the first flight that is consistent with the surviving legends. That is, a single flight across the stars, scattering colonies as it went. Subsequent secondary colonisation waves have set out from those first settlements. In that case the origin would indeed lie at one extreme of the Bubble, just as the root of a tree,’ she said, glancing at the cage, ‘lies at one extreme of its structure.’

  ‘And what you want of me is an Instrument of Authority.’

  ‘I believe that is the appropriate form, yes. The worlds I visit, especially Windru, must open up their archives and other treasures, on your authority. Also we may require material support of various kinds.’

  The Speaker smiled. ‘I am no Xaian emperor to impose my rule on other worlds.’

  ‘Nevertheless your authority as Speaker of Speakers will carry a great deal of weight on any world where the Creed is cherished.’

  ‘True enough.’ She turned now to PiRo. ‘And you, Jennin PiRo. I understand you are not an adherent of our Creed.’

  ‘Regretfully, no.’

  ‘Be not regretful. The Sim Designers made you as you are, scepticism and all, and cherish you even so.’

  PiRo flared, ‘But that’s exactly the kind of circular argument which -’

  LuSi touched his arm. ‘Not now, Jennin,’ she murmured.

  The Speaker of Speakers said, ‘My advisors have had constructive discussions with you, Jennin PiRo. You are a sceptic, as you have admitted, yet you accompany Zaen SheLu on a quest that seeks to establish the truth about mankind – a quest guided by our Creed. Why have you devoted your own life, and your son’s, to a mission you reject?’

  PiRo glanced at SheLu. ‘Well, it was rather forcibly suggested by my own university that I should come along. This hundred-year jaunt is high profile and very expensive. But I was glad to come. Speaker, I do not accept your Creed. But as I told your advisers, I accept that as a human institution it has some beneficial value. It has inculcated a belief that the universe is rational, and that questions we ask of it will yield meaningful answers. Of course, if it were an artefact, that would be so. As such your Creed lies at the philosophical root of all modern science.

  ‘Yet there is potential for harm, if the Creed ultimately stifles our inquisitiveness. After all, any question – even about my own personality! – can be answered by appealing to the whim of the Designers. “They made it that way because they made it that way.”

  ‘Now, I believe that the Zaen will fail in her quest to find a single origin of mankind. The multi-origin hypothesis of the beginnings of mankind is philosophically simpler – and, if I may say so, more satisfying. But whatever the outcome of her quest, the result will be significant for ages to come, either way. And I am very strongly motivated to ensure that the investigation is carried out to the highest scientific standards.’

  ‘And so you wish to accompany her, as a kind of monitor. A conscience.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘Commendable too, and understandable.’ The Speaker glanced down at her notes for a moment, and LuSi thought she came to a decision, or perhaps confirmed one. ‘But, I’m afraid, that it is a wish I cannot endorse.’

  LuSi felt as if her heart stopped.

  The Jennin, too, froze. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘My scholars advise, and I agree with them, that your own time, Jennin, would be better spent here, on Airtree - rather than locked away on a starship for decades on essentially a secondary task.’

  ‘You want me to stay here? Doing what?’

  ‘Exploring the issues you have been describing. The relationship between the Creed of the Sim, and science and other modern philosophies, as they emerge. These are new ideas to us. What enriching arguments these may prove to be.’ She waved a hand at the opulence of the room. ‘Needless to say your physical comforts will be catered for, and in addition we offer you the mental stimulation of debate with the finest minds from all the worlds of the Bubble. And surely there is no better way to spend your life, or a part of it, than in thus honouring the Designers and Controllers and the Sim they have devised for us – or, if you wish, seeking a way to debunk their very existence.’

  PiRo looked confused at this sudden turn of events – as well he might, LuSi thought. ‘Speaker of Speakers, is this a condition of your granting your Instrument of Authority to Zaen SheLu ?’

  ‘Let us not descend into such bargaining,’ the Speaker said smoothly, with only the mildest tone of reproof. ‘Of course your family can stay with you,’ she glanced at JaEm, ‘while the Zaen’s can travel on with hers,’ nodding at LuSi.

  And thus LuSi’s life was smashed to pieces, on a whim of refined scholarship.

  The Spe
aker of Speakers smiled. ‘This is a moment of mythic resonance, is it not? Your crew is breaking up, like the Split during the journey of the first Ark, of which our legends speak. Well. Will you all join me for dinner?’

