Ultima (17 page)

AD 2233; AUC 2986

The command base of the Brikanti Navy was in a city called Dumnona, on the south coast of Pritanike.

The Navy was all over this city, as eighteen-year-old Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson already knew very well, with training establishments and administrative facilities, a deep old harbor that had accommodated oceangoing ships for centuries—and, on the higher ground inland, a vast modern spaceport from which a new generation of Brikanti-Scand ships sailed into the sky itself. But the old city was still a human place, crammed with barracks and a host of hostels and inns—and brothels and gambling palaces—to cater to the huge resident population of support staff, as well as for the steady flow through the port of elderly officials and healthy young serving personnel. To Mardina, who had been fascinated by the Navy since she'd been a small child growing up in the austere newness of the Saint Jonbar Academy, Dumnona was a place thick with history—even though, she knew, it had been repeatedly flattened to rubble in the wars with Rome, and even Xin, that had rolled over this countryside in the course of centuries past.

And of all the city's buildings, more tradition was attached to the great Hall of the Navy than to any other single site.

The Hall was a sculpture of wood and glass and concrete whose form suggested the hull of a Scand longboat, of the kind that had first landed on the shores of northeastern Pritanike to begin the engagement of two peoples. Now Mardina, in her new cadet uniform, walking into the Hall for the first time with her mother on one side and
nauarchus
Kerys as her sponsor on the other, looked up as she passed beneath the tremendous sculpted dragon's head at the
faux
boat's prow, as had thousands of Navy recruits before.

Beth stared up at the dragon, shading her eyes from a watery spring sun.
“Good grief,”
she said in her native English, before lapsing back into Brikanti. “That thing looks dangerous.”

“As if it will bend down and gobble us up, Mother?” Mardina asked.

“No, as if that silly lump of concrete is going to break off and land on our heads.”

Kerys laughed. “Highly unlikely. The concrete sculpting is reinforced by a massive steel frame which is designed to withstand—”

“Unlikely, is it?” Beth was fifty-six years old now, and was always skeptical, always impatient—always vaguely unhappy, Mardina was now old enough to realize, and with a temper that was not improving with age. When she frowned, the vivid tattoo on her face stretched and puckered. “I couldn't
list
the unlikely events that I've had to survive in the course of my long life. That lot dropping on me wouldn't come near the top.”

“Now, Mother, you mustn't show me up,” Mardina said, faintly embarrassed, trying to hurry her on. “Not today.” She glanced at Kerys, who was a pretty significant figure in Mardina's universe. The ship's commander who had once plucked Mardina's mother from a hulk ship of unknown origins was no longer a
trierarchus
. Now she was a
nauarchus
, another hierarchical title borrowed from the Latin, a language replete with such words as Brikanti was not—a commander of a squadron of ten ships, and, it was said, overdue for further promotion, which she had refused so far because of her love of life in her own command, out in Ymir's Skull.

But Beth said, “Oh, don't worry. Your father will be embarrassment enough. Does he
have
to be here, Kerys?”

“A recruit for officer school has to be sponsored by both sides of her family, Beth. Yes, I'm afraid he does.”

“Well, just stop making silly remarks about the architecture then,” Mardina said.

“Actually your mother is being perfectly sensible,” Kerys put in diplomatically. “One thing you'll learn as an officer, Mardina, is that you don't take unnecessary risks. A good survival strategy.”

“There,” said Beth, satisfied. “I remember very well my mother, your grandmother, Mardina, saying the same thing.
She
was a space officer, you know, Kerys.”

“As you've told me once or twice since I picked you up in the
Ukelwydd.
Now, follow me.” She led them to the Hall's huge doors, and waved security credentials at the guards to gain admittance.

•   •   •

Inside the Hall, Mardina found herself facing a long corridor walled by rows of doors on two levels, the upper accessible by iron gantries and walkways. Clerks and other officials carrying bundles of parchment hurried along the central hall and the upper walkways, and strip lamps suspended from the ceiling cast a light that seemed to turn everything gray. Mardina felt oddly disappointed.

Kerys grinned back at her. “Not the romance you were expecting? This is where we administer the largest single organization controlled by the Brikanti government—a Navy that now spans the planets and beyond, as well as its traditional seafaring arm. Mardina, it's not some kind of temple, or museum—and nor does everything revolve around you, I'm afraid.” She winked. “But don't worry. I felt just as small and insignificant when I was in your position. The Navy does notice you, I promise . . .”

Beth grunted. “It's like a hive. I grew up on an empty planet. You couldn't get a place more unlike that than
this
.”

