Ultima (18 page)

“Chaos,” Kerys said. “The signature of Loki. In whom officially, as a Navy officer in a Christian federation, I don't believe at all.”

A junior officer burst into the room, looked for Kerys, and thrust a note into her hand. She looked over it quickly and frowned.

“But if all this is true,” Mardina said practically, “what are we supposed to do about it?”

Ari said, “We could ask Earthshine.”

“Yes,” Penny said. “Obviously. But what is he intending? And what has Ceres got to do with it?”

“Maybe we'll find out more soon,” Kerys said grimly. “Just when I thought this mess couldn't get any odder . . .”

Mardina asked, “
Nauarchus?
What's happened?”

“A Roman vessel has just returned from interstellar space. Twenty-five-year Hatch-building jaunt. And at their target system they found strangers.” She looked round at the group.

Beth asked, “Strangers?”

“They were speaking your tongue.
English
. Knowing about you, the Roman authorities have asked for our help.”

Beth, Jiang, Penny, survivors of the
Tatania
, shared stunned looks.

Kerys stood up. “Well, we need to deal with this. Cadet, you're with me. I'm afraid your formal induction is going to have to wait for another day.”

She hurried out of the room, and Mardina ran to follow her.

The Roman exploration vessel
Malleus Jesu
was directed to land near Lutetia Parisiorum, in Roman Gaul. And Penny and her companions were to be brought to the city to meet the ship's strange passengers.

Penny prepared for the journey, slowly gathering her old-lady stuff, her favorite quilted blankets and duck-down slippers, the pills and ointments and mysterious poultices supplied to her by the local doctors for her various aches and pains. She wondered what strings had been pulled to achieve all this, to bring together the survivors of the
Tatania,
and now these other individuals found on the planet of a distant star by Roman explorers—a dialogue between two governments already wary of each other and dealing with an existential mystery that had dropped out of the sky into their hands. She supposed the calculation was that at least the encounter might yield information. And, she supposed, that was what she was hoping for too, at the minimum. What was she
doing
here? How did she get here? What did all this
mean
? . . . As for herself, she had long ago given up hope of ever going home again. She knew she would die here. She hadn't expected to see her twin sister again, however.

And what were they to do about Earthshine?

As she finished her preparations, she had no doubt Earthshine was very well aware of all that was going on, and would be monitoring closely.

•   •   •

They were to travel from Eboraki, in the north of what Penny would have called England, to a city called Dubru on the south coast. And from there they would cross into Gaul.

With Jiang and Marie Golvin, Penny was brought from her lodgings at the Academy by a coach to a transport hub to the south of the city. The place was a clash of technological eras, with a cobbled road bearing horse-drawn traffic leading to a railway terminus, and splashes of scarred concrete where stood slim needles, kernel-driven ships of air and space.

“You know, I realize now in fact that I've traveled little since I got here,” Penny said as Marie helped her down from the coach. “Twenty years since the jonbar hinge brought us here, and I've barely left the city. I've spent more time off the planet than traveling on it, probably.”

Marie gave her an arm to lean on. “Well, why travel when you are immersed in strangeness every time you open your door?”

“True, true.”

Marie was in her forties now, plump, graying, a mother of three; she still worked with Penny at the Academy, and in fact had long since taken over many of Penny's administrative duties. Penny depended on Marie in many ways—and, she believed, Marie had found a reasonable happiness in her life here, with her husband Rajeev, even though they were all so far from home.

With servants from the Academy handling their luggage, they walked slowly to the railway terminus, a sprawling roof over multiple platforms, a tangle of lines spreading away in the distance. The architecture seemed very familiar to Penny; there was a certain inevitable economic and engineering logic to rail technology, it seemed. But Brikanti trains ran on gleaming monorails supported by elegant Roman-style viaducts, and their locomotives were powered by kernels, a handful of the mysterious wormholes in the heart of each engine. The train itself was a suspended tube of metal and glass. Penny was relieved to see there was an escalator to lift her up.

