Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe
Date: 2015-03-03 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction; Short Stories
Description: Stephen Baxter's bestselling novels, Flood and Ark (ROC, 2009 and 2010) introduced a universe in which a handful of refugees in a primitive starship flee a drowning Earth. In the duology we see the refugees reach colony worlds they call Earth II and Earth III. The three novellas in Landfall answer the frequently asked question, "What happened next?? The final piece, "Earth I," is original to this collection, a trio of stories that continue Baxter's masterful world-building. Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent sf writer of his generation. Published around the world, he has also won major awards i

Landfall:

Tales from the Flood / Ark Universe
by

Stephen Baxter

Published by

Roadswell Editions

P.O. Box 56

Planetarium Station

New York, NY  10024-0056

November 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Baxter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including posting text or links to text online, printing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher.

‘Earth II’ first appeared in Asimov’s, July 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Stephen Baxter

‘Earth III’ first appeared in Asimov’s, June 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Baxter

‘Earth I’ first appeared in UNIVERSES. Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Baxter

These three stories previously appeared in the UNIVERSES omnibus from PS Publishing, 2013.

Introduction

In common with many science fiction writers, the universes I invent and inhabit tend to sprawl over several books and short stories. For me, this goes back a quarter of a century to my first published story, the beginning of my ongoing Xeelee Sequence.

My novels Flood and Ark (Gollancz, 2008-9) introduced a universe in which a handful of refugees in a primitive starship flee a drowning Earth. In the books we get to see the refugees reach colony worlds they call ‘Earth II’ and ‘Earth III’. Possibly my most frequently asked question since then has been, ‘What happened next?’ The three novellas included here are intended to answer that question. These stories are exercises in world-building.

Stephen Baxter

Northumberland, September 2014
www.stephen-baxter.com

Earth II

I

‘Go home, Xaia Windru.’

Xaia sat up straighter in her chair, favouring her left arm with the crudely sewn gash in the forearm, and cradling her cup of looted Brythonic wine in her right hand. ‘Home, Teif?’ She forced a smile. ‘We’re having too much fun. We’ve barely started. Ask the crews.’

Xaia sat with Teif and Manda, her admiral and her general, under the silvered awning over the prow of the Cora. On the polished table before them, maps of the Scatter and the world were held in place by the weight of wine flagons. The Cora stood to sea with her sister ships a kilometre or so from the island of Manhatun, whose low, craggy profile wavered in the heat haze. From here Xaia could see smoke rising from the burning houses in the port city, and warriors with carts drawn by huge, high-stepping horses working their way through the narrow streets, and the landing craft plying to and fro, laden with goods and hostages. Balloons blazoned with the crest of the house of Windru drifted over the helpless city. On the higher land clumps of Purple glistened, useless, ugly.

The heat was intense. It was April, the peak of the hotspring; though the sun still set it each night it sailed high to the zenith each day, pouring light and warmth into the world like wine into a cup. Even sitting inert under this reflective awning was exhausting, and to work like Xaia’s crews was almost impossible. But she heard the crackle of gunfire, and the throaty boom of an artillery piece; even in the day’s heat the mopping up was continuing.

‘That’s just it,’ Teif said. ‘I have asked the crews. They’re exhausted, Lady. They long for home.’ He was a heavy-set man, about fifty, ferociously strong, supremely competent. He wore a thick grey beard that Xaia always thought must have been impossibly stuffy in the hot seasons.

Manda snorted. She stood, her wine cup in her hand, and stretched. She was taller than Xaia, well-muscled, her chest a big-lunged barrel. In her late twenties, a few years younger than Xaia, she wore her hair shaved to the scalp. In her glinting body armour she looked beautiful, but rather terrifying, Xaia thought. And even here, on Xaia’s flagship, surrounded by Teif’s best sailors, Manda’s heavy iron sword was within reach of an outstretched hand. Manda said, ‘Don’t listen to this worn-out old salt dog, Lady. My warriors loved you even before the coldspring raid that broke the siege.’

The siege of the island nation of Brython, Zeeland’s greatest rival in the Scatter, had lasted years, through the unending days of the coolsummers and the icebound dark of the coldwinters, when countless crew had died of cold and disease on their frozen-in ships. It was Xaia’s bold scheme that had broken the deadlock. The previous year she had modified a handful of her ships to give them broad, shallow-draft hulls, that did not get frozen in when the pack ice came but were lifted up above it. Even before this year’s spring equinox she had had the crews out hacking the ships free of the ice. Then teams of horses with thick gripping shoes nailed to their soles had dragged the ships across the frozen sea, and Zeelander warriors and gunfire fell on the ports of Brython, even before they emerged from their winter slumber.

Xaia knew that Manda was right about her hold on the crews. Xaia was co-Speaker of the Zeelander parliament with her spouse Thom Robell, the two of them scions of the greatest houses of Zeeland, with lineages reaching back to the Founders. Though they had their rivals in parliament, together she and Thom, united with their child Maxx, effectively ruled Zeeland, and everybody knew it. And after such a feat as the siege breaking, and not to mention the reward of Brythonic treasure on which the crews had gorged, the crews were hers for life.

‘You are a warrior queen, and a winning one,’ Manda said now. ‘Of course they will follow you. They followed you into Brython. They followed you here to Manhatun -’

‘I didn’t plan the storm that blew us off course,’ Xaia pointed out. ‘It was fortuitous that we ended up in Manhatun waters. And as an ally of Brython -’

‘Manhatun revoked that allegiance when Zeeland declared war on Brython,’ Teif said mildly.

‘As a former ally, she’s fair game. And rich.’

‘We didn’t need more loot,’ Teif said. ‘The holds are creaking as it is.’

Manda said, ‘You have to seize your chances, Teif, you old stay-at-home! Who was it urged us to pursue the Brythonic army after Lundin surrendered?’

Teif spoke pointedly to Xaia. ‘The crew will follow you to the ends of Earth II, Lady. That’s true. But they have hearts, and hearths, and families. Why, most of Manda’s warriors are mothers. And mostly they would like to follow you home. That’s what they say, when they think I can’t hear them.’ He eyed her. ‘And you, too, have duties there, now that the war is won.’

Xaia, restless, stood beside Manda and stared out at the burning port. ‘Duties!’

‘An empire to build across the Scatter, now that Brython is broken at last.’

‘I don’t see myself as much of a builder, Teif. Besides it’s Thom who wears the Fourteen Orbs.’

‘But when the war is won wife and husband rule as a team. That’s the way it’s always been done.’

In Zeeland it had become the custom for men to take senior political positions at home while women went off to wage war. There was a theory behind it, dating back to the Founders, that women, less prone to blood lust than men, would wage war only when necessary, for national advantage and not for glory. Xaia knew herself well enough to know what a crock that was.

‘And besides,’ Teif said, ‘there’s Maxx. You haven’t seen your son in years.’

Manda laughed. ‘He’ll be fourteen years old by now. What do you think, that he’ll have sprouted a grey beard like yours?’

‘Go home, Lady,’ Teif said patiently, ignoring Manda. ‘You have won Brython, the greatest nation in the world after Zeeland. What else is there worth conquering?’

On impulse Xaia sat down and pulled a sea chart towards her. She almost knocked over a wine flagon in doing so; Manda caught it with the reactions of a cat. ‘There’s a whole world! The Scatter is just a patch on the face of the planet. There are the continents, the Belt, the Frysby -’

Teif snorted. ‘The Frysby as you know is a plate of rusted sand, where even the Purple struggles to cling on at the coasts. And the Belt is a strip of land inhabited by relics and wild horses.’

Xaia studied the map. The Belt was a peculiar linear continent that stretched across the world’s latitudes, from north pole to south – much of it uninhabitable, of course, save for the equatorial regions, where it bounded the ocean which contained the Scatter. But Xaia’s sketchy map showed one prominent settlement, called Ararat. She stabbed her finger down. ‘Look at the distances. From here in Manhatun we are as close to Ararat as to Zeeland.’

Manda nodded. ‘We could sail there and back before the end of coolsummer.’

‘Ararat is the city established where the Founders landed. Don’t they have the Shuttle itself? Who knows what other Founder treasure we might find? And the rest of the Belt is pretty much unexplored ...’

Teif looked as if he was regretting starting the conversation. ‘What are you talking about? You can’t seriously be thinking of mounting some kind of expedition to the Belt! It’s world-spanning - and worthless.’

Manda snapped back, ‘But even the Brythonics have legends of the City of the Living Dead, to be found to the far north of the Belt. Alien treasure.’

Alien treasure. Xaia felt the hairs on her arms prickle, despite the smothering heat.

‘Or the far south, as others say,’ Teif said scornfully. ‘Anywhere out of reach, that’s where treasure always lies. Ask the scholars of the Four Universities, who have preserved much of the Founders’ lore. There’s precious little there about a City of the Living Dead. Nothing in the surveys the Founders made from orbit before they landed -’

‘But the Founders didn’t explore the whole world,’ Xaia said. ‘There’s no doubt the Dead existed, of course. We have the ruins on Little Jamaica to prove that, evidence in the Scatter itself. If we were to compare traditions among our own people with whatever we can extract from our Brythonic prisoners, and anything we could find out from Ararat -’

‘What traditions?’ Teif said, almost pleading. ‘Lady, there were no humans at all on this world four hundred years ago! Time enough to spin out lies, but -’

Xaia looked out over the length of her flagship, the iron plates set in a timber frame, much battered by war, much repaired. With the Brython war over, so was her freedom to act. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, she had a new goal - a last chance to achieve greatness for herself, before she was subsumed into her loving, combative relationship with her husband. ‘We can do this. We have the ships, the crew, hardened by experience. We have holds full of Brythonic guns and gunpowder. There can’t be a force on Earth II to match us.’

‘And we have time,’ Manda pointed out. ‘Long months of the coolsummer before the hotfall comes -’

‘And then the winter to freeze the marrow in our bones,’ Teif said. ‘You’re talking yourself into this, Lady. I know you – impulsive! Don’t listen to Manda. She always drives you on; she for one has nothing to go home to.’

Manda smiled dangerously.

‘If you follow this whim you could cost many lives, and dissipate everything you have achieved so far. You’re just putting off your own return,’ he said now, more boldly. ‘Putting off facing your proper responsibilities.’

‘Only you could speak to me like that,’ Xaia said calmly.

‘It’s my job to tell you the truth.’

‘I’ll send a ship back to tell Thom what I’m doing,’ Xaia said. ‘It’s a delay of a season, no more -’

‘The crews will be unhappy,’ he warned. ‘I’m serious, Lady. Some of them are already uncomfortable at having spilled so much blood in Brython. We’re all the Founders’ children. All descended from the same Fifteen. They fled a drowning Earth. They didn’t come here to bring war. If they could see us now -’

Xaia snorted. ‘The Founders were heroes. But they have been dead four hundred years. Listen to yourself, man. In another four hundred years we’ll probably be worshipping them like gods. I’m going to take a look at the inventory. Prepare a study, both of you, on the feasibility of reaching the Belt. I want a report before the sun goes down.’ She slammed her wine cup down on the map of the world, and, without looking back, walked out into the dense light of the overhead sun.

II

Come home, Xaia Windru.

The words floated unbidden into the head of Thom Robell as he walked with Proctor Chivian to the edge of the cliff by the sea. Thom’s aides walked discreetly beside them, bearing broad, light parasols. They were trailed by more Proctors and parliamentary officials. A little way away Maxx, Thom’s fourteen-year-old son, walked with Jan Stanndish, the elderly yet spry scholar who seemed to have put the idea of the Library into the Proctors’ heads. Thom kept his eye on Maxx, who had a habit of straying out of the shade of the parasols and into the searing sunlight.

Proctor Chivian took a breath of the air off the sea. About forty, a few years older than Thom, he was a big man, handsome, imposing in his white formal robes. His nostrils flared wide. ‘The air is refreshing. Almost cool.’

‘It blows in over the sea,’ Thom said. He stepped closer to the cliff edge. Here the grass grew sparse, a green import from Earth, and the native Purple had a chance to flourish, clumps of it like fungi. When he kicked it with his toe the clumps broke up into smaller units that rolled or blew away. ‘About the breeze - can you see, it’s forced up by the cliff face and arrives at us relatively cool. This is the most pleasant walk in the Speaker’s estate and as cool a place as you’ll find anywhere in a hotspring or hotfall. Certainly better than Orklund, a kilometre inland, even in the most robust stone buildings. But I still wouldn’t be out without a parasol.’ But if Xaia was here, she would no doubt be setting a disastrous example to Maxx by wandering boldly into the light.

Proctor Chivian was nothing if not an astute reader of people, and he seemed to sense that Thom was thinking of his wife. ‘I am sure the Lady Xaia’s expedition to the Belt will go as planned. And who knows what will be learned?’

Thom’s feelings had been a swirl of contradiction since a handful of Xaia’s ships had come home, bearing Brythonic hostages, booty, wounded, a few children born during the long campaign – and the news that Xaia was going on to the Belt. ‘Frankly I wish she chose home, and me and her son, over more adventure.’

‘We must cherish the Lady for her boldness,’ Chivian said smoothly. ‘And if I may say so boldness is what is required now, of all of us.’

Thom sighed. Once again, and none too subtly, the Proctor was wrenching the conversation around to the subject of his Library. ‘Your timing is poor, Proctor, I have to say, regarding our personal situation.’

The Proctor raised cultivated eyebrows. ‘But not regarding the Library project as a whole.’ He glanced up to the overhead sun, visible through the heavy fabric of the parasols. ‘Soon the hotspring will pass, and we will enter the long months of the coolsummer. Temperate warmth and twenty-four hours of daylight - ideal for making a start on the building work. Our schedules show that the vault may actually be ready before the hotfall to receive the Books, even if the aboveground building is barely started.’

‘Ah, the One Hundred and Eight Books of the Founders.’ A record of information dumped from a failing memory store brought from Earth, Books containing everything the Founders had believed was essential for their descendants to know about their world, and the history of the remote planet from which they had had to flee. Since then the Books had been patiently transcribed by generations of scholars at the Four Universities of Zeeland, under the control of the Proctors.

‘The Library will ensure the Founders’ wisdom is preserved forever, regardless of human failings or other calamities. What greater tribute could we pay to the Founders’ memory? What greater tragedy could there be than if those Books, our last link to the home world, were lost?’

‘Oh, spare me the sales pitch, Proctor,’ Thom snapped. ‘You know as well as I do that there are more ways of preserving the Books than exhausting the treasury’s coffers building a vault. You could simply make multiple copies, for a start.’

‘Ah, but who would verify the authenticity of those copies? Soon the true texts would be lost in a welter of error and fraud -’

‘And your own power, as holders of the unique texts, would be lost. Yes, yes.’ He began to grow angry, and wondered if the Proctor would dare make this kind of approach if Xaia were here, armour on her chest and pistol at her waist.

The Proctor backed off. ‘We are both realists. We both have personal motives to achieve. That is how the world works. But I am sincere. The Founders were heroes who crossed space from one world, dying, and came to another, this one, and their bravery gave us life – all of us, literally. They were greater than us -’

‘Not literally.’

‘Speaker?’

Like his wife, Thom was impatient with such blanket praise for the Founders, who had, after all, merely been human. ‘I mean, in physical size at least.’ He nodded at the parasol bearers, tall men and women with chests like barrels. ‘I’m told that if we could be transported to Earth, we would tower over the people there. If there are any survivors.’

‘The gravity on this world is less than Earth’s. We grow tall.’ The Proctor shrugged. ‘As sunflowers grow tall in the right soil. Nothing more.’

‘And we remember Earth in our bodies, our language. We share the names of their months -’

‘Folk wisdom counts for little, sir,’ the Proctor insisted with a scholarly sternness. ‘Not compared to what is recorded in the Books. Earth II lacks resources common on Earth, such as oil, coal, uranium, even metals to turn our poor iron swords into steel, like the Orbs around your neck. Where they crossed space, we sail in wooden ships and fire gunpowder weapons at each other. This is a more difficult world on which to build a high technological civilisation. If we are ever to achieve what the Founders did, if we are ever to scale such heights again – if we are ever to overcome the impoverishment of this world - we must build on their wisdom. And we must never forget them. The Library is a way, our way, to do that.’

‘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 rust-red 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 was 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 about 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.’

Teif groaned and slapped his forehead. Manda laughed. ‘You can’t be serious,’ Teif said.

‘We’ll send most of the ships home,’ Xaia said, thinking aloud. ‘That will keep your precious crews happy, Admiral Teif, or most of them. Keep back just enough to support an expedition to the north, tracking the coast. Pick the crew with backbone, who want some adventure. We can live off the land, and the sea. As long as it takes -’

There was a rumble, like thunder. The building, a massive stone structure, shook. Xaia saw a trickle of plaster dust fall down on the Shuttle’s pale surface, like snow.

Manda snapped, ‘What was that? An earthquake?’

Envoy Jeffares laughed. ‘We don’t have earthquakes on the Belt.’

Manda didn’t enjoy being laughed at. She grabbed him by the front of his jacket and bodily lifted him off the ground. ‘Then what, you pipsqueak?’

‘I’ll show you! Please …’

At a nod from Xaia, Manda put him down. He stumbled, coughed, straightened his clothing, and had Chan Hil lead them all out of the Shrine.

In the open air that thunderous rumble was much louder, and it was continuous, not spasmodic like a storm. Xaia saw Manda and Teif exchange uncertain glances; it sounded like they were in the middle of a war zone. Led by Chan, they made their way to the city’s curving outer wall, and climbed another stone stair to a viewing gallery set just below the parapet. And here, along with a line of citizens, they looked down on the plain outside the city.

The plain was empty no longer. A river of animals washed down from the north, a tremendous stampede that spanned the world from horizon to horizon. Xaia saw horses that dwarfed even the great war beasts of Zeeland and Brython, and long-legged cattle and sheep, and even birds, tremendous turkeys that ran two-legged with the rest. This must be the source of the dust cloud she had seen on the horizon some hours ago. The whole mixed-up herd was moving at a tremendous speed, and raised a cloud of dust that billowed into the air around the city.

Every so often, in the headlong rush, a beast would fall. There would be a perturbation in the flow as others stumbled around it, and then predators would descend, cats and dogs and things like rats, to tear the hapless fallen into bloody segments. But these breaks were momentary; the unending surge would pass on and over the scavenged and scavengers alike.

Jeffares yelled above the noise in Xaia’s ear. ‘I’m glad you got to see this, Speaker. These herds can take a day to pass.’

Teif leaned over. ‘Now I see why they aren’t out working those fields yet – and why the city’s shaped like a boat.’ He pointed. The herd was forced to part at the ‘prow’ of the city’s walls, and flowed around it, as a river would flow around a streamlined island of mud, Xaia thought. No wonder the walls were worn smooth, with the friction of those thousands of carcasses.

She turned to Chan. ‘What are they fleeing?’

‘In this season, the heat. Speaker, when the north polar lands face the sun they are baked to aridity; when the pole faces away from the sun it is plunged into a cold so deep every river freezes over. Facing such extremes, animals can only hibernate or migrate. Many herds cross the equator altogether. Animals brought here from Earth grew big quickly, and learned to run so fast because they have so far to go. It is only on the Belt, which stretches from pole to pole, that such migrations are possible. I have made a study of the migration patterns. When I was a boy my brother and I would try to count the individual animals passing in an hour … It was impossible.’

‘Such curiosity seems unusual here.’

He shrugged. ‘Life is easy in Ararat. People come for the Shuttle; wealth flows in, without us having to do anything much. But I am fascinated by the world we live in. I am a scholar, self-taught.’

‘That’s probably the best sort.’ An impulse hit her, another in a lifetime of impulses. ‘Keeper Chan, where we’re going we could use a guide. Want to come?’

He stared, eyes comically wide open. ‘To the Reef?’

‘And beyond.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course.’

‘You bet I’ll come.’

Another idiom she’d never heard before, but she could tell from his grin that his answer was positive.

Manda pointed down. ‘Look what they are doing now!’

Xaia leaned over the wall to see. Booms were being let down from the walls, bearing nets that dangled into the stampeding herds. Fleeing animals were soon tangled up, horses and cattle and sheep and even a few long-legged pigs, and the nets were drawn up with a groan of pulleys and winches.

‘And so we are fed for a few more months,’ Chan said. ‘In Ararat, even the food just comes flowing in, like the money.’

‘Follow me and life won’t be so easy. If I can promise you anything it’s that.’

He grinned again. ‘Good.’

The nets were carried through slots in the walls and dropped. The released animals, many suffering from broken limbs and crushed ribs, were hastily slaughtered and dragged away, and the booms let down into the stampede once more, like the traps of a giant angler.

IV

Maxx loved listening to Jan Stanndish talk. To watch the lively old man sketch his diagrams and equations on bits of slate, or just wave his arms in the air, miming his fantastic hypotheses into existence.

And Stanndish was happy to spend time with Maxx while he waited for his chance to deliver his briefing on the urgency of the Library project to Maxx’s father – waited and waited, for Thom was always distracted by more urgent affairs, including the return of the bulk of Xaia’s fleet, laden with enough booty to distort Zeeland’s economy, but without Xaia.

It was June now, close to the summer solstice and the height of coolsummer, the season when the world’s north pole pointed straight at the sun, which from Zeeland’s mid-latitude wheeled around the sky. Paradoxically it was not the hottest time of the year, despite the unending daylight; the sun climbed higher in the sky during the days of spring and autumn. The days were endless, literally, and full of light and warmth, and life bloomed. Stanndish walked with Maxx and pointed out the intricate dance of predator and prey, of eater and food, working at every scale from the insects living out their tiny dramas in rock crevices and dusty corners, to the hunting of wild rats and dogs out on the plains in the interior of Zeeland.

All living things from Earth, Stanndish said, including humans, still bore the imprint of the home world deep in their chemistry; all living things still longed for the release of terrestrial night, of hours of darkness each twenty-four-hour day. Well, the ‘sidereal day’ on Earth II, its rotation as compared to the distant stars, was more like thirty hours than twenty-four – but that was irrelevant, as on every point on the planet away from the equator there were long periods each year (eighty sidereal days at the latitude of Zeeland) where the sun never set, and in the winter an equally long period where it never rose.

‘Human bodies long for sleep. Especially the young,’ said Stanndish with a gentle envy. ‘When you get old it doesn’t matter so much. Anyhow we organise our societies to allow periods of rest, even when the sun doesn’t set, and wakefulness even when it doesn’t rise. Such rules are broken in times of war – as are many rules, of course. In the world of nature there are no such treaties, but nevertheless predators and prey are adapting: unconsciously working out ways to survive, the prey to avoid being eaten while asleep, the predators to find ways not to allow their food to escape while they sleep. We’re seeing much more elaborate interactions between species as a result. All this is behavioural, and we can expect it to continue for many generations until evolutionary pressures force these exiles from Earth to abandon their outmoded “body clocks” and adapt to the peculiar cycles of high-obliquity Earth II …’

Of course the differing lengths of the days made no apparent difference to the Purple, which sat in unregarded places in its reefs and clumps, dark and glistening.

If the endless days of the coolsummer were times of opportunity and danger for plants and animals, so they were for human beings too. Maxx watched, with a kind of hot envy, the elaborate games of flirting, seduction and bed-hopping going on among the courtiers here at Orklund, some of them only a year or two older than Maxx himself. The endless chill night of the coldwinter was the peak time for conception, but in the coolsummer hearts were stolen or broken, and unions made. But all the girls Maxx met - the younger daughters of the ministers, parliamentarians, merchants and philosophers who thronged the court - seemed determined to become warriors like Manda or his own mother, and their martial mannerisms scared him to his bones. Maybe he would end up like Jan Stanndish, who drifted through the seasons all but oblivious to the flurry and fluster of the human realm.

Of all Stanndish showed him of the world, it was the Purple that came to intrigue Maxx the most.

One day Stanndish took him out of town, beyond the patchwork of farms around Orklund and out to an uncultivated scrap of grassland. Here he dug an iron trowel into the ground. Up came handfuls of thick black soil, speckled with green and livid Purple.

‘This is the reality of our colonisation of Earth II. There was no soil like this on this planet before the Shuttle landed, not a scrap. Soil is a construct of earthly organisms, many of them entirely invisible, a kind of factory for life manufactured by life itself. Look – a worm, whose grandfather came in a box across the stars! Our deepest colonisers are microbes from Earth which are steadily working their way into the alien dirt. But our earthly presence is but a trace – for most of this world remains held by the native life, a stubborn biosphere even older than ours.’

‘But it’s like ours,’ Maxx said. ‘Isn’t that true? I learned it at school. It uses the same sort of chemicals as we use. Carbon and stuff …’

Stanndish smiled, showing gappy teeth. ‘Indeed. “Carbon and stuff”. Life here is based on carbon biochemistry, on a set of amino acids and proteins that overlaps ours, but is not identical. We believe life must wash between the stars, in the form of hardy spores. Life on Earth and on Earth II, which really aren’t so far apart on the scale of the Galaxy, both derive from some common origin, perhaps much further away. Separated for billions of years, when both were at quite primitive stages, they have long diverged in fundamental ways. Earth II life doesn’t use DNA coding, for instance, but stores its genetic data in RNA molecules.’

‘That’s why you can’t eat the Purple.’

‘Precisely. And why it can’t eat you.’

‘The Founders knew all about this, didn’t they? All we do is learn about what they knew already. I wish I was a Founder. I wish I had been born on Earth a thousand years ago.’

Stanndish smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t know. We’re still thinking here, still finding out – some of us, anyhow. Which is why we’ve discovered we need to build the Library in the first place … Something new we’ve learned about the world. Would you like me to tell you about something even the Founders never knew?’

‘Yes!’

He picked a clump of Purple from the soil on his palm. ‘Look at this stuff. What we call the Purple is actually the multicellular manifestation of the native biosphere. It’s purple because -’

‘Of the chemicals it uses to get energy from sunlight.’

‘Yes! Very good. Which is different from the chlorophyll green of Earth.’ He rubbed the clump gently, until it broke up into dusty spores, and, gently, he picked out a single spore on a fingertip. ‘Each of these spores is a little clump of cells.

‘What’s extraordinary about this, compared to the design of Earth life, is, first, that it’s almost autonomous – each Purple spore. Which means it can survive on its own, without other forms of life around it. Drop a single spore on a bare rock, in the sunlight, and it will busily extract the carbon and nitrogen and other materials it needs from the air and the rock. It’s as if each cell is an individual biosphere all to itself – everything you need for life packed into a single genome.

‘And the second extraordinary thing is that this is all the multicellular life we’ve found. Spores, just like this clump, together in a variety of forms, of more or less sophistication – stable reefs like stromatolites, or more advanced composite creatures something like slime molds. We’ve found similar forms as fossils dating back a billion years. That’s twice as old as similar entities on Earth, by the way, according to the Founders. This is an older world than Earth. But all of these, fundamentally, are assemblies of the spores, and can be broken back down into their individual parts. It’s extraordinary that you have a whole biosphere, at the multicellular level anyhow, which is actually a manifestation of a single organism.’

‘These are wonderful ideas.’

‘Yes, they are, Maxx, and I wish more people could appreciate that. But even after the emergence of multicellularity the trajectories of Earth and Earth II diverged. On Earth, it took another half-billion years for intelligent life to evolve – mammals like us. Here, technological intelligence emerged most immediately. Well, within a few tens of millions of years. But it vanished almost as quickly.’

‘You’re talking about the Dead.’

‘Yes. That’s why traces like the ruins on the island of Little Jamaica, and the Reef on the Belt, are so old.’

‘The Reef, where my mother is going.’

‘Yes.’ He clenched a bony fist. ‘I wish I could be with her! If only she had thought to stop and take some scientists on her scientific expedition …’

‘If she thought about such things she wouldn’t be doing it at all,’ Maxx said. ‘That’s what my dad says.’

‘Quite. Well, I envy her.’ He brushed the dirt from his palm back onto the ground, and checked the position of the sun. ‘We had better go. It’s time for Proctor Chivian’s daily audience with your father – and maybe a chance for me, at last, to deliver the briefing on the Library he asked for.’

‘We have to be patient,’ Maxx said solemnly. ‘My father’s very busy.’

‘Busy he may be, but he needs to make a decision soon on the Library, or it will be too late to break the ground this season …’ They began walking back to town and the parliament complex, the old man stiffly leaning on Maxx’s shoulder. ‘We do need the Library, you know. It isn’t just all about my calculations or the Proctor’s personal ambition. I do hope you understand that, Maxx.’

‘We have to be patient,’ Maxx repeated.

V

The day was already ending by the time Xaia and her party came upon the Reef.

Amid kilometres of arid crimson dust they found an oasis, a hollow surrounded by plates of uplifted rock, evidence of some ancient geological torment, the water pooling from some accidental aquifer. Green plants grew, grass and moss and straggling trees, and clumps of Purple sat passively amid the rocks.

Xaia allowed the caravan to break up. The great horses were unharnessed and led to the water. She and her aides and her fifty crew members, most of them women warriors, wearily laid down packs and loosened dust masks. Manda clambered up a ridge with a spyglass, to survey the landscape.

Xaia sought out Chan Hil. Teif followed her. Chan had taken off his boots, replacing them with soft camp sandals, and was unfolding his tent. Xaia had a chart prepared by the Cora’s navigator, a sketch map of this northerly section of the Belt, gradually being filled in. ‘We should be here,’ she said, pointing. ‘At the Reef. Here are the coordinates you gave us, latitude and longitude. Here is our calculation …’

‘I told you we should have sent out scouts,’ Teif rumbled.

‘We are close,’ Chan insisted. ‘Unless everything known at Ararat about the Reef is wrong.’ Two months after walking out of Ararat, Chan looked quite different, his skin sunburned and leathery, layers of puffy city fat worn away. But as they had approached the site where he promised the Reef would be found, he had grown steadily more nervous. They had soon discovered that nobody alive from Ararat had visited the Reef, and nobody knew for sure if old travellers’ records were correct. ‘We should be there.’

‘Wrong,’ growled Teif. ‘We shouldn’t be here at all.’

Xaia suppressed a sigh as he began his usual round of complaints.

The journey from Ararat had certainly been long and hard. Xaia had had two ships track the coast, while rotating parties hiked along the shore, and sometimes further inland. The country was mostly arid right down to the sea, but incised with huge, ancient valleys through which diminished rivers trickled. Every valley was a challenge to cross. Further inland the plain was broken by peculiar outcroppings of rock, layered and twisted, thrust out of the ground by antique geological violence and then eroded to fantastic forms.

The crews on land and sea shared the provisions they collected, fish and crustaceans from the sea, fresh water from the land. At first there were towns or villages where they could buy food - Xaia, not wishing to leave a trail of resentment along a track that she would have to retrace, had forbidden looting. But as they headed steadily north, the density of human settlements had grown sparser, and that option soon evaporated. Soon you barely even saw the glint of Earth green amid the ubiquitous purple. Xaia had grown up on a relatively small, relatively crowded island. Now she started to understand how few humans were on this planet, even after four centuries of expansion.