  III

  ‘History doesn’t matter. Life is all. You won’t build a Library here, Proctor.’

  ‘Then what in its place?’

  ‘Better a monument to me, Xaia Windru, a hero of this world, than to a world lost in the sky …’

  ‘Earth II’, Chapter X

  LuSi hated Windru.

  She hated the climate. Windru was a peculiar, tipped-over world, with its spin axis nearly in the plane of its orbit around its sun. So each turn around the sun, each of the world’s ‘years’, brought months of endless light, months of freezing dark. The only truly habitable areas were around the equator, and even there life was all but unbearable at some times – notably the equinoxes, when the sun climbed highest in the sky and dumped the greatest warmth into the air. And it was just LuSi’s luck that the Reality Dreams had arrived at just such a moment.

  She hated the gravity too! Too low, and she stumbled and tripped all the time and her digestion was shot to hell, and the locals who towered over her laughed, and their enormous rats would run under her feet …

  It was twenty-nine years now since they had left Airtree behind, forty-three years total since Urthen; she had spent most of her adult life, indeed almost all of her life, in the comfortable standard spin-gravity of the starship, and she didn’t welcome novelty. What a dump! No wonder the Xaians had got stirred up enough to go conquering human space; anything to get away from a world like this.

  She hated the local culture too. Even the names they gave things. SheLu argued from her linguistic analysis that this had been a very early colony world, even older than Airtree. But if this planet had ever been called ‘Urth II’ or some similar derivation, that name was thoroughly lost; ‘Windru’ was taken from the name of a long-extinct ruling dynasty. The Xaians in their pomp had begun their career by renaming their world, and obliterating the names given its features by the original colonists (if, recalling PiRo’s theories, such colonists had ever existed at all). After their hugely destructive campaign of Normalisation across the Bubble, the Xaians had been driven back to their home world. Since then the planet had been governed by federations of other worlds, administrations with varying politics but all determined to ensure that the Xaians never rose again: one legacy of the Xaian firestorm had been a trend to global governments on the colony worlds, and inter-world councils of various kinds, a paradoxical unity. Anyhow the generations of offworld administrators sent here had imposed their own names on the world’s geography, physical and human. And meanwhile some diehard natives who had opposed the Xaians in the first place had hung on to still older labels.

  So it was a mess. Even the major landmasses were plastered with contradictory names. The port city in which LuSi resided was called Xaiandria, or Alecksandria, or The Designers’ Conception – whatever. The big north-south spine was either the ‘Belt’ or the ‘Sword’, depending on who you spoke to; the compact island continent to the east was the ‘Frysby’ or the ‘Shield’; the archipelago to the west was the ‘Scatter’ or ‘The Fallen Corpses of the Enemies of Zeeland’ – and so on. It was said that the Xaians had even renamed the other planets of this system, including two big giants that had once been called by the resonant founder names ‘Seba’ and ‘Halivah’. At least, though, everybody agreed on one thing: their name for the native life forms – the ‘Purple’ – a word of such simplicity and antiquity that SheLu argued that it must have been an import from the language of the original settlers from lost Urth I.

  LuSi also hated the rooms they had been loaned, in a wooden-framed apartment block near the local Temple. Too hot, too noisy. The city’s architecture was dominated by structures like this, of wood and grim red sandstone, with pillars and porticoes and elaborately carved friezes. It was an architecture mandated by the conditions of this metal-poor, tectonically weary world, and a sensibility the Xaians had exported across human space in their brief period of empire-building, styles now everywhere associated with the hated Normalisation regime, and universally despised.

  These buildings might be squat and shabby, but none of them were terribly old, LuSi had learned. Windru with its peculiar tipped axis was given to instabilities; periodically it shook itself as, the locals said, a dog shakes off fleas. Buildings would crumble, the seas would rise, and volcanoes would fire. This had happened twice since the first human colonisation. It was an irony that most traces of the Xaians, who had sought to eradicate history, had themselves been eliminated.

  Most of all LuSi resented being stuck indoors with her mother, while Tanz Vlov, the reluctant emissary appointed by the Speaker of Speakers back on Airtree, was sent out to wheedle and negotiate for access to local scholars and records and archaeological sites. It had always been a feature of the Xaian hegemony that men had done the governing, women the fighting. So it was even now, thousands of years after the fall of the Normalisation regime, even in the local Speakerhood of the Creed of the Sim; men did the talking. Women, meanwhile, even two such evidently elderly and scholarly specimens as SheLu and LuSi, were treated as warily as drunken warriors. SheLu quite enjoyed being able to make men twice her size flinch out of her way with a mere glare, but overall the restrictions were wearisome.