Mardina shook her head. “Oh, Mother, please don't start on about
Before
. Not today.” The English word was their private code for Beth's strange other life before she had come to this place, this world, to Terra, to Brikanti. But Brikanti was all Mardina knew. She had come to loathe all that strangeness, as if it were a kind of flaw in her own nature.

If Kerys was aware of all this—and after all it was she who had retrieved Beth from the ship that had carried her here from
Before
—she didn't show it, to Mardina's relief.

They came to a small office maybe halfway along the length of the Hall, a nondescript little room that Mardina probably couldn't have found again without memorizing the number etched into the wooden door. The room was laid out like a classroom, maybe, or a court, with rows of benches and small desks facing a more substantial table at the front. Here two officers sat, looking over paperwork, murmuring to each other; one, a burly man, was evidently the senior, judging by the ornate flashes on the shoulder of his tunic, and the other a scribe or adviser. The room was otherwise empty.

But it was in this mundane room, Mardina realized, one of a warren of such rooms, that her future was to be decided, for good or ill, in the next few hours.

She tried to stay composed as she sat with her mother on the front row of benches, close to the wall. The older man barely looked up at Kerys as she approached the table and presented a packet of papers, and he did not bother to look over at Mardina at all.

Beth whispered, “So who's the
big cheese
?”

“Stick to Brikanti, Mother.”

“Sorry.”

Kerys sat with them. “That is Deputy Prefect Skafhog. Very senior. Do you know how senior, cadet? You should . . .”

Mardina nodded. She'd soon become aware that the most important thing a would-be naval officer had to learn was the constellation of ranking officials above her. “A Deputy Prefect reports only to—well, the Prefect. The chief of the whole Navy, who reports in to the relevant minister in the Althing—”

“There are only a dozen Deputy Prefects to administer the whole of the Navy, on Terra and in the Skull. So you see, cadet, we are taking you seriously.”

“Then it's a shame such a prominent officer, with respect, is going to have to wait for you,” came a voice behind Mardina. “Or rather, for all of us. Because we have family business to discuss.”

Beth stood slowly, her tattooed face a mask of anger. “Ari Guthfrithson. So you deigned to turn up.”

Mardina gave a look of pleading to Kerys, who shrugged and whispered, “It's your family.” Mardina closed her eyes for one second, made a fervent prayer to Jesu the Boatman, and stood with her mother.

Her father, Ari, looked sleek in his own uniform, that of a senior
druidh
, one of the Navy's intellectual elite; he carried a neat leather satchel at his side. At least he had been expected. Mardina was more surprised to see that he was accompanied by Penny Kalinski, one of her mother's old companions from the semi-mythical days of Before. Penny was bent and old—how old
was
she now? Eighty-eight, eighty-nine? And she leaned on the arm of Jiang Youwei. A comparatively youthful sixty, with a heavy-looking bag slung across his shoulder, Mardina had only rarely heard the taciturn Xin speak, but he was never far from Penny's side.

With care, Penny sat down, a couple of rows back from Mardina and Beth. She said with a voice like rustling paper, “I'm afraid you must blame me for this. Well, indirectly.”

Beth glowered. “I know who to blame.
You
—Ari—you'd do anything to worm your way back into our lives, wouldn't you? You knew we had to ask you to attend this procedure today. The rules demanded it. Just this one day, I have to stand your company.”

He grinned. “Yes, you do, don't you?”

“And you can't resist manipulating the situation to your own ends.”

Ari, nearly fifty years old now, glanced around at the company, at Penny and Jiang, at Kerys—at the Deputy Prefect at his desk, who was rapidly becoming visibly irritated. “It's not so much that I couldn't resist it. I couldn't waste the opportunity.
We need to talk
, Beth. And not about us—not even about Mardina.”

Mardina's hopes of getting through this day successfully were receding. With rising panic she took her father's arm. “Father, please—this is a big day for me. I've waited half a year already for this hearing. Can't we wait until later?”

He patted her hand. “I'm afraid not, darling—but, oh! It's good to see you again, and I'm so proud of you today, of what you've become.”

Beth growled, “Become? She wouldn't even exist if you'd had your way.”

“Mother, please—”

“It's all right, Mardina. But, look—no, I'm afraid we can't wait. Because once this ceremony is done, you'll be gone, won't you, Mardina? Lost in your career, lost in Ymir's Skull. And the opportunity to talk will be lost. And we must talk, you know.”

“About what, for Jupiter's sake?”

“About—what is the English word you use?
Before
, Beth.”