Meanwhile the crew, all islanders more used to the sea than ways of the land, were poor at hunting. Increasingly hungry, already exhausted from years of warfare, the crews had tired quickly, and progress had been doggedly slow.

All the way Teif had kept up a slow barrage of complaints. ‘Over and over again I’ve said this. It’s already August, Xaia. Already the sun is setting again, the coolsummer ending -’

‘Oh, shut up, Teif. You pour the utterly obvious into my ear, day after day.’

‘This jaunt could kill us all if we’re not careful, Lady. You don’t like what I say because it’s the voice of your own conscience.’

‘The return trip will be easier,’ she insisted. ‘Down the long river.’ For many days they had tracked a mighty river that had flowed down the spine of the continent, before turning to wash through a huge delta system and out to sea. ‘We’ll raft!’

‘Not through those rapids – not me.’

Exasperated, frustrated, Xaia turned again on Chan. ‘Well, if this addled boy hadn’t got his coordinates wrong we wouldn’t be having this argument in the first place.’

‘He didn’t get it wrong.’ Manda had come back from the ridge, breathing hard, her spyglass folded up in her hand. ‘It’s just over there. Come see.’

Following Manda, Xaia, Teif and Chan hiked to the crest of the ridge. Here Manda pointed to a ledge of some blackish rock that protruded from worn, folded strata – and a cluster of lights that grew brighter as the daylight faded.

Chan, growing excited, pointed at the black stratum. ‘That is the Reef, I think … Is that a fence around it?’

Xaia snatched the spyglass from Manda’s hand to see better. All she saw was that black stripe in the rock. ‘Is that it?’

Manda said, peering at the lights, ‘That’s a village. Not much, just a bunch of shacks and tents. As dusty and rust-coloured as the ground and the rocks. Hard to see in the daylight, until the lamps started glowing in the dusk.’

Xaia, through the glass, saw something suspended over the village, glimmering in the last light of the sun, a square panel on a kind of stalk. ‘I can see where they get their power from.’

Manda nodded. ‘A solar panel.’

‘Founder technology.’ Xaia lowered the glass, looking out over the darkling plain, the huddle of lights. ‘Well, it will keep until morning.’ Which was only a few hours away, so short were the nights this soon after the solstice.

Teif nodded. ‘I’ll post a guard.’

After a few hours’ sleep Xaia prepared to cross the last couple of kilometres to the Reef. She was accompanied by Chen, Manda, Teif, and a dozen warriors. Teif, never trustful, had them watched by scouts positioned behind the ridge by the oasis.

As they neared the village, a man came out to meet them, riding high on a massive, slow-walking horse. Peering beyond him, Xaia saw a few people in the village itself, a woman standing with her arms defiantly folded, ragged-looking children peeking from behind doors. Fields had been cut into the dusty ground, and pigs and scrawny goats wandered, untethered. Judging from the number of shacks and lean-tos there could be no more than a hundred people living here.

Teif said, ‘I wonder how they overwinter. Cellars, I imagine.’ He growled at Chan, ‘Why didn’t you tell us this lot was here?’

‘I didn’t know,’ Chan insisted. ‘I told you. Nobody from Ararat has been here as long as I’ve been alive, longer.’

‘Give thanks for the idleness of Ararat, Teif,’ Xaia said, grinning. ‘If the secrets of this place had been picked bare by generations of scholars, there would be nothing left for us to discover, would there?’

As the villager approached Xaia saw he man wore a uniform of some black cloth laced with silver – but the uniform was shabby and patched, and didn’t quite fit his lanky frame. And the horse, huge though it was, was no warhorse like Xaia’s party’s but a draught animal, heavy-set and plodding. Still he came alone, Xaia noted with some respect, facing a party escorted by several heavily-armed warriors.

The man unrolled a kind of rope ladder and climbed down from his huge horse. He patted its muzzle, reaching up to do it, and left it grazing at a sparse stand of grass. He walked up to Xaia, clearly identifying her as the leader. ‘Welcome. My name is Ossay Lange. I am the leader of this place, this scientific colony devoted to the study of the Reef, which we call Reeftown.’

Xaia thought she recognised his accent as a distorted form of the dialect spoken in Ararat. He was perhaps fifty, though his face was so weather-beaten it was hard to tell; he wore his greying hair long and tied back in a bun. He was missing an eye, she saw; a ball of what looked like steel, grey and moist, sat in one ruined socket.

Xaia introduced herself as a leader of Zeeland.

Chan challenged Lange. ‘What scientific colony? I’m from Ararat. I work in the Shuttle Shrine. I know the curators, the scholars. There’s no record of such a colony, or even a recent expedition to the Reef.’

‘Boy, my grandfather led that expedition. His name was Heyney Fredrik Lange. Look it up when you go back home. This was his uniform. Surely you recognise it.’

Chan shrugged. ‘Heyney Fredrik was, in fact, the first to discover the Reef, or rather to rediscover it after the Founders’ initial survey with their automatic flying machines.’

‘But he never came back to report it.’

Lange said, ‘He suffered vicissitudes. Several of his companions died before he got here. And when he did reach the Reef he found a small settlement, a forerunner of Reeftown here. The people were drawn here by the aquifer. What they were doing so far north in the first place, nobody knows. He settled with them, intending to stay and survey the Reef for a season or two.’

‘But he never left.’

Lange shrugged. ‘He found happiness here. Formed a family. He wasn’t sure he could bring his children back across the wastes to Ararat.’ He glanced across at the broken strata. ‘Besides, the Reef is here, not back at Ararat. He was a scholar. He devoted his life to a study of the Reef. And when he died his son continued the work – my father. And when he died -’

‘And in all these years,’ Manda said sceptically, ‘nobody came to visit. And none of you tried to get back to Ararat to report on whatever it is you have learned.’

‘Some have come,’ Lange said defiantly. ‘Explorers, merchants blown off course in their ships, wrecked and looking for water – and bandits.’ His face set hard, and that eerie steel eye glinted. ‘Most paid their tolls, however.’

‘Tolls?’ Teif shook his great head. ‘You set tolls? Your grandfather must have had the genes of one of those Shuttle keepers back at Ararat. And, having come here, proved just as grasping and indolent.’

Xaia touched his arm. ‘He’s just a fool, Teif,’ she murmured. ‘Him and his fathers. Look at this place. Perhaps he’s got a heap of obsolete money piled up in some hole in the ground, from all the tolls he’s collected. What can he spend it on? Don’t waste your anger.’

Lange didn’t seem to have noticed Teif’s insults. ‘My grandfather was the first scholar ever to have come here. Even the Founders never set foot here, only sent their flying drones over, and they never travelled further to the north.’

Xaia frowned. ‘Are you sure? Does nobody live north of here?’

‘Of course not. The seasons are too harsh. And there is other evidence.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the village. ‘Sometimes we have – disputes. Fallings-out between brothers. You know the sort of thing. Then one or the other will walk off into exile.’ He waved a hand at the dusty panorama. ‘East, west, south – if they go that way, generally we hear from them again, even if it’s just a grovelling apology and a plea to be let back. But of those who went north, no trace has ever been seen again. Nobody lives up there – nobody can live there.’

Xaia glared at him. ‘If the Founders never came this way, how can there be stories about a City of the Living Dead to the far north?’

Lange said dismissively, ‘Whatever you’ve heard it’s all a legend – lies spun out for the credulous in inns and taverns. Travellers’ tales. This is the farthest north any human can travel. And this,’ he said, waving a hand at the Reef, ‘is the only trace left by the Dead on all this world, save for those ramshackle ruins on Little Jamaica.’

Manda glared at him. ‘He’s the liar. Talking up this place, his own importance.’

Lange watched them, expectant, calculating. ‘You would be welcome in my home, Lady. My wife makes a fine cactus tea which -’

‘No,’ Xaia said briskly, growing angry. ‘We came to see yon Reef. The sooner we do that the sooner we can move on.’ She strode that way.

Abandoning his horse, Lange hurried after her. ‘Madam, the question of the toll -’

‘Teif, make him rich beyond his grandfather’s dreams. We can afford it.’

Glowering his reluctance, Teif took fistfuls of Brythonic jewellery from his pouch and ladled them into Lange’s grasping hands.

Lange led them through the straggling wire that fenced off the Reef from non-payers of the toll.

The Reef itself was a shelf, protruding from a layered wall of rock that towered above their heads. The day was hot, and it was a relief to step underneath, and into its shade.

You could see at a glance that this particular stratum was different from the familiar crimson sandstone above and below it. Maybe a metre thick, it was a mottled black and grey, and seemed to be made of some harder material, for it protruded where the softer sandstone had worn away. And Xaia could see where the sandstone had been purposefully cut away above one part of the black shelf, leaving a kind of shallow cave only maybe half a metre high; a crude wooden ladder led up to it.

Some of that protruding black ledge had broken off, and a thin scree of pebbles, flakes and sheets lay at the foot of the cliff. Xaia inspected this rubble. She picked up one fragment, like a slate the size of her palm, with a strange, almost regular pentagonal pattern pressed into it.

Teif looked around, dissatisfied. ‘We busted our balls for this? This is a City of the Living Dead?’

Lange, daring or foolhardy, laughed at him. ‘My friend – what did you expect to find after a billion years? Buildings and streets preserved as if frozen in ice? No – this is all that time leaves behind, crumpled and crushed and changed, thousands of years of history squashed down as if crushed between the pages of a book. And if not for a fortuitous flood, none of this might have been preserved at all.’

‘A flood?’ Teif glanced around sceptically at the arid sandstone plain. ‘Here?’

‘Oh, yes. My friend, the spot on which you stand has lain deep beneath the surface of a sea – not once, but many times …’

Xaia struggled to follow.

On Earth II, as on Earth, if rock was above water it eroded away, turning to pebbles and sand that washed down the sluggish rivers. But below water rock formed. On the beds of seas and lakes, all that eroded silt piled up, compressing under its own weight until the sand solidified to sandstone. Layers set down in different epochs showed as strata, subtly different bands in the depth of the rock.

‘The sedimentary rocks are laid down as flat as the oceans that bear them,’ Lange said. ‘But with time there are quakes and volcanic uplifts, and even the shifting of continents, though that’s not a significant factor on Earth II. The layers may be raised up above the air again, broken, buckled and bent.’ Lange walked around, miming these processes. Xaia imagined he waited all this life for such moments, a chance to show off the family knowledge to passing strangers.

‘And somewhere in that process,’ Xaia said, studying the sample in her hand, ‘between the setting down of one sandstone layer and the next – this occurred.’

‘We think there was a river delta,’ Lange said. ‘Right here. Oh, the river itself has long since shifted its course, but you can still see traces of its valley in the oldest rocks. And on that delta, in its fertile soils, they built a city. We can’t imagine how it looked. But it was a city of buildings of stone and metal, and must have been not entirely unlike human cities on Earth II, or Earth. All this in a flash – geologically speaking, in just millennia, after aeons of emptiness.

‘But the city was flooded. Inundated, suddenly.’

‘How?’ Manda snapped. ‘By its river?’

‘No,’ Lange said. ‘By the sea. Just as on Earth – the sea level rose, suddenly and catastrophically, and covered the tallest buildings. Whoever lived here had to flee or die. But, thanks to the sudden flooding, the city was more or less preserved, sitting there on what had suddenly become a sea bed. The river silt still sifted down, covering the streets and buildings, piling up until it caved in roofs and collapsed cellars. But the city was entombed, you see. And when in the aeons that followed more sandstone formed above, billions and billions of tonnes of it pressing down, the city layer was compressed, from hundreds of metres thick, perhaps, to – well, to what you see today. Millions of years are recorded in these mighty layers – and a mere few millennia compresses to less than the height of a human child. As the planet convulsed in later ages, that vast coffin was lifted up into the light and broken open.’

Manda, to Xaia’s surprise, seemed to be imaginatively caught by this. ‘And yet you can still see what it was like, can you?’

He winked at her, with his one good eye. ‘Come and see for yourself.’

He led the way up the ladder, to the cave cut on the sandstone above the city stratum. They had to crawl to get inside. Xaia could see pick marks in the roof above her – and small pockmarks, deeper than the rest, where something appeared to be lodged. Lamps, perhaps? But if they were lamps they weren’t lit.

Lange let them explore with hands and eyes, their sight adjusting to the cave’s shadows. ‘We’ve found modified landscapes in other locations nearby. “Modified landscapes” - that was my grandfather’s term for it. We think there are traces of something like farms, marked by something like ploughing, but in a kind of cross-cross pattern. But this was the heart of the city itself ...’

The black stone had been chipped away to leave big chunks of a brownish rock set in a rough square, and more massive pieces of rubble further away – all this trapped in the lower stratum, an ossified ruin. It was obviously the remains of a wall. And Teif swore softly. He had found what looked like the mouth of a pipe, neatly circular – or the remains of it; it was a rusted trace in the rock.

Lange was grinning at them. ‘Can you see? This was once a substantial building. My grandfather found it by tracing foundations dug deep into the rock layers below – that’s how to build on the soft ground of a delta, you know, by setting concrete rafts on deep foundations. When it came down it scattered big blocks of rubble all around. Dig up one of these blocks and it would crumble in your hand. With enough time the concrete rots, the cement leached away by acid in the water, but leaving the sand and gravel in place. You see the pipework? We’ve also found what look like wires and cables. Road surfaces. Rusted lumps that could be the remains of crushed iron vehicles. And so on.

‘Here are the real treasures.’ From the shelves in the wall behind him, he produced artefacts that he passed from hand to hand. Xaia became fascinated as she handled these things. A disc of what was clearly glass might have been the bottom of a bottle; it was opaque, milky. A light sheet felt like plastic, but it was discoloured as if burned. Lange said that most plastics would have turned into blobs of oil, and seeped away. Most precious of all was an intricate artefact like a mechanical clock, but wrought in a glittering yellow metal.

‘That’s fool’s gold,’ Lange said. ‘Which iron turns into, given time and the right conditions. What was this, a clock, an astronomical calculator? Whatever, it’s now like a replica of itself …

‘All of this, this high culture, is a billion years old. So my father dated it from his stratigraphy. Intelligence blossomed here almost as soon as animals were crawling around in the mud – not like Earth! And then, within a few thousand years – sploosh, the ocean covered it, gone forever.’ He glanced out of the cave at the bare plain. ‘We can’t know what else was here. Maybe the plain was covered in cities … Chance preserved only this one. And certainly my grandfather believed this was a planet-covering civilisation. He said you could see changes in the biological structures below and above this stratum, changes in the atmospheric content. They changed everything about their planet, mixed it all up and moved it all around.’

‘Just a few thousand years,’ Chan said. ‘But that was enough time for them to change the world forever – to empty out the lodes of fossil fuels and metal ores and the rest, natural treasures never renewed on this small, static world.’

‘But there’s no trace of the people,’ Xaia said. ‘The Dead. Whoever built this place.’

‘Nothing we can identify.’ Lange took back the pieces reverently and stowed them back on their shelves. ‘Worth the price of admission, Lady?’

Xaia glanced at the others. ‘Enough for now. Let’s get out of here.’

Once they were outside Lange’s fence she gathered her aides around her. ‘We need to decide what to do about this stuff, and where to go from here.’

Teif snorted. ‘As to the last – home!’

Chan said, ‘This scholarly resource, this Reef, can’t be allowed to moulder away like this. It sounds as if only the grandfather did any substantial work. We must reclaim this for Ararat – on your behalf, Lady,’ he said, stammering the addendum.

‘Well, I agree. We must open up this odd little nest -’

‘Open up? Nest?’ Lange spoke shrilly. He was visibly angry, his face red, a vein pulsing in his forehead.

Manda and the warriors of the guard touched their weapons.

Lange backed away, fumbling for something under his grandfather’s black shirt. He ranted, ‘I knew this day would come! Some rapacious predator like you, Lady Xaia, would come and take away my family’s birthright – and without due academic credit, no doubt -’

Xaia sighed. ‘Generations in this wilderness have bequeathed an addled brain. He’s not armed, is he, Manda?’

‘Not as far as I could see.’

‘Then restrain him.’

But as Manda stepped forward Lange produced a white box from beneath his coat. ‘Recognise this? More Founder technology, scavenged from the Shuttle like the solar cells and brought here by my grandfather …’

Manda paused, uncertain.

Xaia called, ‘What are you doing, Lange? What is that box?’

‘I always knew this day would come!’ Tears were streaming from the socket which contained his steel eye. ‘And I planned for it, even as a young man I planned, and prepared. I dug those holes in the cave roof – I planted the charges – go, all of you, just go now to your ships, or I will destroy it all!’

Manda lunged forward - but even she wasn’t fast enough to stop Lange closing a switch on the box. She threw him to the ground.

And a dull crump echoed from the cliff face.

Xaia turned. Dust billowed out of the cave over the city stratum, and chunks of the black rock wheeled almost gracefully in the air. Above the collapsed cave a small landslip was starting, burying what had been there before. The charges Lange had evidently set in the cave roof had gone off.

Teif growled, ‘What a crime! To destroy a relic a billion years old, all out of selfish pique.’

Chan laughed.

Teif turned on him. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘No!’ Chan quailed back. ‘It’s just – this man has shown what a fool he is, how much less of a man than his grandfather. Yes, he’s destroyed that one dig site. But I’ll wager the city itself, the black stratum, goes on for kilometres, deeper into the rock. Sealed in the dark as it has been since the day it submerged, safe in the sandstone. All we have to do is bring the resources here to dig it out.’

Teif looked as if he was struggling to understand. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ He turned to Xaia. ‘So you found your treasure. Black rock and bits of discoloured glass. Is that enough for your vanity? Can we go home now?’

Manda was sitting on Lange, pinning his arms. He struggled, and turned his head to spit at Xaia. ‘Yes, go home, Lady, you glory-seeking buffoon with your pack of thug-bitches. Go home in failure!’ He began to hawk, trying to spit again.

Manda grabbed his jaw, turned his head towards her, and dug her fingers into his damaged eye socket. Thick blood spurted, and the man howled. When she held up her fist it contained a bloody sphere, and his face was left a ruin.

Chan retched.

Teif yelled, ‘What are you doing, woman?’

‘Proving he’s a liar,’ Manda said.

Xaia hurried over and, mindless of the blood and mucus, took the eye and examined it in the sunlight. ‘It is an Orb. Teif, look! A globe of the world in the Founders’ steel – here is the Belt, here the Scatter. Just like the others.’

Manda grinned. ‘I thought I recognised the profile of Zeeland, printed on his fake eyeball.’

Xaia said, ‘I always wondered why there were only fourteen Orbs, when every tradition has it there were fifteen Founders.’ She glanced at her companions. ‘You realise what this means.’

Teif said, awed, ‘You hold an Orb. You hold the authority of the Founders – as much as your husband.’

‘And it proves that Lange was lying,’ Manda said, still sitting on the whimpering man. ‘Nobody would have brought an artefact as precious as an Orb out of Ararat. Everybody knows it took generations before the Zeeland families collected the other Orbs, and longer still until they were united enough to join them into the necklace of the Fourteen … The only way an Orb could have been lost here is if a Founder came this way.’

Xaia nodded. ‘And if she or he came this far, they would surely have gone further.’

Teif, alarmed, stood directly before her and stared into her eyes. ‘Lady, don’t even think about it. The season is already late. If we go on, we will be caught by the winter.’

Xaia looked at him, and laughed, and closed her fingers around the Orb. ‘Throw that fool back to his family. Break camp. We’re going back to the coast. And in the morning, we go on.’

Manda howled like a dog. ‘North?’

‘North!’

VI

‘Earth II is unstable.’

Thom Robell paced the streets of Orklund, aides at his heels, Proctor Chivian at his side. It was September, close to the autumn equinox, and the weather was pleasant, temperate, though clouds covered the sky, and a light rain made the pavements of Thom’s home city gleam.

At this time of year, with both the world’s poles looking away from the sun, the roll of the planet delivered day and night of equal lengths, about fifteen hours each. It was said that this time of year was the closest the climate of Earth II came to emulating that of old Earth itself. But everybody knew this was the last of the good weather. In a month the snow would start to fall, and in just two months the sun would disappear altogether, for eighty long days, and the coldwinter would set in. So, all over the city, people were preparing, bottling food, laying in fuel for fires, strengthening the stone walls of their houses, preparing the cellars dug into the ground where the soil would retain some of the warmth of summer even in the winter’s depths. It was an important time of the year, essential for survival. It was too late even to think about starting the Proctor’s absurd Library project; everybody was too busy for that. Winter was coming.

And Xaia was not yet home.

Thom tried to focus. ‘“Earth II is unstable.” What can that possibly mean, Proctor?’

The Proctor sternly matched Thom pace for pace. Thom sensed that he wasn’t going to give up today. Perhaps he had given himself a private target of the equinox to convince the Speaker to cooperate. ‘It comes from the work of Jan Stanndish, Speaker. Who has cultivated your son, at my suggestion, in the hope of finding a way to your ear. I’m sorry if that seems cynical – we are desperate, Speaker. I don’t use that word lightly.’

‘Because the world is unstable?’

‘Yes! That is Stanndish’s conclusion, the outcome of page upon page of mathematics – I will not pretend that I follow it all. Some say Stanndish is the most brilliant scholar we have produced since the Founders’ generations. And what he has been analysing is the motion of Earth II itself.’

Thom frowned. ‘What is there to understand? Earth II spins like a top on its axis. And it follows a circular orbit around its sun. The planet’s spin axis is tipped over so that it lies in the plane of the orbit. At the solstices one pole or another points directly at the sun, and half the world is light, and half dark -’

‘Almost. The orbit is an ellipse – low eccentricity, not quite a circle. And the axis is a few degrees away from the plane of the ecliptic -’

‘Into the sea with your nitpicking! How it is unstable, man?’

‘If it were alone in this solar system, if there were no other planets, Earth II would be perfectly stable, yes. But it is not alone. You are aware that further from the sun orbit two giant worlds, balls of gas we call Seba and Halivah, off in the dark.’ He glanced at the cloudy sky. ‘They are remote, but massive, and their strong gravity plucks at Earth II. You have a child. Did he ever play with spinning tops? If you poke a top with your finger -’

‘It wobbles.’

‘Yes. And that, we think, is what is going to happen to Earth II – and soon, given Stanndish’s integration of a series of astronomical observations dating back to the Founders themselves. Probably not this year, maybe not this decade – within a century, certainly. It is an excursion that seems to occur once every few tens of thousands of years. Stanndish says there is probably a periodicity to it, but -’

Thom marched on ever faster, growing angry, not wanting to hear any of this. ‘An excursion? I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. A wobble? How can a planet wobble?’

The Proctor held his hand level. ‘The rotation axis will tip up, away from the plane of the ecliptic.’ He tilted up his hand. ‘No longer will the summer pole point directly at the sun. We don’t know how far this excursion might be. We do know that everything about the cycle of the seasons will change.’

Thom tried to imagine it. ‘No coldwinter. No coolsummer. Will it be more as Earth itself was?’

‘Perhaps. That might be the end state. But it’s the transition that concerns us, Speaker. For example we know that ice collected at the poles of Earth – huge caps of it, kilometres thick. Sea levels were lowered drastically. That can’t happen on Earth II, not today -’

‘Because any ice that forms in coldwinter melts each hotsummer.’

‘Yes. But if the axis tips ... And even before then, as the global distributions of ice, water and water vapour adjust we must expect extreme climatic events. Storms. Droughts and floods, failures of rainfall …

‘And, even worse than that, the tipping planet will shudder. There will be earthquakes and volcanoes. Tsunamis, perhaps, triggered by undersea quakes. The crust of our quiescent world is so thick that any volcano, punching through, will be violent, and will hurl billions of tonnes of rock and ash into the air. We can expect acid rain. A darkness, a global shadow perhaps lasting years.’

Thom stopped pacing at last. He tried to imagine a huge wave washing across the islands of the Scatter. ‘Dear God,’ he said quietly. ‘I never heard of events like this in accounts of Earth.’

‘Earth was different, in many ways. Crucially it had a moon, a massive moon. That helped stabilise its spin. We have no moon.’

‘Why is it only now that I am learning of this?’

‘We try to be responsible. We don’t wish to cause panic. With respect, I have been trying to tell you of this for some months -’

‘The Founders themselves must have known this was a danger. They surely knew far more about the dynamics of planets than even your tame genius Jan Stanndish.’

‘Yes. We have inferred, from hints in the chronicles, that there was a split among the inhabitants of the Ark when they reached Earth II. Some thought it would be uninhabitable because of the axial tilt. It’s said that our Founders were only a fraction of the crew who chose to stay, rather than go on in the Ark.’

‘Go on where? … Never mind.’

‘Perhaps they believed there would be plenty of time to deal with any tipping. Perhaps they believed their descendants would be able to stabilise the world. Well, if they thought that, they were wrong; after just four centuries, this is the danger we face. And we have no Ark to escape on.’

‘Then what will become of us? Is this the end of mankind on Earth II?’

‘Oh, we don’t think so. We’re a pretty resilient species. But we think it may be the end of civilisation. And if we do fall we may be slow to rise again. You know that this world has been emptied of its oil and metal ores by those who went before us.’

‘The Dead.’

‘Yes. How, then, can our descendants recover? And even if they do, even if there are once more cities and ships and scholars and Speakers, what will they know of where they came from? If the tale of the Founders survives at all, it will seem a legend.’

And Thom understood. ‘Ah. And this is why you want to build the Library.’

‘Yes. So that our memory of our true origin will never be lost. Now do you see why it’s so urgent we do this?’

‘But it’s such an immense project, Proctor. We are a society that must work hard merely to stay alive – you can see that all around you today – we don’t have the spare resources for grandiose monuments.’ Xaia, Xaia – if only she was here! She was not wonderfully wise, and nor was Thom, but together, they seemed to make the right judgements … ‘Proctor, are you sure this axial excursion is going to happen? And that the effects will be as dire as you say?’

‘Oh, yes. We can prove it. It’s happened before. Not once but many times. You can see it in the rocks. Your wife told us she was making for a formation called the Reef, didn’t she? According to the Founders’ own records the Reef is the remains of a city, a Dead city, buried in the rock. You could see where the city had been – a thousand years of history, of building - and then the marks of the inundation - and then nothing, Speaker, nothing but layer upon layer of rock and the remains of burrowing purple things. That city never recovered. Even the people who built it have vanished, Speaker. Maybe they could not recover their culture, as all the metals and fuels were gone. Maybe another tilt wiped them out altogether. Or maybe they simply left this world for a better one, as the Founders left Earth.

‘We owe it to our descendants that cities like Orklund do not suffer the same fate.’ He grabbed Thom’s arm. ‘There’s still time to start, even this year. I know you fear for your wife. But she’s not coming home this year, if she ever comes home at all. Make your decision, Speaker. Let me build my Library. Let me save civilisation.’

VII

His name, he said, was Eykyn. Some kind of grease covered his face, to keep out the wind, and his hair was a nest of ropy lanks. Bundled up in what looked like layers of rabbit fur, it was impossible to tell how old he was.

Eykyn’s home was a mound, already covered thick with snow. The entrance was a dark hole without even a proper door, just a plug of wood and grass that could be forced in, a bung to keep out the cold. It was clear that the main part of the dwelling was deep underground, deep enough that the frost could not reach.

Xaia, Teif, Manda and Chan faced Eykyn, cold to the bones, wary, exhausted. The ground was already frozen, encased under layers of snow. They couldn’t survive out here. But that door was like a mouth, Xaia thought uneasily, a mouth in the earth that would swallow them all up. She felt deeply reluctant to enter.

Eykyn smiled, showing blackened, gappy teeth. ‘You are welcome,’ he said, gesturing. His accent was something like that of Ararat, much thicker, distorted. ‘People are scattered pretty thin up here, and hunker down in the coldfall. We have food.’

Teif, his cloak pulled around him, scowled. ‘What kind of food?’

‘Rabbit. Other stuff. You’ll see.’

‘And you’ll share it with us, will you?’ Manda said. ‘A bunch of people who just walked up out of nowhere.’

‘People are scattered thin,’ he said again. ‘Have to help each other. Otherwise none survive.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Manda said. Lacking Teif’s mass, the cold had got to her more and she was shivering. ‘Living like animals in the hole in the ground. What kind of people are they?’

‘Living people,’ Chan said, his own teeth chattering. ‘Surviving. It’s a rational strategy. Even given the depths of coldwinter, the season is so brief that the frost can’t penetrate too deeply into the ground.’

‘I say we leave this ball of grease to his pit,’ Manda said. ‘I don’t like the look of him.’

‘I don’t like the look of you,’ Teif said. ‘I don’t see what choice we have.’

‘We build our own shelter. Blocks of snow. We don’t need him.’

‘The sun’s nearly gone,’ Chan said. ‘We left it too late.’

Xaia looked up at a lid of cloud. A flurry of snow came in on the wind, the flakes needle-sharp where they hit her cheeks.

Chan was right. He usually was. They had left it too late. It was October now, they were deep into the coldfall, and the days seemed to get markedly shorter, one after the next. The ships were having to stand further off the coast because of the gathering pack ice, and Teif had lost several crew to frostbite and hypothermia already. To show leadership Xaia had undertaken the last few scouting trips into the land’s frozen interior herself, she and her lieutenants, searching for evidence of the City of the Living Dead. But today, not for the first time, they had got their timing wrong, and as the night’s cold clamped down they had got themselves stranded far from the coast.

And here was this man, this Eykyn, offering them shelter.

She murmured. ‘We’re all armed. We’re none of us fools. We take what we need from this man; we take no risks. All right?’

‘I don’t like it,’ Manda said again.

‘We have no choice,’ Chan said bluntly.

‘Discussion over,’ Xaia snapped. She led the way forward.

Eykyn’s grin widened, and he stuck out his hand. She forced herself to shake it. Then she followed him into the mouth-like door of his shelter.

Eykyn was shorter than she was, short and round, maybe an adaptation to the cold. She had to duck to follow him down the sharply-sloping tunnel.

The walls were frozen and slick to the touch. The only light came from scattered lamps in alcoves dug into the wall, lamps that burned something smoky and stinking, perhaps animal fat. Down she clambered, deeper and deeper. It was like a nightmare, the enclosing walls and roof, the hunched form of the man going before her, the harsh breaths of her companions as they followed, all of it visible only in shards and shadowed glimpses.

She had no idea how deep they had descended before the tunnel opened out into a wider chamber. She stepped out onto a floor of hard-trampled earth – trampled but not frozen. Her companions followed her, Teif straightening stiffly.

More oil lamps revealed a dome-shaped chamber, a dozen paces across, maybe more. The ceiling was coated with a kind of thatch. A fire, banked up, glowed in the middle of the floor. Possessions were scattered around, heaps of skin, animal bones. More people huddled warily by the far wall, men, women, children like balls of fur with wide eyes; the light was too uncertain to be able to see clearly.