They had a carriage to themselves at the heart of the train, a roomy space centered on a broad table, brightly lit through big picture windows. It was almost like a dining room, Penny thought. Marie and Penny were in fact the last to arrive. Here were Beth and Mardina, Beth looking resentful, and a rather more complex expression on Mardina's face; she seemed uncertain, withdrawn. And here were Kerys and Ari Guthfrithson—Ari sitting a respectful distance away from his estranged wife and daughter.

Kerys stood to welcome Penny, and helped her get settled in her seat between Marie and Jiang, and called a servant to bring drinks. Kerys had been put in nominal charge of this peculiar mission, and if the
nauarchus
was irritated to be dragged once again into all this jonbar-hinge strangeness, she didn't show it.

The train slid smoothly out of the station and into watery sunlight.

They soon passed beyond the city limits, heading south, and Penny looked down from above at scattered suburbs of roundhouses, set in a wider landscape of farmed fields, horizon-wide expanses of wheat and other crops, tended by huge machines that weeded and watered. The individual farming machines didn't run on kernels; there was an extensive grid of cables to carry power from central stations. There were people around, of course—this culture didn't have machinery smart enough to direct itself—but only a few worked in the fields.

Marie said, “The Academician was saying that she hasn't traveled much since she came here.”

Kerys smiled. “Your first time on a train, Penny?”

“Not quite. But I suppose I've never thought very much about the nature of your transport systems. Your history, you know, diverged from ours so long ago that much is unfamiliar from the foundations up. Pritanike never had the Romans here . . .” Even the Brikanti towns didn't map onto the ones she was familiar with. For example, Stonehenge here was the center of a major urban sprawl and transport junction, a very modern city that seemed to have continuous cultural roots going back almost to the last Ice Age. “Also you don't have
automobiles
”—she used the English word—“by which I mean small vehicles under the control of individuals.”

Ari said, “Of course we have
automobiles
, but they are under the control of the military and the police exclusively.”

Beth smiled. “No. That's not what she means. You don't have
cars
. You have
tanks.
”

Kerys said, “It seems there was less conflict in your world compared to ours. We live in a state of perpetual war, declared or undeclared. Our lives are more . . . militarized. Our cities are fortresses; our transport systems are troop carriers that cannot easily be subverted by hostile forces—”

Mardina snapped suddenly. “I wish you'd all stop going on like this.”

Beth looked surprised. Ari glared at his daughter, but kept his counsel, wisely, Penny thought.

In the end it was Kerys who spoke first. “Is there a problem, cadet?”

Mardina calmed down quickly. “I apologize,
nauarchus
. It's just all this talk; it's so”—she was visibly searching for the words—“old. Weird. Cobwebby stuff, like you're all remembering a bad dream.”

Penny covered the girl's hand with her own. “But you can't blame us for that, dear. I was already impossibly old by your standards when we first came here. Even after all this time on Terra, it's impossible to put Earth aside. But you're right; that's no excuse to inflict our maunderings on you. And I for one need to conserve my energies for the trials to come. Do you have my pillow, Youwei?”

Kerys grinned, and produced a leather pouch. “You're taking a nap? Good plan, Academician. And as for the rest of us, we can while away the time the way soldiers always have—playing pointless games. So what's it to be? I have knucklebones, chess, cards . . .”

•   •   •

Penny woke some hours later.

When she glanced out the window she was startled to find the train was suspended over water. Reflexively she grabbed Jiang's hand.
“Oh, my,”
she said in English.

“Not to worry,” Kerys said with a smile. “We've already crossed several bridges—Pritanike is an archipelago, remember. Now we're crossing the Mare Britannicum. We let the Romans name this stretch of water, since they always built the bridges. You missed Dubru, but we didn't stop. We'll shortly arrive in Gesoriacum, on the Roman side.”

“Impressive . . .”

The bridge terminus on the Gaul side was a massive structure of ancient concrete, evidently heavily repaired and built over. Penny peered up at scarred walls.

Kerys said, “We've been building bridges across the Britannicum for a thousand years. Also tunnels under the seabed. Every time there's a war the bridges are first to be cut.”

“Ah. But these foundations remain, to be built on.”

“And they have got bigger and uglier with every century.”

