Ultima

37 AD 2233; AUC 2986; AY (After Yupanqui) 795

Two days after the impact, after a day under full acceleration and a second cruising at nearly a hundredth of the speed of light—beyond most of the asteroids, so far out that the sun showed only a shrunken, diminished disc—the Malleus Jesu floated in emptiness, an island of human warmth and light.

And yet it was not alone.

With the ship drifting without thrust, the Arab communications engineers unfolded huge, sparse antennas, which picked up a wash of faint radio signals coming from across the plane of the solar system: from Earth, from Mars, from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the asteroid belt, and the Trojans, great swarms of asteroids that preceded and trailed Jupiter in gravitationally stable points in the giant planet’s orbit—some from even farther out, from the ice objects of the Kuiper belt.

The signals weren’t sophisticated, the ColU murmured to his companions. They were just voice transmissions, and mostly of an official kind: listings of positions, trajectories, cargoes, permissions sought and denied or granted, payments made and received. Very occasionally sparks of laser light were picked up, fragments of signals. Maybe these carried the more sophisticated communications of whatever culture dominated here, with the radio reserved for those who could afford no better. The narrow-beam laser signals could only be picked up if the ship happened to swim in the way of their line-of-sight trajectories, of course. What made all this harder to understand and interpret was that many of these messages were like one side of a conversation, such were the distances between transmitter and receiver. It could take forty minutes for a signal to travel from Jupiter to Earth. Why, it could take ten or twelve seconds for a radio signal just to cross between Jupiter’s moons, such were the dimensions of that miniature planetary system alone.

The Arab observers gathered other evidence of activity too, mostly the characteristic radiation leakage of kernel engines, as ships criss-crossed a very busy inner solar system and sailed to the great islands of resources farther out.

The Roman and Brikanti officers listened hard to the messages, trying to make sense of these static-masked scraps of information. Listening, mostly, for Latin and Brikanti voices. They even had Chu and Jiang up in the observation suites listening for traces of Xin.

At least they seemed to be sailing undetected. There had been no direct hails, no approach by another ship—no sign that any other craft was being diverted to rendezvous with them. That was no accident. As soon as the first transmissions had been received, Quintus Fabius had ordered the shutdown of all attempts to transmit from the Malleus. Even the ship’s radar-like sensor systems, which were capable of characterizing other ships, surfaces and other objects to a fine degree of detail, were put out of commission; only passive sensors, like the Arabs’ telescopes, were permitted. And nor was Quintus yet ready to fire the drive, even to decelerate a craft fleeing from the inner solar system, for the kernel drive would surely be immediately visible. Quintus didn’t put it this way, Stef recognized, but he had instinctively locked down the Malleus into a stealth mode. The ship was undetected, and Quintus wanted it to remain that way as long as possible.

After a few days the ColU summed up the dismal results to its companions.

“There are a few scraps of a kind of degenerate Latin to be heard,” it reported. “The crew leap on these as if they were messages from the Emperor himself. But they are only a few, and usually just phrases embedded in a longer string of communication. As if a speaker of a foreign language lapses into his or her native tongue when searching for a word, when muttering a familiarity or a prayer… There is actually more Xin spoken, by word count, than Latin, but again, it’s a minor trace compared to the dominant tongue.”

Stef prompted, “And that dominant tongue is…”

“As I detected from the beginning, Quechua.”

“Inca?”

“Inca.”

The Malleus wasn’t just an island of life in the vast vacuum of space; to the crew it was an island of romanitas in a sea of barbarians.

Inca.

For the time being there was no great urgency to act. The ship had been reasonably well stocked with supplies before its voyage from Terra to Earthshine’s Mars; that wouldn’t last forever but there was no immediate crisis.

Meanwhile the centurion managed his crew. As soon as the drive was cut Quintus had ordered the fighting men, legionaries and auxiliaries, to adopt the routines of in-cruise discipline, and they threw themselves into this with enthusiasm. They were without gravity of course, so that such exercises as marching and camp building were ruled out. But soon the great training chambers within the hull were filled with men wrestling, fighting hand to hand or with weapons, blunted spears and swords and dummy firearms. They were building up to a mock battle on a larger scale, a practice for free-fall wars of a kind that had in fact been fought out in reality, in the long history of the triple rivalry of Rome and Brikanti and Xin.

Thus the troops were kept busy, and that struck Stef as a good thing, because it stopped them thinking too hard about the reality of their situation.

These were men, and a few women, who were trained for long interstellar flights; they were used to the idea of being cut off from home for years at a time. Yet there were compensations. The legion’s collegia promised to hold your back pay for you, and manage your other rights. And, on the journey itself, you could take your family with you, even to the stars.

But now, Stef realized, many of those psychological props were missing. The mission should have been a relatively short-duration mission to Mars—with a return to Terra in mere weeks, perhaps. There had been no need to take families on such a jaunt, although a few had come along anyhow, such as Clodia, the bright-eyed daughter of Titus Valerius. Many of the men grumbled that they hadn’t even been offered the chance of signing the usual premission paperwork with the legion’s collegia. They shouldn’t have been away that long. The men already missed their families.

And there was a greater fear, under all the petty grumbling and uncertainty. Rumors swirled; disinformation was rife. But most of the men had some dim idea that they had been brought to a place more remote than the farthest star in the sky, farther, some said, even than the legendary Ultima. And, they feared, nobody, not even the mighty Centurion Quintus Fabius himself, knew how to get them home again.

Stef Kalinski, meanwhile, cared for her companions—including the ColU, who shared its deepest concerns with her.

The ColU said, “Mardina and the others were right not to follow Earthshine—leaving aside the family entanglements. He is furthering his own ends, that’s for sure, and in a horribly destructive way. But, just as I promised him, someday, somehow, I must follow him.”

Stef frowned. “How, though? Through the Hatch on Mars? But it may not even exist anymore. And why you?”

“Because he and I, of all the artificial minds of the UN-China Culture, are evidently the only two survivors. There were none like us in the Rome-Xin Culture; it seems likely there will be none here, wherever we are. And, in a way, he seeks the truth.”

“What truth?” Stef pressed. “What do you mean?”

“The larger story. The truth of the universe, that links the phenomena of the kernels, the Hatches, and Earthshine’s noostrata, the dreaming bugs in the rocks. Even the reality shifts we call jonbar hinges. And the echoes I saw in the sky, aboard the Malleus, in interstellar space. Echoes, not of a past event, but of a future cataclysm… All of this is linked, I am convinced. And Earthshine feels the same.”

“And you fear, that when he finds this truth—”

“He means to smash it. To smash it all. He seeks to do this because he is insane. Or,” the ColU added, “perhaps because he is the most sane entity in the universe.”

“And you must stop him.”

“It is my destiny. And perhaps yours, Stef Kalinski.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Stef said, feeling even more small and helpless than usual.

38

Four days out from Mars, Centurion Quintus Fabius summoned his senior officers, with Eilidh the trierarchus and some of her Brikanti ship’s crew, and Titus Valerius as a representative of his troops, and the survivors of the UN-China Culture.

They met in a lounge in the area Stef thought of as officer country, stuffed into the heavily shielded nose of the Malleus. Basically the anteroom of a Roman bathhouse, this was an opulent room with tapestries and thickly embroidered rugs, and even oil lamps of a traditional design burning on the walls. In the absence of gravity, pumps and fans had to keep the oil and air circulating; this was a re-creation of an ancient technology in a space-bound setting. Such backward-looking luxury, Stef had long since learned, was a deliberate ploy by the Romans, and the artificial lamps were a classic touch.

Stef and the others strapped themselves loosely to couches. Chu carried the ColU, as ever, his eyes modestly downcast. Arab observers sat quietly together against one frescoed wall, and Stef idly wondered if they longed to get out of this place of crowding and light and graven images, and return to the twilight calm of their great observation bays.

The centurion himself was the last to arrive.

He pushed through the air with an easy grace, and grabbed a handhold at one end of the room. “So we face the future,” he said briskly. “Mars is behind us now, with all its heroism and failure. We have survived. And we’re here to discuss the nature of the place in which we find ourselves. I’ll leave the briefing itself to my optio, Gnaeus Junius, who draws, in turn, on careful observation from the navigators, assisted by Collius the oracle.” Before he yielded the floor, Quintus Fabius looked around the room. “Everybody here was purposefully invited, whatever your rank aboard this vessel—or the lack of it. Purposefully, that is, by me. I need to make a decision about our future, the future of the vessel and its crew and passengers.

“And the decision is mine to make, it seems, for we have yet to contact my chain of command. I probably don’t need to tell you of the absence of any signals from Ostia, or Rome itself, or indeed any outpost of the Empire we recognize. Your orders, all of you, are to listen to what’s said here, and advise me to the best of your ability. Is that clear?”

Titus Valerius snapped out, “Yes, sir, Centurion, sir!”

Quintus grinned. “Well said, Valerius. And you can tell that daughter of yours that she will not succeed in defeating me with gladio and net next time we meet in the training chambers. Right, get on with it, optio…”

Gnaeus Junius took his commander’s place. Drifting in the air, papers in his hand, he nodded to a crew member at the back of the room. The lights dimmed—Stef noticed the flames in those oil lanterns drawing back as their pumps and fans were slowed—and an image became visible, cast on the wall behind Gnaeus. The bulky projector wouldn’t have looked out of place in a collection of nineteenth-century technological memorabilia, Stef thought, and she knew the image had been captured by the crudest kind of wet-chemistry photography. But it worked, and the content was all that mattered…

She saw a world, floating in space. Gnaeus let them observe without comment.

It was Earth—but not Stef’s Earth, and not Quintus’s Terra. She could make out the distinct shape of the continent of Africa, distorted from its school-atlas familiarity by its position toward the horizon of the curving world. Though much of the hemisphere was in daylight, artificial lights glared all over Africa, including what in her reality had been the Sahara and the central forest. Some of these were pinpricks, but others were dazzling bands, or wider smears. The seas looked steel gray, the land a drab brown between the networks of light. Nowhere did she see a splash of green.

Gnaeus Junius looked around the room. “This is Terra, then—or rather, it is not. This is not the world we left behind. For a start there is no sign of the war whose beginning we witnessed, as we fled from Mars.

“You can see that the whole planet is extensively industrialized. Much of the glow you see comes from industrial facilities, or the transport links between them, working day and night. The glow, I am told by the observers, is characteristic of kernel energy. The observers do tell me they see the green of growing things nowhere. Clearly the world is inhabited by people, and they must eat; perhaps the food is grown underground, in caverns, or made in some kind of factory. We cannot tell, from a distance of several Ymir-strides.”