Eykyn stood proudly.

Teif flared his broad nostrils. ‘Stinks like a toilet.’

‘You’re none too fragrant yourself,’ Xaia murmured.

Manda was loosening her outer layer of clothing. ‘It’s not cold.’

‘I told you,’ Chan said. ‘Go deep enough and it never gets too cold – or too hot. Look – see the tree roots in that wall? Trees from Earth are adapting to survive, growing deep roots down beneath the frost, so their sap flows through the winter.’ He glanced around. ‘There are elements of design. The thatch must soak up the fire’s smoke. And the fire itself is banked and air-starved so it burns slowly. See the way the lamps flicker? There must be passages for the circulation of the air …’

Xaia saw a heap of bones in one corner, stacked as if precious. Big bones, maybe from horse or cattle.

Eykyn gestured at heaps of straw. ‘Summer grass. Beds. Eat, sleep, drink.’ He beckoned, and a couple of the older children came over with earthen plates piled with meat. One brighter-looking little girl was almost pretty, under the grease, and her hair was plaited. She smiled at Xaia.

Xaia took a plate from the girl and bit into a chunk of meat. ‘Rabbit. It tastes fresh. I mean, not salted or dried.’

‘So it is,’ Eykyn said.

Teif growled, ‘How can you find fresh rabbit at this time of year?’

‘We know where they hibernate. Big burrows in the ground.’ He pointed. ‘We have tunnels. We don’t even go up top. And we have the flesh of the horses and cattle from the herds that pass at the equinoxes. Dried, salted. We have dried fruit, wheat, the harvest from the spring and autumn.’

‘How many are you?’ Teif growled.

‘Not many. You can see.’

‘Why live here?’ Manda said. ‘Why raise your children in a hole in the ground?’

‘Our forefathers came here to get away from the cities. This is our land, our place. Our way.’

‘It is a remarkable feat of adaptation,’ Chan said.

Eykyn eyed Xaia. ‘You’re far from home.’

‘I’m seeking the City of the Living Dead.’

Eykyn shrugged.

Xaia said, ‘If it exists, it’s north of here. Do you know how far north?’

‘Couldn’t say. Never been there. Never met anybody who has.’

‘Do you believe it exists?’

‘Couldn’t say.’

Chan asked, ‘How many live like this, further north yet?’

‘Couldn’t say. None, so far as I know.’

Teif asked, ‘Do you think it’s worth going on, hunting the City?’

He smiled that broken smile. ‘If you do, come back this way. We’ll make you welcome.’ He held out the meat plates. ‘Look, do you want this or not?’

So they ate, and washed their faces in the meltwater that trickled from a pipe in the wall, and, self-conscious, used the corner of the dwelling marked out as a lavatory. The natives stayed away, though the children brought them more food.

To some unspoken signal, Eykyn and his people retreated to their own heaps of straw and fur.

It was a relief for Xaia to spread out her cloak on her pile of dry summer straw, and ease her boots off and tend to her feet, rubbing the sore patches and work at calluses and blisters; mercifully she was still free of frostbite. She found she couldn’t bear to have the rabbit-fur blankets Eykyn had given them anywhere near her body. She made a pile of her own clothes and burrowed into it.

The whole chamber was like a nest, full of breaths, sighs, farts, the rustling of straw as adults and children tried to get comfortable. Perhaps she slept.

‘They are like animals.’

The whisper, soft in her ear, startled her awake. There was a mass in the bed with her, warm, heavy. She reached for her blade, under the heaped jacket she was using as a pillow.

A hand touched her bare shoulder, a callused palm. ‘It’s all right.’

‘Manda? What the hell?’

Manda kneaded her shoulder, her hand strong. She was behind Xaia, and snuggled closer; Xaia felt the pressure of her belly against her back, her knees in the crook of her own. ‘I was cold. Couldn’t bear those piss-soaked furs.’

‘No.’ Xaia laughed softly. ‘Nor I. Stay, then.’

Manda’s hand slid down Xaia’s arm, caressing.

Xaia came even wider awake. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Do you ever feel as if you are the only human beings in the world? You and I, Xaia. Listen to them.’ Soft snores, a scuffling as if somebody was humping somebody else. ‘They are animals. Like pigs. Even Teif. They turn into animals when they sleep. But not us. We don’t need them.’ Her hand slid over Xaia’s waist.

Xaia, thrilled, uneasy, didn’t want her to stop. ‘Need them? I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need Thom. Not any more. Not after this. You have an Orb, the Orb you took from Ossay Lange. A Founder’s Orb, the fifteenth, as valid as the fourteen that dangle from Thom’s fat neck. And you didn’t just have it handed to you by your uncle, like Thom. You found your Orb yourself, you risked your own life -’

‘And spent the lives of others.’

‘You can rule in your own right. We don’t need these others, Thom grunting like a pig over you.’ Her hand slid over Xaia’s breast, hard-palmed, almost like a man’s, and Xaia’s body shuddered with shock and desire. ‘We can rule Zeeland, you and I, Zeeland and the Scatter and the Belt and the rest of the world, forever -’ The word ended in a throaty gurgle. She convulsed, her hand gripping Xaia’s flesh so hard it hurt.

And Xaia felt a seeping of warm fluid, smelled an unmistakeable iron tang. Blood. Suddenly there was shouting, screaming.

Xaia grabbed her knife and rolled out of her bed, coming to her feet in a tangle of clothing. The light was dim. People moved everywhere, adults, children. She saw Chan huddled against a wall, a sword held in both hands before him. Before her, Manda, beautiful Manda, lay on her back with her throat laid open by a livid slash, her eyes on Xaia, fading. Over Manda’s prone body stood the girl, the smiling kid with the plaits who had brought Xaia the plate of fresh rabbit meat. She held a bloody knife in her hand.

And Teif stood in the middle of the chamber, huge, wrathful. Blood seeped from his own belly. Eykyn’s people stood off from him, wary. He swung his sword - and removed the head of Manda’s killer with a single swipe. The pretty head fell onto Manda’s belly, and the body convulsed, blood spurting from the arteries at the slim neck before falling.

The others closed in, the adults and the older children, all armed with clubs and knives. Xaia and Teif pushed through to stand before Chan by the wall, and Xaia scrabbled for her firearm. The detonations of the gunshots were ear-numbingly loud in the enclosed space, and their blades cut satisfyingly into human flesh. Xaia ignored the ache in her healing left arm, just as Teif showed no reaction to the gash in his belly.

The fight didn’t last long.

When it was done, Teif and Xaia laboured to pile the corpses at the centre of the chamber, Teif at the shoulders and Xaia grabbing feet and legs. The floor was slippery with blood, and spilled guts. Xaia was aware that Teif was grunting, his own wound giving him trouble. She felt stunned at the loss of Manda, unable to react, to think further.

They had spared a couple of the women, the smaller children. They huddled against a wall, clutching furs, eyes wide and fearful.

‘Told you so,’ Teif said as they worked.

‘So you did, old man. I won’t question you again.’

Chan, trembling, was in shock too. He seemed as afraid of Teif and Xaia as of dead Eykyn’s people. ‘I never saw people die that way. You were outnumbered. They way you killed them all – it was a frenzy.’

‘They are butchers,’ Teif said. ‘We are warriors. Once they lost the element of surprise they were doomed.’

Chan was nodding. ‘Butchers, yes. That’s the right word. There are human bones, piled up in the corner with the others. I took a look. You can see the butchery marks. They sit here in their hole in the ground, eking out their summer supplies, their scavenging of hibernating animals. And, when chance wills it, they take the opportunity to feast on a supplement, on passing humans whose flesh they take like that of the animals that migrate at the equinoxes. No wonder Lange’s cousins exiled from the Reef never came home!’ He glanced at the frightened children who huddled against their mothers. ‘Maybe they feed on their own, when times are particularly hard. Their own children as emergency larders. But with you three, they bit down on gristle.’

‘I wonder what the Founders would think,’ Teif said. ‘If they could see this, see what they made, when they brought their children here.’

Xaia glanced at Manda’s body, covered by her own cloak. She had learned more of Manda, the true meaning of her ferocious loyalty, her true ambitions, in Manda’s last few seconds of life than in all the years before. No wonder Manda had always driven Xaia on to feats of ever greater daring and ambition. She would never know how it might have worked out, one way or another, if Manda had lived - and become a rival to Thom in Xaia’s heart. Well, it was a story cut short, of ambition and lust and maybe love thwarted. Maybe it was better that way.

She glanced at the cowering women and children. ‘Do you think they can survive? All the men are dead.’

Chan shrugged. ‘I know you’re planning to take their supplies, their bread and jerky -’

‘Who cares?’ Teif asked. They had finished their corpse-piling he stood, breathing hard, holding his great right hand over his wound. ‘Let them eat their husbands and fathers. As for us, we stay until morning – and then we go, Xaia. Back to the ships, and to the south, and home. We’ve come to the end of the world, and all we’ve found here is decadence and savagery.’

‘But the City,’ Xaia murmured. ‘It may still exist.’ She looked at Manda’s corpse. ‘And it’s already cost me so much. In the morning we go on.’

‘North? How far, Xaia? How long? What would it take to convince you the quest is futile? When you are dying yourself, or freezing to death? I can’t let you put yourself at such risk again. Not while I’m still able to save you.’

Teil’s loyalty moved her. But she said, ‘We go on. In the morning … But first we’ll take care of Manda.’

‘We can’t bury her,’ Chan said. ‘The ground is like iron.’

‘We’ll take her back to the ship,’ Teif said. ‘Bury her at sea. She’d have appreciated that, I think, even though she was a lousy sailor.’ Then he slumped against a wall of the chamber. His sword propped against his legs, he kneaded his belly and grimaced in pain, his face grey. But he wouldn’t let Chan or Xaia see the wound.

VIII

It was November by the time Proctor Chivian’s surveyors had chosen the optimal site for their Library of the Founders. It was inland, so away from the coast and any evidence of oceanic incursions on the past, and on the side of a hill, far from the flood plain of the nearest river, and far from the craggy slopes of Zeeland’s principal mountain, a volcano that had been long dormant but which, Chivian assured Thom, might waken when the world tilted and shook. ‘Nowhere is entirely safe,’ Chivian said. ‘Not on this world. But this vault, dug deep into the bedrock, will be as safe a repository as possible for the Founders’ wisdom.’

Thom grunted. A thin sleet was falling from a leaden grey sky. He and the Proctor stood on the hillside above the construction site. From here he looked down a sweeping valley to the huddled rooftops of Orklund, and saw the glimmer of the sea beyond, with the murky glow of the cloud-masked sun low on the horizon. At this time of year, the sun never climbed much higher, and soon it would not rise at all.

But even now, in late November, as the world headed into the depths of the coldwinter, the Proctor had insisted the work proceed. So teams of workers were kicking aside resistant clumps of Purple, and hacking at the ground, stripping back the turf and the scree to expose the bedrock that lay beneath. The monument they would erect here, the Proctor had assured Thom, would be visible from throughout Orklund. But much labour remained to be completed before that monument’s capstone was put in place.

Thom said now, ‘It’s not the challenges facing future generations that trouble me, Proctor, but the difficulties I’m imposing on this one. That rock is basaltic. It will be a huge task to dig as deep into it as you claim you need.’

‘We have explosives,’ the Proctor murmured, unperturbed. ‘And plenty of spare muscle.’

He was referring to the Proctors’ proposals to ship over indentured labour from defeated Brython. It would be another hugely unpopular step for Thom to take, and a further darkening of the relationship between Zeeland and Brython. And all without any input, let alone approval, from Xaia. But by now Thom knew what the Proctor was thinking: that if Xaia had not come home by now, this deep into the winter, the chances were she never would, and was therefore no longer a factor in the Proctor’s calculations about the future.

The Proctor said now, ‘Grasp the goal, Speaker. Visualise the end goal. This won’t be just a Library; there will be a whole town here, of scholars and farmers and merchants and builders, all that is needed to support a great academic institution, and a network of roads to link it to Orklund and beyond. I’m told there is a proposal to name a wing of the Library after me. I am quite sure they will name the new city for you, as a memorial to your visionary leadership that will last for all time - even through the next precession event.’

Or I will be condemned as the greatest fool since the Landfall, Thom thought gloomily. Thom hadn’t felt in control of events since the Proctor’s party had turned up at the parliament halls so many months ago with his outlandish proposal. If only Xaia were here.

Come home, Xaia Windru! Come home!

IX

The crew had to be forced to enter the City of the Living Dead. Only Xaia herself went willingly, and Chan – and Teif, because he hadn’t left Xaia’s side since the nest of Eykyn, even though he loudly despised the inhuman place.

‘Inhuman, yes,’ he said as once again he walked with Xaia through the City. ‘The very light that bathes us is inhuman.’ A violet glow coming from all around them, it cast no shadows. ‘And human cities stay still; they don’t swim around you. There’s nothing here for us. There never was …’

‘It has some similarities with our cities,’ Xaia protested, and she quoted Chan’s analyses back at him. ‘It’s finite, for one thing, with an edge. Different within than without. It has internal structure that Chan is trying to map -’

Teif swung a leg at a structure like a low, softly glowing wall. It broke up into clouds of violet spores. ‘It’s just Purple! Just a heaping-up of weeds …’ But the gentle action had hurt him, and his hand went to his lower belly.

Xaia was concerned for him. But he wouldn’t even admit the wound’s existence. There was nothing she could do for him, because there was nothing she was allowed to do.

He was right, in some ways, about the City of the Living Dead, however.

At least they had found it, however enigmatic it was. She had achieved her goal. She supposed history would remember that about her, if it forgot everything else – always assuming she survived to tell the tale.

After the nest of Eykyn they had returned to the coast and pressed on with their dual journey, the ships at sea and the scouting parties on land, heading ever further north. At last there had come a day when the sun hadn’t shown at all, and there had only been a vague, reluctant glow on the horizon at high noon. This was several days ahead of the sun’s disappearance at the latitudes of Orklund and Ararat, Chan said, itself a measure of how far north they had travelled. The cold bit hard, turning the ground to rock and the sea to a plain of pack ice. Soon the ships could no longer follow, for fear of being caught in the ice and crushed. So Xaia had ordered the construction of sleds, with runners made from polished ship beams, and harnesses for the huge warhorses that had endured this journey for months in the ships’ holds. And on they had pressed, with sleds laden with tents and food and fuel dragged by horses with iron grips nailed to their hooves, and when the horses had failed and died and been butchered, still a remnant of the party had pressed on over the frozen land, the sleds dragged by human muscle alone.

It had been an epic journey; nobody would deny that. But in the end, it was perhaps only Xaia herself who had continued to believe – until at last the forward scouts had spotted the violet glow on the northern horizon.

Presumably the vanished race called the Dead had been nothing like humans, to have built such a city as like this. Even the lighting was exotic. There were no lamps or fires. The City itself glowed, the streets and the structures that lined them all shining a faint violet. Often, when the skies were clear, this strange, subtly shifting glow was answered by the flapping of auroras far above, as if the star-strewn sky was a mirror.

And there was an endless mobility. It was a ‘city’ of streets and blocks and structures, like buildings or like trees, some of which grew and changed as you watched them. Chan said there were patterns everywhere in the City, in the branches of the tree-like structures and in how they interconnected, and even in the layout of the ‘streets’ – if that was the right word, if these broad open avenues had a function anything like the streets in Orklund. Every day the scholar busily mapped what he could, walking the length of the City accompanied by crew holding up lamps. And every day, he said, he found the City changed, on every scale from the smallest to its largest. It had complexity and structure that changed in space and in time, he said, scribbling his maps and charts. He longed for the ‘computers’ spoken of by the Founders, marvellous machines that could have analysed such complexity at the touch of a button.

And Teif seemed to be right. All of it was made of Purple, the ubiquitous native weed that cost human farmers and gardeners so much energy in eradication. Kick a wall, push your hand through the side of a ‘building’, and the substance crumbled down to elusive spore-like structures, blowing away on the wind from the north, perhaps to settle on some other part of the City, a subtle and endless rebuilding.

‘Yes, it really is just Purple,’ Chan said at the end of the day, when Xaia and Teif and the scouts had retreated to the igloo village they had constructed on the City’s edge. ‘I say “just”. The shining is a new phenomenon, though there have been reports of bioluminescent clumps before, found in caves and so forth.’

Xaia said, ‘Some of the crew don’t believe the City actually glows by its own light, but is just reflecting the aurora’s glare.’

Chan snorted. ‘That’s easily disproved. Just bring a handful of the stuff into an igloo and douse the lamps. That’s typical of the untrained mind, that it’s incapable even of observing something that defies its own prejudices. In fact I suspect it may be the other way around. That the city’s evolving patterns generate a kind of electrical activity, which in turn interacts with the aurora …’

Xaia shook her head. ‘I never heard of Purple behaving this way before.’

Chan shrugged. ‘It could be that’s because humans always treated Purple as just a weed, to be cleared out of the way so we could graze our cattle and plant our beans. It’s said that the Founders’ Shuttle pilots deliberately aimed for the densest Purple reef they could see, on the modern site of Ararat, in order to cushion their landing. We have smashed up the Purple from the first Landfall. It’s only here, far beyond the reach of humans, that it can flourish in these complex communal forms.’

‘Complex how?’ Xaia growled.

Chan produced a notebook, and tried to show Xaia his calculations. ‘I’m doing my best, Lady. In the end, I fear, we’ll have to come back here with a fully equipped expedition. I can only map the changing structure at the gross physical level. I’ve only a handful of measurements of the changing electrical fields, for instance. It’s like trying to understand what’s going on in a human brain by counting its folds. But still, I’ve tried doing raw counts of element types, and then mapped their distribution in space and time, and then done correlations on the clusters that analysis uncovered, and then correlations on them …’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not like a city. It is more like a brain – I believe. Or a machine for storing thoughts. And the patterns I’m detecting, flowing and changing, are like the traces of an ongoing conversation.’

Xaia tried to understand. ‘And did the Dead build this?’

‘No,’ Chan said. ‘Yes. I mean – I don’t believe this is an artefact of the Dead, Lady. I believe this is the Dead. Or all that’s left of them. Look, the biosphere of Earth II is not like Earth’s, in that there is only one kind of multicelled organism, above a substrate of microbe analogues. Some of us in Ararat, and I know there are scholars in the Four Universities of Orklund who hold similar views, believe that such an arrangement is unnatural. Artificial.’

Xaia said, ‘You believe the Dead created this.’

‘Yes! They rebuilt their entire biosphere, from the microbial level up.’

‘Why?’

‘To store the best of themselves – all that’s left of them. After a billion years, their memories and philosophies, everything that defines them, are stored in the endless conversations of their living cities – cities that might have covered the planet’s land surface before humans came.’

‘And why in this form?’

‘For robustness. No spore of Purple is immortal; but the Purple itself is, as long as the planet lasts, the sun shines. And the patterns stored in the City cannot be lost, as long as the City itself survives in some form. Break it down and it just grows back. They had to plan for calamity, for repeated and disastrous events, just as we must if we wish to survive on this world. They must have decided it was futile just to rebuild another city of the human type, like the one we found in the Reef -’

Xaia was struggling to follow this. ‘What “repeated and disastrous events”?’

Chan stared. ‘The axial tipping. You mean you don’t know?’

And Xaia learned for the first time of the coming axial excursion, and the damage it was likely to cause to the human world.

Xaia dug into her pocket and found the Orb Manda had taken from Ossay Lange’s bloody eye socket. She twisted it this way and that, pointing its polar axis towards the igloo’s central fire’s glow, and away from it. ‘If the scholars at Ararat know about this, so must ours,’ she said to Teif. ‘Why was I never told? Why not our predecessors as Speaker?’

Teif snorted. ‘Those brain-cases always have their own agenda. A juicy bit of knowledge like this gives you power. You don’t want to waste it by revealing it to the rabble, or their leaders.’

Chan said, ‘There might be nobler motives. Maybe they thought there would be panic of this was made known.’

Xaia asked, ‘Is this common knowledge in Ararat?’

‘Oh, yes. Ask anybody.’

‘And is there panic?’

Chan shrugged. ‘You’ve been to Ararat. We tend not to get worked up.’

On impulse Xaia got to her feet, ducking to avoid the igloo’s low ice ceiling, and pushed her way out through the skins that covered the entrance. The sky was clear, the stars like shreds of bone. Under the cold auroral glow the City of the Living Dead was bathed in its own violet light. She thought she could hear a soft sifting noise as its billions of living components, each almost too small for the eye to see, sorted through their endlessly repeating configurations.

Light seamed across the sky: a meteorite, whose billion-year career ended in a spark of light.

Teif came staggering out after her. He carried a heap of coats, but he stumbled and dropped them on the iron-hard ice. Chan followed, and grabbed a coat for himself and draped another over Xaia. Teif murmured, his breath frosting, ‘Wear a coat, Lady, the cold will kill you …’ He slumped to his knees. Chan knelt over him and tried to haul his great bulk back against the wall of the igloo, and covered him with the remaining coats.

Xaia faced the City, and held the Orb in fingers turning numb with the cold. ‘I feel – betrayed. My ancestors travelled light years to come here. I travelled around the world, a journey just as hard. I came for treasure. But there is no treasure here, is there?’

Chan said, ‘Only the frozen conversation of a culture a billion years dead. Is that not treasure?’

‘No wonder the stories of this place are so fragmentary. Even the Founders must have failed to understand what they observed.

‘Well, here’s what I understand. There is nothing here that cares anything for me or mine. The planet itself is going to try to shrug us off. And when it does, this Purple, this heaped-up decaying stuff, will crawl out of refuges like this and take back the land we have cleared, the ruins of all we have built. And as for the Founders – look at us, with our wooden ships and our clumsy guns; look at us, still merely retracing their footsteps. What a disappointment we would be to them. I imagine they would wish they had never succeeded in reaching Earth II in the first place. Well, here’s what I say to the Founders.’

She flung the Founders’ Orb at the City, as hard as she could.

Teif gasped, ‘My Lady … no …’ His words broke up in a coughing fit.

Chan, cradling him, became frantic. ‘Lady Xaia – he is bleeding again.’

Xaia knelt down and thrust her hand under the coats. The whole of Teif’s right side was damp, with blood that was quickly freezing. ‘We have to get you inside,’ she murmured.

‘No bloody point,’ Teif gasped. ‘You’ll only be lugging me out in the morning, stiff and stinking.’ He gripped her arm, but with fading strength. ‘Go home, Lady. Promise me that.’

‘I will. Tomorrow, we turn back. Good Teif, you did your duty – more than I deserved.’

‘And when you get to Orklund, when you get back, there’s a woman in the Garment District, Bella her name is … Find her for me, Lady. Tell her … tell her the money I owe her …’

‘Hush now,’ she murmured, and put a bloody finger on his lips. His eyes were already closing, frosting over. ‘Come on,’ she said to Chan. ‘Let’s get him inside before we all freeze in place.’

X

‘The last of the frost,’ said Thom, as he walked with Proctor Chivian over the hillside above the nascent Library.

It was a bright day, the sun climbing high in the sky as the world spun towards its spring equinox, and even the workers in the Library’s foundation trenches looked cheerful. Thom himself, not given to elaborate show, felt rather splendid in his bright ceremonial robes, where the crimson thread caught the sunlight.

He glanced around to see the ceremonial party, scholars and Proctors and representatives of the various parliamentary parties, picking their way across the short, sheep-cropped grass. And there was Maxx, fifteen now and spectacularly taller after a year’s growth, walking alongside old Jan Stanndish, as ever the two of them talking and gesturing, blind to everything but the speculations they shared. All of them had clambered out of the city of Orklund to this hillside to commemorate the deposition of the Hundred and Eight Books of the Founders in the Library’s central vault – the kernel of the place, already planted securely underground, even though the rest of the structure had barely been begun. The Books themselves were set on a pallet on a hillside, an unspectacular pile ready for internment – exposed to the elements, and yet, as far as Thom was aware, the only copies of these precious, ancient texts in existence.

The footprints they left in the frost were vanishing fast.

‘Indeed, the last frost of the winter,’ said Proctor Chivian. ‘One can always tell.’ He took a deep breath of air, opening up his wide nostrils.

Thom himself could smell the scents of sap, of growing grass, of spring. ‘The seasons change so quickly around the equinox, from coldspring to the torrid heat of hotspring, just a few weeks. It always seems to catch me by surprise.’

‘So it should,’ Proctor Chivian said. ‘We humans evolved as tropical animals on Earth – a planet, I remind you, of moderate seasonality. It’s said that even on Earth those who lived at high latitudes felt surprised every year at the abrupt changes of length of the day -’

‘This is Earth II. Not Earth. Why speak of a planet none of us will ever see?’

Thom whirled, shocked by the familiar yet half-forgotten voice. ‘Xaia? …’

And there she was, dressed in drab, scuffed armour. Warriors stood by her, all women, many of them apparently carrying injuries, all weather-beaten, sunburned or with the characteristic scars of frostbite on their faces – or both. Two of her crew carried torches, their burning an anomalous sight in the bright morning light. Xaia stood beside the Books, casually leaning with one gloved hand on the pile.

Thom felt a yearning to run to her, a physical compulsion like a steel cable yanking at his guts. Yet with Proctor Chivian standing stiff at his side, with the Library project splayed over the hillside, he could not move.

Maxx had no such inhibitions. He broke away from Jan Stanndish and ran to his mother. ‘Mum! Mum!’ They embraced, though Xaia seemed shocked how much he had grown in the years she’d been away. ‘You’re back! But where are the others, Manda and Teif?’

‘Dead, and dead,’ she said softly. ‘Both gave their lives to save mine – or to help me achieve my goals. Too many died on the way back – including those who drowned as we tried to run the rapids on the Belt’s greatest river, a perilous course Teif warned me against. Why, I only brought one ship back, the Cora; the others I didn’t sent home are wrecked or sunk or cannibalised … Oh, it’s been an expensive trip. And if you want its story,’ she said to Thom and the Proctor, ‘ask Chan Hil, scholar of Ararat, who is writing it all down even now. That will be a story worth reading,’ she said, glancing with contempt at the Books piled beside her. ‘A story of our world, of our achievements. Not the dead past.’

The rest of the parliamentarians and scholars had caught up now, and were forming a loose horseshoe around the Books, and Xaia, Thom and the Proctor. The parliamentarians muttered, agitated by Xaia’s challenging tone. Even the workers in their foundation trenches, aware that something was going on, were leaning on their shovels and watching.

Suddenly this was a sensation, Thom saw, the incident exploding into a turning point in his relationship with Xaia, and their sharing of power. He touched the Orbs at his neck, caught himself doing it, and dropped his hand. ‘I looked out for you. I missed you every day.’

‘I’m sure you did.’ She sounded sincere.

‘And, unable to consult you, I put off as many decisions as I could.’

‘But not this one.’ She gestured at the Library workings.

Thom felt anger simmer. ‘You show up like this after years away … A decision had to be made. The Proctor and others made a good case.’

‘About the world’s axis tipping? Yes, I learned all about that too.’

‘You should have come home, after Brython. You should not have stayed away.’

‘I did not “stay away”. I went somewhere else.’

‘Yes,’ the Proctor sneered. ‘You searched for the City of the Living Dead. A fool in pursuit of a fantasy.’

There was a stir among the parliamentarians, but Xaia, to Thom’s relief, did not react.

‘And what did you find, Lady, in the wastes of the north?’

‘I found the City,’ she said, evoking a gasp from her audience. ‘I found the Dead – what is left of them. Frozen thoughts in mounds of Purple. That’s all. They wait for us to pass from this world, like other blights of the past, so they can fill up our abandoned fields and cities with their Purple heapings. In the meantime they dream of the glory days of a billion years ago.

‘But we are the same.’ Abruptly she grabbed at Thom’s necklace of Orbs; when the thread gave he felt a sharp burn at the back of his neck. ‘Here is our most precious artefact, our definition of power. Toys given to us by the Founders. Here, when we could be building our own cities for the future, we dig holes in the ground to preserve the Founders’ words.

‘I say, it’s time to forget the Founders. Forget the Dead, and the billions who died on the Earth. Their memory crushes us, as if we are no more than moss on the feet of a statue. 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.’

‘Your arrogance is so overweening it is absurd.’

She grinned. ‘Quite possibly.’ And she reached out, took a torch from one of the bearers and lowered it to the Books of the Founders.

‘No!’ Chivian lunged forward and would have flung himself on the Books, but Xaia’s warriors fielded him easily.

The Books of the Founders, old and dry, caught alight immediately.

Thom was appalled at the act, yet something dark in him surged with joy at the destruction, and at Chivian’s devastated reaction. ‘So it is true,’ he said maliciously. ‘These really are the only copies. You foolish old men.’

Jan Stanndish came marching forward, waving a spindly fist. ‘What have you done, Lady? This is a crime that will ring down the generations.’

‘On the contrary. I have set those generations free. We are orphans. We are rejected by this planet. To our ancestors we were a goal to be fulfilled, worthless in ourselves. Well, no more; let us build a world for ourselves. And we will start here in Zeeland, by consolidating the empire I have sketched out in the Scatter and on the Belt, as far north as any human has ever travelled. And wherever we will go we will eradicate emblems of the useless past, beginning with the Shuttle in Ararat.’

The Proctor, trembling, managed to sneer. ‘Such petty ambitions. And when the axis tip comes?’

‘We will survive, and build again.’ She held up her arms. ‘Let it come! Let it cleanse us of the rot of the past!’

‘There will be war over this!’ Chivian roared, struggling.

Some of the parliamentarians ran over to remonstrate with him. Others took the Proctors’ side against Xaia. Feeble punches were thrown.

To Thom’s astonishment, young Maxx forced himself into the middle of the crowd. ‘No! No fighting. Think of the Founders. The Books are gone, there’s nothing to be done about that. Whatever lies ahead now, we must work together. That’s what the Founders would have wanted. Let a healing peace be the Founders’ last gift to us …’

Xaia came to Thom. ‘He’s turning out to be a smart kid.’

‘Wiser than either of us,’ he said ruefully. They stood together, not quite touching, not quite apart. ‘I think we need some healing peace of our own.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And in my case, a change of clothes and a damn good bath.’

‘And then what? Will you start planning your statue?’

‘Oh, I wasn’t serious about that. Well, not much. Enough mythology; we’ve too much to do … You were close to old Teif, weren’t you? Did you ever hear of a woman called Bella, in the Garment District? …’

She linked his arm, and they walked away from the burning Books and the squabbling scholars and politicians, across the dewy grass towards the town. With a shout their son followed them.

Earth III

I

At the foot of the ladder Vala paused, one slender hand on an iron rung, her face raised up to the tower’s curving wall and the hulk of the Star above their heads. ‘Oh, Brod – what are we doing? This is the Eye - the holiest place in all the world!’ And she murmured a prayer to the Sim Controllers.