Beth shook her head. “That's all gone. This is our life now—here in Brikanti, in this world of Romans and Xin. There's been nothing new to say about all that old stuff for twenty years, not since we stepped off the
Tatania
.”

“I'm afraid that's no longer true, Beth,” Penny said tiredly. “If it ever was. I don't know what Ari has to tell you today. But part of it's my fault. The Academy of Saint Jonbar. I always hoped it would bear fruit . . . Now it has.”

“What kind of fruit? What are you talking about?”

“And then there's Earthshine,” Penny said doggedly. “
Earthshine
. He's been holed up on Mars for decades. Now—well, now he may be making his move.” She glanced up at Kerys. “Ask the Navy types about Ceres. Höd, as they call it here.”

The Deputy Prefect had been listening with commendable calm to all this. But now he intervened, speaking directly to Kerys: “What's going on,
nauarchus
?”

“I don't know, sir,” she said honestly, looking warily at Ari. “I feel as if the
druidh
here has handed me an unexploded bomb, and I don't quite know what to do with it.”

Skafhog tapped a pen against his teeth. “One hour,” he said briskly, standing up. “I'll let you get all this family nonsense out of your systems in one hour—or not,” he said severely to Mardina, “in which case all you'll be seeing of the Navy, young woman, will be lights in the sky.”

“Yes, sir,” Kerys said with some relief. “You're being very indulgent.”

“I am, aren't I? Get on with it.” And he stalked out of the room, with his official scrambling behind.

When he'd gone, Ari smiled around at them. “Well. I suppose you're wondering why I've gathered you all here today.”

Beth punched him square in the face.

“Hold still,” said Kerys. She was crouching before Ari, dabbing at the wreckage of his mouth. “I think the bleeding from your cheek has stopped.”

“I should hope so. That spirit stung.”

“You're lucky we had the right stuff to hand. Then again the Navy is used to handling scuffles—even in its headquarters, even in the heart of Dumnona. Now, I want to put some ointment on the swelling under your eye . . .”

“Ow!”

“If you wouldn't keep yakking, I could get it done. And you have a dislodged tooth. I'll push it back in its socket for now—”

“Yow!”

“You need to see a dentist. Again, you're in the right place. The Navy has the best dentists in all Brikanti; we can't afford to send out crews on years-long missions with rotting teeth . . . There. Hold this compress against your face until you get better attention.”

“Thank you, Kerys,” he said dully, and indistinctly, Mardina thought.
K-chh-er-yssh.
“How you enrich my life, Beth Eden Jones. In so many ways.”

“Maybe you should have stayed away from me in the first place,” Beth snapped back.

“Perhaps . . . but I could not resist. Even from the beginning, when we found your ship, the
Tatania
. I thought you were so beautiful. And a woman born under the light of a different star, in a different history altogether! That was why I fell in love with you.”

“You didn't love me,” Beth said, and she sounded desolate to Mardina. “You loved the idea of me.”

“No,” he said firmly. “It wasn't like that. After all, we did manage to bridge the vast divergence in our cultures, did we not? For a time at least. We married—or would have, if we could have resolved the legalities. And we had a daughter! Here she is, standing before us. A child who is a product of two different histories.”

Mardina pouted. “You make me sound like some exotic crossbreed.”

Penny cackled. “True enough. You're a mongrel, child. A mongrel in space and time.”

Kerys touched Mardina's hand. “Ignore all this, cadet. Where you came from doesn't determine who you are, and that's true for any of us.”

Mardina forced a nod. “Thank you,
nauarchus.
”

Ari said now, “I have always remained fascinated by the question of your origin, what it means for all of us. And that question has become more urgent in recent years.”

“Why? What's changed?”

“Earthshine,” Penny said grimly. “That's what.”

“He is long established on Mars,” Ari said. “He could not be dislodged, even if we tried, I believe. And for years he's been moving Höd, a tremendous mass, around our planetary system. Of course he has a stated objective to bring Höd to Mars, to use its substance to enrich that planet. It was always going to take years, decades, to nudge such a huge body into the correct trajectory. But now he's stopped filing reports to the Navy on the burns he directs the crews to make, the trajectory adjustments. The crew managing the kernel banks, driving the thing in its slow approach to Mars, are nominally Navy, but it's become clear their loyalty has drifted to Earthshine. He seems to have promised them extraordinary wealth, power, on a transformed Mars of the future. As a result we can no longer predict the path of Höd, not in precise detail. This creature has accrued extraordinary power over us, in just a few decades. And
you
brought him here—”

“You released him,” Penny pointed out.