“You have done well to learn so much,” Quintus growled. “And, though I know the mother city is silent, have you seen Rome?”

Gnaeus nodded to the crewman operating the projector. The screen turned glaring white as the slide was removed, to be replaced by another, much more blurred, evidently magnified. The boot shape of Italy was clearly visible, even though, Stef thought, trying to remember detail, it looked to have been extensively nibbled back by sea-level rise, even compared to what she remembered from the Roman reality. The peninsula was carpeted by the usual network of industrial activity, and Stef tried to map the brighter nodes on the locations of familiar cities.

Gnaeus pointed to a dark patch near the west coast. “This is Rome. The image has been greatly enlarged, as you can see… Sir, we would have to move in closer to do much better than this.”

“That can wait, optio. The area of darkness, you say—”

“At first we thought there was some kind of quarry there. Then we realized that the site of Rome is encompassed by a crater, big enough that it would not disgrace Luna. And in the interior of the crater—nothing. No life, no industry.”

“I reckon we can see what’s gone on here, sir,” said Titus Valerius. “Some of the lads have talked it over. If I may speak, Centurion—”

“You already are speaking, Titus.”

“They bombed us, sir. Whoever runs this world. There must have been a war, and they drove us back, and when there was nothing left of us but the mother city herself, they bombed us.” He rubbed his chin. “Maybe they dropped a rock from the sky. Or maybe they used kernel missiles. Making sure Rome would never rise again.” His voice grew more thick, angry. “These bastards did to us what we did to those Carthaginians, long ago, sir.”

“I fear you’re right, Centurion. The question is who these ‘bastards’ of yours are.”

He seemed to hesitate before speaking further. Stef wondered how the ordinary Romans on this ship had taken the news of the loss of their eternal empire—how the likes of Titus Valerius had coped with such torment of the soul. Rome—gone!

“Very well. Carry on, optio.”

“Luna is missing,” Gnaeus said now, bluntly.

That startled Stef. “What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

“I’ve got no images to show you… It simply isn’t there. We know that must have distorted Terra’s tides and so on, but we’d need more study to understand that fully. Maybe it was destroyed in some war. We made a mess of Luna when we fought the Xin up there. Our best theory, given the level of industrialization on Terra itself, and the massive colonization of space—I’ll discuss that—is that Luna was dismantled for its raw materials.”

He showed more slides, more worlds with faces disfigured by massive industrial operations, more carpets of glowing light. “All the rocky worlds are the same, sir. Mercury, Mars. On Venus much of the atmosphere is gone, and some kind of huge operation is going on under the remnant clouds—we don’t know what they’re doing there.”

“And on Mars,” the ColU put in, “the observers detected a kernel bed. A primordial deposit of the kind we found on Mercury, Stef Kalinski, though not on our copy of Mars.”

Knowing the ColU’s own obsession, Stef prompted, “And where there’s a kernel bed—”

“There’s probably a Hatch.”

The ColU said no more, but Stef understood. Some day we need to get to Mars, and through that Hatch, in pursuit of Earthshine. But, looking at image after image of worlds transformed by industrialization—Gnaeus even showed huge mines on the moons of Jupiter—and given the power and reach of a civilization that had gone so far in mastering their whole solar system, she wondered how and when the chance to do that might ever come.

Quintus said, “So we have a solar system of integrated industrialization, of intense use of material resources, and, I presume, energy.”

Gnaeus nodded. “Mostly kernel-based, but not entirely; we’ve seen sunlight captured by huge sails. There are tremendous flows of raw materials, mostly from the asteroid belt inward to the inner planets. Evidence of widespread organization and control. And we see no signs of current conflict, incidentally. As if all this is run by a single, unitary government. One empire, sir.”

Quintus snapped, “Whose empire? Who’s benefiting from all this? And where are they? The planets, even Terra, barely look livable.”

“Save by toiling slaves, probably,” said Titus grimly.

“Cities in space,” Gnaeus said now. “That’s where we think the people must be. Cities—or fortresses. We had a few such settlements, habitats capable of supporting life. Observation platforms, docks for spacecraft and so on. The Xin too.

“But here, wherever here is, the sky is full of them.”

He produced images of structures in space, grainily realized, cylinders and spheres and wheels, more angular structures.

“They cluster around the major planets, or trail them in their orbits around the sun. And they come in all sizes, from units the size of small Roman towns, Centurion, to much larger. There may of course be smaller constructions below our ability to resolve. Some of them, near the asteroids or planets, may be habitats for workers: construction shacks. Others may be the equivalent of military camps, permanent forts—and cities, places of government and administration. We can only guess, for now. We have barely begun to study these objects. One thing that might help us, sir. The smaller habitats are very diverse. There’s a variety of designs, technological strategies. And although this ‘Quechua’ is their dominant language, evidently the official one, we hear scraps of many other tongues—including bits of Latin.”

Quintus scowled. “So how does that help us, exactly?”

“We can hide, sir. If we have to. Or at least be camouflaged. Some of those habitats and ships are not unlike the Malleus in size and shape.”

Quintus waved his hand. “I take your point, optio. And given the challenge of the bookkeeping of an empire on this scale, if it’s anything like our own, there will be room for concealment.”

“That’s it, sir. And then there’s the big one, the one we’ve been calling the Titan. At the very top end, only one of a kind, the largest structure we have observed in the system by far… The big beast resides in a Shadow of Terra.”

“He means, it’s at L5,” the ColU told Stef. “Trailing Earth at a Lagrange point.”

Quintus waved his hand. “You’re beginning to bore me, oracle, and not for the first time. Show me that big monster, optio.”

Gnaeus obeyed.

It was a blunt cylinder, its exterior scuffed, returning muddled highlights from a distant sun. This was shown against the background of the self-illuminated Earth.

Quintus drifted to the front of the room to inspect the “Titan” more closely. “That doesn’t look so special. Looks a bit like Malleus, in fact.”

“It’s a little bigger than that, sir. You’re not grasping the scale of this thing—with respect, Centurion,” he added quickly. “We’ve made guesses about its layout. It is spinning, around its long axis, not quite three times an hour.”

“To provide spin weight inside that big ugly shell.”

“Yes, sir. We’ve seen ships approach, along the long axis, where there must be docking ports.” He pointed. “Just there, in fact.”

Quintus frowned. “I see no ships. Must be tiddlers.”

“Sir, there are plenty of vessels larger than the Malleus itself; we see them coming and going… You still don’t see the scale.”

“Tell me, then, you posturing fool.”

“Centurion, the cylinder is nearly three thousand miles long.”

“Three thousand—”

“That is more than the diameter of Luna, sir. The end hubs alone could swallow a small moon. The land area within must be similar to that of the whole of Asia…”

Titus Valerius, muttering a blasphemous prayer to Jupiter, floated before the image of the great habitat, inspecting it more closely, casting shadows on the screen. He pointed to a blemish on the hull. “By God’s bones. That looks like a crater.”

“Yes,” Gnaeus said. “We’ve spotted many such scars. The structure may be old—centuries old.”

“What a monster. No wonder they had to take poor Luna apart to build such things.”

Gnaeus said, “The question is, of course, who would live in such a structure—”

“I can tell you that, optio,” Quintus said. “That’s where the emperor will be. And the very rich. Living off the huge rivers of goods that flow between the worlds.”

“An emperor become a god,” Titus said. “I wonder how you could ever get rid of him.”

Quintus grinned back. “Good question, Titus. All right, optio, thank you. Well. We’ve seen enough. Now we need to decide what we’re going to do about all this.”

Stef had to smile.

The centurion growled. “Am I amusing you, Colonel Kalinski?”

“I’m sorry, Centurion. I’m just admiring your boldness.”

“I’m a Roman,” he said, to a muttered rumble of support from his troops in the room. “And that’s what Romans are. We are bold. We take control. Although,” he said, “to get through this crisis we may have to behave in ways Romans aren’t particularly used to.”

The men looked more uncertain.

“Look—we’ve been out here four days, since Mars. And our time is already running out. Why? Because our supplies are. Our mission was supposed to last only weeks, at most. Soon we’ll need to land somewhere.”

Titus Valerius said, “Sky full of rocks out there, sir, among the Tears of Ymir. We could find a place of our own. Kick out a few Quechua speakers if we have to. We could call some of those other Latin speakers the optio heard out in the dark. Start building another Rome, to replace that hole in the ground we saw.”

Again Stef heard rumbles of approval.

“I admire your spirit, Titus Valerius. But the problem with that plan is simple. Not enough women. Most of us didn’t bring our families on this mission, to my eternal regret. But then, none of us knew what was going to become of us, did we? You know how things would go if we tried to make do with the ship’s population as it is.”

Stef laughed. “Even I would get a date.”

The centurion eyed her sternly. “Stef Kalinski, we would destroy ourselves within a few years at best. That is, if these Quechua speakers didn’t seek us out and destroy us first. Think about that, Titus Valerius. You remember our strongest enemy. Even now, Carthagio is a powerful memory for us all, the campaigns gone over again and again during training. Do you imagine these Quechuas, these Incas, will have forgotten Rome?”

“Never,” Titus rumbled.

“There you are then. And besides, Titus, we need to be wilier. We need to buy ourselves some time.” He glared around at them. “I don’t want any of you telling me that what I’m going to propose isn’t the Roman way. It isn’t all about blunt force; sometimes you get your way by stealth and guile—by waiting until you’re ready to strike. Remember Germania? Augustus lost his legions in those dense forests. The Caesars had to wait a generation—but when Vespasian finally struck north, destiny was ready to embrace him. So it will be with us…”

Only a Roman, thought Stef with exasperated affection, could come through a jonbar hinge into some kind of Inca space empire and deal with the situation by referring to the adventures of the Emperor Vespasian in the first century after Christ.

Titus said, “So what is the plan, sir?”

“We do as the optio suggested. We’ll need to use the drive, of course, to fly back into the heart of the solar system, but kernel drives are common here. But we keep our heads down. We hide. We go in camouflage—we’re a bunch of miners from the other side of Jupiter, come in for supplies, maybe looking for work…”

“And where do we go, sir? Not Terra.”

“Not the hellhole it’s become, Titus, no. This is where we go.” He gestured at the screen. “This big monster, this artificial Asia. That is the center of power and wealth. Think of us as an undercover military mission if you like. Rome strikes back! I can’t take you home. But I can give your life meaning in this new situation, and mine. It may not be you who gets to sit on whatever magnificent throne they have in there, Titus Valerius—but I guarantee your grandson will, or your great-grandson!”

That won him a cheer, as Stef might have predicted.