She had been hesitant all the way, as the two of them had climbed up from the Eighth Temple – hesitant, Brod knew, but excited too, thrilled on some deep level to be joining in this illicit adventure. She wouldn’t have been here if she hadn’t wanted to come, hadn’t wanted to be with him.

He dared to take her hand, touching her for the very first time, and she shuddered as if from the shock of it. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said gently. ‘We’ve come this far. Let’s just climb to the top of this wall, and we’ll be closer than anybody else in the whole world to the Star -’

‘Which is why it’s so holy! Which is why we mustn’t do this!’

‘But if we’re quick, we can be back in the Colloquy sessions before anybody’s even missed us. Who would ever know?’

‘Nobody keeps secrets from the Sim Controllers.’

‘Well, I hope that’s not true -’

She seemed genuinely shocked. ‘Brod!’

He had strayed too far into heresy for her, and he murmured reassuring noises. Brod had grown up with the theology of the Designers and Controllers, those strange silent figures who had designed the world and created all the people in it, and who watched everything unfold from behind invisible glass walls in the sky. Brod supposed he believed. It made more sense to him than the competing idea you heard bandied about in the taverns sometimes, that people had come to this world from – somewhere else. But what was real beyond doubt was the woman before him, her soft scent, and the way the breeze off the ocean caught the pale, milky wrap she wore, and the loose strands of red hair. She cast virtually no shadow, for on this island called the Navel, uniquely on all of Earth III, the Star was directly overhead – always was, and always would be.

Vala was twenty Great Years old, a couple of Greats younger than Brod himself, and, as a daughter of the Speaker of Speakers and a Sapphire, he knew she was a hothouse flower. Yet he had lusted for her from the moment he set eyes on her, as he never had for the world-weary whores of Port Wilson, or any of the women he’d talked into bed during his raucous careering around the island nations of the Middle Ocean. The fact that as a Sapphire she was destined to spend her life celibate made her all the more achingly desirable.

And he knew, under all the dancing around and the meaningless words, that she felt the same about him.

He kept trying. ‘Just a little further and we’ll be there. Imagine the stories you can tell the other Sapphires -’

‘Oh, them.’ She pulled a face. Then her mood seemed to switch, abruptly. ‘I’ll do it!’ And she grabbed the rungs and began to climb.

This was so sudden and impulsive she left him standing in surprise - and he wondered who was seducing who. But he scurried up the ladder after her, relishing the glimpses of a pert behind through the robe’s billowing folds.

They soon came to the top of the ladder, and climbed onto a walkway, of roughened wooden slats set in basalt blocks. Brod had never been to the Navel before this Colloquy; he knew nothing of its treasures. Now he saw that the top of this cylindrical tower enclosed a kind of shallow dish perhaps a hundred paces across, a bowl coated by what looked like a thin, black layer of Slime.

And they weren’t alone up here. Bulky animals were set out along one radius of the circular dish – he counted twenty of them, spaced a few paces apart. They were working their way around the bowl, the row of them sweeping around the dish like a clock hand; he saw that the outermost had to move faster than those nearer the centre to keep the line straight. And they were scraping up the Slime layer as they went, exposing a surface that gleamed like the wing of a mirror-bird. Big brutes, each coated in thick brown-black hair, snuffling and snorting and their squat legs working, he recognised them as tractors, with their big gouging jaws and spade-like multiple tails, used in the fields around Port Wilson for ploughing the fields and digging ditches. Whatever else he’d expected to find up here, it hadn’t been these mundane beasts! And it must have been quite a challenge, he thought, to get them up here in the first place.

‘You can see the whole island from here,’ Vala said, turning around, her gown billowing about her. ‘And the other islands beyond.’

Brod glanced around indifferently. The Navel was a scrap of land in a sea like a burnished shield, one of a chain that stretched off to the west. There was really nothing special about the Navel – save that it sat precisely at Substellar, making it the holiest point on the whole planet, and the reason why tens of thousands of pilgrims made their way here every Great Year. So, despite the Navel’s smallness, isolation and poor harbours, the warehouses, hotels, restaurants, palaces and churches that served an industry of holiness lapped right up to the walls of this central complex of temples and towers.

A bell chimed, marking the end of another eight-hour watch.

‘We ought to be getting back,’ Vala said nervously. ‘My brother will be looking for me.’

That was Khilli, a brute of a man and even more possessive than her holy father. ‘Oh, but we only just got here. I don’t even understand what I’m looking at. What is this place?’

‘We call it the Eye of the Master Controller.’ She pointed. ‘People built the outer wall, and this walkway. But the core of the tower and the great dish is Substrate.’ A structure put in place before humans ever came here – or a piece of engineered reality underlying the ephemeral Sim forms, depending on your faith. ‘And at the end of every Great Year, when the tithe fleets call, we have the tractors peel off the Slime that encrusts the Eye, just as they’re doing now.’

‘And then what?’

She squeezed his hand, playful. ‘You’ll have to wait until the end of the next watch to see! Although mucking about with the Eye is about as exciting as things get around here.’

‘Don’t Sapphires have any fun? We have a good time in Wilson. If you came away with me you’d see.’ Suddenly he wondered what he was saying – she was, after all, the daughter of Elios Speaker of Speakers! Again he wondered who was really in control here - and yet there was something in her manner, a mixture of innocence and coquettishness, that led him on helplessly.

Now she said, ‘Fun? What kind of fun? Show me.’

‘All right.’ He looked around. ‘We have tractors back home. Sometimes we have a little fun with them.’ He stripped off his jacket, revealing a muscled torso creased by the scars of a life of fighting. ‘Hold my coat – and watch!’ He jumped down off the wall onto the surface of the Eye, and took an experimental step. On the bands of Slime the footing was good enough, though the Slime itself was unpleasantly slick and oily, but the mirrored surface beneath was as sheer as it looked. Hopping between the bands of Slime, he sprinted after the nearest tractor.

Vala called down, agitated. ‘Brod – oh, Brod! What are you doing? You’ll get us into terrible trouble!’

He just grinned back. As he reached the beast he jumped, slapping the tractor’s rump with both hands, did a back-flip, and landed with both feet on the animal’s double spine. The moment of landing was always the trickiest, and he flailed as he shed his momentum, but then he stood proud. The beast lumbered on, indifferent, and he could feel the complex motion imparted by its six limbs, and the ripple of the banks of muscles under its tough hide. He whooped, and looked back at Vala.

She squealed, and clapped and jumped like a child. He imagined her telling this story to the other Sapphires, pretty virgins like herself gathered like flowers in a breeze.

But then a voice like a volcano’s rumble came echoing up from below the walls. ‘Vala? Vala! You’re supposed to be at the tithe accounting. Vala, where are you? If I find out you’ve been fooling around with that idiot sailor again …’

It was Khilli, the evil brother. Vala looked down, anxious.

Brod back-flipped off the tractor, and hurried back to her. ‘You should go,’ he said.

‘I know.’ Yet she did not move.

And they kissed. Afterwards he was never sure who made the first move.

II

‘Vala! Vala! …’

As she waited for the Polar woman, Tripp, to visit her, Maryam listened to the stentorian voice of Khilli echoing through the streets of the Navel’s crowded township. Son of the Speaker of Speakers, brother of the most beautiful of all the current crop of Sapphires, and a brute of a man in his own right, Khilli was capable of causing a great deal of trouble if you got in his way, Maryam suspected. And she hoped beyond hope that her son Brod had nothing to do with the strange absence of Vala.

In the meantime she awaited her visitor. For their private talks, Tripp the Polar would naturally come to Maryam’s suite, rather than the other way around. Maryam and Brod hailed from Port Wilson, one of the principal embarkation points on the south coast of Seba, the continent that dominated the northern hemisphere. From the point of view of the Speakers Wilson was essential not just for the tithes it provided itself but as a conduit through which flowed much of the wealth of the scattered communities of the continent. So Maryam had been given an apartment of several rooms in an upper level of this Seventh Palace of the Sim Designers, laden with fine furniture and with banks of photomoss lighting every dark corner. From here she had a grand view of the Navel in all its crowded complexity, and the flat light of the Star beat down on the world from its eerie position directly above her.

Whereas Tripp was just a Polar, a woman hailing from the edge of the endless shadow of Darkside. So she was stuck in some room deep inside the carcass of the Palace, a windowless, airless, lightless cell with a bathroom you had to share.

And, as the woman arrived and bustled into the room, there was something dark about Tripp herself, Maryam thought.

After a formal greeting the Polar unbuttoned her heavy coat, slumped in a chair, and accepted a glass of wine. Tripp was short, compact, muscular – it was said that it was better to be short and round if you had to withstand the insidious cold of the Pole – and she wore a heavy coat of tractor-fur lined with sheep’s wool. Aged about forty, maybe ten Great Years younger than Maryam herself, she had a round, weather-beaten face, grey-black hair pulled back from a high forehead, and a customarily stern expression. Maryam didn’t actually know much about her personally – she’d heard hints of husbands back home, of children. Tripp was too serious a person to make small talk with.

She had a leather packet which she opened, and spread documents of some kind over a small table expensively carved from solid basalt. She had to move a bowl of apples out of the way to make room. Maryam glanced at the papers, not very interested; they were clearly old – or looked old – torn, fragmented, yellowed, and stained with various fluids. Some were covered with close-printed text in an archaic language, and others bore enigmatic diagrams.

‘You look as if you’re having a bad watch,’ Maryam essayed, as they sat together.

‘Aren’t you? The negotiations over the tithe levels get worse every Great Year …’

A Great Year was twenty-four small-years, each of which lasted for forty-five watches – the time it took Earth III to circle its Star. And as Maryam grew older, the interval between these Colloquies, at which tithe levels were set and reset, seemed to get shorter every time.

Tripp was evidently distracted by Khilli’s continued bellowing. ‘Vala! Vala!’

‘And the aggressive attitude of the Speakerhood is increasingly dismaying,’ Tripp said. ‘The young man you hear in the streets below, calling for his sister, is himself a son of the Speaker of Speakers.’

‘I know -’

‘Khilli to me symbolises the increasing dominance the Speakers are asserting, and not too subtly - the Speakers and their craven allies, who scuttle to obey in return for the waiving of a few tithes.’

‘Wealth breeds power, which accrues more wealth.’

‘Yes. And I suspect if we knew more about humanity’s history, we’d recognise that as an old, old story.’ Tripp grinned fiercely, showing browned teeth. ‘At least you in Wilson are now finding out what it’s like to be at the mercy of the Speakers, as we at the Pole have been for generations. We rely for our very survival on the trade the Speakers control. The metals and other minerals we mine pay for our tithes, and for the food imports we need to survive -’

Maryam nodded curtly, and glanced around. ‘My staff relayed something of your proposals to me.’ The Polars had been floating a suggestion to cut out the Speakerhood by negotiating a covert but direct trading deal between Wilson and the Pole. Aside from the direct benefit to the Polars, they argued that such openness would lead to a rapid growth in the planetary economy, after its strangling by the Speakers’ control. Maryam said softly, ‘I’m never sure who’s listening, here in this palace. It’s best not to go into details here. Plenty of my companions are fearful of the wrath of the Speakers, and of the Controllers.’

Tripp snorted. ‘More fool them. By indulging in such superstitions they are doing the Speakers’ work for them. As if they are forging the bars of their own cages.’

Maryam was irritated, as she often was, by the smug, strange Polars with their arrogance and certitude. ‘It may be a mere set of “beliefs” to you, that we live in a Simulated reality. The fact is, it is the foundation of a religion of global reach and power. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting in this Palace dedicated to the Controllers’ worship, would we?’ She riffled through the pages on the table between them. ‘And are these more pages of the “Venus Document” you’ve been trying to buy up?’

‘Those that aren’t forgeries, good enough to fool me.’

‘Aren’t you being contradictory? It seems to me that by seeking out these things you’re tacitly admitting the historical existence of Helen Gray, whose life story is a key part of the entire legend.’

Tripp looked irritated in her turn. ‘We don’t deny all of the standard account of the past. You have to consider our myths and legends as source material, to be handled sceptically.

‘We do believe that Helen Gray, and Wilson Argent and Jeb Holden, all existed. It’s just that we don’t believe they were created out of thin air, along with the Thirty-Seven Children, by any Sim Designers. They all came here in some kind of ship, from another world – from Earth I, maybe, or Earth II. A ship of space. Helen, Wilson and Jeb were the only adults. We believe they fought – and my opinion is Wilson and Jeb fought over Helen, the only woman, as simple as that, and never mind more fanciful theories – and killed each other off a mere three Great Years after landing, and left the Thirty-Seven to grow up unsupervised, and fend for themselves as best they could. And we are all their children, a thousand Great Years later. That in itself is a remarkable story.’

‘But if that’s so, where does the legend of the Sim Controllers come from?’

‘Probably from half-memories of a space mission the Children grew up barely remembering, and never understood! There are pages in the Venus Document that hint at a kind of madness among the crew of that ship – locked up for decades, whole generations living and dying in a metal prison. Some of them came to believe that it was all a hoax and they were being watched, the way you might watch a mirror-bird in a cage.’ She waved a hand. ‘And so this tremendous layered theology, this edifice of power and wealth – all of it came out of a child’s bad dream! We’re lucky that before she died Helen Gray managed to set down a kind of story of her world, and the trip she’d taken. She called it the Venus Document – we think Venus was a companion on the ship. The Document was seen as heretical from the age of the first Speakers. It was locked away, copied, broken up so its imagery could be used as fine art, burned, forged … We suspect only fragments remain. But those fragments, when sifted, are enough to prove -’

‘To the satisfaction of you Polars, at least -’

‘- that this world is real. It’s no Simulation. And that humans came here, somehow, from somewhere else.’

‘I thought you Polars were rationalists.’

‘Well, we have to be. We think the fact that we have to mine for a living has made us deeper natural philosophers than you farmers. We’re favoured for astronomy, too; from here you rarely even see the lesser stars beyond the Star. We like to believe we rediscovered science.’

‘Yet you accept the authority of a long-dead and semi-mythical figure like Helen Gray!’

Tripp pushed away the pages crossly. ‘Not just that, woman! Anybody who looks around at this world we live in – really looks – will see that humans don’t belong here. There are whole layers of life here, Maryam, one laid atop another, as immiscible as oil and water! We humans and our trees and grass and cows and sheep are latecomers. Before we came you had the tractors and the tunnel-moles and the mirror-birds, animals which seem to have been engineered to do specific jobs, engineered and then abandoned. The Slime seems to be a bacterial life form which may be a true native of this planet. And under all that you have the Substrate, as it’s called, relics that may be older than life itself, or anyhow the kinds of life we see now. The tractors and even the Slime are like our kind of life, relying on carbon and water and nitrogen – if we hadn’t forgotten everything Helen knew, we could probably say how alike. But we can’t eat the tractors, and the tractors can’t eat the Slime – that fact alone proves we’re different! – even if we’re from the same wider family, and we have some interesting ideas about that.’

Maryam tried to provoke her. ‘The Speakers say the Substrate buildings are elements of the vast Sim chamber that generates the world.’

‘Phooey. They are clearly relics of some culture that was here long before we humans arrived. And yet they were drawn to the same pivotal locations we were, for surely the geometry of the planet hasn’t changed. This, in fact, is what I came to talk to you about. We’ve another proposal for you to consider.’

Maryam felt faintly uneasy, wondering what was coming.

Tripp picked an apple out of the bowl on the table. ‘Earth III orbits close to its Star, which is small and cool – according to Helen – compared to other stars in the sky.’ She made the apple orbit her fist, turning it steadily. ‘The world is locked, and turns so that a single hemisphere always faces the Star.’

‘That’s elementary -’

‘Yes. But because of that elementary fact, our world is blessed with a certain number of unique locations. The Substellar point – right here. The Poles, for our world does have an axis about which it turns, even if the rotation is locked – or at least our north Pole, for there is only ocean at the south Pole. The Equator – especially those points on the Terminator, east and west, standing between dark and light. All these places the builders of the Substrate visited, for surely they were as attracted by their geometric significance as we are. There are hints in Helen’s document that the ship’s crew found structures at geometric points off the planet as well as on it – places of orbital stability … All this was built a long, long time ago. You can tell that by the rock layers that have formed over some of the structures. As much as a billion Great Years ago, perhaps.’

In an effort to regain control of the conversation, Maryam took the apple off her and bit into it. ‘Fascinating. So what is your proposal?’

Tripp smiled. ‘from my list of significant points, here in this static little system of ours, I omitted one.’

‘Where?’

‘The Antistellar. The point which is precisely opposite the Navel, the Substellar, on the other side of the world – the point at the heart of Darkside.’

‘There’s nothing there but ice.’

‘Maybe. We know nothing about it save mentions in Helen’s record – a record many dispute as authentic.’ She leaned forward. ‘But what is surely true is that the Substrate builders must have gone there. And surely they built something there. Perhaps we Polars, we burrowing miners, will be able to understand it. Perhaps we’ll be able to use it. And there’s the matter of scientific curiosity, which Helen Gray counsels us to cultivate. Who knows what we might learn, about the world and ourselves? And anyhow it’s surely better we get to it before it occurs to the Speakers to go there.’

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 -’

‘And, if we miss them,’ Tripp reminded her, ‘for us, the ultimate result is that we starve. For we rely on food imports from the lower latitudes.’

Maryam studied her, an uncomfortable scrutiny. ‘And you especially, Tripp, have a motive for seeing this sorry business settled.’

‘I do?’

‘I haven’t forgotten your talk of an expedition to the Antistellar. All postponed because of the war, I imagine? Look - if you help us resolve this conflict we of Port Wilson will help you achieve your goal. Materials, supplies, tractors, crew – whatever you need.’

Tripp rubbed her cheek. ‘I should tell you that most of my people, the elders, aren’t interested in the Antistellar. It is half a world away even from us -’

‘But you’re interested,’ Maryam said bluntly. ‘And it’s you who’s sitting here. You’re a good negotiator. I’ve seen that.’ She sat back. ‘Offer them a deal, concerned specifically with the reason they went to war: Brod and Vala. You can offer a punishment for Brod, to return Vala – whatever. If we can resolve the immediate issue there’s a good chance this whole conflict will just dissolve.’

Tripp nodded. ‘It might work.’

‘It’s certainly worth a try, for all our sakes -’

There were footsteps, and Vala came bustling in. ‘Good mid-watch, Maryam.’ She turned to Tripp, who rose.

Maryam smiled. ‘Vala, this is Tripp, from the Pole station. I’m sure you met her at the Colloquy last Great Year.’

Vala wore a short skirt, shirt and sweater, sensible-looking shoes, and she carried a racquet. She smiled prettily at Tripp. ‘Forgive me if I can’t remember your face, madam Tripp. There was rather a lot going on at the time!’

Tripp bowed her head, forgiving. But she hadn’t forgotten Vala’s face. Who could? Her delicate features – that long nose, the high cheeks – the bright red hair and startling blue eyes that seemed, if anything, accentuated by the subtler, slanting light of this mid-latitude location. She was thin, as most of Wilson’s citizens seemed to be after the long siege, but Vala had always been slender, Tripp seemed to remember, and she had always worn it well. Most inhabitants of Earth III were stocky, it was said because the planet’s gravity was that much higher than the world of mankind’s origin, but humans had a deeper sense of aesthetics that seemed to prefer a slender build.

Tripp found herself staring at this girl, whose very understandable desire to take hold of her own destiny had caused so much trouble – who was coming close to breaking the heart of a young man at this moment scraping at a hillside trying to grow potatoes – who was evidently on her way to play some game. Vala smiled, evidently used to stares, and Tripp looked away, embarrassed.

Vala turned to Maryam. ‘I thought I’d play some racquets with Roco.’

‘Her racquets coach,’ Maryam murmured to Tripp. ‘Brod will be back for his supper -’

‘Oh, I’ll be home long before then. ‘Bye – and nice to meet you, Tripp from the Pole!’ She skipped out, swinging her racquet.

Maryam sighed. ‘Poor Brod! I don’t think she has feelings for Roco. But young men seem attracted to her like mirror-birds to the light.’

Tripp murmured, ‘She is beautiful – no wonder she causes so much trouble – it’s not just her physical beauty but the friendliness in her face, the openness – I could barely take my eyes off her myself!’

‘I noticed,’ Maryam said sternly. ‘Funny lot, you Polars. Well – I suppose you’d like a bed for the sleep watch? It will be another tricky journey, I imagine, back out through the line of the siege, if you’re to meet Elios …’

VI

Despite the siege’s privations, Tripp found that at least within the Wilson perimeter there was a semblance of civic order – and evidently, judging from Maryam, there were still citizens able to live reasonably well. Not to mention Vala and her racquets!

But for the besieging army things were much rougher. There was little sense of order beyond the basic military command structure, and the army units were expected to fend for themselves. So the countryside for many kilometres around had been systematically plundered, and all the way up the valley of the Wilson there was only bare, trampled earth where once crops had grown and sheep had grazed.

In their camp, some soldiers had been on station for nearly the whole siege, living beside drains they themselves had dug down to the river, and wearing uniforms that were reduced to the colour of the mud. Everywhere smoke rose from the endless fires, and Tripp saw rat carcasses and other indefinable bits of meat roasting on skewers. All of this went on under the flags of the Speakerhood, listlessly fluttering banners that showed a fat bird-like shape with fixed wings, a black underbelly, and wheels.

‘It doesn’t change,’ said the young lieutenant from New Denver, as he and Tripp picked their way carefully through this morass. He had been assigned as Tripp’s escort and guard. ‘Watch after watch. The Star just hangs there in the sky, and we all sit in the mud, waiting. Every so often we mount a raid against the walls, or the Wilsonians come riding out against us, and there’s a bit of drama. But then it’s just back to sitting and waiting.’

Tripp squinted up at the Star; lacy cloud hung before a face mottled by spots and flares. ‘Helen Gray says that we humans came from a turning world, where a sun rose and set. I wonder if we miss that, on some deep level.’

‘It feels like I’ve been here all my life,’ said the officer miserably.

They let their horses walk on in silence.

Naturally the Speaker of Speakers wasn’t living in the mud with his soldiers. At a small jetty near Wilson’s main harbour wall, a smack was waiting to carry Tripp out through the picket-line of blockading ships to the Speaker’s yacht. This was a grand affair, painted brilliant white, standing well off the coast and out of range of any gunfire. The smack’s captain seemed a gossipy sort, and he regaled Tripp with tales of the twice-daily arrival of provision ships from the Navel, and the petty graft that followed.

Tripp, weary and travel-worn and carrying her packs of spare clothes and trade goods, felt shabby indeed as she was conducted into the august presence of the Speaker of Speakers, and told to sit on a couch to wait as Elios received submissions from advisers and ministers who entered the cabin one after another. An aide at his side took notes, murmuring in his master’s ear. In his white robe the Elios easily filled the chair on which he sat. The chair itself, however, was unusual – not a throne but practical-looking, a sturdy metal frame hung with canvas, and with straps, unattached now, that could be buckled around the Speaker’s girth.

Elios saw her looking. When there was a gap in the flow of supplicants, the Speaker of Speakers beckoned Tripp forward. ‘You study the chair.’

‘Yes. I couldn’t help wondering – we Polars like to think of ourselves as engineers, Speaker -’

‘Could this be the Left Hand Seat itself, you think? Please, come and inspect.’

Boldly Tripp walked around the throne, and Elios’s assistants looked faintly alarmed. ‘Light but sturdy. Harnesses to hold in the occupant. It is a seat from a ship, a ship designed to sail in the air. Just as the legend of the Landfall says.’

Elios slapped the metal frame. ‘Sadly the original is in a vault, somewhere deep beneath the ground on the Navel – precious beyond reckoning, as you can imagine. But this is said to be a fair replica, and is itself hundreds of Great Years old. But – “legend”?’ His voice was sharp, faintly mocking. ‘Are you not a true believer, madam Tripp?’

‘I’m no theologian, Speaker.’

‘Yes. Best we each stick to what we know – is that your philosophy? I imagine if we all did that the world would be a less turbulent place. My advisers tell me you’re here on a mission given you by Elder Maryam in Wilson.’

‘And for my own purposes too, Speaker.’

‘Of course, of course.’ He eyed her bag. ‘To which end, you bring me gifts, do you?’

‘Nothing so coarse, Speaker. Trade goods.’ She opened the satchel. Within, she had samples of new kinds of hardened steel and brilliant glasses, a novel musket-trigger mechanism, and a box-like device that exploited the strange properties of photomoss.

The Speaker inspected all these carefully, and handed them on to his advisers. He was intrigued by the photomoss. After being exposed to Starlight for a while, it could be shut up inside its box, and a small metal wheel, attached to the outside of the box, would begin to turn, powered by the moss within.

‘This is just a toy, of course,’ Tripp said. ‘But it’s meant to illustrate a basic principle. Speaker, we think the photomoss is an engineered organism. Much of what it does is not, apparently, for its own benefit, but for the benefit of a user. In that, it’s like a tractor beast, which happily digs out furrows and ditches and canals not for itself but for whoever commands it. There is another sort of moss that, we believe, is intended to strain the salt from seawater. The mirror-birds seem designed to scatter light into the dark -’

‘I’ve heard of this idea, of course,’ the Speaker said. ‘These animals were changed, made into what they are, for some purpose or other, by people who have long gone.’

‘People – intelligent creatures like us, or not - yes. That’s what we think. They went away, or died out. Since then the various creatures have evolved away from their original forms, but they still retain traces of that engineering, which we can exploit.’

‘Or,’ said Elios, ‘the creatures were Designed that way, by those who made the world. It’s just that we poor Avatars have yet to discern the purpose of that Design.’

‘Well, that’s possible too.’ Tripp saw the slightest smile crease the corners of the Speaker’s eyes, and she knew that the theology didn’t matter; they were talking business here. ‘With the photomoss, it clearly gathers energy from the Starlight – but, unlike our own grass and trees, and indeed unlike the Slime, it doesn’t exploit much of that energy to fuel its own growth. Instead it dumps it out as light – which we find useful for lighting shady rooms.

‘But we can do more than that.’ She opened up the wooden box and showed the Speaker a kind of mesh of electrodes around the moss clump, and a small, simple electric motor. ‘It’s possible to use the flow of energy to power this engine. I’m sure you see the possibilities, if we can scale this up. You can have photomoss reliably and cheaply powering machines to do whatever you like – dig ditches, build your Palaces, drive carts without horses -’

The advisers gasped in wonder at these visions.

‘Or drive machines of war,’ said Elios. He smiled. ‘But none of these miracles are available yet, I suppose.’

Tripp shrugged. ‘I’m here to ask you to help fund the development of these advances, as well as to purchase the results in the long term.’

Elios dismissed the photomoss box with a wave; an adviser took it. ‘And I suppose all of this is contingent on our resolving the current war. Shall we get to the point of your mission, madam Tripp?’

Tripp sat on her couch. ‘Yes, Elder Maryam asked me to speak to you. I think she hoped that a neutral voice, a relative outsider, might be able to broker a solution satisfactory to all parties. But I don’t deny an ending to this conflict is in all our interests. The shutting-off of such a vital trading link is strangling global trade -’

‘Yes, yes. And I suppose you’re authorised to offer me the return of my daughter – yes? And perhaps the handing over of that buffoon Brod, who caused all this trouble in the first place.’

‘Or at least a commitment to punish him.’

‘But I’m sure that Maryam explained to you, point by point in her own tedious way, how the lovestruck youngsters are only one reason for this conflict.’

Tripp forced a smile. ‘Actually the word she used is “pretext”.’

‘Ha! Well, she would. You are caught in the middle of a conflict with much wider purposes – political, economic, even strategic. Why do you think she summoned you as the ambassador of peace? Have you thought that through, Polar?’

Tripp stiffened, feeling insulted by his implication. ‘Say what you mean, Speaker.’

Elios counted the points on his fingers. ‘You at the Pole are long-term rivals to the Navel, in terms of your divine position. Even you secularists must see that in terms of strategic advantage. You’ll have to be dealt with some time, I imagine, but for now we want to keep you calm – neutral – on good terms, as long as possible. Also we need your steel and gunpowder, of course. This is the calculation Maryam has made, that we’ll listen to you, given the context of our relationship.’ He sat back, his face hard under his shaven head, his plucked and dyed eyebrows fierce, and he ticked off the next point.

‘And what is it we are being encouraged to hear from you? She instructed you to offer us a deal concerned with the specific reason we are supposed to have gone to war: Brod and Vala. And if you make such an offer, and it’s just, and if my low-browed allies get to hear about it – and they will, Maryam will make sure of that – then I will not honourably be able to turn you down. For if I do there’s a good chance my alliance will dissolve. You see? They think they are fighting for my family honour, and the sanctity of the religion; they think it is a war of heroes and warriors and so forth – and not about hegemony, about breaking the power of an upstart statelet, which is the reality. And if that pretence is taken away, they will either not understand the geopolitics, or will be repelled by it. Either way we must withdraw, and Maryam will win.’

Tripp considered this flood of ideas. ‘You know, I really am just an engineer. I’m not used to thinking this way. You make me feel -’

‘Naïve?’

‘Innocent, anyhow. But the fact is, Speaker, the offer to return Vala has been made. So what are you going to do about it?’ She found she was anticipating Elios’s response with some interest.

But what that response might have been she was never to learn, for just at that moment a messenger burst in with the news that Elios’s son, Khilli, sick of the drawn-out siege, had taken matters into his own hands.

His face white with anger, Elios hurried out. It took Tripp some time to find somebody to escort her off the yacht safely, and back to shore.

VII

‘Brod! Brod son of Maryam! I am Khilli son of Elios! Come out here and meet me! Brod, you are a coward and a kidnapper and a rapist, and I will avenge my sister! …’

Once off the smack, Tripp was met by her patient officer from New Denver, and escorted back through the besieging army’s camp. But even from the harbour she could here Khilli’s bellows. Single-handed, armed only with a sword and spear, he was stalking beneath the walls of Port Wilson, and was yelling up his challenges and insults to Brod.

Tripp shook his head. ‘I can hardly believe it. One champion challenging another to single-handed combat? Are we really reduced to this?’

But Khilli’s challenge had the whole camp churned up, and Tripp could hear the roars of support, and the clatter of spears and musket-butts on shields. The Denver officer said, ‘It’s one way of getting it finished. Oh, madam Tripp – there are a couple of traders who said they wanted to speak with you.’

‘Traders?’

‘From Holle City. They said you knew them.’ He pointed to a small supply dump, where fresh horses waited, and two strangers dressed in heavy, concealing cloaks. The officer stuck out a hand. ‘Been interesting meeting you, madam. Travel carefully now.’

She shook his hand, uncertain. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’

Then, her samples pack and rucksack on her back, she walked warily towards the strangers. Even when she’d come close enough to touch them she still couldn’t see their faces within their heavy hoods. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Holle City?’