  And she was trapped with SheLu. On the roomy starship they had managed not to speak to each other for years on end. Now they were cooped up together.

  The loss of JaEm and all LuSi’s plans for the future was a long time ago now, nearly thirty Years. Since then LuSi had taken other lovers, and had even married, once, one of the ship’s officers, but had borne no children. Thanks to anti-ageing treatments there was still time, but … The truth was that nothing, nobody had replaced JaEm. Given that the separation had come out because of the Speaker of Speakers’ decree, it had always been irrational for LuSi to blame her mother – save that it had been her mother’s driving ambition to discover Urth I that had so pulled LuSi’s own life out of shape in the first place. But, logical or not, LuSi had never quite been able to forgive her.

  It was a manageable situation on the roomy ship, in the life she had built for herself. But not here, in this stuffy box of an apartment, on this world of a failed empire … She avoided her mother as best she could.

  But sometimes SheLu sought her out.

  SheLu summoned her daughter to the room she used as a study. ‘You might be interested in this.’

  LuSi looked around at a desk heaped with books and scrolls and slates, and a kind of laboratory workbench laden with instruments, and dishes of the dusty local life form called the Purple. ‘I might, might I? Do you even know what I’m interested in?’

  SheLu smiled, and as so often LuSi had a queasy, disconcerted sense as she looked into her mother’s face, a face like her own, yet oddly too young-looking now, thanks to quirks in the ageing treatments. Like looking in a distorting mirror. SheLu said, ‘I do know you have spent the last twenty years fooling around with specimens of life from Urthen and Airtree and other worlds …’

  LuSi, looking for meaning in her life, had trained herself up in biology. She had asked for samples from the worlds the starship had visited since Airtree en route to Windru, and had tried to unpick ravelled-up ecologies. She had begun with a vague idea that she might test one of her mother’s hypotheses, that human-related life had been brought to each world from a single source. LuSi had confirmed for herself that what ecologists called the ‘Human Suite’ - humanity and its cousins, the animals and grasses and trees that supported human life - had uniform designs across the worlds, from the metabolic down to the genetic, while other life forms that shared the worlds of the Bubble had wildly varying bases. This unity did lend credence to her mother’s argument for a single source for humanity.

  But beyond that LuSi had become fascinated by the glimpses she saw of the intricate interdependence
of life forms of evidently different origins. Even if you couldn’t eat your neighbour, you could use it as a support, or incorporate it into your own metabolism somehow … She was developing a vision of the very far future, when life forms from across the human worlds, united by starships, would converge on some common shared ecology.

  Not here, though. Not on Windru. Here, the Purple remained stubbornly isolated from the Human Suite, as if expressing its own disapproval of the antics of humanity. Yet it was not the Purple’s relation to the Human Suite that interested SheLu, but the Purple itself.

  ‘I think it’s true,’ SheLu said now.

  ‘What is?’

  But SheLu stayed silent, after that enigmatic statement, as so often becoming lost in her own thoughts.

  LuSi slammed her palm flat on the desk. ‘Pay attention, mother. What’s so interesting? What is true?’

  ‘Hm? Oh, yes. Sorry. The old stories they tell here. The pre-Normalisation legends of a City of the Living Dead, of some kind of live arcology up in the north of the continent they call the Sword. Where, as Xaia Windru herself is supposed to have discovered, the previous intelligent inhabitants of this world had gone to hide, their identities mapped and stored in some physical structure, analogous to -’

  ‘The Sim,’ LuSi said. ‘Just as we are all patterns in the Memory in Holy Denva.’

  ‘Quite so. I think it might be true. I’ve been mapping the deep biochemistry of this stuff, the Purple. It’s full of signalling, electrical, biochemical, at times even physical, one chunk pushing at another, at a variety of speeds and bandwidths. It is a kind of data store. No doubt much of the information here is concerned with the basic needs of the survival of the Purple itself. But -’

  ‘But maybe there’s room for more.’

  ‘Yes. And since the Purple is alive, it serves as a self-replicating, self-repairing storage medium. Very robust. Hmm. And maybe in there the refugees of former times experience something like the Sim we ourselves believe we inhabit, some kind of virtual reality.’