“But,” Quintus said now, “the journey to the top of the mountain begins with a single step into the foothills. We make our way in, as cautiously as possible. We show up at that tremendous terminus, where the optio says he sees ships coming and going. We find a way to make them let us land. And if necessary…”

“Yes, sir?”

“We surrender, Titus Valerius. We surrender.”

39 Date Unknown

Once again Beth Eden Jones walked across the stars, and between realities.

The chamber into which Beth emerged, having passed through from Mars, was empty, a bare-walled cylinder. It was Hatch architecture stripped to the basics, she thought, with no equipment—no ladder, no steps—no adornment on the walls, nothing resembling any science gear, no signs that humans had ever been here before.

But the chamber was flooded with light.

She looked up. The roof was open, the Hatch cover was raised, a slim circle tipped up on invisible hinges over the circular opening. And a star hung directly over her head, a sun, huge, pale, just too bright to look at directly, a circle of brilliance suspended in a clear faun-colored sky. Its light poured into the shaft, and Beth’s shadow was a patch of gray directly beneath her feet.

She knew that star. She knew how it felt to stand directly under such a star.

She let her Mars pressure suit run a quick check of the ambient atmosphere—she wasn’t surprised to find it was breathable, with no toxins—and opened up her faceplate with a hiss of equalizing pressure. She breathed in, deeply. The smell of the air was familiar too, a dusty, dead-leaves smell, not unpleasant. She even knew the gravity, she thought, a lot heavier than Mars, just a touch less than Earth.

A deep warmth filled her, almost a kind of relaxation, despite the extraordinary journey she had just undergone, despite the strangeness of her only companion. She dumped her pack on the floor and began to shuck off the outer layers of her pressure suit. “I’m home,” she said.

“What?”

Earthshine stood beside her, projected as a slick avatar to the usual standard, a middle-aged man dressed in a robust gray coverall. His own instant disposal of his virtual pressure suit was reassuring enough, she supposed; his monitors must agree with her own suit’s that the air was safe. But the projection looked oddly unreal in the vertical starlight, not quite as convincing as usual, as if the software that generated such images hadn’t yet quite adapted to this environment.

And the avatar looked on anxiously as his support unit, squat and blocky, rolled up to the final doorway to join them in this cylindrical shaft; it had to raise itself up on extensible rods to climb through the door frame.

Beth ran her toe over the floor, disturbing a fine layer of dust. “I wonder how long it is since anybody was in here.”

“Or anything. We don’t know where we are—not yet.”

She met his gaze as he said that—he sounded almost defiant, as if denying the reality—but she knew. She recognized this star, this air, and she had some deeper body sense of the familiarity of this world, a sense she couldn’t have put into words. But the argument would keep.

“Well,” she said practically, “wherever we are, the first priority is always the same. We have to climb out of this hole. You’re a virtual; you can hardly give me a leg-up. We have rope in our packs. We could rig up a loop, try to lasso something…”

“Use the support unit.” The boxy machine rolled up to the wall and stood there, patient and silent. “You could stand on it—”

“Reach the lip of the well, and pull myself out. OK. But I could never lift your unit out.”

“No need. It contains grappling hooks, cables—it’s actually been specifically designed to negotiate Hatches, among other environments.”

She smiled. “I suppose that makes sense.” She dug rope out of her pack anyhow and began to attach it to her pressure suit and her pack, so she could haul the stuff out after herself later.

Earthshine said, “Once we establish where we are, the unit will adapt itself appropriately. It has extensive self-repair and self-modification facilities. Various kinds of fabricator, for instance.”

“A regular Swiss Army knife.”

He looked at her. “That’s an old reference.”

“Something my father used to say, some relic of his own past. His boyhood on Earth, before the freezer lid closed on him.” As you know very well, she thought.

Earthshine just turned away.

She crossed to the machine, set her hands on its upper surface, and hoisted herself up. “I feel stiff. Stiff and heavy. That’s what a few hours on Mars will do for you. Getting too old for this.”

“You’ll toughen up,” Earthshine said dismissively. “Excuse me if I take a shortcut.” He flickered out of existence, and reappeared over her head, standing on the lip of the pit, hands on hips, surveying his domain.

“I bet you can’t see a damn thing.”

“Not with my eyes and ears still stuck down that shaft, no. Nothing but the crudest extrapolation from the available information. The star in the sky. A blank landscape, a horizon appropriately positioned for a rocky world of a size that can be extrapolated from the gravity we experience.”

On top of the support unit, Beth unsteadily stood upright and reached up to take hold of the rim of the cylindrical pit. The substance of the Hatch structure was smooth under the skin of her hands, and, as always, felt oddly elusive, as if her hands were slipping sideways. The Kalinskis had tried to explain to her that a Hatch, to the best of anybody’s knowledge, wasn’t a material artifact at all but a structure of distorted space-time, and that the sideways forces she felt were something like a tide, a secondary gravitational effect… None of that made it any easier to climb out of this hole, however.

“The gravity, yes.” With a lunge she pulled herself up, straightening her arms under her and lifting one leg over the lip of the pit. “Ninety-two percent of Earth’s. Right?” Of course that was the value; she’d grown up knowing it. She got to her feet, panting a little; she really did feel out of condition.

Now from the pit came a sound like small crossbows being fired. She glanced down and saw that two hooks, supported by suckers, had fixed themselves to the rim of the pit. Fine cables laced down to the support unit, and with a whir of hidden winches, the unit began to rise up from the pit floor. So that was how it got around.

Leaving the unit to its business, Beth turned and looked around.

She was in a forest, surrounded by trees with stout trunks and big, sprawling leaves that caught the light streaming down from above. But there was plenty of open ground—there was no continuous canopy, evidently no permanent cover. The Hatch structure itself sat in a broad clearing, with saplings sprouting beside trunks like fallen pillars, trunks infested with what looked like lichen, mosses, fungi. All of this was tinged in shades of green, some of it drab, some of it more vivid, brilliant in the wan light of the star overhead. In one direction, she saw, the view was more open, revealing water glimmering in the light. What looked like stubby reeds pushed out of the water. And, by the water’s edge, a cluster of glistening forms stood, almost like huge mushrooms. “Stromatolites.” She said the word aloud, letting it roll on her tongue. She remembered how hard it had been for her to learn that word as a little kid, and how confused she had been when her mother had told her that the name was wrong, really, that it had been taken from an Earth organism that was like the structures she saw around her but not quite, structures that grew in the water, but not on land…

All this was familiar. And yet, she thought, it was not.

The support unit labored to haul itself out of the hole in the ground. As it made the last perilous step, and extended stubby caterpillar tracks to claw at the ground, Beth stood by, trying to think of ways she could help if the hefty unit started to topple back into the pit.

Earthshine, meanwhile, paid no attention. He stalked back and forth, impatiently. “Nothing here,” he growled.

Beth frowned. “Nothing? Nothing but the trees. The undergrowth. The water over there, a lake maybe. Life—”

“Just this damn Hatch unit, sitting on the ground. Look at it…”

It was like every other Hatch she’d ever seen, a square of smooth, grayish material with the circular lid raised up over the cylindrical shaft beneath. “Just like the Hatch on Mercury, the first I came out of with my mother and father and the Peacekeeper. Just like the first I walked into, on Per Ardua.”

“But there’s nothing here. No buildings, no structures, no community—no people…”

She raised her face, closed her eyes in the light.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he snapped.

“It’s not what I think. It’s what I feel. I grew up on Per Ardua. I know its air, its scents, the way its gravity pulls on my bones.”

“You think this is Per Ardua. That that star up there is Proxima.”

“What else could it be? Look around, Earthshine. You’ve never been here before but you’ve seen the records; I’m sure of that. You’ve seen the analysis the scientists did once we came back to the solar system, the data the UN teams returned later. Look at these stems, pushing out of the ground. Stems, the basis of all complex Per Arduan life, all the way up to the builders.”

“You really think that’s Proxima?” He was squinting up into the light, his supporting software casting perfectly formed shadows across his face. “Kind of bland-looking, don’t you think? Where are the stellar flares? Where are the starspots?”

That was a point, and, oddly, she hadn’t noticed it before. The star’s surface, seen through scrunched-up eyes, was smooth, almost featureless, marked by only a few patches of grayish mottling—not the map of restless stellar energies she’d grown up beneath, not the uneasy god that had inflicted particle storms and starspot winters on its hapless planets.

Planets, yes. She walked a few steps and turned around, looking up at the sky, which was a featureless bronze wash. Proxima had had more than one planet. In the permanent daylight of its star-facing hemisphere, the stars and planets had been forever invisible—all save one, a brilliant beacon… “There,” she said, pointing at a spark of light unwavering in the sky. “Proxima e, the fifth planet. We called it the Pearl.” She laughed. “Just where I left it.”

He walked around, growing increasingly angry. “You seem to be seeing the similarities and screening out the differences. Such as the life-forms. These tree-like structures, the ‘stromatolites’—they are like the samples shown in images retrieved from Proxima c, from Per Ardua. But they aren’t identical, are they? And what about this?” He pointed dramatically at a small clump of plants at his feet, with sprawling bright green leaves. “How does this fit in?”

She crouched down to see. No, this didn’t fit in with her memories of a childhood on Per Ardua at all, at least not of the wild country away from the farms she and her parents and the ColU had labored to create. These leaves bore the green, not of Arduan life, but of Earth life, a brighter and more vivid color born under a more energetic star. You’d never have found such things growing in the wild. She dug her fingers into the soil—it was rust brown, quite dry—and found a mass of small tubers. “These look like potatoes, or a distant relative.”

Earthshine snapped, “So what do you conclude?”

She stood, clutching a couple of the tubers, brushing the dirt from her hands. Even the texture of the dirt felt familiar. “This is Per Ardua. That is Proxima. If there are potatoes here, people must have brought them—people must have been here. But—”

“But it’s not the Per Ardua you remember. Not quite. If this is the substellar, where’s the UN base? Where’s the relic of the Ad Astra? Yes, you see, I did my homework. Where are all the people?”

“And where are the builders?” she mused. “Of course, they might have learned to keep away from people and all their works, given enough time.” She glanced up at Proxima—if it was Proxima. “How much time?” she wondered.

“This may be another reality strand,” Earthshine said. “Correction: it probably is another reality strand. That’s what the Hatches do, don’t they? Knit up the timelines. Even if it is Per Ardua, this may not be the version of history in which your family pioneered.”

“Maybe not,” she admitted. “But there have been people here.” She held out the tubers in her palm. “Somebody brought these here.” She broke one of the tubers, revealing crisp white flesh within a sleeve of dirt-matted skin. “Looks edible.” She nibbled the raw flesh, avoiding the skin; it was crisp, moist, cool, all but flavorless.