‘Of course not,’ the taller of the two hissed. He pushed back his hood just enough to let Tripp glimpse his face.

‘Brod. And Vala, I suppose. What’s going on?’

‘My mother was going to give Vala up to her father – and me. That’s what’s going on! As you knew very well, Tripp, as you went over to the Speaker’s yacht to broker the deal.’

‘I was hoping to stop the bloodshed -’

‘You could have told me.’

‘Evidently your own spies work well enough. And what about Khilli?’

‘What about him?’

‘Aren’t you going to respond to his challenge?’

‘Are you joking? I could take down that tractor-spawned brute, but his companions would rip me apart. No, ma’am, Khilli can wait.’

‘And I,’ Vala said from the shadows of her own cloak, ‘am not going back to the Navel. To be a Sapphire would have been dull enough. To be a failed Sapphire, returned in shame – not for me!’

‘Then what? What do you want of me?’

‘We’re coming with you,’ Brod said simply. ‘There’s nothing for us here. We’ll make a new life at the Pole - together.’

‘As simple as that?’

‘You owe us, Tripp,’ said Vala heavily.

‘I owe you nothing,’ Tripp snapped back. ‘And besides, don’t you think we’ll be pursued? Your father no doubt has spies riddling Port Wilson – and that brother of yours doesn’t strike me as the kind to give up easily.’

‘We’ll deal with that as it comes,’ said Brod.

‘Oh, will you? You’ve dealt with it all so well so far, haven’t you? And what about the journey itself? You’re talking about a trek to the Pole! Have you any idea -’

‘Brod! Brod, son of Maryam! Come down here so I can strangle you with your own intestines! …’

‘He’s not getting any more patient,’ said Brod. He untethered three saddled horses, and jumped on the back of the strongest-looking. ‘Shall we make a start?’

Vala grinned and leapt easily on the back of her mount.

And Tripp, gloomily resigned to the fact that neither of these two children had any idea what they were letting themselves in for, even if they weren’t being pursued by a demented super-warrior, started to load her bags onto her own beast.

‘Brod! Brod! …’

VIII

They were to travel only fifty kilometres on their first set of horses, Tripp said. Then they’d change to a solution better suited to the long haul – which spanned no less than twelve thousand kilometres north, all the way to the Pole itself.

In those first hours Brod was intensely excited, charging along the open road into unknown realms, with a beautiful girl at his side and an enraged enemy at his back. ‘We’re making history!’ he cried. ‘They’ll tell our story for generations!’

Vala laughed prettily. But she stayed back with Tripp, who kept her own horse at a steady trot.

When Brod finally reined in his own mount, Tripp praised him for being ‘sensible’. ‘Horses must have their own ancestral dreams of a lost world where their grandmothers were slender and fleet. They’ll always run if you give them their head. But on this world they are better suited to a gentle, steady trot. Their hearts won’t take it, not if you push them too hard – and you’re likely to break their spindly legs.’

Brod felt restless to hear this sage advice. Sensible? Shepherding his horses for fear they might drop dead under him wasn’t in his nature at all – and not what he had expected of this journey, which he had vaguely imagined as a kind of running skirmish with Khilli and his warriors.

But Vala surprised him by adapting quickly to the ride. She even seemed interested in Tripp’s yakking about the horses’ history. ‘How strange, to think that horses, like people, might have been brought here from somewhere else. And, I suppose, sheep and cows and pigs and chickens as well.’

‘Yes. Along with grasses and wheat and fruit trees – everything you can eat must have been brought here in Helen Gray’s ship, for we can’t eat Slime or tractors.’

‘I can imagine carrying a box of grass seed. But how could you carry a horse? I’ve seen the trouble it takes to ferry a horse a few kilometres by sea. My father says this is proof that we live in a Sim, because you could never carry a horse in a spaceship.’

Tripp shrugged. ‘There’s much we don’t know about our origins. Perhaps you could carry a living horse frozen, like meat. Or perhaps you could take it from its dam’s womb as an infant, and carry it that way.’ She slapped her own mare’s neck. ‘But certainly, if this nag is an Avatar, why isn’t she better suited to this world?’

‘I suppose you’d say humans should be better suited to living here too.’

‘Well, so we should. If we were designed for this world, there would be at least some parts of it where we could go naked.’

Vala actually blushed.

Brod’s interest was snagged for the first time. ‘Naked?’

‘Sure. Presumably at the equator, the Substellar, at least. Why should we need thick layers of clothing even to survive even there? Why should we not have been made fit to go unclothed, like animals?’

Brod roared laughter. ‘There you are, Vala! If Elios and Khilli went around the Navel bare as babies, they wouldn’t seem half so impressive!’

‘And nor would you,’ Vala said pointedly, and trotted a few paces ahead of him. But he could tell she was teasing him, and his heart warmed.

After the first fifty kilometres Tripp directed them off the main north road, which even this far from Port Wilson was reasonably metalled, and led them a couple of kilometres down a track to a travellers’ stop with a small inn and a much larger stable.

‘Wonderful!’ Vala cried, leaping down from her horse. ‘A bath, a change of clothes, a good meal -’

‘But we can’t stop,’ Brod said, glancing back down the road. ‘Your brother won’t be far behind.’

‘Brod is right,’ said Tripp. She climbed down stiffly, and made for the small dwelling house. ‘We’re going to change our transport here. But we must press on …’

Vala pouted, and she looked as if she was going to protest. Brod had seen her deploy her temper before, and he knew it was a formidable weapon. But she quickly perked up when Tripp began to assemble their mode of transport from here on.

On the way down, Tripp had left a compatriot here at the waystation, another Polar, a man Astiv Pellt. Older than Tripp, he was shorter, rounder in his layers of coats, and fierce looking – until he smiled, to reveal rows of discoloured teeth. He said he was Tripp’s cousin. ‘But then we’re all cousins up there,’ he said, grinning again. ‘Not a very big place, you see. We all have lots of husbands and wives, and cousins and second cousins …’

Astiv brought over two carts, covered with wool-lined tarpaulin, with three teams of horses to drag them.

‘My backside wouldn’t stand twelve thousand kilometres on horseback, even if yours would,’ Tripp said. ‘And we design for redundancy. We can lose one whole horse team, now that we’ve a spare. We could lose a cart; we’ve a spare. Astiv has made sure we’ve got plenty of food – we at the Pole have perforce become experts at drying, salting and other storage methods – and we can collect the water we need as we travel. We have plenty of coats, boots, hats, blankets.

‘We’ll travel for two watches and rest for the third; the horses need their sleep. But we’ll sleep in shifts, with at least two of us awake – and driving the carts – at any moment.’

Brod tried to look as if he knew what he was doing as he walked around the wagons, checking their iron-rimmed wheels and leather harnesses. He had more experience of ships than land transport, but he could tell when something was soundly made. He was impressed by the Polars’ preparations and evident competence.

Vala, though, seemed faintly disappointed. ‘I half-thought we’d be bowling along in some magic chariot driven by photomoss or something. Like the gadget you gave my father. How long do you think it will take us to get there?’

Astiv shrugged. ‘Three hundred watches. Maybe a little more.’

‘Three hundred?’ Vala’s eyes were wide. ‘That’s twenty small-years!’

‘It’s a big world,’ Tripp said, ‘and we have to cross a fair chunk of it.’ The carts both had simple hourglasses fitted. Tripp turned one of these over. ‘We’ll wait one hour,’ she said. ‘Go bathe, eat, eliminate – whatever. And then we leave, with or without you.’

The landscape was monotonous, a rough plain littered with eroded hills and patches of grassland and forest, and wider lakes of Slime, black as the inside of Brod’s eyelids. The towns were few and far between, and they never stayed over anyhow, pausing only to change their horses. You rarely even saw any evidence of farming or logging save close to the towns, though you did sometimes see untamed horses and cattle, and even a few wild tractors patiently ploughing furrows in non-existent fields.

Tripp said that this continent of Seba was the largest on the planet, a great shield of rock that covered a quarter of the world’s surface and stretched all the way to the Pole and beyond, though it was broken by inland seas and lakes. And as watch after watch wore by, though the four of them became used to exchanging their roles as drivers and passengers and sleepers, the sheer immensity of the landscape began to bear down on Brod’s limited imagination.

It made it worse that he was never alone with Vala, and neither of them had the nerve to do more than a little gentle flirting in the presence of the stolid figures of the Polars.

And, even deeper than that, he started to miss his old life – his companions, his ships, his adventures – even his enemies – even his mother! It had been a grand gesture to uproot himself from everything he had grown up with, and set off into the complete unknown. But somehow he had not thought ahead to how it would actually be to have his whole world stripped away, to be plunged into a situation where he wasn’t even particularly competent, let alone in command. Sometimes he even wished Khilli might catch up with them, so he could remind Vala how good he was in a fight.

It got worse yet when the mixed landscape of grassland and scattered copses gave way to a belt of trees, of fir and larch and pine, that gradually thickened until the road cut between towering green walls of forest, and the Star, a little lower in the sky every watch, sent its light in long shafts between the slim forms of the trees. Tripp softly told them there was some element of danger here, from dogs, cats, even pigs long gone wild, and Brod kept a blade ready at his belt.

Vala, though, seemed fascinated. ‘I never saw so many trees. But why are there so many just here?’

‘Because of the latitude,’ Tripp said. She spoke carefully; in their early conversations it had become evident that Vala, a pampered creature of the Palaces of the Navel, hadn’t even been entirely clear that the world she lived on was a sphere. ‘The Star is lower in the sky here, and gives us less heat. These trees are more suited to the cold than the shrubs and grasses of lower latitudes. This boreal forest stretches right across Seba, to east and west, between the grasslands to the south and the tundra to the north. And wherever there is land in the southern hemisphere, at the same distance from the Substellar, you’ll see similar vegetation.

‘If you could see the world from space, it might look a bit like an archery target, with bands of vegetation all circling the Substellar point, broken only by stretches of ocean.’ She sketched a sphere for Vala. ‘You see? From everywhere in this band around the face of the world, the Star would be seen to be at the same elevation in the sky. And so similar vegetation will grow.’

‘How strange,’ Vala said. ‘How wonderful! And there’s more to come? This tundra you spoke of?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Tripp said, smiling. ‘And wonders beyond that too.’ Vala smiled back.

Brod was irritated. They seemed to be building a relationship, like that between an eager student and a patient teacher. A relationship that excluded him.

It got even worse when it started to snow.

IX

The first serious resistance the holy army met was at the southern rim of the great forest belt.

A few kilometres to the west of the main trunk road running north from Port Wilson, Khilli’s scouts found a community of loggers. Over the generations they had cut their way into the world forest, and had built a veritable city, of wooden buildings roofed with grass turf or moss. This green town was surprisingly populous, and the people lived well, on the meat from the herds of semi-wild cattle they cultivated, and crops purchased from farms on the grasslands to the south, traded for their wood.

Before this journey Elios had only been dimly aware of the place. Accompanying his son on this long military adventure was teaching him the sheer scale of the world – and he was gathering an uneasy sense of just how little of it was even nominally under the Speakerhood’s control. Which, of course, was a justification for this long and expensive military adventure in the first place.

Khilli followed his usual practice of sending in senior officers with demands for provision for his army – horses, food, labour. The elders among the loggers seemed astounded to be asked, and politely refused. The loggers were a major power in their region; they were used to making demands, not meeting them, and to winning wars, not losing them.

So Khilli burned the city.

The holy army set up its camp a little way off the road, in a rare patch of open grassland in a country that was increasingly grown over by the forest blanket. Elios accompanied his son on a quick tour, Elios treading delicately on the raw, trampled earth, nodding to soldiers who as usual tended to their feet and complained about the weather and the food.

Khilli had established a discipline in this as in all things relating to his mission. When the army paused, even for just a few watches, he had his sergeants organise squads to dig out a roughly circular compound with embankments, ditches, latrines and open drains, while the holy Shuttle Banners fluttered over their heads. Only then were the men allowed to set up their tents, build their fires and go hunting and foraging.

Today there had been fighting, the raid on the loggers’ town. After the battle was done, the Speaker of Speakers paused by the small field hospital that tended to the wounded, and reassured the dying that death was not an end, merely a return to the frozen patterns of thoughts in the greater Memory of the Sim.

Then Khilli sat with his father on the porch of their own lavish tent, sharing a stolen flagon of the loggers’ rich, dark beer. The flames from the loggers’ city burned high in a sky that was never bright, so low was the Star, and there was a thick resinous smell in the air.

Elios said, ‘I hope that the fire doesn’t spread to the wider forest. We’ll cook half the world.’

Khilli took another slug of beer. ‘Your Designers surely they won’t allow their Sim to be wrecked by a bit of fire.’

A hardening cynicism about his father’s religion was an unwelcome aspect of the remarkable transformation of Khilli, in the watches since his sister’s abduction. Elios murmured, ‘You better hadn’t let your men hear remarks like that. It’s only the flag of the Speakers that unites this bunch of soldiers of many nations under your command, remember.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘And – was it entirely necessary to burn the city? We’re looking for worshippers, remember. The dead don’t pay tithes, son.’

‘Those wood-cutters put up a surprisingly good fight. They were no match for us when they dared venture out onto the open field. It was the usual one-two, with cavalry and infantry. When the army was broken the city fell quickly …’

Elios listened to this soldiers’ talk absently.

This was no hasty expedition but a planned, provisioned and thought-out invasion of the interior of Seba, intended to consolidate the Speakers’ power across the continent. Even the way the army advanced was designed to awe populations into fearful submission. The troops were solely provisioned by what they could scavenge and seize, and they stripped the landscape they crossed like a swarm of voracious ants. Any who resisted this ‘liberation tithe’ were punished.

Since leaving Wilson, Khilli had forged an effective army out of the disparate corps provided by the Speakers’ tithe-paying allies. He had resolved the Wilson siege with a swiftly concluded, if punitive, treaty. Then, listening to the advice provided by his more experienced soldiers, he had spent a whole fifty watches preparing for this expedition: gathering supplies, planning the route from the sketchy maps available, forming up his troops into a unified command structure, and training them in battlefield and siege tactics. It had been a remarkable sight for Elios to watch as his warrior son, through some forging in the frustration of the long siege of Wilson and the fire of his own anger, had mutated into a general.

And so they had marched, roughly following the trail of Vala and Brod. Elios believed that Khilli had relished the resistance put up by the loggers; it had been the nearest thing to a full-scale battle he had been able to throw his troops into since they left Wilson.

‘There was actually more resistance when we entered the city – some of those fires were started by the citizens themselves – but we aren’t brutes, father; my men were under orders to kill only if unavoidable. So we drove a whole herd of them, women and kids too, off into the forest.’

‘All save those your men kept back for themselves, I suppose.’

Khilli shrugged. ‘You have to be punitive, father.’

‘But the butchery of children, the rapes – we can’t condone such savagery and you know it.’

‘Savagery? I spare enough to tell their children in the future when they build this place again, how much more savage I could have been. After all, it’s in all our interests to protect the Integrity of the Sim, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t quote theology at me, boy.’

But Khilli showed no remorse at the rebuke, no reaction save a sip of his beer.

Elios often wondered if this transformation of his son had been entirely for the good. His mother, and Vala’s, had died young, and Elios, then a mere Scribe, had taken his children with him into the embrace of his church. It was a safe environment, if a restricted one, he supposed, as if you sat on a mountaintop looking down with faint disdain on the rest of mankind. And there were only a few career choices available, all essentially academic – you could become a theologian or an administrator, or if you aspired to the Speakerhood you could combine the two.

Neither of Elios’s children, both clever in their own ways, had turned out to have the patience for study, which blocked off many options for them. At least Elios had found a safe role for Vala; beautiful and vain, she had seemed an ideal candidate for the pampered virginal life of a Sapphire, meant to embody the idealised perfection of humanity that resided in the heads of the Designers. With Khilli it had been more difficult. Physically powerful and headstrong, he had been coached by his father in a cut-down and simplified version of the faith - and he had been trained to use his muscle and his aggressive instincts to protect his father, and most especially his delicate sister.

Well, Elios admitted ruefully, it had all gone wrong in the end. Even Vala, wily and manipulative, had evidently rejected the career her father had selected for her; Elios was sure she wouldn’t have let herself be taken anywhere she didn’t want to go, although he wouldn’t have expressed this to his son. And Khilli, as soon as he had got a taste of true combat, had discovered the soldier inside himself, and had set off on this global rampage. Perhaps if their mother had survived, she might have developed a gentleness in Vala, a more controlled temper in Khilli … But she had not. And all that was now unfolding, Elios supposed, was his responsibility. Or his fault, if it went badly enough wrong.

Perhaps it might still turn out well. He knew from communication through runners that his subordinate Speakers were delighted with the progress of the force so far, and with the slowly increasing streams of tithes that were already flowing into the Navel. But as he watched the loggers’ city burn, a city whose existence he had been barely aware of a few watches ago, Elios wondered how long this march of destruction and submission would continue, and what would become of them all, and the world, when it was done.

And he wondered about the hardening of Khilli’s heart.

X

With time Tripp’s small party passed beyond the northern boundary of the forest strip, and the carts trundled over a new, open landscape of sparse grasses, mosses, lichens and small, windblown trees. Tripp called this a tundra, another belt of flora and fauna types that stretched around the world’s landmasses. Here and there you saw Slime, puddles of it in dips and hollows and on rock faces, like darkness poking through the world’s wearing-away skin. There were few people to be seen here, only an occasional collection of dome-like huts of animal skin. Tripp said the people hunted a kind of wild sheep, grown large and long-legged with long horns and a thick wiry coat. But Brod never saw any of these exotic animals, as he peered into a horizon that was more often than not laced by grey mist.

More than two hundred watches since they had left Wilson, they had all changed, Brod thought – all save Astiv Pellt, who was as stolid, silent and cheerfully grinning as ever. Even Tripp seemed more withdrawn, more inwardly reflective.

Vala had gone through phases of adjustment. Her early quick interest in the unfolding world around her had dissipated in irritation at her inability to keep her clothes clean, her hair coiffured, her nails shaped as she was used to. And she had got bored with ‘Tripp’s endless lecturing, Astiv’s stupid silences, and Brod’s adolescent sniffing around me,’ as she brutally put it one watch. For a time none of them dared speak for fear of setting off another tantrum. She had come out of that phase too, however, and now rode steadily and silently with the rest, and did her share of the chores and sometimes more, and she started to ask Tripp questions again. She was growing up, Brod thought.

But that wasn’t a comfortable thought, for it meant she might be growing away from him, and that after he had given up his whole world for this girl.

On the tundra stretched, for watch after watch, and in one gloomy village after another children in grimy skins with big dark pupils came out to see them go by.

‘You know,’ Brod ventured, ‘I don’t think I’ve seen anybody crack a smile since we came north out of that forest. Nobody except Astiv, and he’s an idiot.’

Tripp said, ‘It’s not surprising. Look how low the Star is, how murky the light. It’s rarely brighter than this – and it’s not bright enough for people, despite the big wide pupils of the children.’

‘It makes you gloomy,’ Vala said.

‘Exactly. Some of these hunts and tents are brightly lit inside, which helps a little. It gets worse at the Pole; with the dark forever at our backs, we get more than our share of suicides.’

‘But you were never tempted,’ Brod said dryly.

Tripp smiled. ‘Oh, for the thinking person the world is much too rich to leave it early. And besides, there are always the lesser stars, treasures forever hidden from you at the Equator – just wait and see.

‘The real problem is that our world is changeless, Brod. A diorama studded with obvious significant points, like the Substellar and the Antistellar and the Poles. A world where the conditions for living things, including people, are fixed forever by one single parameter, the angular distance from the Substellar point. A world where your fate is forever determined by where you happened to be born.’

‘You could always travel,’ Vala said sensibly. ‘You could always move, as we are.’

‘Very few do,’ Tripp said. ‘The teaching of your church, that you are created just where the Sim Designers intended you to be, has something to do with that, no doubt. But I think that feeds on a certain lassitude in the spirit of humanity here. A feeling of helplessness in the face of the vast celestial machinery we inhabit.’

This conversation of predestination, despair and suicide soon fizzled out, leaving Brod rather relieved, and he retreated into dreams of raids across Star-bright seas.

Still they ploughed further north, watch after watch, across an increasingly empty and desolate terrain.

And then the landscape began to change again. There was more snow, for one thing, which they’d suffered on and off since the boreal forest. Now it pooled and drifted in a landscape of sandstone bluffs carved by wind and shattered by frost. There was less green to be seen now, and what there was amounted to no more than mosses or lichens, mostly gathering around clumps of photomoss, evidently feeding off its light.

Tripp pointed to this as a rare example of symbioses between species from entirely different biospheres. ‘They can’t eat each other, but they can cooperate, in their unthinking way; the photomoss feeds the green things with light, and they in turn break up the rock to give the moss a place to grow …’ Brod barely understood any of this, and cared less.

And, above all, there was the Slime, a black slick that increasingly coated swathes of the bare rock face, as Earth life receded. There came a rest stop when Brod became aware that there was nothing around him but rock and snow and ice and Slime – nothing associated with humanity save the four people themselves, and their carts and animals.

‘I’ve never been a deep thinker,’ he admitted.

Vala guffawed, but Tripp touched her arm, and she quietened.

Brod went on hesitantly, ‘I suppose I’ve always grown up believing in the Sim and the Designers and the Controllers. It was an easy story to understand, and it was what everybody else seemed to believe. But I can’t see why any Sim would have all this deadness in it. What’s the point? Let alone them.’ And he pointed up to an increasingly star-cluttered sky.

Tripp nodded sagely. ‘We’ll make a scientist of you yet.’

‘By the Controllers’ mercy, I hope not!’

The Polar punched his arm playfully. ‘Oh, come on! With the eyes of a scientist, you see so much more. What do you think, Vala?’

‘I think,’ said Vala, ‘that I see a light.’ She pointed north.

They all turned to see. There indeed was a light, right at the northern horizon, a flickering spark.

Tripp took out a small pocket telescope and snapped it open. ‘That’s photomoss light, backed up by a bonfire. It’s the Pole! We’re there! Come on …’

And they encouraged the horses to take a few more weary steps over the frozen ground.

XI

They halted a couple of kilometres short of the Polar citadel. Brod, Vala and Astiv huddled for warmth in their covered cart, stinking of icy fur and the grease they smeared on their faces to keep out the cold, while Tripp went ahead to negotiate entry. She’d said, ‘We came fast, but I’ll bet the news of Khilli’s campaign will have moved faster yet. I’ll make sure they know who we are, and let us in.’

So Brod and Vala had time to consider the enigmatic Substrate structure Tripp had called the Pivot.

It was like the Eye on the Navel, said Vala, in that it was a cylindrical pillar, though this one tapered inwards at the top, and appeared to support no upper structure like the Eye mirror, according to Astiv. But unlike the Eye, which was surrounded by a human-built basalt wall on a mound crusted over with temples, this Pivot stood proud and alone, towering over the shabby human structures at its feet. Some of these hut-like buildings were actually igloos, said Astiv Pellt, built of blocks of old ice. Humans here didn’t have the energy to challenge the ancient architecture.

‘Look,’ Vala whispered to Brod, pointing. ‘They look like birds. In those trees.’

The ‘trees’, they learned from Astiv, were related to the photomoss and other engineered forms. You could find them in a thin belt all along the Terminator, the unmoving boundary between light and dark. Some of them were even rooted in the perpetual shadow; just so long as their uppermost branches saw the Starlight. Their trunks were coated with photomoss – and their ‘leaves’ were actually mirror-birds, who gathered the light with their wings to feed the trees, on which they fed in turn. Every so often something would disturb the birds, and they fluttered up, their wings sparkling with pink-white light, before finding a fresh branch to land on. It was an entrancing sight against the black star-strewn sky behind them.

At last Tripp came stumping back down the road. She clambered into the cart, frost thick on her coat. ‘They won’t let us in,’ she announced.

After such a journey, this was incomprehensible to Brod. ‘What? Why not?’

Tripp pointed south. ‘Because of your friend Khilli, that’s why. I told you news travels fast. And the news is that Khilli is coming, and not with some light force but a whole army.’

‘It’s too far,’ Brod said. ‘Surely.’

‘No,’ Vala said. ‘My father always spoke of the need to deal with the Pole some time. Maybe he’s decided this is the time.’

‘But the elders don’t want to have to face the Speakerhood - not yet,’ Tripp said thoughtfully. ‘Give us another few Great Years and we will ride out to meet those footslogging soldiers in our armoured motors … But not yet. And not over you two. They want you gone from here, so Khilli can search as he likes and find no trace of you – not even witnesses who saw you. At least that should minimise the damage.’

Vala looked at Brod, and he grabbed her mittened hand.

‘But what are we to do?’ Vala asked. ‘Die out here in the cold? Wait for Khilli and give ourselves up?’

Tripp said, ‘There’s a third way. The elders are prepared to provide horses, fresh provision -’

Brod said, ‘So we could run. But where? Everywhere is south from here.’

Tripp grinned. ‘But there’s more than one destination south.’

And Brod saw it. ‘You’re talking about making for the Antistellar, aren’t you? The middle of Darkside.’

Vala was horrified. ‘Another journey as long as the one we’ve made – and without the Starlight at all?’

Tripp began to explain how the journey would be perfectly survivable, but Brod interrupted. ‘This has been your dream all along, hasn’t it, Polar? Everything else we’ve been through is just an excuse to do this – is that the story?’

‘Not at all,’ she said mildly. ‘It certainly isn’t the way I planned to do it. I came to your mother, Brod, to propose a joint expedition, properly equipped. But this mad dash is better than none at all, in this interval of volcanic mildness. At the minimum Darkside is a place to hide, until Khilli has lost his enthusiasm for the chase – or more likely his army, having reached the end of the world, starts agitating to go home. And at maximum – who knows what we’ll find? Who knows what advantage we might gain?’ She looked at them all, one by one. ‘You’re with me, aren’t you, Astiv? I know you – never happier than when you’re on the road. Well, here’s a road never travelled before. And you, Vala, Brod? Do you want to just give up? Do you want to run and hide? Or do you want to do what you said you’d do, and make history – to have your names remembered for all time, like Helen Gray? Well? What’s it to be?’

Of course there was no real argument.

But still they had to wait for three watches while both Tripp and Astiv visited the station, to pick up resupplies and to immerse themselves briefly in the tangled affairs of their extended, polygamous families, before they set off again.

XII

Another journey, another three hundred watches, each to be counted out by the turning of the big hourglasses mounted in Tripp’s covered carts. And yet now they moved through a world that was its own clock, for with the Star forever invisible below the horizon the pinpoint lesser stars wheeled above them in a cycle that lasted forty-five watches, the length of this world’s day, and its year.

Vala was entranced, and sketched the distinctive patterns the stars made, and tried to measure the time it took them to return to the same position in the sky. Tripp encouraged her. Brod could only look at Vala’s uplifted face, with the air misted by her warm breath, and try to conceal his own helpless longings.

If Vala was adapting to this strange new life, Brod was increasingly sunk in misery. What did he care for the silent stars? – even if humans might have come from one of them. They were cold and remote and abstract, worse even than the frozen world across which he travelled. And what did he care for the Antistellar monument, if it existed at all, that was their goal? It would just be another heap of incomprehensible Substrate antiquity, irrelevant to his life.

He threw himself into the details of the expedition. There at least he could add some value. He liked working alongside Astiv Pellt, who had stuck with Tripp and his two southerners as they swept on past the Pole station; Astiv, dogged and silent despite his habitual broken-toothed grinning, was the glue that held this expedition together.

Tripp had described how she intended to reach the Antistellar – a journey she had been planning for many Great Years. They had kept their two wagons, each with thick covers and newly laden with salted and dried supplies. Their fresh horses, this time four teams for additional redundancy, were unlike any Brod had seen before: ponies really, stocky, round-bodied and covered with thick hair, they were a breed that had been developed by the Polars to be capable of withstanding long periods in the dark and cold lands beyond the Terminator. They even had special spiked iron shoes to be nailed to their hooves if they had to cross bare ice fields. But a part of the plan, unspoken but apparent to Brod, was that not all the ponies might survive the return journey. They would sacrifice themselves for the sake of their flesh, to feed their fellows or their human passengers. So, as he helped Astiv feed and water them, Brod had done his best not to become too attached to the animals.

Supplies were always going to be a challenge. They would melt ice for water, but nothing living – and, more to the point, edible – was expected to be found in the frozen landscapes of Darkside. Tripp patiently explained that just as in normal times the warmth trapped and transported by the air of Earth III stopped the atmosphere itself freezing out on Darkside, so the massive volcanic eruption in the south had injected so much soot, ash and gas into the air that the whole world was warmed above the long-term averages, even the sunless hemisphere. The temperature would never fall so low as to be lethal for humans – if they took appropriate precautions – probably. But they could not expect to find anything living, for plants depended on the Star’s light as much as its heat, and animals depended on plants for fodder.

During an early rest stop, with the four of them huddling in a cart by the light of a photomoss lantern, Tripp took them through sketch maps of the configuration of the continents and oceans of Darkside. These were largely guesswork, based on oral lore, and scraps of Helen Gray’s journal that described surveys compiled from space before Landfall.

‘You can see that much of the northern half of the hemisphere is dominated by this continent, which is an extension of Seba. In the south you have these scattered islands, set in a sea that’s largely covered by pack ice. Around the Antistellar, where the world is coldest, you have this ice cap. But there’s a massive mountain range, it seems, at the Antistellar itself. And we believe the Antistellar Substrate monument will be somewhere in that, clear of the ice. The existence of the mountains themselves may have something to do with their unique position, opposite the Star, perhaps the result of tidal flexing …’

Brod understood none of this, and ignored the questions Vala asked.

Tripp traced their planned route with her forefinger. ‘There’s supposed to be a frozen lake, a massive one, just here. An inland sea, really. So we will skirt to the east of it, as we head generally south. And I intend that we should follow this valley here.’ It was a monumental trench that spanned thousands of kilometres.

Vala was fascinated. ‘A mighty river must have carved this valley.’

Tripp smiled. ‘A river of molten rock. Helen says this is a place where the continent is splitting apart at the seams. Earth III is evidently active in this regard. And you can imagine that such a wound in the world will be warmer than the general landscape, which should help us …’

She spoke of how the continents on Earth III slid about on a deeper liquid layer like scum on stagnant water; at times the currents could break the continents up, or smash them together. Brod had a hard enough time imagining the land, which he had always taken as a fixed backdrop to the drama of human life, as itself undergoing evolution, change and growth: whole continents colliding!

But all this speculation made no difference as they pressed on with their journey, a steady progression into eerie darkness, across a landscape frozen bone-hard and illuminated by strips of photomoss on their wagons, and by the stars above when the sky was clear. Everything was strange in the near-dark, distances swimming and hard to judge, the shadows thick and black and threatening, and the only noises in all the world were the clank of the horses’ hooves on the ground, and their own soft voices.