“Some of us who remember the old faiths think he is Loki returned,” Ari said with a smile distorted by his injuries. “Loki, on the loose among the planets, and planning a devastating trick.”

Beth shook her head at that. “I don't think he would see it that way. I heard him talk about those old legends—as they existed in our timeline anyhow. He sees himself as
opposing
Loki.”

Kerys frowned. “That's interesting. And to him, who is Loki?”

Penny said, “The Hatch builders, of course. Whoever gave us the kernels. Whoever's meddling with our history.”

Ari shook his head. “Mythic monsters aside, it is Earthshine's actions that have motivated me to dig deeper into this question of the adjusted histories. Because this was the origin of Earthshine, this extraordinary threat.” He glanced at Penny. “Whether you were prepared to cooperate with my investigations or not.”

Penny smiled, a tired old-lady smile, Mardina thought.

Ari said, “What intrigued me particularly about Penny's own account was not the great leap across realities that she seems to have made aboard the
Tatania
. It was the smaller, subtler adjustment that she suffered in her own personal history, when a Hatch was first opened on Mercury. An odd case. Nothing but a twist to a personal history.

“But what is interesting to me was that Penny and her sister managed to find evidence of that limited history change. I mean, other than the memory of Stef Kalinski, who remembered a previous life without a sister. Physical evidence, their mother's grave marker in Lutetia Parisiorum—or the equivalent city in Penny's reality—bearing an inscription that mentioned Stef alone, and not the sister. Do you see? A scrap, a trace left behind by an adjustment that was evidently—
untidy
. Well, with that as a lead, it occurred to me that perhaps, given we have evidence of at least two of these history changes, this world of
ours
might contain evidence of others. Why not?”

Beth said, “And you've been looking?”

“I have. I began a search of archives, of reports from historians and archaeologists. Looking for evidence of structures, documents, even mere inscriptions that might not fit the accepted history. But I soon found I was not working alone.” And he looked again at Penny.

Penny smiled. “Guilty as charged. Now it can be told. I always had an ulterior motive when I set up my Academy of Saint Jonbar. Yes, I taught them mathematics, physics, as per my charter. But I always ran other classes too. History, for example. I claimed that I was using those courses as much to educate myself about your history as the students. But I always tried to make the students think about other possibilities—
counterfactuals
. Which is an English word that has now been adopted into your language. I see it pop up in scholarly articles.”

“Yes,” Kerys said drily. “Along with much speculation about the identity of Saint Jonbar.”

“Who never existed,” Penny admitted. “Not even in my own reality. It's a term from popular culture, from fiction. A jonbar hinge is a point where history pivots—where the path forks. Well, I always hoped that I would create at least a few bright young scholars who would be predisposed to work in this area. And to look for the kind of evidence Ari describes. We haven't yet succeeded—”

“But I have,” Ari said.

Mardina was no scholar, and usually hated all talk of
Before
, especially on such a day as this. But she found all this vaguely exciting. “It's like a mystery story.”

Ari smiled at his daughter. “It is, isn't it? And what's really exciting is that, in time, I found some clues.”

“Clues?”

“Not on land, but suitably, for a seafaring nation, under the oceans. Mardina, could you please pass my satchel?”

Penny grumbled, “About time you got to the point,
druidh.
” She shuffled over to see better.

•   •   •

The satchel contained maps that Ari spread out over the Deputy Prefect's table. He held his bandage to his mouth, but even so a few spots of bloodied saliva spattered on the parchments.

“These show coastlines and oceans, as you can see,” he said, gesturing. “It's well known that the levels of the oceans have risen since, say, the time of Kartimandia. We have historical accounts of inundations and land abandonments, and everybody is familiar with drowned settlements off the modern shores—not least in Pritanike, where vast swaths of land have been lost. But this is true all around the world. In recent centuries the archaeologists have turned their interest to such remains, and have commissioned Navy vessels to support them in their research.

“Now, in addition to the towns and roads and so forth that we
expected
to find, given what we read of them in the historical accounts, we have also mapped some much more enigmatic structures, farther out from shore. Naturally these are difficult to explore and map—”

“Spare us your scholarly caution,” Kerys said. “Show us.”

“The most striking remains are in the Seas of Xin, and in the ocean off our own northeast shore, the Mare Germanicum . . .”

Mardina and the rest, including Penny who hobbled over with Jiang's help, crowded around the maps. Mardina saw structures in the offshore oceans, sketched by hand on the printed maps: what looked like tremendous walls, dikes, canals, and what might have been town plans of a particularly stylized kind, concentric circles cut through by radial passages.