“Well, if you live for a few more hours, we’ll know if that’s true or not, won’t we?”

“At least I’m not going to starve here,” Beth said. The light changed, subtly. She glanced up and saw clouds, thin streaks of white, drifting over the face of the star. “Looks like there’s still weather here after all. I’ll make camp.”

She got to work hauling her pressure suit and pack up from the Hatch with her rope.

In the pack she had a pop-up inflatable shelter, emergency blankets, a small stove, and scrunched-up disposable clothes: a space-age Roman legionary’s survival gear, all she needed to survive a few days in the wilderness. She soon had the shelter erected. She shoved the rest of her gear, the pack, the pressure suit, the helmet, inside the tent, and began to haul the whole lot toward the nearest dense-looking clump of trees, seeking anchorage.

Earthshine grunted. “I apologize I can’t help with your chores.” He rubbed his palms together and glanced at the sky. “If this is Per Ardua, and I still reserve judgment, it is a quieter Per Ardua. Look at the ground, the soil. The rust color, like Australia, like Mars. Per Ardua always had a peculiar way of letting out its tectonic energy…”

The continents did not drift on Per Ardua. Perhaps that was something to do with the way this world was tidally locked to its star, the same hemisphere forever bathed in the light, the other forever dark. But there had been internal heat that needed release, as on Earth, and the result had been volcanic provinces, as the ColU had identified them. Every so often a whole chunk of some continent or seafloor would dissolve into chaotic geological upheavals, releasing heat, ash, lava, even building new mountains to be eroded away by the rain.

But, Beth saw, Earthshine was right; this dirt looked old. And that dusty Martian color in the sky wasn’t the way she remembered it either. It was a long time since any mountains had got built here.

A small voice asked again, How long? And how could that be?

“But there’s still weather here,” Earthshine said. “Which is logical. The substellar point, directly beneath the star, will always be the hottest place on the planet, always a center of low pressure, like a permanent storm system. And the antistellar, the opposite point, will always be the coldest—ouch.” The first few heavy drops of rain fell, pattering on the broad, dead leaves around them, and slicing through Earthshine’s body. “I don’t get wet in the rain, but it hurts me.”

“Your software’s consistency protocols.”

She dragged the tent over the ground, trying to get to the shelter of the trees.

She saw that the upright cylindrical carcass of the support unit had sprouted open panels, from which manipulator arms had emerged. Small components were being lifted out of the interior of the carcass, while net-like structures were being used to scrape together heaps of dirt. “What is it doing?”

“Wheels,” Earthshine said, walking slowly beside her. “It’s making wheels.”

“Planning a journey, are you?”

“Obviously.”

“Where to?”

“Away from here. Away from this wrong place.” His anger was evident now; he said this with a snarl.

She reminded herself that he wasn’t human. Everything about him was the product of software logic of some kind. Yet she wondered too if he had the artificial equivalent of a subconscious. Given the way he’d behaved in the past, including smashing the Mars of the Rome-Xin history, that would explain a lot. So maybe his anger was genuine, the display unconscious.

At the fringe of the forest clump she found a couple of stout trees ideally positioned to anchor her shelter. She took lengths of her rope and began lashing the shelter to the trunks. The trees at least were as she remembered them, basically expanded forms of the ubiquitous stems. “If this isn’t Per Ardua, it’s a damn good impersonation,” she muttered as she worked.

By the time she was done the rain was coming down harder, hissing on the leaf-carpeted ground. She looked back at the Hatch, whose lid, she saw, was closing. “The Hatch is a space-time artifact, and yet its designers took care that it’s protected from the rain. Well, that’s attention to detail for you.” But there was no reply, and when she glanced around she saw that Earthshine had already retreated to the interior of the tent.

Beside the Hatch, in the rain, the support unit was rapidly assembling big skeletal wheels, four of them.

40

The reception chamber was meant to impress, Mardina thought, if not to awe. Even before you got into the main body of the Titan, the huge space habitat itself.

The chamber was a wide, deep cylinder set precisely at the spin axis of the rotating habitat, with zero-gravity guide ropes strung from wall to wall. To reach this chamber you had already had to pass through a series of locks, each of which alone had been larger than any single cabin in the Malleus Jesu. The place was ornate, too, with rich woven blankets spread over the steel walls, and sprays of brilliantly colored feathers, even the gleam of gold and silver plate. The huge face of some angry god, his eyes picked out by emeralds, glared down at the Romans from the opposite wall.

And, from glass-walled emplacements all around them, troops stared down at the newcomers. They wore a uniform of a simple shift tied at the waist, brightly colored, and functional helmets of what looked like hard steel. They had weapons to hand, short swords and stabbing spears—even some kind of artillery, and blunt muzzles peered at the Romans from all sides.

And now the stranded Malleus personnel—forty legionaries with their Centurion Quintus Fabius, Mardina, Titus Valerius and his daughter, Michael the Greek medicus, and Chu Yuen with the ColU in its pack on his back—were huddled in this vast arena, tangled up in the guide ropes like flies in a spiderweb. It didn’t help that all of them had been cleansed before being allowed this far into the habitat—stripped naked, bathed in hot showers, their clothes shaken out in the vacuum. The ColU said it was entirely sensible that the controllers of this enclosed world would try to keep out fleas and lice and diseases. But it had taken all of Quintus’s personal authority to persuade his men to submit to this.

The Romans, in their military tunics and boots with their cloaks and packs, looked like savages in this setting, like the barbarians they effected to despise. At least they didn’t look like soldiers anymore. Well, Mardina hoped not. At Quintus’s orders the legionaries had left behind on the Malleus Jesu their gladios and spears and fire-of-life weapons, and their armor, even their military belts and medals.

The bulk of the ship’s occupants had transferred to the habitat. The ship itself, having come close enough to the Titan for the smaller yachts to deliver the legionaries to the hub port, was now hiding among the asteroids manned by a skeleton crew, a handful of legionaries under the command of optio Gnaeus Junius and trierarchus Eilidh—and with the more fragile passengers, including Jiang, Stef Kalinski and Ari Guthfrithson—able to survive for a long time on supplies meant for five times their number.

Now, as the Romans waited for the latest step in their induction, Quintus Fabius kept up a steady stream of encouragement. “Take it easy, lads. You look stranger to them than they do to you—even if you are simple farmers of the ice moons. I doubt very much if they’ve seen the likes of you before, Titus Valerius, save in their nightmares… Ah. Here comes somebody new to order us about.”

An official approached them now, a stocky, scowling woman of perhaps fifty, pulling herself along a guide rope. Flanked by an unarmed man and two soldiers, she wore a simple tunic not unlike the soldiers’, but with a pattern of alternately colored squares—like a gaudy chessboard, the shades brilliant—and obviously expensive, Mardina thought. It was a brash garb that did not sit well with what appeared to be an irritable personality. And she carried a peculiar instrument, a frame almost like an abacus but laced with knotted string. She glanced down at this as she approached them, working the knots with agile fingers.

Titus Valerius murmured, “Speaking of nightmares, Centurion—look at those lads with the clerk.”

The soldiers who accompanied the official were tall, almost ludicrously so, a head or more taller even than Titus Valerius. Their long limbs looked stick thin but were studded by muscles under wiry flesh, and their faces were bony, skull-like. They moved through the mesh of guide ropes with practiced ease. Close to, they were very strange, even inhuman, and Mardina tried not to recoil.

“They look ill,” Quintus said. “Too long without weight and no exercise. Put them under my command and I’d soon sort them out…”

“No, Centurion,” Michael murmured. “I think you’re misreading them. These are perfectly healthy—and functional for their environment. They are adapted for the lack of weight. Look how strong they appear, strong in a wiry sense; look how confidently they move. I suspect they would be formidable opponents, just here at the axis of the ship, where there is no weight. Perhaps they have been raised in this environment, from children: specialist axis warriors. Or perhaps they are the result of generations born and bred without weight.”

“Or,” the ColU murmured from its pack, “perhaps they are the result of genetic tinkering. We have spoken of this, medicus. Your culture knew nothing of this, but we could have done it—”

“Before the last jonbar hinge but one,” the medicus said drily.

“Be interesting to fight them, then,” Quintus said thoughtfully. “But not yet. And hush, Collius; that clerk is looking suspicious.”

The lead official looked up at them now from her knotted strings, her scowl deepening, and she inspected them one by one. Fifty-something she might be, but, Mardina thought, like the soldiers with her, she was handsome. Under black hair streaked with gray she had dark eyes, copper-brown skin, high cheekbones and a nose a Roman might have been proud of.

The official pulled herself up into the air, so she could look down on the disorderly group of Romans. “Inguill sutiymi—quipucamayoc. Maymanta kanki? Romaoi? Hapinkichu? Runasimi rimankichu?”

Inguill was not having a good day, and when the strangers muttered disrespectfully among themselves before her, her disquiet and irritation quickly deepened.

Inguill’s formal title was senior quipucamayoc, keeper of the quipus. She was one of a dozen of her rank who, on behalf of the Sapa Inca and through a hierarchy of record-keepers beneath her, effectively governed all of Yupanquisuyu, this great habitat, both cuntisuyu and antisuyu, from Hurin Cuzco at the eastern hub to Hanan Cuzco, palace of the Inca himself, at this western hub. It was a role that, it was said, had had a place in Inca culture since the days before the empire’s conquest of the lands of the first antisuyu, the passage across the eastern ocean, and the move out into the sky.

And it was a role dedicated to the primary function of control: the essence of the imperial system of the Intip Churi, the Children of the Sun.

That fact had become apparent to Inguill at a very young age, when the teachers at her ayllu had first picked her out as an exceptional talent and had put her forward for training at the Cuzco colleges. Inguill had risen up the ranks of the imperial administration smoothly—shedding her family and her ties to her ayllu, shunning personal relationships in favor of the endless fascination of the work.

She had always been able to grasp the key importance of maintaining control, in the empire of the Sapa Inca. Especially in a habitat like this, huge yet finite and fragile, where you had to control the people in order to ensure the maintenance of the complex, interlocked systems that kept them all alive. And in the theology of the Intip Churi, you had to control the gods, too, endlessly placating, and excluding the willful divine anger that could break into the world if chaos and disorder were allowed to reign, even briefly. Of course this great box of a habitat—a box from which there was no possibility of escape, under constant and total surveillance from Hanan Cuzco at the hub, from the Condor craft that continually patrolled the axis, and from operatives dispersed on the ground—lent itself to such control.