Perhaps the strangest discovery they made was evidence of frozen life. They stumbled across banks of what might have been photomoss, or the trunks of mirror-bird trees, and Slime carpets – even what appeared to be the relics of animals, desiccated and twisted and frozen to the ground by ice like concrete. These were creatures none of them recognised.

‘How is this possible?’ Tripp asked, as if speaking to herself. ‘Can these be relics of previous expeditions? No, surely not, for it is all far too extensive. Somehow these creatures lived here, and grew, and died – perhaps long ago. But how? No light from the Star can reach this place; the other stars are too remote, their light too feeble …’

The deep mystery of these mute corpses troubled her, and Brod found he was obscurely pleased. The Polar was far too smug, in his opinion, far too quick with her explanations of the world. It was refreshing to see her as baffled, at least for a while, as he was all the time.

Soon they came to the rift valley, and followed it, though with caution.

Yes, it appeared to be warmer than the surrounding landscape, but it was filled with features very strange to Brod: lakes of bubbling mud that gave off stinking, choking gases, fields of distorted formations crusted red and yellow in the pale photomoss light, even plains of white rock that looked like ice, but was in fact salt. Tripp explained that this was a new landscape being formed by minerals escaping from the bowels of the earth – and the salt plains may have been left behind by incursions of the ocean into this deep wound.

Brod concentrated on the practicalities, such as ensuring the stocky Polar ponies did not drag them all into some stinking, bubbling pool of lethal mud.

As the watches wore by in the endless dark they all became subdued. But Brod in particular felt a deepening disappointment, that could shade into despair – as if he had set himself on the wrong road, a path he could not now turn off.

His relationship with Vala, or the lack of one, was surely the key to that. What had really united them had always been the physical stuff, the sex. Even on the long haul to the Pole they had been able to enjoy each other. But there was no chance of that now. Even when they found themselves alone, tucked up in one of the carts while Tripp and Astiv took the other, they rarely felt like exposing enough flesh to the cold to make any meaningful contact. And, Brod knew, the estrangement between them went deeper than that. Vala just didn’t show any interest in him any more. Whereas he missed home desperately, she was fascinated by the newness of the world she was discovering. Out of place, he was sunk in misery; her mind, which had been locked up in her role as a Sapphire, was opening like a flower.

The idea that the whole jaunt beyond the Pole might be futile nagged at him too. Yes, they were off to explore the Antistellar, and that had always been Tripp’s goal. But they were also supposed to be fleeing Khilli. Was it really plausible that even such an obsessive as Khilli would pursue them beyond the Terminator? Were they fleeing phantoms?

These were questions that didn’t seem to occur to the others. So he developed a habit of trying to find a scrap of high ground, every few watches, and looking back the way they had come, seeking signs of pursuit. He borrowed Tripp’s pocket telescope to help with the seeing. He found nothing, in one vigil after another. He wondered if he was wasting his time, even in this, but at least to stand watch made him feel useful.

Then, as he stood alone in the deep dark cold, he saw a light, a pinpoint, like a star but fallen to the ground, crawling slowly but steadily across the landscape. He said nothing to the others. But after that he doubled the frequency of his watches.

And he dug his weapons out from the depths of their stores. He tried firing his muskets, seeing if the cold affected the powder or the guns’ mechanisms. And he practiced using sword and spear, club and knife, while swathed in his heavy Darkside clothing.

XIII

‘“The Galaxy is old …”’

Sitting alone in his son’s carriage, comfortable in a lightweight simulacrum of the Left Hand Seat, Elios, Speaker of Speakers, was warm despite the chill darkness inside, with his blazing iron stove and cocooned by walls lined with padded tapestries. The light from the photomoss strips was bright enough for him to read. And, as he preferred, he read aloud, his finger following the spidery, much-copied text, trying to pick out meaning from a string of archaic words, many of which he was entirely unfamiliar with.

‘“As the Galaxy formed from a vast, spinning cloud of dust and gas and ice, embedded in a greater pocket of dark matter, the first stars congealed like frost. In the primordial cloud there wasn’t much of anything except hydrogen and helium, the elements that had emerged from the Big Bang. Those first stars, mostly crowded in the Galaxy’s centre, were monsters. They raced through fusion chain reactions and detonated in supernovas, spewing out metals and carbon and oxygen and the other heavy elements necessary for life – at any rate, life like ours. The supernovas in turn set off a wave of starmaking in the regions outside the core, and those second stars were enriched by the products of the first ...”’

The heavy drapes that covered the entrance to the carriage were pushed aside, and Khilli shoved his way in. He was a bundle of black fur, bold, stern. Without a word he began to drag his outer clothing off. Beneath, he wore armour of polished leather reinforced with metal plates – not the warmest combination, and an outfit that had at first seemed excessively cautious to Elios, given how far they were from any likely foe, but he had come to understand that Khilli feared a treacherous back-stabbing from among his own ranks.

Elios clutched his papers to his chest and waved a hand at his son. ‘Oh, shut that flap, in the name of the Designers; you’re letting out all the heat – as usual.’

Khilli pushed closed the flap, but he snarled, ‘Still lying around reading, are you? You might feel warmer if you got off your leathery arse and did some work.’

Elios pursed his lips, but otherwise did not react. This kind of arrogant cheek was all too typical now. The boy was becoming too aggressive, too independent; he would have to be dealt with, ultimately. But not now – not here. ‘I take it from your relative good temper that all is going well.’

‘It could be worse.’ Khilli sat on a couch, and rummaged for food, a flagon of beer. ‘Two ponies lost in the last three-watch. One man down – fell into one of those poison lakes. The next peel-off is due in ten more watches. We’re on schedule …’

Elios was sure that this was the truth. Despite the gathering tension between them, the Speaker of Speakers had felt able to relax in the growing competence of his son’s generalship.

It had already been a remarkable achievement for Khilli to deliver enough physical force to the Pole of the world to intimidate the inhabitants of that remote place. With none too subtle threats Khilli had been able to force the Polars to hand over the provisions he needed for his ongoing pursuit, notably wagons and a whole herd of their sturdy cold-resistant ponies. And with their antique sketch maps, scraps fascinating to Elios, the elders had been able to show Khilli the likely route Tripp would take, following the rift valley to the equator of Darkside.

Khilli had planned his mission with ruthless competence. Not for him a risky dash with a couple of carriages and a few sacks of salted meat – but he understood from the beginning that his strategy of foraging and thieving his way across the landscape would not work on Darkside. So, enlisting his father’s help with the numbers, he planned an elaborate sequence of deliveries and stages, like several expeditions folded into one. Having established his route, he sent carriages off early to make supply drops. Then, when he was ready to depart, he took a fleet of carriages with him, all laden with provisions, all in support of a key core force. At preplanned stages a number of these carriages would ‘peel off’, in the language he and his officers developed, to dash back to the Pole leaving the survivors laden with fresh supplies. And, so far, it was working. Khilli had enough fat in his budget to cover losses to hazards like the strange mineral fields of the rift valley; even one fully laden wagon wrecked in a crevasse in a salt lake had not stopped him.

And Elios, having stood atop the Substrate monument the Polars called the Pivot to peer up at wheeling stars forever invisible from the Navel, could not resist the temptation to come with his son. The Speaker of Speakers had, after all, pretensions to rule the whole world. He had seen enough during his expedition to the Pole to accept that he knew far too little of the planet he lived on to justify any such claim. How could he turn away from glimpsing its hidden side? When would he get another chance – or any Speaker in the future, come to that?

So, while Khilli tended to his men with his noisy mixture of boisterous encouragement and ostentatious punishment, and while the soldiers complained of the cold and the food and their aching feet and their piles, Elios studied the strange chimneys of discoloured rock that lined the steaming mud pools, and wondered at the transient ocean that must have deposited these lakes of abandoned salt, and he watched the stars turn overhead.

And he had brought with him fragments of the past.

Following a thread of curiosity provoked by the Polars’ maps, he had ordered the elders to show him any more documents they had relating to the earliest times. The elders had been reluctant, but in the end they produced pages that seemed to complement the scraps Elios had seen of the document that had come to be known as Helen Gray’s ‘Venus Document’. Despite Khilli’s ever-present aggression the elders would not let these fragments out of their sight, but they did allow Elios’s clerks to transcribe copies hurriedly.

Now Khilli, with his mouth stuffed full of horsemeat pie, snatched a page from his father’s hand, and read slowly, his voice muffled by the food. ‘“So you have this zone of intense activity in the centre of the Galaxy, and a wave of starmaking washing outwards, with metals and other heavy elements borne on the shock front. That starbirth wave finally broke over the sun’s region maybe five billion years ago. But Sol is out in the boondocks, and we were born late …”’ He glared at his father. ‘What is this garbage?’

Elios took the page back delicately. ‘It’s supposedly a record, written down by Helen Gray, of a conversation she remembered with a woman called Venus Jenning, who never descended to this world, but who had used her voyage through space to study the worlds and the stars, and coming to certain conclusions.’

‘And what’s a “year”?’

‘The same as a Great Year – I think.’

Khilli scoffed. ‘Doesn’t matter anyhow. All fairy stories.’

‘Maybe. Just listen … “The Galaxy’s starmaking peak was billions of years earlier. Most stars capable of bearing planets with complex life are older than Sol, an average of two billion years older. That’s maybe four times as long as it has been since multicellular life emerged on Earth. Perhaps this is why we see no signs of extant intelligence. They were most likely to emerge billions of years before us.”’

Khilli frowned. ‘What’s a billion?’

‘A lot. “Whatever, after a billion years, they’re nothing like us, and they’re not here …”’

Khilli twisted his face. ‘What difference does any of this make to us?’

Elios put down the pages. ‘It’s clear we forgot, as a people, almost everything we once knew about this world, and any others that might exist. Maybe Tripp and the rest of the Polars are right to try to preserve this stuff.’ He returned his son’s glare. ‘Knowledge is power. If we let the knowledge that’s hinted at in these scraps fall into somebody else’s hands, we might regret it.’

Khilli sneered, took a knife from a sheath at his waist, and ostentatiously began to polish it. ‘This is power.’

‘But that blade was made by some Polar metal-worker! I think you’re making my point, in your thuggish way.’

‘Oh, am I? Here’s another point to make, then. You, the Speaker of Speakers, are indulging in heresy by going on about Helen Gray and journeys into space. None of this is real, remember? Everything we see is an artefact of the Designers’ plans. We understand only what they need us to understand. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to believe?’

Elios frowned, facing him. ‘Listen, son - nobody intelligent enough to observe the world around them, and educated enough to interpret it, can fail to have doubts about our Creed, or at least our understanding of it – and there’s the paradox, that the most educated and intelligent of all are to be found among the Speakers, at the heart of the faith. In my position it’s perfectly reasonable to believe two things at once. I can firmly believe in the validity of my religion, while at the same time opening my eyes to the reality of its contradictions. That may seem cynical to you, but I could scarcely wield the power I do without seeing the limits of the faith I administer – or, you could say more respectably, those aspects of it we have yet to understand. And power is what it’s all about, isn’t it? If you observe me, you’ll find there’s plenty for you to learn.’

Somewhat to Elios’s surprise, Khilli nodded. ‘Oh, I know, father. I listen to you, and I learn, believe me. After all, I have to learn from you if I’m eventually to take your place, haven’t I? Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve had my eye on one of the whores we brought from the Pole …’

He pushed his way out of the carriage, and the cold air ruffled the sheets of Helen’s journal, and his father was left open-mouthed with shock.

XIV

The ice cap that straddled the Antistellar point was smooth and all but featureless – an abstraction, a perfect plain under the wheeling stars.

Wearing their spiked shoes the horses made good time over this surface, huffing, panting and snorting, their breath steaming in the still, frigid air. There was little loose snow. Tripp said she thought precipitation must be low here, and that the ice was very old. And, near the centre of the cap, the ice was stable, intact and worn smooth by the wind, unlike the broken and crumpled landscape they had seen at the rim of the cap, where glaciers calved and shattered.

But it was a numbing, empty landscape to cross. It was almost a relief for Brod when his gaze was caught by a crevasse, and he was able to shout a warning and change their course – to do something.

As they approached the Antistellar, Tripp had to refine her navigation. Now she used instruments of wood, steel and glass that she used to measure the stars’ trajectories, and so work out precisely where she was.

Soon they came upon the mountain range she had promised, blocky lumps of granite that protruded roughly from the ice, their grey flanks carved by glaciers and streaked white with ice. This range itself spanned hundreds of kilometres, but Tripp was growing confident that her stellar navigation, and she led them through passes in search of her goal. When they paused for sleep watches, Brod found it comforting to be surrounded by the mountains’ silent, brooding flanks, rather than to be sat out exposed on the tabletop-smooth ice plain. At least there was cover if – when – Khilli came calling.

And at last, a full fifteen watches after entering the mountain range, Tripp led them through one last pass, and they all knew, unmistakeably, that they had reached the Substellar point. Cradled by the mountains that stood tall and silent around it, the monument, clear of ice, was mounted on a stubby hillock that looked as if it had been deliberately shaved off to provide a platform.

Tripp could not bear to wait a moment, to have a single hour’s rest, before hurrying ahead to inspect her discovery. Astiv Pellt insisted on coming with her, much to Tripp’s annoyance. ‘Don’t fuss, man!’ And Vala was just as eager as Tripp was. Astiv made her promise to proceed with proper care; it would be absurd to fall and break her neck a dozen paces short of the discovery of the age.

And if Vala, Tripp and Astiv were all going ahead, that left only Brod to tend the horses. That suited him; he wasn’t much interested in monuments, and was more concerned with watching their backs.

But Tripp approached him with some embarrassment. ‘You’ve come all this way,’ she said. ‘I do know what young men are like – the bragging they do – how they like to be first to the target. In at the kill, so to speak.’

‘I can wait. The monument’s been there a long time. It will still be there next watch.’

She grinned. ‘Of course it will.’ That duty done, she gave in to her own eagerness and hurried off.

The hillock’s walls were steep and glinted with ice in the starlight. Vala had already begun her ascent.

And before Tripp reached the slope she passed Astiv, coming the other way. ‘Ladder,’ he said shortly.

Once Tripp had begun the climb, only maybe thirty metres to the broad summit of the hillock, she found the slopes were slick with ice and eroded, but they were rough enough that climbing them wasn’t too difficult as long as she took care where she placed her feet and hands. At last she stood on the hillock’s flattened top – and it was flat, she saw immediately, dead level, more like a frozen pool than anything made of rock. Obviously artificial.

Vala was waiting for her here, smiling from ear to ear. The girl held out a mittened hand to Tripp. Then, hand in hand, they approached the Antistellar monument. It was a cylinder, set on the hillock and tapering slightly as it rose over their heads.

Vala breathed, ‘So what do you think?’

‘I -’ Tripp waved her hands. ‘It’s wonderful. It’s magnificent. We found it! Yet it’s just like the structure at the Substellar, if you stripped away all the human clutter there, and indeed at the Pole. Maybe I was hoping for something a bit more spectacular.’ Which would have seemed a fitting reward for undertaking such a journey, a full half-circumference of the whole world since the Navel – but that was a petty thought, and unscientific.

‘Do you think there might be another Eye in the top? Another mirror, like on the Navel?’

‘I don’t know. As soon as Astiv shows up with the ladder we can go see.’

‘I suppose it really is the same size as the others.’ Vala strode forward to the column, touched its surface reverently with one mittened hand, and began to pace around it boldly. ‘One, two, three …’

Tripp smiled, pleased. She’d been trying to imbue scientific instincts into the girl since they had met, and she had perceived a raw intellect under all the vanity and silliness. Measure – always measure! She walked up to the monument herself, and began to count out her own paces, moving clockwise while Vala went anticlockwise.

The silent stars watched as they walked and counted. By the time they had done, they found their counts differed by only a couple of paces, easily explained by their differing lengths of stride, and they promised to measure it properly later.

‘But, yes,’ Vala concluded, ‘it has the same dimensions as the Eye tower, and the Pivot.’

‘Here comes Astiv with his ladder.’

It took only a moment for them to set up the fold-out wooden ladder and prop it against the tower’s side. Without asking permission Vala immediately leapt onto it and began to clamber up, a bundle of dark fur, her legs working vigorously. Tripp glanced at Astiv, and shrugged. More cautiously, the two of them followed the girl.

They found Vala standing at the lip of a bowl of darkness. Tripp stepped off the ladder and stood with Astiv, their breaths steaming as they panted after the climb in their heavy coats.

‘Take it easy,’ Vala said. ‘The edge here is rough, but it’s not as secure as the wooden path we laid around our Eye.’

Astiv dug a roll of photomoss out of his coat and draped it over the wall, and its soft glow enhanced the starlight. And they peered into the bowl of darkness contained within the tower’s cylindrical wall.

Tripp said, ‘It does look like another Eye, doesn’t it?’ She knelt down. The bowl was coated with a black substance that crumbled as she touched it. ‘Slime – long dead and freeze-dried. Quite a thickness of it, though.’

Vala jumped down into the bowl, her lack of caution making Tripp’s heart pound a little harder, and she began to rip up the Slime enthusiastically. The surface beneath was smooth and full of stars, a mirrored surface that looked at first glance as flawless as the one on the Navel.

‘Another mystery,’ Tripp murmured to Astiv. ‘Evidently Slime grew over the mirror. How? Where did it get the light to grow?’

Astiv shrugged. ‘Why ask me? I just mind the horses. Seems to me you came all this way for answers -’

‘And all I found was more questions. All right, all right.’

Vala was tearing up great swathes of the dead Slime. ‘Come on, you two, help me. This stuff’s easy to shift. We could get the mirror clear quickly, if we all work at it.’

‘Why?’ Astiv asked practically.

‘Well, why not?’

Astiv grinned. ‘I do like that girl.’ He jumped down into the bowl, landed on his backside and slid in a great shower of black flakes. He got to his feet and began pulling away the Slime methodically, rolling it up like carpet and throwing it over the lip of the tower.

With a sigh, Tripp herself stepped down, more cautiously, and joined in. The Slime was so old and desiccated it came away easily.

‘Tell me about the Slime,’ Vala said. ‘The fact that it lies on top of the tower means it came after the tower was built. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes. But the Slime itself has been here a long time.’

‘How long?’

Maybe a very long time. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy, Venus Jenning had apparently said. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard … Or a battlefield. Maybe humans built their lives amid the relics of monumental wars long ago fought to a conclusion.

‘Look, we’ve got more than half clear now,’ Vala said. ‘I think it’s reflecting the starlight!’ She raised a handful of Slime dust in the air, and let it drift around her; it caught a sparking, misty beam, barely visible. ‘Come on, help me clear the rest …’

Tripp heard a shout. Perhaps Astiv Pellt heard it too; he turned, frowning. But Tripp’s head was too full of marvellous, strange ideas to be concerned about that. With renewed eagerness, hungry to know what would happen next, she ripped into the remaining Slime with new determination.

And she thought she saw a shadow beneath her, vaguely defined, as if cast by a source of diffuse light far above.

XV

A single carriage came rolling through the final pass to the monument, covered in canvas and grander than either of Tripp’s carts, and pulled by four weary-looking horses. It had a single driver, bundled in furs, and the way was lit by a strip of photomoss fixed to an arched frontage. It stopped some way short of Tripp’s carts, which weren’t even unpacked properly, such had been the haste of the others to climb the monument.

Brod considered calling Tripp and the others, giving them some warning.

Instead he walked forward, checking his weapons, the blade in one deep pocket, the musket in the other. His blood was pumping, his attention focussed, his spirits as high as they had been for many long watches. The challenge had come, and he relished it. Meeting challenges was what he was for; that was what he had inherited from the brave pioneers who had crossed space to come to this world - or had had programmed into him by the Sim Designers, depending on what you believed, and right now he didn’t care, because either way this was his moment.

As he approached the wagon the driver didn’t dismount. Brod couldn’t even see his face, and the man, or woman, seemed determined not to react to his presence. Even the horses, breathing steam, showed more interest. But it was obvious he wasn’t to be challenged from that quarter.

He walked around the wagon. It was sealed tight, the canvas pinned firmly in place, and he thought he could feel the warmth leaking from it. His enemy travelled in comfort, then.

He was ready.

He stood back from the wagon and bellowed. ‘Khilli! Khilli son of Elios! I am Brod son of Maryam! Come out here and meet me – or skulk in your cart like the coward you are! …’

A flap pushed open at the back of the wagon, and two men clambered out. One was stocky, dark-clad, a blade already in his hand, his head covered by a hood. The other was taller, slimmer, moved more stiffly, and, though clad in a heavy cloak, he shivered at the stab of the Antistellar cold.

Brod drew his musket and his blade, a stabbing-sword that was shorter than his opponent’s, and stepped forward. ‘Khilli. I’m flattered you came all this way.’

Khilli pushed his hood back to expose a shaven head, and a scar on his cheek that was livid even by the light of the stars. ‘Don’t be. I came to clean the world of a stain, kidnapper, rapist. Since you wouldn’t stand and fight before.’

‘I fled from your army, not from you – and I saved your sister from you, animal. And besides – here I am now, standing alone. Or have you brought your daddy to back you up?’

The other man slipped his own hood back from his shaven head. It was Elios, Speaker of Speakers, as Brod had suspected. ‘I have come only to observe.’ Elios sounded tired, almost wistful.

But Brod cared little for the Speaker’s mood. ‘To observe what, the death of your son?’

‘The conclusion of this, Brod. This strange affair that began the whole diameter of the world away. At least it will end here.’

‘And somebody’s going to die,’ Khilli said. ‘Then when my forces arrive we will tear down yon monument, as it should have been demolished long ago, and leave the world with only a single righteous focus of worship – the Navel.’

There was a flare of light from above, bright enough to be dazzling. Brod glanced towards the monument, distracted.

And in that instant Khilli hurled himself forward. Brod raised his musket, but Khilli’s blade flashed, slicing away the musket before it could be fired, and taking two joints of Brod’s trigger finger with it. Brod cried out, and blood pumped; he staggered backward, out of Khilli’s reach, and curled his fist into a ball to try to staunch the bleeding.

Khilli stood back, laughing. ‘One encounter, one blow and you have already lost your main weapon, and the use of your good hand. Give it up, rapist. Kneel before me and suck on my sword. I’ll be quick – you’ll hardly notice it’s inside you -’

Brod sneered. ‘That’s what all your lovers say.’

And he charged, right shoulder first, his blade raised in his left hand. As he rammed into Khilli he smelled meat and blood and sweat and grease. The man was knocked back, skidding on the icy rock underfoot, and Brod brought his own blade swinging down. But Khilli went with the skid, let himself fall and rolled, and Brod’s blade slammed harmlessly on the ground.

Khilli swept his blade in turn, and Brod had to jump to avoid his legs being taken out below the knees. But Khilli was on his feet even as Brod landed, and they closed again. Brod raised his blade, two-handed now, but Khilli raised his own fists to meet Brod’s, over their heads.

Again they were still, locked together, face to face. The strange light was bright now, coming from above, whatever it was, as they strained to bring the blades down. Brod could see Khilli’s face clearly, every stitch-mark in that scar, every blackened pore on his cheeks. ‘By all that’s holy,’ Brod said, ‘the Sim Designers made you ugly.’

‘Then let my ugly features be the last thing you see before I send you back to Memory.’ He spat in Brod’s face, and lunged.

And Brod, his right arm weakening, could not resist him. He gave way. The two blades swept down and slammed against the ground, and both shattered. Khilli lowered his head and butted Brod in the mouth, and Brod felt teeth shatter. He staggered back, and a shove in the chest sent him flying to the ground.

Khilli straddled him, a dagger held up in both gloved hands. ‘Goodbye, rapist.’ He straightened up, tensing for the lunge.

And he convulsed, a look of shock on his face, his mouth wide, his eyes staring. He looked down at Brod, and blood spilled from his mouth. His hands loosened, and he dropped his knife harmlessly. Then he fell back, like a toppling tree.

Elios stood motionless, a blood-stained dagger in his hand, a spatter of his son’s ichor on his cloak. He considered the fallen Khilli, apparently without emotion. Then he turned to Brod. ‘You could not have won. He wore armour under his cloak. A coward’s defence, really. But I have seen him dress and undress; I remembered the chinks, the gaps.’ He held up the knife, looked at its bloody blade, then dropped it to the ground beside Brod. It landed on the frozen rock with a bell-like chime.

Vala called. ‘Father! Is that you? Father – oh, Brod!’

Brod, fallen, cradling his hand, could not turn to see her. He tried to speak, but he spat blood and bits of broken tooth onto a ground that was bright beneath him – bright and sparkling with light, reflected from scraps of ice.

Vala ran up, her hood pulled back. As she took in the scene, the fallen Brod, her father, the corpse of Khilli, her face was wide with shock – and, just for a moment, Brod saw her brother in her, his face at the moment of his death at the hands of his father. Then she fell to her knees and cradled Brod’s head.

‘Ow! Careful – my teeth.’

‘Sorry. Oh, and your hand! I must bandage it before you bleed out.’ She dug in a pocket and pulled out a scarf, and wrapped it around his hand. She seemed reluctant even to look at Khilli. ‘My brother -’

‘He’s dead,’ Brod said.

Elios, awkwardly, reached down and touched her shoulder. ‘It’s over, my child. Many things will change now. Nothing will be the same …’

‘You have that right, Speaker.’ Tripp came lumbering up, with Astiv in her wake. Tripp glanced around at the fallen Khilli, the wounded Brod, the blood-stained Elios. ‘Whatever happened here – oh! How limited, how petty we humans are, slaying each other in the light of that!’ And she pointed up.

Brod glanced up, shading his eyes to see for the first time the brightening, pinkish-white light that bathed the scene. It was like the Star, he thought, or a scrap of it, somehow flung into the sky above the Antistellar. But since the Star was on the far side of the world, that of course, was impossible. Wasn’t it?

Vala stroked his brow. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? And we did it, when we cleared away the Slime – or so Tripp thinks.’

‘There’s a mirror,’ Tripp said. ‘A Substrate mirror, hanging in space. Orbiting up there, all these hundreds of millions of Great Years. Seen by Venus Jenning and Helen Gray, apparently, who spotted orbital architecture around this world – and it seems to have a twin in the sky over the Navel, perhaps a lens to deflect the light rather than to gather it. Controlled from this tower on the ground, it seems, by reflected starlight, in as simple a way as possible – the builders planned for the long term, planned for a system that would keep on working even if their own children forgot what it was! But they didn’t plan for the Slime, which wiped out the builders’ children, and covered over their grand mirrors, feeding on the very light that it was blocking out. And when the mirror in the sky turned away, the world turned colder, and the Slime itself died, but froze in place. And so things stayed, for uncounted millions of Great Years – until now.’

‘It will warm the world,’ Vala said, full of wonder. ‘Think of it, Brod! Tripp says the mirror gathers up the warmth of the Star and throws it back at this Darkside, and lights it up. Not all of it, not at once –’

‘But enough to melt this ice cap, I’ll wager,’ Tripp said, her face raised to the light in the sky. ‘Once it let life spread over this Darkside – the life we saw frozen, dead. Now the light comes again, enough to allow the green things to grow – and people to live here permanently on Darkside. It’s as if we discovered a whole new planet.’

Astiv grunted, sceptical. ‘Maybe. If so, it’s thanks to the engineering of those long dead Substrate builders. We haven’t done anything to shout about.’

Vala had seemed distracted, with the sudden presence of her father, Brod’s injuries, the miraculous light in the sky. But now it was as if she remembered Khilli. She released Brod, went to her brother’s body, and touched his cheek with her fingers, as if wondering. ‘He came to save me, I suppose, as he saw it. And it’s finished up like this.’ She looked up at her father. ‘But I won’t go back with you, despite his sacrifice.’

Elios had not moved. Now he stepped closer to Brod, and indicated the knife that still lay on the ground, out of Vala’s sight. He murmured, ‘Pick it up. Let her think you killed him. It will be better that way …’

‘She’s no fool. The truth will come out.’

He sighed. ‘If it does I will have to deal with that. Especially if she is to become my successor, as Speaker – for in spite of her protestations, that is her fate now.’

Brod stared. ‘You can think of such matters, at a time like this?’

‘But this affair has always been about the longer term. That is why I had to stop Khilli. He has changed our world, thanks to his campaign of conquest – united it, in a sense, under the Shuttle Flag. And now we have this, as Tripp said, like a whole new world to conquer. Who knows what wonders will follow?’ He raised his face to the reflected sunlight. ‘But Khilli wished to replace me. He’d have destroyed me to do it, in the end – and destroyed the faith, and then the world. You are more like him than I am; you must understand how it would have been. So I had to deal with him – and this was my one chance, this one last moment of weakness as he made his dash for vengeance, when I had him alone, before he gathered his loyal troops around him once more.’

‘And you took that chance.’

‘I had no choice. Surely you see that …’

Brod heard Vala weeping softly. Tripp went to her.

Elios, his face raised, was murmuring softly.

‘What are those words, Speaker?’

‘A prayer to the Sim Controllers. A prayer for forgiveness.’ He closed his eyes, and the pinkish light bathed his face.

Earth I

I

If we expected to come out here and join in some kind of bustling Galactic culture, it ain’t going to happen. We seem to be young, in a very old Galaxy. We’re like kids tiptoeing through a ruined mansion. Or a graveyard ...

Ark, Chapter 91

LuSi and JaEm, laughing, hand in hand, ran down the concrete slope into the tremendous dish of the starship construction yard. Huge structures stood here, inert and silent today, cranes and manipulators and giant trucks, portable fusion plants, fuel tanks frosted with glittering ice. LuSi knew that what had been constructed here, immense sculptures of metal and ceramic and monomolecular carbon, had been grander still, before being hoisted into orbit around Urthen and assembled into the delicate, gravity-vulnerable superstructure of a starship, itself a transformed asteroid.

A ship that was going to take LuSi away to the stars.

But not today, she told herself, not for a few Days more, she wasn’t going to lose JaEm and his warm touch, not today. And a few Days was a long time for a fourteen-year-old. On they ran, seeking a quiet place amid the silent machines.

And even at this moment LuSi had an unwelcome sense of perspective, the kind of perspective JaEm’s father, the scholar Jennin PiRo, had tried to beat into her thick skull, in his words. The yard, a crater dug into the ground, was too big, too big even for the monumental machines they built here. And why was that? Because it hadn’t been constructed to build mere human starships. It hadn’t been built by humans at all, as far as anybody could tell, but by an alien culture, star-faring, long-vanished. Why should it be so? It was an illogic in the Sim, the Jennin protested, in the Backstory, the received history of the universe and the human story within it. Unless the Sim’s Designers and Controllers were insane, why build in a feature like this that had nothing to do with mankind - it made no sense! Couldn’t LuSi see that? ...