The train crossed the coast without pausing for custom or security checks, and Penny peered out. “So here I am, almost in my nineties, and arriving in the Roman Empire for the first time. What an impossible dream that would once have seemed!” Staring out at the countryside of northern Gaul, she lost herself in her thoughts.

The others, apparently with relief that the old lady was shutting up, returned to the complicated card game they had been playing.

Gaul, then: province of Rome, as it had been since Caesar's conquest over two millennia before. The high-tech monorail cut across a landscape of farms, small fields centered on sprawling villas, and cities—walled towns, really—with what looked like ancient and battered fortifications. She tried to identify differences with Brikanti. There was more evidence of monumental engineering; she glimpsed towering aqueducts, bridges, roads laid laser-straight across the green landscape. But this was a blocky architecture of stone and straight lines and rectangles, compared to the more organic Celtic style of Brikanti with its use of wood and thatch. Penny felt a spurt of regret that she hadn't traveled more when she was younger. Maybe Mardina was right; she had always been too obsessed about the jonbar hinge and the differences from her own lost world to open her eyes and see what was all around her—to let herself relax and just
be
, to live here in Terra, in this world with its own wonders. But she had brought trouble to this place in the shape of Earthshine, she reminded herself, and that was a challenge she couldn't duck.

And this world was hardly a utopia, as she could see by glancing out of the window now. Compared to Pritanike, few machines were to be seen in these small fields. But she saw many people working, bent over the crops, carrying baskets of fertilizer or produce, even scraping at what looked like drainage ditches—people everywhere. And wherever the train passed, the people in the fields below stopped their work and lowered their heads, avoiding any chance of eye contact with the train's passengers.

Ari Guthfrithson, sitting opposite, was watching her.

She raised an eyebrow. “You're not playing the games?”

He shrugged. “I fear my fragile relationship with my family would not survive a tense knucklebones contest. Here you are in the glorious realm of Rome. What do you think?”

“That I'm glad we castaways from the UN-China Culture were picked up by a Brikanti ship rather than a Roman. The people working those fields—starships and slavery. What a contradiction.”

Ari shrugged. “When we were able to build machines more powerful than people and animals, we started to grow our economy on that basis, and slavery became old-fashioned. But Christ Himself, according to our Bible, kept slaves. It is not a sin.” He glanced out the window. “Lutetia Parisiorum is approaching.”

“I visited this place once,” Penny murmured, remembering. “
Before
, I mean. When Earthshine brought us here, my sister and myself, to show us the graveyard where our mother was buried . . .”

“The rail line parallels the ancient road into the city from the south, which the inhabitants call the
cardo maximus.
It has always been the Romans' habit to build their cemeteries outside the city walls.”

After more than twenty centuries of continuous habitation, the cemeteries lined the road for many kilometers south of the city.

•   •   •

Even before the train reached the walls, Penny could see that the city was much less extensive than the Paris she'd known. Lutetia Parisiorum was a mere provincial city, not a national capital as in Penny's home timeline. Still, the urban sprawl was extensive, under a dome of brownish smog.

The monorail cut through the stout walls, close to a road gate huge enough itself to have served as a fortress. Within the city, multistory red-tiled dwellings crowded along straight-line streets, with spires and domes rising above the rest. Aqueducts snaked over the walls to deliver water, and Penny imagined an equally impressive network of sewers hidden beneath the ground. Many of the grander buildings, with domes and pillared porticoes, either copied the styles of antiquity or, presumably, dated from that long-gone age. But Penny could see more monorail lines laced over the city, and as her train slowed there was a crash of thunder from the sky, a glare of liquid light, as some kernel-powered spacecraft raced over the city toward orbit.

The monorail terminus was close to the river, the south bank of the Seine, and as the elevated train pulled in, Penny could see across the river to the Île de la Cité, no doubt blessed with a Latin name in this timeline, where a magnificent domed cathedral towered over a crowd of lesser buildings.

As the train drew to a halt, Jiang helped Penny out of her seat. It was only a short walk, Kerys promised, to the office of the provincial administration, where the passengers of the
Malleus Jesu
had been lodged since their passage to Terra. Penny braced herself for the walk, and an encounter she could barely imagine, with her sister, Stef Kalinski.