It soon became apparent too that camayocs like herself, endowed with that kind of intuitive perception about the need for unsleeping and unrelenting control, were rare indeed, and prized. So she had found herself plucked out for promotion ahead of many of her age-group cadre—even the privileged sort, the sons and daughters of the rich of the Cuzcos who could afford the finest pharmaceutical enhancements, the most refined extracts from plants and animals bred for the purpose over generations, to sharpen their intellects to a degree of brilliance. Even such an expensively shaped mind was of little use to the state if beneath the glitter and the quick-talk was a lack of basic perception, a lack of an understanding of the challenges of existence. And that was the understanding that Inguill enjoyed, and cultivated in herself.

Not that it did her career much good. She had proven to be so good at her job that she was given a kind of roaming brief, sent to manage, not the orderly, everyday problems of Yupanquisuyu, but the disorder, the unusual, the out of the ordinary, wherever it might crop up—either within the habitat or coming from without, like this bunch of Romaoi. The paradox was that as a result she spent much of her working life in a state of frustration, even anxiety, and certainly irritation. For the unusual, the disorderly, the chaotic, the very stuff it was her job to deal with, annoyed her profoundly until she could master it and clean it up. And all the while her rivals, over whom she had in theory been promoted, were busily worming their way into comfortable niches in the vast hierarchy of the Cuzcos.

Nothing in recent times had annoyed her more than these mysterious Romaoi, with their bulging muscles and sullen expressions. Ice-moon farmers? Hah! Not likely… But where there was novelty, she reminded herself, where there was strangeness, there was always opportunity—for herself, if not the empire.

Now she faced the big man with the gaudy cloak who looked to be the leader.

“My name is Inguill—I am a quipucamayoc. Where are you from? Are you Roman? Do you understand? Do you speak runasimi?”

The ColU’s earpieces had been given to Quintus, Michael, Mardina and a few others. Now Mardina heard the strange device whisper its translation in her ear—a translation from Quechua, which the official called runasimi, into Latin, by an artificial being whose own first language was a kind of bastardized German. Just when it seemed her life couldn’t have got any stranger…

Quintus grunted. “I will never be able to speak this tongue of theirs! It sounds like squabbling birds.”

“Allichu, huq kuti rimaway!”

“That was, ‘Say that again,’” the ColU whispered. “Apologize, Centurion. And wait for me to translate.”

“I am sorry.”

“Pampachaykuway…”

“My name is Quintus Fabius. I am the leader of this group. We are grateful for your shelter.”

“Well, you haven’t been granted it yet.” The quipucamayoc glared at Quintus and his men, suspicion bristling as visibly as feathers on a predatory bird, Mardina thought. “Tell me again where you claim to come from.”

“We lived on an ice moon, far from the sun. I apologize; I do not know the names of these bodies as they are known in your mighty empire…” (“Collius, I’m not comfortable with all this lying…”)

(“Be humble, Centurion. Guile, remember? You can display your strengths later.”)

“We were there for many generations. Our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers worked the ice, living off the thin sunlight. We farmed—”

“You were there so long you forgot most of your Quechua, it seems. Ha! Five centuries after Tiso Inca stomped Rome flat, you refugees still cling to your primitive tongue. Oh, never mind. So you farmed. Why are you here now?”

Mardina could hear the tension in Quintus Fabius’s voice as he swallowed these insults and responded. She was glad Titus Valerius and the rest could not understand what was said.

“There was a calamity, quipucamayoc. Another body, a fast-moving rogue, hit our home. We, most of the men, were away, investigating another moon that seemed mineral-rich. We had not detected the rogue, there was no time—our home was destroyed, most of the women and children. All we had built over generations. We who survived came here in the last of our ships, to throw ourselves on your mercy.”

She peered into his face. “Well, at least you’re sticking to your story. But you don’t betray much grief. That’s either a sign that you’re strong, which is admirable, or you’re lying, which is less so.” She pulled herself along a guide rope and inspected the legionaries. “Also you don’t look like no-weight farmers to me. You’re too solid. Too muscular.”

Quintus straightened his back. “We—our ancestors were Roman. We retained their sense of discipline, even in our exile out in the dark.”

“Really. And that ship that brought you in—don’t imagine we didn’t see it before it scurried off into the dark—it didn’t look like any kind of mining craft to me.”

“Another relic of our pioneering ancestors, quipucamayoc. All we had left. We sent it back to the ice moons to search again for survivors of our family. While we came here looking for work.” (“Collius, these lies become elaborate.”)

(“Please, Centurion. Humor me. We are playing a long game.”)

(“Hmm…”)

Inguill glared at Quintus. “You mutter in your antique tongue, as if talking to a voice in your head. Are you simple or insane?” She studied the group, deeply suspicious. “I don’t like you, Quintus Fabius, if that is your name. I don’t like this rabble you have brought into my world. I don’t like your story, which stinks like a week-old fish head. I don’t like the way you hesitate before speaking every line, as if somebody is whispering in your ear. You don’t fit—and I don’t like things that don’t fit. I have the power to throw you all out into the airlessness, you know.”

Quintus held her gaze. “We are at your mercy.”

“You are, aren’t you? But you have muscle, and evident discipline of a sort. This is a big craft and we are always short of muscle and discipline—especially if it can be applied to the jobs nobody else wants. Very well. I will let you live. I’ll send you to the antisuyu.” Inguill grinned coldly. “You don’t know what that is, do you? In the antisuyu you will be far from my sight. Indeed you will be far from this place, which is the only way out of this habitat. And a deeper contrast to Rome, and indeed your ice moon, could hardly be imagined. But you won’t be out of my thoughts, believe me. You are a conundrum, Quintus Fabius, and it is evident to me that, to say the least, you are not telling me the whole truth.” She pushed her face close to his. “I don’t like you, and you owe me your life. Never forget that.”

Quintus did not reply.

She backed off. “In anticipation of the decision, I brought this man.” She indicated the other clerkish man next to her. “His name is Ruminavi, and he is the tocrico apu of the region to which you will be sent—which contains the ayllu to which you will be attached, among others.” She looked at their empty faces. “Do you understand any of this? You are in Tawantinsuyu, the Empire of the Four Quarters—the earth and the sky, and east and west here in the habitat, the antisuyu and cuntisuyu. Under the Sapa Inca each quarter is controlled by an apu, a prefect, and under him or her are twenty-two tocrico apus… Oh! You will learn.

“Now Ruminavi will escort you to your transports to the antisuyu. Do what the tocrico apu says, and your local curaca, work hard and don’t cause trouble, and you might survive a little while. Oh, and you will give up any weapons you are still concealing. No weapons in Yupanquisuyu, save for the troops and other designated officials.”

There was grumbling in the ranks at this, but Quintus said quietly in thick rural Latin, “Lads, we’ll find weapons as we need them, or steal them, make them. That’s always been my plan.”

The ColU said, “Make sure they don’t confiscate me. Tell them I am an idol. Or a piece of medical equipment. Or a scrap from the farmed moon, a sentimental souvenir…”

But the men had fallen silent.

Mardina turned, and saw that a door at the far end of the chamber had opened, to reveal the interior of the habitat for the first time. A tube of cloud, brightly illuminated, stretching to infinity.

“By Jupiter and Jesu,” muttered Fabius. “Into what have you delivered us, Collius?”

As the Romaoi filed toward the internal transport, one of Inguill’s soldiers approached her, holding a block of metal. “Found this, quipucamayoc. No idea how one of them smuggled this through the cleansing area. And then managed to drop it on the other side…”

Inguill took the piece. It was a kind of belt buckle, she saw, intricately shaped, and stamped with square, ugly Latin lettering that she had to pick out:

41

Ruminavi, who was a fussy little man with none of the evident intellect of Inguill, said they would be transported in some kind of carriage to their new home—Mardina imagined something like an elevator car—indeed they would ride in a series of such transports; the carriages would not take all of them at once.

So the Romans were roughly divided into groups of a dozen or less. Quintus, with Titus’s help, made sure the men were in their contubernium tent groups as far as possible, with somebody relatively sensible in charge of each. The legionaries grumbled and moaned as they formed a queue, hanging weightless in the air—a line that would take them into a chamber of wonders, Mardina realized, but soldiers always grumbled whatever you did for them.

When it was her turn, Mardina followed Quintus and Chu and a handful of Romans, and passed through a portal into a box of glass, a box riding on upright rails, which in turn were attached to a tremendous vertical wall that stretched above and below her, as far as she could see. Behind her in this glass box, Ruminavi the apu settled on a seat, surrounded by a handful of spidery axis warriors, and the Romans crowded in. And ahead of her…

She recoiled from the view, closing her eyes. She heard a kind of moaning, high-pitched, like a frightened animal. She thought it might be Chu Yuen, the slave, more intelligent than the average legionary and therefore more capable of wonder, and horror. She hoped it wasn’t herself.

“Look down,” the ColU said now, from the security of its lodging in Chu’s backpack. “Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson, listen to me. Don’t look ahead, or up—don’t look at the wall to which we are fixed—just look straight down.”

Mardina opened her eyes and looked. And, through the transparent floor, she saw what looked like Terra as seen from low orbit, a slice of sprawling landscape, washed-out green and gray under scattered clouds, and with stretches of water that glistened in the sunlight like polished Roman shields. “This isn’t so bad,” she said with relief.

“Here at the axis of the habitat we are over two hundred miles above this landscape. For that is the radius of this cylinder. The view here is just as if you were in a spacecraft, orbiting.”

“It seems almost normal, in the sunlight. Except—”

“What sunlight?” the ColU said. “I know. There are breaks in the habitat’s tremendous walls. Pools that admit what must be reflected sunlight, to illuminate this enclosed environment—surely indirectly reflected, so that the radiation shielding is not compromised. There is one below us and not far ahead—you can look up now, just a little farther…”

The sunlight pool glared under the clouds, like a city on fire. It was an eerie, beautiful sight.

Ruminavi said, “We call them the windows of Inti. For Inti is our sun god, you see.”

The transport suddenly lurched into motion, heading down the face of the wall on its rails. The passengers were jerked into the air, like pebbles in a dropped helmet, Mardina thought, and forced to grab onto whatever handholds they could reach. Already some of the legionaries looked as if they wanted to throw up.

Ruminavi, safe in his seat, looked on with a malicious grin. “Keep tight hold. The acceleration will be high. We’ll be covering a lot of your Roman miles every hour by the time we hit the atmosphere. Of course by then you’ll be feeling the spin weight…” He laughed out loud. “Not so tough now, you Romans, are you? Just like your ancestors who begged on their knees to Tiso Inca’s generals to spare their city from the Fist.”

Quintus Fabius glared at him.