Unfortunately she could, and it crowded into her head even now, even as they reached the shadow of a tremendous truck, found a sheltered spot behind one huge tyre out of the wind, and, laughing, sat side by side. Their breath steamed and mingled before them. They kissed, for the first time that day. And when JaEm slid his hand inside her coat, and she could feel his warmth, his strength.

Their shared warmth was a defiance of the cold of the day. The Ember hung above them, above the scattered clouds, in the sky from which it never moved. Its broad face was like a fading fire, mottled with huge dark spots. All LuSi’s short life the spots had been gathering, and the Jennins and other scholars predicted gloomily that the world was heading for another Ember-winter. Well, LuSi couldn’t remember the last Ember-winter, it had been over hundreds of Years before she was born. The only warmth she cared about was in JaEm’s lips, his hands, the firm body she could feel under his clothing. Yet she was soon to be taken away from this scrap of warmth too, and flung between the cold stars. All because of her mother and her hateful, self-imposed ‘mission’ ...

JaEm could sense her distraction. He hugged her, then sat back. He was sensitive that way, more so than she was. One reason she loved him, she supposed, though they had not yet used such loaded words out loud.

He asked, ‘What are you thinking about? Not about leaving? We shouldn’t waste the time we’ve got left thinking about that.’

‘No, not that,’ she lied. ‘I was thinking about your father, if you must know. His lectures. The shipyards are one of his “classic” examples of Sim flaws.’

‘I suppose I’ve had more practice in shutting him out of my head than you have.’ He kissed her again, delicately. ‘Do you think we’re all in a Sim?’

‘Of course,’ she said dutifully.

‘Even when I do this ... and this.’ Now he nibbled her ear, a move that always seemed to liquefy her internally. ‘Are we all just patterns of electricity in Memory, in some big calculating machine in Denva?’

‘If we are, it’s a very good Sim,’ she said, wriggling closer. ‘I don’t care if I’m real or not, as long as you’re here with me.’

‘Oh, LuSi -’

‘Oh, what rot.’ A light shone in their faces, harsh, dazzling. The voice behind it was unmistakeable: Jennin PiRo, JaEm’s father.

They pulled away from each other, fixing their clothing. JaEm raised a hand to shield his eyes. ‘Father? What do you want?’

‘Nothing from you, son,’ the Jennin said. ‘I need to talk to LuSi. And where she is, you are. You are depressingly predictable, for two of my brightest students. Come on out of there.’

PiRo, aged about forty Years – ten Years younger than LuSi’s mother - was a tall, habitually severe man dressed in the jet black uniform of a Jennin, a scholar. Severe, and habitually impatient with the flaws and weaknesses of others, particularly of his students, like LuSi, who he seemed to think should be doing better. ‘Sloppy, sloppy,’ he said now, ‘and I don’t mean your kissing technique, son.’ Which made JaEm blush horribly. PiRo turned on LuSi. ‘I mean your sheer emotional immaturity.’

LuSi bridled. ‘Immaturity?’

‘How can it not matter if you are a Sim character, or not? Would it not matter if you were the arbitrary creation of some cold onlooker? Imagine what she or he could do to you. Freeze you. Disorder your life, so that you might leap from death to birth – from my son’s youthful embrace to the bony hug of an ancient. Delete you! He could delete you from this artificial world you believe in, leaving no trace. Does that not appal you?’

Actually it did, but she felt her privacy had been violated by this pompous man, and she knew the theory enough to argue back. So she shrugged. ‘It would make no difference. Even if the instants of my life were jumbled up in the Memory, I would still experience them in the proper order. From my point of view, my own time line, I could never tell if -’

‘Oh, yes, rationalise it away. That kind of circularity of argument is precisely why, I suspect, the mythos of the Sim, and the Controllers in Holy Denva, has lingered as long as human civilisation has persisted on this planet. Do you know how long that is?’

‘Well -’ She should know.

‘Ten thousand Years! Nearly three quarters of a million turns of Urthen around the Ember! That’s as best as we can reconstruct, given the damage done by the Xaian Normalisation. Four hundred human generations – why, is it really imaginable that the most cold-hearted Controllers could maintain a Sim of whatever complexity for so long? What could possibly be the purpose?’

She stuck out her chin defiantly. ‘I don’t know. I have no answer. And since this isn’t your classroom, Jennin PiRo, I don’t have to find an answer, do I? You came looking for me, you said. Maybe you should get to the point.’

JaEm flinched at her defiance.

But PiRo gave her a kind of wary grin. ‘All right. I suppose I deserved that. Look, you may have an important future. More important than you know. And it’s because of your mother.’

‘My mother?’

‘You understand why Zaen SheLu is undertaking this decades-long mission to the stars.’

‘She has a hypothesis about Denva,’ LuSi said. ‘The Controllers’ base. Denva is the world humanity came from, or maybe a location on that world. She thinks it’s real, has a real location. Or at least -’

‘A location that maps onto a site in this “simulated” universe. A place where humans first came from. That’s correct. The difficulty is, she might be right.’

LuSi was baffled. ‘What do you mean, Jennin?’

‘I mean that her arguments are good, intellectually. She might well find some world, some primal site, that matches many of the criteria she has set out in her arguments. And if she does, that will cement the notion of the Sim in the minds of humanity for all time. Because the idea that all of humanity emanates from one single, primal, sacred world is just the kind of mythic element a Sim Designer would build into a fictitious Backstory. It’s a good narrative, and so it appeals to us.’

She shrugged. ‘But if it’s true -’

‘If it’s true, then the notion that we are mere toys in the hands of the Controllers will lock us in us forever. We will lose initiative. We will give up. What other reaction can there be? And this is not a universe in which it is safe to give up, to stop thinking, to become complacent. Not if the stars are going out.’ He glanced up at the Ember.

The Ember was not a star, like the more distant points of light in the sky. It was called a ‘brown dwarf’ by the astronomers, a term said to go back to the arrival of the Ark itself – if you believed the Ark ever existed. The Ember was not a star but a mere mass of glowing gas, heated by its own infall, and therefore gradually cooling.

LuSi was only growing more confused. ‘But if it’s true, if Denva ever existed, if the Sim exists and we can prove it, then that’s all that matters – isn’t it?’

‘There are many kinds of truth, LuSi. And many uses to which “truth” can be put.’

‘You still haven’t told me what you want of me.’

‘It’s simple, LuSi. Somebody needs to counterbalance your mother on this crusade of hers. I’ve been invited to join the mission myself ...’

And that brief line electrified both LuSi and JaEm. For if the Jennin came aboard the ship, surely his family would too – surely JaEm would follow his father – and LuSi and JaEm would have Years together, not mere Days.

The Jennin seemed oblivious to their reaction. ‘I have many responsibilities here, which I am reluctant to shed. I am undecided. But failing that, if I am not there -’

LuSi felt as if she was groping towards an understanding of all this. ‘Me? You want me to spend the next fifty Years arguing with my mother, about Sim theory and theology?’

He grinned. ‘That’s the idea. Somebody has to. And I think you have it in you, LuSi, even if you don’t see it yet yourself. Look – I don’t mean to impose on you, in this time you two have left together. Or to order you around. I want to inspire you, and I know I’m not always good at that, am I? A Jennin I may be, but not always a great teacher.’

‘Inspire me? How?’

‘I’ve secured you a ride on a torchship. You too, JaEm, if you must. We’re going into space! I know our journey will be dwarfed by your jaunt to the stars, but the scenery will be a lot more fun.’

JaEm gaped, evidently delighted.

‘Why?’ LuSi asked, more sceptical. ‘What’s the point? What are we going to be talking about?’

‘The Backstory,’ Jennin PiRo said simply.

The torchship was called the Holy Water. Owned by PiRo’s university, it was a practical, basic design meant for scientists, surveyors, explorers, a small, highly manoeuvrable, all but automated craft, capable of transporting a dozen passengers in comfort between the worlds of the Ember system in a matter of Days. LuSi and JaEm had travelled in such ships many times before; the Holy Water was a trivial achievement for a civilisation capable of routine interstellar travel.

But as they boarded, as the ship leapt out of another gigantic port facility and into the sky, the Jennin made them think about how the ship worked, the miracle of physics that powered it.

‘You are riding a fusion torch,’ he said. ‘And, generous as the Ember is to give us its warmth and light, the Ember is a failed star, it never achieved the mass it needed to allow hydrogen fusion to spark in its core. Until humanity arose here -’

‘Or came here,’ LuSi said automatically, correcting his father’s mild multi-origin heresy.

‘Before us, fusion had never happened here, in this system, not since the birth of the universe itself. Think what a wonder that is – what power we have! ...’

The first few days of the voyage were a jaunt. The Jennin took them on a looping tour of the Ember’s planetary system. LuSi knew that compared to some systems out among the stars of the Bubble, this was an impoverished place, with only two large planets, Urthen and Bigmars, a handful of smaller, scattered worldlets, and more distant belts of asteroids, comets and sparse ice moons. Both Urthen and Bigmars orbited so close to the Ember that they were tidally locked, each holding one face permanently to the sub-star’s dim glow – the price they paid for the meagre warmth of the Ember. But that warmth had not been enough to save Bigmars from an endless age of ice; unlike Urthen, which too had its chilly regions, no liquid water could persist anywhere on Bigmars’s surface.

It was towards Bigmars that Jennin at last pointed the ship’s prow. And as that cold, glittering world approached, he ordered the youngsters to tell him the Backstory.

The Backstory was the history of the universe and of mankind in it, and every child on Urthen learned it at first school. LuSi said, ‘The Ark was built, by the giants Nimrod, Seba and Halivah, so that their children could flee Denva when the oceans rose. On board the Ark, the Crew struggled to survive, until the Son extracted the Ship’s Law from the Will. And the Ship’s Law remains the basis of our system of justice to this day.’

Jennin waved a hand. ‘Yes, yes. And then?’

JaEm went on, ‘And then the Ark split in two, when some of the Crew fell upon the poison ground of a world of false promise, and the rest continued the Journey. Then there was the Blow-Out, when rebel children challenged the parameters of the Sim itself and caused a lethal rupture of the remnant Ark.’

‘Which is commonly interpreted as a metaphor for a Sim systems crash,’ said LuSi. ‘According to an analysis by -’

‘Don’t analyse!’ the Jennin snapped. ‘Don’t interpret! Just tell me the story.’

JaEm went on uncertainly, ‘The Ark split in two at one more false world. Then finally its mighty Journey was over, the sacred engines were shut down for the last time -’

‘Yes, yes. And humans fell to the ground of Urthen all those Years ago, ten thousand Years. Then what?’

‘Then we prospered, and spread, and cultivated our farms,’ LuSi said. ‘Cities rose. Learning spread. At last we heard messages, whispers from other nations out among the stars of the Bubble. We built new ships, not as mighty as the Ark but capable of reaching the stars. And we sent out emissaries to the other worlds and their peoples, and then we found more new worlds and we populated them, until the Bubble was filled with human worlds -’

‘And then the Xaians of Windru got hold of starship technology,’ the Jennin said.

LuSi suppressed a smile. It sounded to her as if PiRo was becoming enthralled by the familiar story, despite his intellectual scepticism. ‘The Xaians,’ she said, ‘seeking to cut mankind free of the burden of history, scoured the worlds of the Bubble and destroyed all traces of the human past, on world after world -’

‘Or tried to,’ PiRo said. ‘All they succeeded in doing was making the job of the archaeologists and historians and other Jennins a lot more difficult.’

‘On Urthen, even starship technology was lost. But eventually it was recovered ...’

Bigmars was looming close now. Through the transparent hull of the habitable compartment the planet bellied before them, its surface rust-red and wrinkled under splashes of ice. Awed or intimidated by the sight, they fell silent.

The Jennin was the first to speak. ‘The Backstory,’ he said. ‘The whole tangle of it. LuSi, think. Of course it has a storytelling unity. But doesn’t it all sound too complicated? If you were a Sim Designer and you going to invent a history for mankind, why make it so complex and unlikely? All these ships flying around an empty universe ... And what about the elements of the Backstory that have nothing to do with mankind at all? What are they for?’

JaEm frowned. ‘What do you mean, father?’

The Jennin snorted. ‘Tell him, LuSi.’

LuSi, embarrassed for JaEm, just said: ‘Look down.’

They were in orbit now, swooping low over the northern hemisphere of Bigmars. Close to what looked unmistakeably like the shore of a sea, vanished save for glinting salt flats, were rows of dimples in the ground, like craters, small features seen from space but huge if you were down there among them. But they were not craters.

‘You know what they are,’ Jennin PiRo said. ‘Even you, JaEm -’

‘Evidence of starships.’

‘Yes. Construction yards, like on Urthen – maybe. Or at least the marks of the launch of starships. Interstellar technology is always going to be hugely energetic; it is always going to mark any planet on which it takes root. And we know this isn’t evidence of human activity because -’

LuSi said, ‘It’s all too old. Sealed under water ice and frozen air.’

‘More air than water, but yes. What do we think happened to the people who built this?’

‘They left in their starships. Or else they died out here, so long ago that their tombs have eroded away ...’

‘The Ember got too cool,’ said JaEm.

‘That’s it,’ said the Jennin. ‘That’s the story – or the Backstory. The Ember is cooling, slowly, but inexorably. At any point in time there is a location in space around the Ember where a planet is warm enough for life – life like ours, life that needs liquid water. Once Bigmars was warm enough. But the habitable radius moved in towards the Ember, and Bigmars froze. Much of its water is probably still there, but locked underground in big aquifers. Useless for life. All this took a long time, billions of Years, but it was inevitable. And, yes, LuSi, the inhabitants of Bigmars must have fled, or died out. Just as we, one day, will have to flee, when Urthen starts to freeze in its turn.’

LuSi said carefully, ‘Some people think that adds to the authenticity of the Backstory. I mean, the story of the Ark. The crew must have come far; maybe they could go no further, and had to stop here, however imperfect the world is, however inadequate the Ember.’

The Jennin snorted dismissively. ‘That’s not what I brought you here to see.’

‘I know,’ LuSi said. ‘It’s just like the starship yards at home. You argue that there is no need for a human Backstory to include evidence of a vanished alien civilisation.’

‘Well, why should it?’

She faced him. ‘You say you want me to argue with my mother over her interpretation. But she has evidence on her side. At least for the consistency of the Backstory, the logic of the Sim. For instance, the very existence of mankind on the many worlds of the Bubble. How could we have got there if a ship didn’t deliver us?’

‘Oh, there are plenty of secondary colonies. We know that. But the primary worlds, including Airtree, Windru, Urthen - mankind arose separately on all these worlds. Convergent evolution. Our form is in some sense optimal for sentient, tool-wielding creatures.’

‘But it’s not just mankind. What about the Human Suite? That’s what the ecologists call it, isn’t it?’

‘Go on. What is the Human Suite?’

‘The creatures on which we rely, the grasses, the animals. Things we eat, or that can eat us. They are always to be found on human worlds – even though we have to share every world with other forms of life. Some quite unlike ours.’

‘So what? So on each world there has been a multiple origin of life – more than one tree of life. Why not? Why should the initiation of life be unique? And as for the Human Suite – convergent evolution, once again. What else?’

‘There’s the fact that the human worlds share elements of culture. Similarities of language, we all speak something like Anglish. We even use time measures like Years and Days that have nothing to do with the turn and spin periods of a world like ours -’

‘All probably imposed by the Xaians in their ideological fervour, much more recently than the flight of any Ark from a proto-world. Certainly that’s a much simpler explanation, and one based on an event we know happened, from the surviving records.’ The Jennin leaned forward. ‘Look, child. I’m not expecting you to swallow my arguments today. Or ever, even. I just believe that your mother needs a countering voice.

‘Her pet theory, and the theological orthodoxy on this world and many others - that we are all trapped in some artificial reality - is deadening for the human spirit. The standard Backstory, about the drowning primary world, the Ark, only reinforces the idea. On the other hand the notion that the universe is just as it seems, that humanity evolved independently on all these habitable worlds, is actually simpler; we don’t need an elaborate secret history to explain it all ... If the Backstory is confirmed by your mother, the whole Sim hypothesis is strengthened too. Your mother is never going to be convinced by the likes of me, but at least she needs a counter-voice. She must be made to work hard to convince others, no matter what she finds out there among the stars. And that’s what I want of you, LuSi – to be that counter-voice ...’

‘Or,’ JaEm said, reading a note scrolling on a comms screen, ‘you could do that job yourself, father.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The university has just made an announcement. It is a big project, after all; the journey will take at least a century, there and back. They want a presence on board, to ensure their objectives are met. The College of Zaens is apparently going to mandate it.’

‘Mandate what? ... Oh. My presence on the ship?’

‘You’re going to the stars too.’ JaEm grinned at LuSi. ‘And so are we.’

They couldn’t resist it. They flung themselves at each other and embraced.

The Jennin groaned and rubbed his face. ‘Serves me right. Be careful what you wish for, in case you get it. I bet that saying is as old as mankind itself ...’

It took another year before the great starship Reality Dreams was ready to cross the interstellar gulf.

It took fourteen more years to achieve that crossing.

LuSi and JaEm were together on the ship; in the course of the journey they were even married. Thanks to their advanced anti-senescence science, the people of Urthen were long-lived; only a fraction of their potential lifetimes was expended.

But still, by the time the ship reached Airtree, its first destination, their youth was gone.

II

After the battle was done, the Speaker of Speakers paused by the small field hospital that tended to the wounded, and reassured the dying that death was not an end, merely a return to the frozen patterns of thoughts in the greater Memory of the Sim ...

‘Earth III’, Chapter IX

The starship Reality Dreams settled into orbit around Airtree.

Shuttles, approved by the local authority, came up from the ground to transport down the passengers. Blocky winged craft powered by fission rockets for the ascent, and essentially gliders for the re-entry and landing, these were elderly, well-worn craft, beaten up by multiple flights to the edge of space. JaEm, who had devoted his life aboard the Reality Dreams to space engineering, looked faintly appalled at the sight of them.

But LuSi knew this was what they had to expect. Airtree was ruled by a single government, as it had been through most of its history: a theocracy built around the cult of the Sim Controllers. The theocracy was rich, but its world was technologically backward, relatively.

Even the slightly grander craft that was to transport Zaen SheLu, the Jennin PiRo, and their children LuSi and Jaem, plastered with heat-resistant tiles and holy symbols, was old and shabby and smelled faintly of urine. LuSi settled in grimly beside JaEm; nearly thirty years old now, and after fourteen years in the cavernous interior of the starship, she felt a twinge of apprehension as the shuttle parted from its lock with a rattle of opening latches.

Before making their descent they completed a high-inclination orbital loop around the planet, and LuSi was able to make out the main features of this world, fixing them against the maps she had studied in the years before their arrival. Like Urthen, Airtree orbited close in to its sun, so that a single hemisphere faced the light. The illuminated face was a muddle of ocean and land, and LuSi could make out great concentric bands of vegetation types surrounding the subsolar point, green fading to brown or grey, swathes of forest or grasslands or crops, or even surviving scraps of native life, she supposed, adapted to the particular conditions of light and climate dictated by the unchanging altitude of the sun in the sky. The far side, perpetually dark, seemed wholly abandoned, although history texts told of how it had been partially colonised thanks to the reflected glow of some alien technology in space, an ancient gift smashed up by the Xaians.

And above all this, LuSi saw Reality Dreams, patiently following its own orbit. The starship was an engineered asteroid, a bubble of glass and ice that shone green from within, like a tremendous jewel; it looked more like a small moon than a ship. It was a miracle of the ancient warp technology that had driven the ship between the stars that in flight this huge bulk was folded away out of spacetime into a higher dimension, so that only a warp bubble the size of a sand grain protruded into the mundane cosmic stratum. LuSi longed with all her heart to be back aboard the ship, with JaEm, in the home they had built together, with their work, their slates and models, their friends. But she knew, too, that that was a symptom of her long interstellar confinement; she was like a released prisoner longing to be locked up again.

Light flared beyond the cabin windows, and the ride grew briefly bumpier, the air thickening, turbulent. When the plasma glow faded, the starry sky had been replaced by a violet blue, the stars were obscured, and the starship was lost to LuSi’s view. She reached out for JaEm’s hand.

Speaker Tanz Vlov, sitting opposite them, observed this. This Airtree native, compact, shaven-headed, had been sent up in the shuttle to be their escort to the ground. Like many of his people, from a world of sterner gravity than Urthen, he was short by the standards LuSi was used to, but not exceptionally so. Despite his drab clerical garb he was a cheery, irreverent man who appeared about forty, but since anti-ageing treatments were available on this world, at least to the ruling elite, that was no real guide. Now Vlov smiled. ‘You look nostalgic.’ He spoke the Urthen tongue - or their own particular dialect of Anglish depending on how you classified it - well but with a heavy accent. ‘You miss your ship.’

‘It is our home,’ LuSi said. ‘Has been since we were both teenagers.’

‘Your home? You are married, yes? You have children?’

‘Not yet,’ JaEm said. ‘Perhaps in the next phase of the journey. Which will take another thirty years, nearly, to Windru.’

Vlov whistled. ‘Thirty more years, in a big enclosed machine. Strange to think of it.’

Jennin PiRo leaned forward, past his son. ‘It shouldn’t be strange. Not to you. This world is the capital of the Creed of the Sim! You’re a Speaker, senior in the faith. You believe that everything is an artefact – even the physical world, even the stars, all a dream stored in some vast machine’s frozen Memory. What is life in a starship but a metaphor for that? It should seem familiar to you ...’

LuSi was used to this kind of goading from the Jennin. Vlov’s reaction seemed to be a commonsense one; he winked at her, and grinned. ‘Of course nothing is real. But the Sim Controllers created us for a purpose, a purpose expressed through how we live our lives. And we must live those lives as if it were all real. What else is there to do?’

LuSi’s mother, meanwhile, was entirely uninterested in the conversation. SheLu was dressed in her own world’s version of clerical garb, the plain steel-grey robe of a Zaen, a priest of the Sim, and her hair, while not shaven close, was cut short and neat. She was in her sixties now but her ageing treatments had preserved her at around thirty; seeing her in the unfamiliar light of this new world, LuSi saw how her skin was just a little too taut, her eyes a little too clear.

She peered out of the small window beside her seat, as the shuttle banked and turned in the air. In the ocean beneath was an island, the largest of a chain, a speck of land directly under the suspended star. The shuttle dipped low over this, heading north towards the shore of a continent called Seba, where they would make landfall.

‘And that is the island you call the Navel?’

Vlov didn’t need to look to see. ‘At the Substellar, yes. Just like Urthen, from what I hear, our world huddles close to its sun, which is a small, cool star – as stars go, anyhow. But at least it is a star! I can’t imagine living in a sky full of a big fat gassy bag of a planet ...’

‘There is a monument,’ murmured SheLu. ‘On the island. But it is a mighty wreck.’

So it was, LuSi saw, when she got a chance to look. The island seen from above was a scarred mass of docks, dwellings, temples and pathways, all centred on a tremendous pillar – a pillar that was smashed, melted in places, with great fallen blocks larger than some of the buildings at its feet.

‘The work of the Xaian Normalisation,’ SheLu guessed.

‘Yes,’ said Vlov. ‘Once it was called the Eye. The monument itself was Substrate. Which is what we call the relics of an older technology found by humans on this world when they arrived.’

JaEm asked, ‘Older?’

His father said dryly, ‘Alien.’

‘We had nothing which could scar it, break it. We could build on top of it, or around it, and so we did. It is said that the Xaians used a starship drive to dismantle such features, here, at the Antistellar, at the Poles, even in orbit.’

SheLu shuddered. ‘Warp technology brought to a planet’s surface. What barbarism.’

‘Before the Xaians came, the monument was dedicated to the veneration of the Sim Controllers.’

‘But if that’s so,’ PiRo said, ‘why would the Controllers not simply reverse the damage and restore the monument? It would take only a Word, after all.’

Vlov, unperturbed, just grinned. ‘But the pilgrims continue to come here even so. Perhaps the wreckage adds another layer of lustre, of romance. The Controllers don’t need to fix it, you see. It works fine just as it is.’

PiRo stared at him, and laughed. ‘There you have it, Zaen SheLu. Why do we never see any signs that the Controllers intervene in their Sim? Because they choose not to. A perfectly closed and irrefutable argument!’

‘If you say so,’ SheLu murmured, indifferent. LuSi thought she heard her mother mutter prayers to the Controllers as the shuttle began its final approach.

Much of this world chimed with echoes of LuSi’s home planet.

They landed near the shore of a continent called Seba, which in Urthen lore was the name of one of the giants who built the Ark. The landing facility was close to a city called New Denv, a name not so terribly far from Denva, the legendary home of the Sim Designers. Then they were transported to the largest coastal town, near the southern coast of Seba, called Port Wils. It stood on a mighty river of the same name. The name Wils was like a half-remembered fragment of the story of the Son of the giants who had extracted the Ship’s Law from the Will, the semi-incarnate purpose of the Designers themselves.

Maybe all this did reflect some common origin, of a star-scattered mankind, LuSi wondered. Or maybe it was all an artefact of the great cultural smearing-out delivered by the Xaian Normalisation in the course of its hugely destructive rampage across the Bubble. Or maybe it really was an artefact of the world’s nature as a simulation, with these common elements being used and reused by the Designers on one world after another – their signatures, some speculated. One thing was sure; all this needed a deeper explanation than Jaem’s father’s austere but supremely rational notions of evolutionary convergence.

After a voyage of fourteen years, the plan was to spend only perhaps twenty Days here – or, in the local argot, sixty watches, each of which was almost precisely one-third of a Day. This had been negotiated in advance, in communications between the ship in its final sublight approach and the Speakerhood authorities here at Port Wils. Though they had come so far, a few Days, it seemed, were all that was required for the Speaker of Speakers to make her decision concerning SheLu’s requests for support of her ongoing expedition in search of the origins of mankind within the greater Simulation.

While the Zaen and the Jennin, priest and scholar, met with various minor functionaries in advance of their meeting with the Speaker of Speakers, JaEm and LuSi tentatively explored Port Wils, under the avuncular guidance of Speaker Tanz Lvov. The priorities of the Speakerhood here soon became apparent. It was on Airtree, so it was said, in lost, semi-legendary times before the wave of destruction that was the Xaian Normalisation, that the cult of the Sim had first arisen – or perhaps, others said, it was a legacy of the Ark as it had passed this world. And in the generations since then, the Speakerhood at Port Wils had made sure that it remained the hub of the faith – and therefore the destination of interstellar pilgrimages, from across all the human worlds where the faith had taken hold. All those worshippers, and all their tithes, flowed into Airtree, and specifically to Seba, and across Seba to Port Wils, gateway to the Navel itself. The Speakerhood was a vast, efficient, and highly profitable organisation, and to the senior administrators a passing starship was a mere distraction.

‘No wonder they are so backward technologically,’ JaEm said to LuSi as they wandered the crowded streets.

‘Not completely,’ LuSi said. ‘The Speakers seem to have access to anti-ageing technologies just as good as ours, if not better. And their kitchens -’

‘Yes, but you know what I mean. Those surface-to-orbit shuttles might have come off the Ark itself. I don’t believe there’s a starship construction yard in the whole system.’

‘But there doesn’t need to be,’ LuSi said gently. ‘The starships come here.’

‘Yes. Stuffed with money!’

Beneath the surface of this bustling human city, itself millennia old, they came across traces of older habitations. The ancient alien material called the Substrate wasn’t restricted to the monument on the Navel, and nor had it all been eradicated by the Xaians. Here and there it persisted, as fragments of walls or foundations set out to linear or circular plans, apparently as unweathered and enduring as when their unknown builders had abandoned them, and built over by coarser human materials, bricks, concrete, steel and glass. And then, in cracks in the sidewalks, at the corners of neglected gardens, they would glimpse scraps of a different kind of life, unimposing mats and films of a black-green tint. The natives, Tanz Vlov told them, called this the Slime. It too had been here long before humans arrived, and the Human Suite had pushed it disregarded into the corners of its own world.

Yet it persisted, LuSi thought, yet it persisted, like the Substrate, a hint of a deeper meaning to this world, like so many others, a meaning beneath the froth of human history. And that was true whether all of this was a dream of some electronic Memory or not.

The party from the Reality Dreams was called at length to a meeting with the Speaker of Speakers in a lavish building called the First Temple, set at the heart of Port Wils. They were kept waiting, not for long, in a kind of anteroom, where they were served drinks in cut-glass goblets borne on silver trays by silent junior clerics. Even this waiting room was tall, airy, thickly carpeted and every scrap of wall surface was covered by paintings, tapestries, and ornate designs – some of them holographic, so that when you turned your head this way and that different aspects of reality were presented, presumably a representation of the nature of the Simulation that was the core of the faith.

At length they were called into another vast, ornate room, but LuSi was impressed by a kind of working office set out at the centre of the room, an island of furniture in a sea of carpet, one large desk surrounded by chairs, smaller desks, blocks of filing cabinets and slate racks. A woman in a purple robe sat behind the desk, working at papers; this was the Speaker of Speakers herself, a woman of an ancient local family, called Kira Elos. She did not look up.

The starship passengers were led to seats before her desk. Attendants fluttered back and forth, carrying slates and papers, murmuring to each other and to the Speaker of Speakers.

LuSi noticed, standing in one corner, a curious cage, of some fine silvery mesh, taller than she was. Light from the sun, which was overhead at this location, was reflected from a bank of mirrors into the cage, where a kind of tree grew, tall, spindly. Birds with silvery, mirrored wings fluttered around the tree, catching the light and reflecting its glow onto its trunk, which shone in return.

At last Kira Elos looked up. ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting. You have come far to visit me.’ She spoke what sounded like comprehensible Anglish to LuSi, but translators stood by discreetly, to aid the conversation.

Jennin PiRo said smoothly, ‘But we know that other pilgrims come from much further away yet. Thank you for your time and attention, Speaker of Speakers ...’

He calmly introduced the party, one by one. The Speaker in turn introduced some of her staff. The names did not seem important to LuSi, and she made no attempt to memorise them.

She was distracted by the tree in the cage. Every so often blinds would furl and unfurl, apparently automatically, so that the pattern of light falling on the cage changed, and the mirror-wing birds would flutter and fly, adjusting their position in response to the changing light.

The Speaker of Speakers noticed her watching. ‘Distracting, isn’t it? And charming.’

‘I’m sorry -’

‘Don’t apologise. You’re right to be intrigued. There are few of these specimens left on this world – by which I mean the trees and the birds, for they form a symbiotic partnership, you see. The birds bring the tree light, and it feeds them in turn.’

‘But the light comes at a low angle,’ JaEm said. ‘Artificially, thanks to these mirrors.’

The Speaker nodded. ‘True. From which you deduce?’