Ari let them look. “We call this the ‘Drowned Culture.' It seems to have been a global technology, if not actually a global civilization—perhaps there were rival empires of a similar level of development, as there are in our world today.”

“Interesting terminology,” Penny said. “
Cultures.
Perhaps our own history, then, was the UN-China Culture . . . The town plans are intriguing, if you study them, as I have. You find the same motif of circles and bars everywhere. Here to the east of the Xin mainland. Here, between Pritanike and Jutland. The ‘towns,' incidentally, are not systems of roads and walls but mostly extensive systems of drainage ditches and other flood-control measures—just as the Romans have built in Belgica and Germania Inferior, for example. Ways to save the land from the sea, or even to reclaim it once flooded. This seems to have been a civilization that resisted the sea-level rise, long before that rise even reached the coastlines known to our ancients.”

“That circle-and-bar motif,” Penny said. “Youwei, could you fetch my bag?”

Kerys said, “I don't see why this is so exciting. So here is a culture that evidently vanished, drowned, long before the rise of Brikanti or Rome, the traces lost under the rising sea.”

“But it's not as simple as that,” Ari said, looking pleased with himself. “We took a closer look. The Navy teams even sent down divers. They found evidence of
war
. Bomb craters and burning and the like. These communities seem to have ended in a catastrophic global conflict. For we can date such things, you see, with a little ingenuity, by looking at the thickness of the marine deposits laid down over the ruins in the centuries since—”

“Yes, yes,” Kerys said irritably. “Just tell us.”

“The problem is the date, you see. The date of their terrible war. It occurred in the twenty-first century.”

Penny stared. “You Brikanti use the Roman calendar.” She glanced at Beth. “That's the fourteenth century by our timeline.”

Ari pursed his lips. “You see the problem? Our own history is robust and complete, a heavily documented and multiply sourced account. This builds on an unbroken tradition of literacy that reaches back three millennia, if not more. There is
no
mention of walls and cities in the Mare Germanicum a thousand years after Kartimandia and Claudius—certainly no account of a devastating war in the twenty-first century. Xin scholars make similar observations. Here, then, is a set of evidence that does not fit into the history we know.
There was another world
, dominated by this Drowned Culture, which ended in a terrible war, and somehow our history was—recast—”

“And not just yours,” Penny Kalinski said. She was rummaging ineffectually in her bag. “Where is that damn slate?”

Mardina looked around the room, at her mother, at Jiang, even Kerys—at stunned faces. She touched Kerys's arm and whispered,
“Nauarchus . . .”

“Yes, cadet?”

“Everybody seems amazed by all this. But it's just a bunch of old ruins under the ocean, isn't it? What difference does it make?”

Kerys looked at her curiously, almost fondly. “Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You'll go far in the Navy.”

“I've seen this before,” Penny said now, still searching her bag. “The motif of your Drowned Culture, the circles and bars. Earthshine
showed
me before. When he took us all down into his bunker under Paris, before the Nail fell.” She closed her eyes. “And he had a plaque on his wall, some kind of rock art, etchings in sea-corroded concrete, the first time he brought the two of us to Paris—oh, years earlier, my sister and myself. And he brought the plaque with him on the
Tatania.
” At last she found her slate, tapped it with bony fingers, and showed them an image. It was a brooch, Mardina saw, a bit of stone, marked with concentric circles and a radial groove. “Earthshine was wearing this on Mars eight years ago. And in meetings I had with him,
Before
.”

Ari frowned. “Earthshine? Then somehow he knows about the Drowned Culture already.”

“Yes.” Penny pursed her lips. “But you don't get it; you don't see the bigger picture, Ari. Earthshine must have already gathered evidence of this ‘Drowned Culture'
from Earth
. From my history. Not from Terra. Do you see? It is as if our divergent histories are not organized in any kind of linear fashion, an orderly sequence, so that one gives way to the next, and then the next. They are like . . . ice floes on a frozen ocean, bumping up against one another in a random way. But I suppose if Earthshine is right that the kernels are wormholes—if in fact we live in a universe riddled with wormholes—then this kind of chaos is what we must expect.”

Ari looked doubtful. “
Wormholes?
I'm afraid I don't understand.”

“Connections across space and time, even between universes . . . If you have such links, then causality can be violated. Cause and effect disconnected, mixed up. Even archaeology need not make sense, as we see here, because its basic logic, that whatever lies beneath the ground was put there by somebody in your own past, need not apply anymore. Anything is possible; history is ragged . . .”