“All right,” the ColU said now. “Look down again, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. And look up. Look at the wall itself, down which we are climbing…”

It was more than a wall, she saw now, it was an engineered cliff face, crusted with structures, blocks and domes and pyramids—all essentially constructed of steel, Mardina thought, but ornately painted, even faced with stone and bound by steel straps. Structures—that was the wrong word. She saw lights gleam from within, doorways opening: these were buildings, inhabited by people. At the axial point itself a tremendous tower sprouted straight out from the wall, built of stone blocks of some kind: a stepped pyramid, skinny and enormously long. And in one place she saw a gang of workers, in pressure suits, tethered to handholds fixed to the wall, engaged in the construction of something new. A living, changing place then, a vertical town, stuck to this wall. And the rails on which the transport ran cut through all this clutter in a dead straight line before plunging down into the clouds far below.

Mardina uttered a silent prayer. “It is a city in the sky.”

“No,” said the ColU. “A city above the sky. We are in a near vacuum here, Mardina. The air will only become significantly dense perhaps twenty miles above the ground—I mean, the cylindrical hull. This habitat, four hundred and fifty miles in diameter, essentially contains a vacuum, with a thin layer of air plastered over its inner surface, kept there by the spin gravity.”

“A vast city in the vacuum. Why’s it here?”

The apu snorted. “Why do you think? This is Hanan Cuzco, home of the Inca himself, and his family and heirs and closest advisers. The greatest marvel in Yupanquisuyu, outshining even that dump Hurin Cuzco at the eastern pole. The mitimacs are kept out by all this lovely vacuum. Why, a war could be raging down there on the ground and we’d never know about it up here.”

“‘We,’ Ruminavi?” said Quintus. “But you don’t live here, do you? It was my understanding that you’re coming with us, all the way to this grubby antisuyu, where you live.”

Ruminavi scowled. “Yes, and let’s see how long your Roman arrogance lasts in my jungle, you posturing clown.”

Mardina looked again at the compartment’s rear wall, the relatively comforting vision of a riveted metal wall flying up past her face. Hundreds of miles of metal, of steel and rivets… “All right, Collius. I think I’m ready for the next stage.”

“Very well. Stay upright, feet down toward the ground—so to speak. When we are farther from the axis the spin gravity will become stronger and pull you down. Now look straight ahead, lift your face slowly…”

If she had been in orbit around Terra, at this altitude the curve of the world would be apparent; she would find a horizon in every direction she looked. But here it was different. Here, when she lifted her head, she saw the panorama below her, of rivers and hills and inland seas and what looked like farms, what looked like cities, extending directly ahead, the details becoming a compressed blur with distance, until at last she saw only a band of air glowing with the illumination of the light pools. There was no sense of curvature—not if she looked straight ahead. But if she looked away from that axis, the landscape curved up, rising to either side and joining over her head to form a tube of smeared light, green and blue and gray. It was as if she were holding up a rolled-up map, she thought, and peering through it at a distant source of light.

Far away, at least, it was all a comforting abstraction. But then she let her gaze wander back down the length of the tube, back to her position, and she looked up over her head at a great roof of land, plastered with inverted mountains and patchwork farms and even rivers, pinned there by a spin weight she could not yet feel. She felt her heart hammering, her breath growing shallow.

The ColU said, “Easy, Mardina. Chu Yuen—hold her hand.”

The touch of the former slave’s flesh was comforting. But, glancing to her side, she saw that Chu had his own eyes clamped shut.

She laughed.

“Are you all right, Mardina?”

“Yes, Collius. A folded world. What magnificence. What arrogance. What madness!”

“Quite. Yet here we are. Chu Yuen? What do you think?”

“That I miss the stars,” the slave said. “But I am now, however, standing on the floor of this box.”

He was right. Mardina hadn’t noticed. She was light as a feather still, but when she jumped, she drifted back down.

Ruminavi said, “Some way to go yet before we descend into the clouds. But we are already a tenth of the way there, and so you have a tenth your weight. We carry no refreshments, save water from that spigot over there…”

Mardina glanced around the transport, aware of her companions for the first time in a while. As their weight returned, the legionaries were pulling off their boots and settling down on their cloaks and blankets. Titus Valerius was playing knucklebones, or trying to, complaining loudly about the way the pieces rolled in the low weight. The medicus was huddled in a corner, obviously trying not to look terrified. One of the soldiers seemed to be taking a nap.

While the tube world unfolded all around them.

42

It took two hours of descent before the transport compartment finally plunged down into the thicker clouds—although by now the blueness of the high air was visible beyond the walls.

Two hours: it was that fact alone, that this evidently high-speed transport had taken a whole two hours to cross a radius of one hub of this tremendous cylinder, that drove home to Mardina the sheer scale of the structure she was entering. It was already hundreds of miles back to the port where she had entered this habitat; it would not be rapid to travel anywhere in this great volume. At least now her weight felt comfortingly normal, even though the descent was not finished yet.

And when they passed through the high cloud layer, abruptly Mardina found herself looking down on mountains. Mountains that lapped up against the hub wall like a wave of rock breaking against the steel, mountains with ice clinging to their upper peaks and slopes, and glaciers spilling down their flanks.

The rail diverged from the wall now, though the transport box tipped up to stay vertical, and suddenly Mardina found herself skimming down an icebound slope of rock and frost-shattered scree. The landscape itself, at the foot of these mountains, was still far below.

“This feels almost normal,” she said.

Ruminavi grunted. “Until you remember there is a big band of these mountains all the way around the base of the hub wall.”

The ColU said, “Yes, of course—a mountain chain over a thousand miles long, like the mountains of Valhalla Inferior: South America, where the ancestors of these Incas arose. Folded up into a band!”

“And all fake,” Ruminavi said, grinning, trying to provoke a reaction—to awe them, Mardina realized. “Hollow! Built by engineers, shaped by artists! And inside the mountains there are big engines that circulate air and water and even stone, gravel and sand from the ocean.”

Mardina asked, “What ocean? Never mind.”

“But look out at the spectacle…”

Abruptly the transport descended beneath the snow line, and now sped over bare rock. The view was giddy, with green-clad precipices falling away to the valleys of turbulent rivers below and those towering ice-clad peaks above, clawing at the metal face of the hub. Spectacular bridges spanned some of the gorges. And looking out now Mardina could see that some of the mountain’s face had been leveled into terraces, where people toiled; there were huts, fields, smoke rising from fires into the thin air. These were the first inhabitants of the cylinder they had seen since the hub.

“Potato farmers,” the ColU said. “Just as in the Andes in the time of the Incas. Our Incas. There they farmed all the way up to the snow line.”

Ruminavi frowned at the unfamiliar names. But he said, “Just as in the old country, we built mountains here as residences for our gods. The country is littered with shrines.”

“Yes, the Incas came from the highlands,” Mardina said. “I remember that from my own history, of what the Xin and the Romans found when they fought over Valhalla Inferior. There had been a mighty empire spanning the continent, but armed only with bronze swords and armor of leather…”

“Just as the Europeans of my UN-China Culture discovered,” the ColU said. “And destroyed. Here, however, the Incas evidently prospered. They destroyed Rome, they went out into space, and they brought their culture with them—indeed, they re-created it. Andean mountains, built of lunar rock perhaps.

“Inguill called this habitat Yupanquisuyu, which means the Country of Yupanqui. And Cusi Yupanqui, at least in my Culture’s timeline, was the man who truly established the Inca empire. He conquered vast swaths of territory, and established the empire’s legal, military and social structures. Yupanqui was their Alexander the Great, and it is as if this vast habitat is called ‘Alexandria.’ So Yupanqui must have lived here too, in this reality; the histories must have been roughly consistent until that point—though, evidently, Rome survived to be defeated. I need to see the quipus, you know.”

“The what?”

“The frame of strings that quipucamayoc Inguill carried. That was, and evidently still is, the way the Incas kept their records. Somewhere in this artifact there must be a library, banks of knotted strings telling the story of this empire all the way back to Yupanqui himself. If only I could see it…”

Quintus Fabius had been listening. He said drily, “I’ll see what can be arranged, Collius. In the meantime it seems to me that this box of glass is slowing.”

In the last moments, the transport entered another, lower bank of clouds that blanketed a green-tinged landscape.

Instructed by Ruminavi, the passengers picked up their gear and lined up by a side door. The axis warriors from the hub, fragile-looking in gravity, remained carefully strapped into their couches, but they kept the blunt muzzles of their ugly-looking weapons trained on the Romans. Meanwhile, waiting outside the door was another squad of soldiers to take over their supervision, heftier-looking types, their clothing gaudy, their dark faces stern and suspicious.

Mardina could see it would be just a short walk to the next transport, which was a kind of carriage on rails, one of a series, pulled by a heavy engine at the front. The rails of the track swept down the flank of the mountain.

“Ah,” the ColU said as he was carried out by Chu, “another railway system. A universal, it seems, across the timelines, common to all engineering cultures. Quintus, please ask Ruminavi what powers it—what is the motive force behind the engine?”

It took some moments of interrogation before the answer was extracted from the apu, and at that Quintus had to flatter him to make him brag about the mighty achievements of the Incas. The train, which he called a caravan, ran on the capac nans, the roads of the gods, which spanned this habitat from end to end. Ruminavi said the engine, which had a name something like “llama,” was powered by a warak’a, derived from an old Quechua word for “sling”—and which turned out to be the Inca term for a kernel…

But Mardina, as she stepped out of the carriage, stopped paying attention to mere words. This steep mountainside was choked with green and swathed in mist, the moisture dripping from the crowding vegetation. The air was damp and fresh—but thin, hard to breathe, and she had a sense of altitude. Above her head, patchy clouds obscured her view of the higher mountains, which lifted islands of green into the air, like offerings. And beside the path that led to the railway, flowers bloomed in thick clusters with vivid colors, yellow, orange and purple, and tiny birds worked the flowers, flashes of brilliant blue.

The apu was watching her. He seemed to be admiring her show of interest, at least in comparison to the soldiers who stamped along the trail, already complaining about the state of their feet in a full gravity. “Cloud forest,” he told her, a term that took some translating by the ColU.

“And I suppose there’s a big band of this too all around the rim of the world.”

“That’s how it’s designed. Come. It gets even prettier farther down.” But he smiled at her a little too intensely, as if drinking in every detail of her face, her skin.

Mardina drew away and walked back to her group.

Once aboard the train they had to wait a full hour before it was ready to pull away.

There were many coaches bearing passengers, but the legionaries were herded into rougher carts evidently intended for freight. The legionaries grumbled as they settled down, complained about the thinness of the air, the food grudgingly supplied by Inca troops—fruit, meat, water—supplemented by biscuits and other rations they’d brought in their packs from the Malleus. And, as soldiers always did whenever they got the chance, they tried to sleep.