Jennin PiRo jumped in with the answer, and LuSi knew how much that irritated JaEm. ‘That this is a native of high latitudes – lands close to the terminator between day and permanent night. Where the sun is always low.’

‘Correct. But the mirror forests are almost gone, now, eradicated to make room for variants of wheat and rice and other crops we have developed to be tolerant of the poor light conditions.’

SheLu nodded. ‘It is a common observation, demonstrable by archaeology, that a mass extinction of any native life follows the successful settlement of any world by humans. It is logical; the new life must supplant the old, if it is not to be pushed back.’

The Speaker smiled. ‘I understand that. But even so, it is a miracle the birds survived.’

She said that once this world had been full of animals and plants that seemed to have been designed, by some vanished precursor inhabitants – maybe the Substrate builders, maybe not – to serve as tools, or engines. There had been tractor beasts and tunnel-building moles and ‘photomoss’, a life form that collected useful energy from the sunlight.

‘All of these were exterminated by the Xaians. But the birds were spared, whether by intention or accident we are unsure – they are after all hard to trap. One strand of our theological thinking suggests that the Xaians were actually carrying out the will of the Controllers in their great extirpation. Perhaps the Sim had drifted from its parameters and needed cleansing. And so perhaps the birds’ continuing existence is somehow heretical.’

LuSi, staring at the birds and their tree, could not believe anything so intricately exquisite could possibly be regarded as wrong, in any value system.

The Speaker of Speakers considered SheLu. ‘Of course, Zaen, the Xaians’ enthusiastic destruction must have complicated your quest to trace the origin of mankind.’

‘If such a single origin exists at all,’ PiRo put in.

SheLu smiled. ‘Actually it makes it more interesting, intellectually. A challenge, set for us by the Controllers themselves, perhaps, to test the minds they have given us ... Not even the Xaians could extirpate everything about human culture. It’s a commonplace that the human worlds share common concepts. Measures of time, for instance, like the Days and Years we use on Urthen – or the watches you use here. Each watch is about a third of on of our Days; your Great Year is three hundred and sixty of our Days, which is about the same as our Year. And so on. All this might derive from some primal source.’

‘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 Speaker 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.’

‘But wouldn’t that have to be a Sim within the Sim?’

‘I’ll leave that to better theologians than me to sort out. And if this is true, maybe the legends of the source of the Xaians’ plague weapons are true also.’

Lacking metals, the Xaians had never developed starships. They had had to wait until explorers from other worlds, specifically from Urthen, had come to them, with ships ripe for the hijacking. But the storm of extirpation they had unleashed subsequently on their companion human worlds had relied on biological weapons of devastating ferocity. When the Xaians had been driven back, they had taken the weapons with them. Even now, visitors to this world had to undergo heavy programmes of inoculation to protect them against lingering, ineradicable traces – programmes LuSi and Tanz between them had had to force SheLu to endure, so impatient had she been to get on with her work. The Xaians had never admitted the source of these weapons.

‘The legend is,’ SheLu said, ‘that the Xaian scholars found a way to interrogate the City of the Living Dead, and retrieve secrets from the alien minds stored there. Weapons lore, perhaps? If so no wonder the weapons were so effective; they weren’t human in origin at all. As for the City itself, it was destroyed in the liberation wars. So some say. Or was lost after climate lurches on this unstable world, so others say. It was always very far to the north, always inaccessible.’ SheLu looked up at her daughter. ‘Maybe it still exists out there somewhere. And the people here, these children of the Xaians, know it, and know where it is. Perhaps they anticipate the day when they might get a chance to use it again.’

LuSi stared at the chunks of Purple on the desk. ‘You know, mother, here we are trying to puzzle out human origins. That’s challenge enough. While all around us there are these deeper, older mysteries. Alien life everywhere. Signs of vanished intelligences, on so many worlds. They can’t all have locked themselves away in storage to dream away the Years. But if not, where have they gone?’

SheLu left the question hanging in the air. For a moment they pondered cosmic mysteries together, mother sitting at the desk, daughter standing over her. As if they had forgotten who they were, LuSi thought, forgotten all that had passed between them.

Then a kind of self-awareness returned, and they pulled apart, turned away.

At that moment, providentially, Tanz Vlov bustled into the room, carrying a slate and a sack of scrolls. ‘I have it. The information you sought. I have it!’

And Zaen SheLu fell on the man and his data as if her daughter no longer existed.

LuSi busied herself with her own studies for a full Windru spin, a ‘day’ that was nearly one and a half times a standard Day. She let her mother, and a slightly baffled Tanz Vlov, work through the data he had retrieved from the city’s libraries and archives. When SheLu came to some conclusion, she would not hesitate to let her daughter know.

And, sure enough, towards the evening of the next Windru day, SheLu summoned her. ‘I have found it,’ she said, in an evidently unconscious echo of Tanz’s eager cry of the day before.

‘Found what, mother?’

‘Come and see.’

What Lvov had unearthed was information on a variety of worlds unknown to Urthen science. In their search for human colonies to ‘Normalise,’ the Xaians had carried out a survey of star systems in and even beyond the Bubble of colonisation not equalled before or since.

Tanz Vlov seemed proud to have dug up all this information. ‘Thousands of Years old, this stuff, but presumably still valid, unless the parent stars have blown up, or some such ... The Xaian legacy is either venerated or despised, even here on Windru. You can imagine the tact I had to use to extract all this old stuff from the temples and colleges, museums and archives, institutions called the Four Universities which claim a very great age. Even private collections, some of which are like shrines to Xaia ...’

‘Don’t boast, little man,’ SheLu said dismissively. ‘The point is,’ she told her daughter, ‘in among all these planetary systems the Xaians found ocean worlds.’ She had pinned images, names, scraps of information about these worlds around her study walls. ‘Worlds more or less like Urthen, worlds more or less habitable for humans, but -’

‘But drowned by oceans.’

‘Yes. Now, look. By interrogating the data I can eliminate many of them as candidates for Urth I. See from the displays how I have filtered them out? Some worlds are in the wrong part of the sky. Others have oceans that are too deep – a world like ours may form with as much as half its mass in water, and an ocean enormously deep. No, Urth I cannot be as drowned as that. Second, I have eliminated worlds orbiting Embers, as our own Urthen does, or dim stars like that of Airtree. Why? Because to be close enough to their stars to be habitable the rotations of such worlds are always tidally locked. They have no “days” – or rather, their spin takes the same time as their turn, their “day” is identical to their “year”. We suspect that Urth I must have had a “day” distinct from its “year”, for those are the units of time that have descended to us: Days, Years, each of which comprises hundreds of Days.’

LuSi saw that this argument eliminated most of the candidate ocean worlds, simply because most of the Galaxy’s stars were small, dim stars, and there was an equally large number of Ember-like failed stars. In any event, now only a handful of candidate planets from the Xaian survey survived, ocean worlds orbiting big, bright stars.

‘The final match,’ SheLu breathed, ‘was against our time units themselves. I sought a world with a day and year that matched our own, or simple multiples or fractions of it. For example the Airtree “watch” is almost exactly one-third of our “Day”; either of those could be a measure of an Urth I spin ...’

Following the logic of the display on the study walls, LuSi saw that only one candidate remained, a grainy old image of an otherwise unspectacular ball of steel-grey, cloud-shrouded ocean.

‘Urth I,’ SheLu said, grinning like a self-satisfied child. ‘I have found it.’

‘Perhaps.’ LuSi wished PiRo was here, to judge this as a piece of scientific thinking. SheLu had juggled the facts to fit a preconceived story. Perhaps, even given the same data, a different framing story would have produced a different outcome. ‘But at least we can test this idea -’

‘By going there, yes,’ SheLu said. ‘I have already called the ship. The target world is seven years’ travel from here.’

‘Seven more years!’

‘I know. It’s nothing. We leave tomorrow.’

IV

A light flared in the sky. Lily glanced up, thinking it must be the end of totality, the bright sunlight splashing unimpeded once more on the moon’s face. But the moon, still wholly eclipsed, was as round and brown as it had been before.

It was Jupiter: Jupiter was flaring, still a pinpoint of light, but much brighter, bright enough to cast sharp point-source shadows on the glistening weed of the raft substrate. But the light diminished, as if receding with distance. And soon Jupiter shone alone as it had before.

That was the Ark, she thought immediately. That was Grace. What else could it be?

Then a sliver of white appeared at the very rim of the moon, lunar mountains exploding into the sunlight. She was quickly dazzled, and Jupiter was lost. She was never going to know ...

Ark, Chapter 56

Despite the surging of the grey global ocean – despite the waves that battered the raft’s pontoons, the signature of an immense storm breaking just over the horizon of this turbulent world – the raft was steady, stable, like dry land, like an island rooted deep in this world’s mantle rather than a manmade construct adrift on the breast of a deep ocean. You would expect it to be that way; it had been prefabricated in the workshops of Urthen and brought across the stars, in anticipation of just these conditions. As LuSi walked across its deck in the dawn light, seeking her mother, she could sense hear the mysterious hum of tremendous fusion engines, feel the vibration of great impellors and jets as the raft fought the surging ocean.

Yet the raft felt fragile to her, felt like a mote lost on the breast of this untameable water world.

She feared this world. The air itself was thick, choking – lacking oxygen, the scientists said.

She even feared the sky, when it was visible at all through breaks in the habitual cloud banks. It was a grey dawn just now, a quiet, uneasy time, and she was alone on the deck – apart from her mother, who she’d yet to find. A smear of pinkish light to the east showed where this world’s too-bright sun was rising. Overhead the sky was growing grey, yet was still studded with stars – an eerie set of stars too, quite unlike those visible from the darkside of Urthen. Eeriest of all was the thought that here beyond the edge of the Bubble, if you looked in certain directions, there were no human worlds at all: nothing but stars, stars and worlds, empty of mankind, and perhaps empty of mind altogether. It was so unlike Urthen’s sky, which was dominated by the bland, immobile face of the Ember.

And then there was this world’s moon. A wandering ball that spun through its phases like a child’s toy, a dead face disfigured by impact scars and volcanism. Most disturbing of all, as the ship’s navigator-astronomers had predicted, while the moon would sometimes be darkened by sailing through the planet’s shadow, periodically it would eclipse the sun – and when it did, at certain times, visible from certain parts of the world’s surface, the moon’s face would exactly blank out the sun.

When Tanz Vlov showed her simulations of this eerie event, the blocked-out solar photosphere like a hole in the sky, LuSi had recoiled, a strange superstitious awe rising.

‘Don’t show this to my mother,’ she had urged Tanz.

‘Why not?’

‘Because she might take it as proof that this is Urth I. Maybe before they fled the Ark builders tinkered with the orbits of sun, moon and planet to devise this coincidence. Maybe it’s a kind of signature ...’

He had grinned. ‘Or maybe it’s the Sim Designers messing with our heads.’

That foolishness had passed. Most distracting of all about the moon for LuSi now, when it was visible, was the glimmer of light she sometimes saw on the shadowed portion of its face, like a star captured in the curve of its crescent. That was the Reality Dreams, which had been brought to land on the moon’s dust-choked surface for a period of restoration, refurbishment and resupply after its fifty-year flight, in preparation for the home journey. LuSi, stuck down here on this storm world, longed to be up there in the graceful, translucent halls of the starship hull, surrounded by her gardens of alien exotica.

This morning Tanz himself was lost up in that turbulent sky somewhere, on his way down to the surface in a shuttle, saying something had been found on the moon that ought to interest her: she’d no idea what, some exotic vacuum flower, perhaps. This was why she was up so early, seeking her mother. She needed to make sure she knew what SheLu was up to before Tanz showed up expecting an update. It wasn’t just for reasons of progressing the science programme; he would expect it of her, expect the middle-aged daughter of an increasingly ill and frail old woman to know what condition her mother was in. If she was honest, she was looking for SheLu not through a daughter’s concern – they were well past that in their relationship – but because of not wishing to be shamed before Tanz Vlov.

At last she found her mother.

SheLu was working close to the edge of the raft, behind mesh screens that kept her from falling over the side but did nothing to protect her from the elements, the salty wind, the spray that so often turned into lashing rain. She was walking between the collection tanks where every day and night automated traps deposited samples of the local wildlife that came sniffing around the raft.

SheLu walked with care, her legs stiff, her gait bent and nodding, as if she were learning to operate a faulty robot body. It was only seven years since they had left Windru; SheLu looked as if she had aged seven decades. The ship’s doctors surmised that she had succumbed to a trace pathogen in the air of Windru, some weaponised alien bug. It had been discreetly suggested to LuSi that SheLu might have skipped some of the supposedly mandatory inoculation routine, and that wouldn’t have surprised LuSi at all. In which case, SheLu deserved everything she got, in LuSi’s opinion.

Which turned out to be some kind of corruption of the anti-ageing agents that swarmed through her cells. Essentially SheLu was ageing very rapidly, converging on something approaching her real age of over a hundred Years. The doctors wouldn’t give LuSi a prediction of how long she had left. Perhaps she could be cryo-preserved and shipped back to Urthen, for specialist care. But SheLu had crossed the Bubble to find this world, and she wasn’t going to submit to cryo-sleep until she had squeezed out its mysteries. And with every additional Day that went by - Days whose length did so eerily match the period of the spin of this world, coincidence or not - the risk that she would not live to see Urthen again accumulated.

And right now, LuSi saw as she approached, this world’s mysteries were embodied in the sleek form of a swimmer. SheLu stood over the tank, holding a rail, watching. LuSi came to stand beside her, wordless.

In the tank the swimmer’s body was a pale mass that surged back and forth, agitated, almost colliding with a wall on each approach but just barely missing each time. Through the murky water LuSi could see the creature’s stubby limbs, the webbed hand-like front paws, the flowing hair. Its anxiety, its anger, was obvious. As was its mindlessness.

‘So,’ LuSi said to her mother. ‘You still think this is some kind of human descendant?’

‘Why not? The anatomy suggests it, of the samples we’ve taken. What else would become of the children of mankind, if dumped into an endless sea like this? There are fast-swimming things with sharp teeth in there. A brain isn’t much use in this ocean, compared to an ability to swim fast.’ Her voice was an odd high-pitched rasp now, a product of the fluid that gathered in her chest.

‘But is it really plausible? Even your most tenuous models predict that it has only been ten thousand Years since the Ark left this world – if it existed at all. Can the human form evolve so rapidly?’

‘You should know the answer to that,’ SheLu said with a kind of feeble snarl. ‘You’ve spent decades fiddling about with samples of life from the other worlds. All genetic mechanisms have common features, and one is an ability to find some adaptations rapidly, to cope with fast-changing conditions, with a simple resetting of switches, so to speak. In humans there are switches that control body size and hair cover, for example, even maturity rates.

‘The last generations of humans, I mean humans like us, might well have lived out their lives on rafts like this, built from the debris of their drowned cities. While their children took to the water, knowing nothing of what had been lost, and caring nothing either. Changing ...’ Her speech broke up in a cough. ‘And more than that,’ she struggled on. ‘We’ve found nothing on this world so far that could not be considered part of the Human Suite. Consider that. No multiple life sets on this world ... Only a single origin of life here.’

‘That’s based on what you’ve sampled, which has been pitifully small.’ Which was true; aside from scoopings like this from the surface layers of the ocean, they had been reduced to sending down automated probes to take pinprick samplings from deeply drowned landscapes. ‘It’s hardly good science to come to such general conclusions based on such little data.’

‘Oh, don’t lecture me about scientific methods, you ninny. You always were such a silly girl, so easily distracted.’

‘Mother, by the Ember’s slow fade, I’m in my sixties now -’

‘One can generalise. One can use sophisticated statistical methods to form and test rigorous hypotheses from the most limited data sets. Of course a single clinching piece of evidence, to prove or disprove a notion, is best. But ...’ More coughing. ‘Consider this,’ she gasped. ‘We have mapped the subsurface; that’s one data set that is complete. We see what look like continental masses scattered over this world, all of them drowned, of course.’

‘I know. I’ve seen the charts.’

‘We even see evidence of continental drift, the million-Year creep of the land, driven by this world’s inner heat.’

‘Just as on Urthen,’ LuSi said reluctantly.

‘Just as on Urthen. We have taken samples of the assemblages of life, animals, plants and bacteria on each landmass.’

‘Again, necessarily limited.’

‘Yes, and also compromised by the actions of the technological civilisation which evidently prospered here before the water’s rise. Everything mixed up. And not helped either by the subsequent Years of drowning, and the action of the sharp teeth of the ocean.

‘But what we have been able to reconstruct, to some degree, has been the pattern of the evolution of life on this world. Evolution marred by extinctions, some of them evidently caused by external causes – a flaring of that big sun, perhaps, an impact from one of the big rocks that litter this untidy system. There were even extinctions caused by the collision of continents, one suite of creatures flooding over a land bridge to compete with another.’

‘Oh, this is all so partial -’

‘Do listen, child. Now, it’s well known that on every world that humanity settles, an extinction event among the native life forms inevitably follows. If must be so. If not, the world is abandoned as uninhabitable. Here too, on this world, we see traces of recent extinctions. Complex affairs that bear the hallmarks of human-induced events, as opposed to natural causes – the removal of most animals larger than human mass, for instance; a uniform spreading of certain scavenger creatures.’

‘That could be explained if this world was colonised from the stars before it was flooded.’

‘No! The timing is wrong. Here, as far as the best evidence shows, the extinction pattern was deep in time – it lasted as long before the flood as has elapsed since the flood. Don’t you see? Don’t you see, girl?’

‘I’m no girl -’

Again the coughing, but SheLu forced the words out. ‘The extinction was not all at once. It spread across this world in spasms. The pattern is just as if humanity had evolved on this world. Had developed the capability over hundreds, thousands of Years to compete with, eliminate, consume, other species. Had spread from landmass to landmass, island to island – spreading by ships on the ocean, most likely, it wouldn’t be like Urthen, like the worlds of the Bubble, where humanity fell suddenly from the sky. They would have pushed an extinction wave ahead of them wherever them went, an eerie forerunning of the story of human colonisation of the Bubble played out on the stage of a single world. But here, all of this occurred on a planet in which there was no alien life to push aside – the extinctions occurred within the Human Suite itself.’

‘Just as one would expect if this were the original world of mankind.’

‘Precisely. You understand at last.’

SheLu grunted, irritated. ‘Those are strong claims, mother. You will need strong evidence to back them up.’

‘That will come, that will come. To date, certainly, I have found nothing to contradict the hypothesis ...’

Without warning, the swimmer in its tank lunged. That sleek body hurtled out of the water, and a small skull, an open mouth ringed with sharp teeth, strained at the women.

LuSi grabbed her mother and pulled her back. For an instant, as the creature reached the top of its arc, spraying water, its face was directly before LuSi’s: a low brow, small skull, clear blue eyes, a flattened nose, a very human mouth despite the sharp teeth, and long sleek hair washed back in a streamlined pattern. It was like a child’s face, LuSi thought, a malevolent, malformed child, a thing out of a nightmare.

She thought she saw bloody scraps of meat stuck in those sharp teeth. She remembered the classic folk definition of the Human Suite: whatever you can eat, or can eat you, is in the Suite. Hello, cousin, she thought.

Then the sleek, fat-laden body fell back into the tank. With a shudder of disgust LuSi pulled a lever to release the thing back into its world ocean.

There was a flare in the sky, a crack like thunder. Tanz’s shuttle, coming down from the moon.

And Zaen SheLu collapsed, almost falling into the tank, after the swimmer. LuSi yelled for help.

The shuttle, which had been modified for the special conditions of this water world, landed on the ocean surface on skis.

By the time the spaceplane had drawn up to the raft it was mid-morning, and the weather had closed in; a huge storm was crackling on the western horizon, and the black boiling clouds were coming ever closer.

SheLu, at her own insistence, was still out in the open, sitting in a chair bolted to the raft’s deck, facing the churning sea. She was hooked up to a medical support machine, connected by wires and tubes. A nurse stood by, a young man, who periodically gave her oxygen through a mask. Other crew were setting up a shelter to protect SheLu from the weather.

Tanz Vlov clambered off the shuttle and over a short gangplank onto the raft. Vlov was huddled up in a waterproof coat, and he walked with difficulty across the deck in the wind. He carried something, a small parcel, clutched against his chest.

LuSi waited for him in the shelter of one of the more substantial buildings on the raft’s back.

When Tanz joined LuSi he said, shouting over the storm, ‘I have something to show you.’

‘To show me?’

‘And your mother. Something from the moon ...’ In the shelter of the building he shook his head, splashing drops of water. ‘By the Designers’ balls, the storms on this world are meaner than a Xaian with a grudge. Does it have to be this way?’

‘My mother says so. Something to do with the loss of weathering from the land ...’

It was a question of nutrients, SheLu had said. Life in any ocean – at least, Human Suite life – needed certain nutrients, calcium, silicon, phosphorus. On a world with continents and islands - dry land, like Urthen - such nutrients could be provided by the weathering of the land, the washing away of crumbled rock into the sea. On this world, when the seas rose, that mechanism was lost, quite suddenly, and there must have been a mass extinction, on the drowning land, and then in the sea. But as the percentage of oxygen in the air diminished and carbon dioxide accumulated, so the air and ocean grew warmer, trapping heat energy from the sun. All that energy was expressed in tremendous storms. And the storms churned up deep-lying sediments in the ocean, stirring up the nutrients needed for life.

‘So the great wheel turned once more. All living worlds seek balance,’ SheLu had said. ‘A mix of mass and energy flows that optimises the potential for life, to some degree. Here, on Urth I, when the land was drowned, there must have been extinctions. Even now the world may not be as fecund as it once was. But the storminess is one mechanism by which the great cycles of life are sustained. It’s not comfortable for us, but that’s a detail; this world, though it may have birthed mankind, is no longer for us ...’

‘It’s a lovely idea,’ LuSi said now, with some regret, looking over at the still form of her mother. ‘Just a shame it means it has to rain the whole time.’

Tanz glanced at SheLu. ‘She’s declining, right?’

‘Very quickly. Her systems are failing, from her eyesight to her heart. The medics are running around in a panic, but they’ve never seen anything like this before. We’re lucky to have that guy – his name’s Stabil – he once did some voluntary work in a shanty town back home, where they couldn’t afford anti-ageing; at least he’s used to the manifestations of old age. But he’s not so keen to be out in this weather.’

‘Neither am I. And neither are you,’ Tanz said acutely. ‘But you’re here for her, right?’

LuSi shrugged. ‘She may not have long. She insists on staying out here, even if it’s ending up costing her life. I resent it all, more than I can say,’ she flared now. ‘My whole life’s been pulled to pieces because of her ambition. She doesn’t fear death, by the way. It’s the Creed. She believes she will merely be returning to Memory. That’s what she tells me, anyhow. But now that’s she’s actually dying -’

‘You need to be near her.’

‘Not need. Duty. In case there’s anything more she wants to say.’

‘Umm. Or if there’s anything more you want to say to her.’ And he held up his package.

Wrapped in a thermal blanket, she saw it was small, the size of a data slate maybe, evidently rectangular but curved, like a fragment of hull plate maybe.

‘Less of the mystery, Vlov. What is this?’

‘We had a look around. Up on the moon. Nobody expected to find anything except geology, not on a rock ball like that. The expeditions were really to give the crew some time out of the ship. Recreation rather than serious exploration. But -’

‘You found something,’ she guessed wildly. ‘Human traces.’

‘Six sites with human traces, yes. All on the near side. A few more robotic. I say “robots”; there was no sign of real artificial intelligence. Gadgets, really. It was all incredibly primitive. I mean, chemical rockets for propulsion! They could only have come from within this system. This world, presumably.’

‘Six sites.’

‘There was a major impact in the centre of the near side, quite recently. A lot of splashed debris, rays; all the sites were covered over to an extent. And then you’ve got ten thousand Years of micrometeorite rain on top of that. It would take a team of archaeologists to reconstruct it all.’

‘But the explorers were humans, from this world.’

‘Oh, yes. And this world must have been the first. That’s what the moon evidence indicates. We checked the databases; nowhere else in the Bubble has human technology fallen back to levels as primitive as this. This was the world where humans rose, the first place they set out from, riding rockets that must have been little more than flying fuel tanks,’ and he shuddered. ‘Your mother must be right. And we found this, at one of the sites. Strapped to what looked like a lander leg.’ He handed her his parcel.

She unwrapped it carefully. The object was a plaque, engraved steel, pitted by micro-impacts, the images and lettering clear.

Tanz pointed. ‘These two circles here. We think they’re maps of this world.’

‘Yes.’ In fact LuSi recognised the continents from SheLu’s mapping. Here they were, two hemispheres side by side. ‘This was how the world must have looked before it drowned. My mother, you know, thinks that “Denva”, the headquarters of the Sim Designers, must correspond to a city on this world, long drowned. A speck on one of these continents, perhaps on higher ground. And this lettering -’

‘It’s very archaic, but we were able to reconstruct some of it. We can even make out some of the words. Your mother would be able to work this through better than we could, but this looks like proto-Anglish to us. I mean, the theoretically predicted root language from which all the tongues of the Bubble are derived. And some of these words look like terms the linguists have reconstructed by working their way back down the family tree of languages. Very common terms, and so enduring. Look: “Here.” “Men.” “Foot.” “Peace.” Actually we’re not sure of the meaning of that last one.’

‘“Earth,” it says. Urth?’

‘Maybe. Some of it we’ll probably never reconstruct. What was a “Nix-on”? ...’

The storm was abating now. As the weather lifted, SheLu seemed to wake, to stir. She moaned, lifted her head, raised a bony hand.

‘I need to go to her,’ LuSi said.

‘I know.’

He accompanied her as she walked across the deck, to her mother.

LuSi cradled the plaque against her chest. The bit of ancient steel smelled faintly of burning, as the patina of a surface exposed to vacuum for thousands of Years reacted with the oxygen in the air. ‘My mother wanted some crucial, convincing bit of proof,’ she said. ‘Either that mankind did not originate on this world. Or -’

‘Or that we did. It will probably never be possible to prove that beyond doubt. Well, not without Years of undersea archaeology. But for the layman -’

‘This plaque will be pretty convincing.’

They slowed as they neared SheLu.

Tanz was studying her. ‘You’re thinking of not giving it to her, aren’t you? But this may be your only chance to show her, to validate what she’s done.’

‘I know,’ LuSi said. The conflict in her head was almost paralysing her; it was physically hard to keep walking towards her mother, at the water’s edge. ‘But – what if she is validated? What will that do to humanity? I’ve come to believe Jennin PiRo was right, you know. And not just because he was JaEm’s father. The idea that humanity was born on a hundred worlds, scattered among the stars, is – healthy. Healthier than this, the idea that we all stem from this one place, this dead and diseased world that rejected us. Even if it is the kind of Backstory a Sim Designer might dream up.’

‘This isn’t the only evidence, LuSi. There is all the archaeology buried under this global ocean.’

‘Which will take generations to recover, even if this place is ever visited again. By which time we may be in a healthier state, culturally.’

‘And the plaque’s not the only relic, up on the moon.’

‘I could order the stuff on the moon destroyed. Couldn’t I? As soon as my mother is dead, I will be in command of the mission’s objectives.’

‘You could.’ Tanz seemed more intrigued than offended. ‘Then you would be like the Xaians. So it would be argued. It is said their first action was to destroy the Books of the Founders, their own carefully preserved records of humanity’s arrival on Windru. And they went on from there, on world after world. History judges the Xaians as criminals.’

‘One day, history may thank me. Let’s leave this place to the swimmers – it’s their world now. We belong to the stars, to the uncounted worlds that birthed us. You see, if we do identify this planet as the mother, we’ll never be able to break away from her.’

Tanz raised an eyebrow. ‘Which mother are you talking about?’

‘Don’t try to analyse me.’

‘Hmm. You know, in the Temples we are taught that almost every human action is fundamentally driven by personal motives. Not by a desire to venerate some Designer, not by some grand vision of the benefit of mankind as a whole, or whatever. I think you want to punish your mother by denying her this final victory.’

She didn’t feel like arguing with him. ‘Call it a side benefit, then.’

‘LuSi? ...’

With the plaque held behind her back, she hurried to SheLu’s side. ‘Mother? I’m here.’

SheLu raised a hand, and LuSi took it. ‘I’m sorry, child.’ Her eyes were misty globes, grey as the world ocean, and as unseeing.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘For dragging you across the stars ... I was so sure, so sure.’

‘Try to be calm ...’

‘Here’s another thought,’ Tanz murmured in her ear. ‘There’s more than just humanity in this universe of ours. You know that. The Galaxy is full of antique mysteries that we’ll surely have to face some day. If you do destroy the truth about our own origins, will that not diminish our ability to cope with those unknowable challenges?’

‘I’ll leave the future to those who live in it,’ LuSi snarled.

‘LuSi?’

‘Yes, mother, I’m here.’

‘I was right, wasn’t I? About Urth I. I was right. And it makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?’

LuSi didn’t reply. Still holding her mother’s hand, she knelt to the raft’s deck, leaned over, and let the steel plaque slip out of her hands. It passed out of sight in a heartbeat, falling silently into the sea.

V

Once, just once, as Venus Jenning floated in the dark of the Ark’s cupola, she picked up a strange signal. It appeared to be coherent, like a beam from a microwave laser. She used her spaceborne telescopes to triangulate the signal, determining that it wasn’t anywhere close. And she passed it through filters to render it into audio. It sounded cold and clear, a trumpet note, far off in the Galactic night.

If it was a signal it wasn’t human at all.

She listened for two years. She never heard it again.

Ark, Chapter 93

Also by Stephen Baxter

Xeelee Sequence

Raft

Timelike Infinity

Flux

Ring

Vacuum Diagrams (collection)

Anti-Ice

The Time Ships

NASA Trilogy

Voyage

Titan

Moonseed

The Light of Other Days (with Arthur C. Clarke)

Manifold Trilogy

Manifold: Time

Manifold: Space

Manifold: Origin

Phase Space (collection)

Destiny’s Children Trilogy

Coalescent

Exultant

Transcendent

Resplendent (collection)

Mammoth Trilogy

Silverhair

Longtusk

Icebones

Evolution

A Time Odyssey (with Arthur C. Clarke)

Time’s Eye

Sunstorm

Firstborn

The H-Bomb Girl

Time’s Tapestry

Emperor

Conqueror

Navigator

Weaver

Flood

Ark

Northland Trilogy

Stone Spring

Bronze Summer

Iron Winter

Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice

The Long Earth (with Terry Pratchett)

The Long Earth

The Long War

The Long Mars

Proxima

Ultima

Nonfiction

Deep Future

Omegatropic

Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time

The Science of Avatar

Title

Introduction

Earth II

Earth III

Earth I

Other works by Stephen Baxter

Table of Contents

- Title
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Earth II
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- Earth III
- 1
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI
- XII
- XIII
- XIV
- XV
- Earth I
- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- Other works by Stephen Baxter
- TOC