Meanwhile more trains came rolling into the hub station from the habitat interior, laden with goods, foodstuffs, timber. The ColU speculated that some of these goods must be meant for export from the habitat, perhaps to other space colonies, as well as supplying the big hub city.

At last the train pulled away.

At first the descent was alarmingly steep and rapid. Looking ahead, sitting on a wooden bench and with her head resting against a window, Mardina saw that they soon descended below the level of the cloud forest and into more open air. Now they emerged from the last foothills of the mountains and came to a flat plain—flat at least in the direction of travel—marred by ranges of low hills and gouged by the valleys of sluggish rivers. This land was the puna, the prefect said. The great plain itself was uninspiring, Mardina thought, as they sped across it, nothing but grass and shrubs on arid land. But if Mardina looked sideways she could distinctly see the upward curve of the landscape, as if she was traveling through some tremendous valley. Sparks of artificial light and palls of smoke on those sloping walls must mark townships, and she saw the iron glint of rail tracks and roads.

And there were people everywhere, farming the land in great fields and on terraces. The buildings they lived in were unassuming hut-like structures, although the larger townships featured complexes of massive warehouses that the apu said were tambos, imperial facilities for storing food. Every so often they saw a larger structure yet, compounds surrounded by walls with multiple terraces like huge steps. These were pukaras; they were obvious fortresses. Their walls were of a rough, dark stone that the ColU speculated might be rock from the dismantled moon.

But some features of the landscape were less recognizable, to a Brikanti eye. At rail junctions and springs, even on particular outcroppings of rock, there were small shrines that the Incas called huacas, with carved idols, poles, cairns, hanks of human hair—once, even what looked like a mummified human hand. It was as if the landscape was permeated by the presence of gods and spirits. Away from the sparse human settlements it was as if nothing existed on this eerie plane but the train on its track, and the markers of the gods.

Quintus had a conversation with the apu, steadily interrogating the little official about the nature of the world.

The ColU summarized this for Mardina. “This engineered landscape, the puna, is the equivalent of what was called the altiplano in my Culture. In Valhalla Inferior, this was a plain of tremendous extent, very amenable to cultivation. And high, two miles or more above the level of the ocean. Just as it seems to be here, judging by the thinness of the air. Again, they re-create their culture from Terra.”

“But there’s so much of it,” Mardina said. “It’s crushing. And what is it for? All these people laboring away, this gigantic engine they live in…”

Quintus joined them. “The apu is not a discreet man. Given a little flattery, he has explained to me the essential purposes of this monster, this Yupanquisuyu.

“It is the hub of a system of exploitation and expansion and control that spans sun, moons and planets—the Empire of the Four Quarters. The vast fertile expanses of the habitat feed the miners and engineers who work the worlds and moons across the solar system. The habitat is a source of people too, people to be trained up to mine those moons. And, as well, it is a recruiting pool for soldiers to fight the occasional necessary war—these days wars against internal rebels, since the Inca empire seems to span the whole planetary system. Oh, and the habitat supports the enormous establishment that sustains the Sapa Inca himself, son of the sun. Well, one must be seen to be wealthy and in control, mustn’t one? Our Caesars always knew that. Hanan Cuzco, his ghastly city in the airlessness of the hub, is the Sapa Inca’s Capitoline Hill…”

“And there is one more objective,” the ColU murmured. “One more purpose all this serves.”

Quintus nodded. “They have star vessels. Bigger than our Malleus, it seems, but no more advanced. They have many of them, in great fleets, which for more than a century, says the apu, have been swarming out to the stars, and—”

“Building Hatches,” Mardina breathed.

“So it seems. On a far greater scale than we ever did.”

The ColU murmured, “And so it goes. Whatever the merits of this Culture compared to any other, we can say one thing: it is better at building Hatches. As if it has been designed to serve the needs of those who would desire such a thing. And just as we would expect, given our prior experiences of jonbar hinges.”

Quintus grunted. “Apparently so. But I would suggest we set aside such cosmic mysteries for now and focus on the needs of the present, which will be challenging enough.”

It turned out to be ten hours before the first stop—ten hours in fact before they reached the end of the altiplano. Since the ColU estimated that the train, running without a break, was averaging sixty Roman miles an hour, that gave Mardina another impression of the sheer scale of this artifact into whose interior she was busy tunneling.

When the train finally slowed, night was falling across Yupanquisuyu. Mardina supposed they must fortuitously have been brought to the hub from space in the early morning. She wondered vaguely how the mirror mechanisms worked behind the Inti windows, deflecting away the unending sunlight to emulate nightfall.

They got out at a waystation, which Ruminavi called a chuclla. Here there was a kind of refectory, and a place to wash, and shops where you could obtain food or even fresh clothes, and dormitory blocks—but the apu said they would not stay long before the train resumed its journey, with a fresh crew; they could sleep on the train, or not. Anyhow, the grumbling legionaries had none of the credit tokens you needed to buy stuff at the shops. The Inca soldiers laughed at their frustration.

This small hub of industry and provision was set in the astounding panorama of Yupanquisuyu.

As the Romans bickered around the shops, Mardina once more walked alone, away from the station. Though by now it was evidently full night in the habitat, it was not entirely dark; the residual glow seeping from the light pools was clear and white, but so faint that colors were washed out. It was like the moonlight of Terra, Mardina thought, and no doubt that was by deliberate design. She could make out the sleeping landscape all around her, the terraces and fields. A little way ahead, though, the country began to break up into hills and valleys that were lakes of shadows. They would be descending soon, then, to lower country, and thicker air.

And to the left and right, the uplift of the landscape was easily visible, even in the night. The ColU had told her that a round world with the curvature of this cylinder would have a horizon only a mile away, compared to three miles on Terra. So, well within a mile, she could see the land tipping up, the trees and houses visibly tilted toward her. And the rise went on and on—there was no horizon, only the mist of distance—until the land became a tremendous slope, bearing rivers and lakes at impossible angles. Soon the detail was lost in darkness, and in the thickness of the faintly misty air. But then, as she raised her eyes further, she saw the roof of the world, an inverted landscape glowing with pinpricks of light. It looked like the dark side of a world as seen from space, with threads of roads and the spark of towns clearly visible beyond its own layer of air and clouds. At this altitude the air was so clear it was as if she were looking through a vacuum.

The apu joined her. He was chewing some kind of processed green leaf; he offered her some, but, moving subtly away from him, she declined. He said, “Quite a sight if you’re not used to it. And even if you are, it astounds you sometimes.”

“It doesn’t look like the other side of a cylinder. It’s like another world suspended over this one.”

The ColU murmured in her ear, “That’s natural. The human eye was evolved for spying threats and opportunities in the horizontal plain, and so vertical perceptions are distorted—”

“Hush,” she murmured.

Ruminavi looked at her quizzically.

She said, “I can see we’ll be coming down from the puna soon.”

“Yes. Which is why they put this chuclla here. The last stop before the descent. A place to acclimatize to the thinner air, if you’re coming the other way.”

“And the land below…”

“It’s a kind of coastal strip. The rivers pour down off the puna and spread out, and you have sprawling valleys, immense deltas. Very fertile country, nothing but farmers and fishers. They grow peppers, maize. Should take us half the time we traveled already to cross.”

“Five more hours? And then what? You said a coastal strip. The coast of what?”

“Why, of the ocean. Goes all the way around the waist of the world.” He pointed to the sky, in the direction they’d been traveling, the direction he and his soldiers called east. “You can see it at night sometimes. Spectacular by day, of course. We’ll be crossing by the time the sun comes up.”

“Crossing it?”

“It’s spanned by bridges, for the railway, other traffic. We’ll go rattling across it without even slowing down.”

“How long to cross the ocean?”

“Oh, it’ll be getting dark again by the time we reach the eastern shore.”

The times, the distances, were crushing her imagination. Fifteen, twenty hours more, and she would still be traveling within the belly of the artifact. “And beyond the ocean?”

“Ah, then we come to the antisuyu. The eastern country, all of this side of the ocean being the western, the cuntisuyu. And if you went on all the way to the eastern hub, it would be another fifteen hours.”

“But we won’t be going that far.”

“Oh, no. Only five, six hours to home. My home and yours.”

“Which is? What’s it like?”

“Jungle. Hacha hacha. You’ll see.” He grinned, his teeth white in the pale light. He held out his leaves again. “You sure you won’t have some of this coca? Makes life a lot easier to bear…”

She shook her head, and once more backed away from him. He followed, ineffectual, evidently drawn to her but, thankfully, lacking the courage or guile to do anything about it.

43

On Per Ardua, that first “night” after Beth and Earthshine came through the Hatch, it rained for twelve hours solid.

The sound of the rain on the tough fabric of her shelter was almost reassuring, for Beth. Almost like a memory of her own childhood, when, as her family had tracked the migration of the builders and their mobile lake her mother had called the jilla, they had stayed in structures that were seldom much more permanent than this.

But no matter how familiar this environment felt to her, Beth was painfully aware that she was alone here, save for an artificial being that seemed to be becoming increasingly remote—even if he was, in some sense, her grandfather. “And that’s even before he drives off over the horizon,” she muttered.

“I’m sorry?” Earthshine sat on an inflated mattress beside her, with a convincing-looking representation of a silver survival blanket over his shoulders.

Over a small fire—the first she’d built here since she’d left for Mercury, all those years ago—she was making soup, of stock she’d brought with her in her pack, and local potatoes briskly peeled and diced and added for bulk. Plus, she had boiled a pot of Roman tea. She had flashlights and a storm lantern, but in the unending daylight of Per Ardua, enough light leaked through the half-open door flap of the tent for her to see to work.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just rambling. I keep thinking I haven’t slept yet, not since the Hatch.”

“But it’s only been a few hours,” Earthshine said gently. “We’ve seen a lot, learned a lot. It just seems longer.”

“Maybe. Only half a day, but you’re already planning to light out of here, aren’t you?”

He shrugged, and sipped a virtual bowl of tea. “I see no reason to hang around here any longer than it takes the support unit to make itself ready to travel.”

“Where?”

“The only logical destination on a planet like this.”

“The antistellar?”

“Of course.”

“Which means a trek across the dark side,” she said.

“You are free to come with me,” he said evenly. “There is no rush; we can make preparations. You could even ride on the support unit if you wish. We could rig up some kind of seat.”

“Thanks.”

“Alternatively, you are free to stay here, or go where you wish. I will donate some components from the support unit, if you choose that course. A kit: basic environment sensors, food analyzers, a medical package to supplement the first aid available from your suit.” He passed his fingers through the fabric of her sleeve, wincing as he did so. “Remember, I won’t need it.”

“I lived off the land here once, with my family, and I can do it again.” She did a double take. “Our family.”

He didn’t respond to that.

“Why are you going to the antistellar?”

“In search of answers.”

“Answers to what? What’s wrong with being right here?”

He clenched a fist. “This is all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I smashed Mars to make them listen to me—to us, to humanity.”

“You mean the deep bugs in the rocks.”

“The Dreamers, yes. As I call them. Our puppet masters, or so I’m coming to believe. They have been disturbing our worlds, trashing our histories, wrecking our painstakingly assembled civilizations with impunity. Well, no more! I made them listen. I made them respond.”

“Their answer was the Hatch on Mars.”

“Yes. A Hatch which brought us here. But this isn’t good enough. Not a good enough answer.”

“I don’t understand—”

“This is Proxima! Oh, I can’t deny it, Beth—it must be, a Proxima somehow old and withered, but… Proxima, the nearest star. But I wanted to be taken to Ultima, the furthest star of all our legends—or the equivalent for the Dreamers. The place where the answers are—the place where I’ll learn at last why it is they do what they do. And,” he said darkly, “maybe I will stop them. Maybe I can still be Heimdall to their subterranean Loki… Yes, I forced an answer out of them. A response, at least. But it’s not enough. So I will put them to the question again.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. When I get to the antistellar I’ll figure it out.”

She thought that over. “Somehow I feel you’re wrong. I don’t know how or why… They brought you here. Maybe the answer you seek is right here, and you just aren’t seeing it.”

“That’s possible. But even if so, it can’t do any harm to go search some more, can it?”

“A lot of people thought you should be stopped from pursuing your ambitions. That was always true, all the way back to your early days on Earth, wasn’t it? Even before you became—”

“What I am now? When I was merely Robert Braemann, bona fide human being, and busy breaking the law to save the world? Or at least that’s the ‘I,’ of the nine of me, who interests you. And then I became Earthshine, a Core AI, one of three rogue minds, once again breaking humanity’s laws to save it. And again, they never forgave us. Now here I am alone, trying to save—”

“The world? Which world?”

“All the worlds, maybe. I don’t know.” He was silent a while; the rain continued to hiss on broad Arduan leaves. “Do you think you will come with me? I ask for purely practical reasons. The timescale, the preparations—”

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said curtly. “We only just got here… I like it here, even if it isn’t what I quite remember. I like the day side anyhow. I don’t know if I want to go into endless night, so cold I’ll need to wear a spacesuit.”

“But,” he said gently, “you also aren’t sure if you want to be alone.”

“Do you want me to come? After all, it was you who brought me through the Hatch with you.”

“I didn’t force you.”

“Do you really think of us as family, Earthshine? I know my father’s father is only one of you, one of the nine minds… Do you think of him as your son?”

“Of course I do. I always did the best I could for him—myself and his mother.”

“Which included shoving him into a cryo freezer for a century, and ultimately killing him?”

He sighed. “We were working at the margins of the law. We were trying to save him. We thought that perhaps in a century he at least would be able to live his life out of our shadow. We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.”

“Did you love him? Do you love us now?”

He smiled. “A part of me does. That’s the best answer I can give you. I’m sorry. Humans aren’t meant to be like this, you see. Like me. Identity, consciousness, isn’t meant to be something you can pour from one container to another, and meld with others as if mixing a cocktail. So you’ll find my reactions are always going to be—off. But at least I’m here, with you, today. Which is all, in the end, you can ask of anyone.”

She smiled back. “That’s true. I feel an atavistic urge to hug you, Granddad.”

“I urge you not to try. I think the rain is stopping. I will go check on the progress of my support unit.”

“And I,” she said, stretching and yawning, “think I’ll take a nap. Don’t wake me when you come in.”

“I’ll try not to.”

In the warm, moist air of the Arduan substellar, she slept as well as she had for years. And for an unknown time too, under the unmoving face of Proxima. Whatever the unanswered questions, whatever the reservations she might have, she was home; she could feel it. Alone or not.

Even if she missed her daughter, Mardina, with a savage ache, as if a steel cable were attached to her belly, dragging her back to Mars.

When she glanced out of the shelter, she saw Earthshine standing over his support unit as it slowly reassembled itself for the journey.

44

The Romans were brought to a wide, flat clearing cut into the rain forest.

Here they were to farm, they were told.

They would grow maize, corn, wheat, rice, coca, and the ubiquitous potato, which the Incas called papas. There were no animals to raise, no sheep, goats, cattle—no llamas—though, they were told, some animals ran wild in the hacha hacha, the jungle. But they were expected to raise some more exotic and unfamiliar crops, gaudy flowers, strange fungi and lichen, that the ColU speculated were the source of mind-altering potions—psychoactive drugs, he told Mardina, evidently a feature of Inca culture in any timeline.

So the work began.

The land had to be kept open by regular burnings at the perimeter of the clearing. And the labor of keeping the land drained would always be considerable. It was poor, the soil thin, but not so bad that it was unworkable. The Romans fertilized their patch, mostly with ash from the burned rain forest perimeter, or the dung and bones of the animals that ran wild in the rain forest, notably rodents that could be the size of sheep. The work was hard but bearable.

There were people here already, of course.

They had joined an ayllu, a kind of clan, a loosely bound group of families, some of whom had some kind of relationship with each other, some of whom didn’t. The people were friendly enough, however, Mardina found. It seemed to be the Inca way to move people around their box of an empire, from place to place, from near to far—sometimes across the toroid of an ocean from one “continent” to the other, from the puna and river deltas of the west, the cuntisuyu, to the rain forest–choked eastern half of the habitat, the antisuyu. All this was no doubt intended to ensure continued control, of the kind that quipucamayoc Inguill had talked about on the Romans’ first arrival here. If you didn’t stay long in a place, you couldn’t set down roots, couldn’t establish loyalties—your only long-term relationship was with the Sapa Inca, the Only Emperor, and his officials, not with the strangers around you.

But a consequence of the system was that people were used to strangers moving in—strangers they called mitmaqcuna, colonists. So while everybody had their property, and a plot of land to work, and, more important, they all had some kind of status in their society, they weren’t so territorial that they excluded the Romans and their companions.

The Romans, however, did not own this land; that was made clear from the start—and nor did anybody of the ayllu, and none of them ever would. The Sapa Inca owned everything. The people were not slaves—as was proven by the fact that there were actual slaves, called yanakuna, to be seen throughout this place. The Romans were to be mitimacs, which meant something like “taxpayers.” They were entitled to keep the produce they raised, save for a proportion that they had to hand over to be stored in the big tambos, the state-owned storehouses that studded the countryside. This was part of the mit’a, the tax obligations of every citizen.

Also as part of their mit’a they were expected to contribute a proportion of their labor directly to the services of the state. This might mean creating or maintaining military equipment such as quilted armor, boots, blankets—never any weapons—or field rations of dried potatoes or maize, all to be stored in specialized warehouses called colcas, for the use of the army. It might mean laboring to support the big pukaras, fortresses of stone with spiral terraces winding around their inner cores of buildings: a design that reminded Mardina of huge snails squatting in the countryside. It might mean working on projects for the common good such as the regular forest clearance, or scraping clear the dust and algae that gathered with time on the habitat’s huge Inti windows, or maintaining the capac nans, the long, straight roads and rail tracks that threaded through the forest, and the chucllas, the waystations that studded their length.

And the mit’a obligation might even mean serving in the military, although it was clear that the beefy, tough-looking, well-disciplined Romans weren’t trusted enough for that, not yet.

All of this was organized on a global scale by a hierarchy of officials, beginning with the ayllu’s local leader, the curaca—an imposing, reasonable-looking man called Pascac, who was the leader of ten families, and reminded Mardina a little of Quintus Fabius—and up through the Deputy Prefect Ruminavi, the tocrico apu, who in turn reported to one of two apus, the prefects each of whom ran one of the two great “continents” of the habitat, west or east. And then the command chain reached up to the court of the Sapa Inca in the two hub Cuzcos, including the quipucamayocs like Inguill, and the colcacamayocs, keepers of records and stores respectively.

The legionaries grumbled at the lack of freedom. And about the lack of money, the lack of shops and stores where you could buy things, from beer and wine to fine clothes and other luxuries, and not least, prostitutes. But then, this wasn’t an economy that ran on money. And there was some tension in the very beginning, when the local curaca decreed that the Romans could not use permanently any of the small wooden houses that made up the core of the small township inhabited by the people of the ayllu, but must construct their own. But legionaries always grumbled, whatever you tried to get them to do.

And Quintus Fabius once more proved he was a more than competent leader. In fact he seemed to relish the challenge of the situation.

On the very first night in the antisuyu, Quintus had the legionaries construct the rudiments of a marching camp, with a rectangular perimeter wall of dirt and timber with rounded corners, and ditches for drainage and latrines, and the start, at least, of permanent structures inside: a training ground, a principia for the centurion, barracks blocks and storehouses. It was a lot smaller than would have been built by a full legion on the march, of course. There were fewer than fifty men here, a little more than half a full century in the Roman system. Nevertheless, Mardina thought, as a demonstration of Roman competence and adaptability, it clearly impressed the locals. And right from the beginning of their time here the exercise reassured the legionaries that—whatever else might become of them, whatever this strange place was, and Mardina suspected some of them were pretty puzzled about that—they were still Romans, still legionaries, and all they had learned over years of training and experience still counted for something.

And Quintus was very careful that the legionaries preserve and respect a huaca, a local shrine—little more than a heap of stones—that happened to fall within the domain they were given to set up their camp.

Soon they had their fields laid out and plowed. It was hard work. The lack of draft animals, and a paucity of machines away from the richest ayllus, meant there was a reliance on human muscle. But for all they grumbled, Romans were used to hard work.

There seemed to be no seasons here, as far as Mardina could tell from interrogating baffled locals, though she supposed a cycle of shorter and longer days, a “winter” created by selectively closing some of the light pools, could have easily been designed in. But then, much of the Incas’ original empire on Terra had been tropical, where seasonal differences were small. This did mean that growing cycles, and the labor of farming, continued around the year; you didn’t have to wait for spring.

Yet life wasn’t all work. They might have to pay the mit’a, but the legionaries soon learned they didn’t have to go hungry. If you fancied a supplement to your vegetable-based diet, you could always go hunting in the rain forest, where there seemed to be no restrictions on what you took as long as you were reasonably frugal about it. There were big rodents, which the ColU called guinea pigs, that provided some satisfying meat, even if they were an easy kill. Smaller versions ran around some of the villages.

The lack of alcohol was one enduring problem. It seemed to Mardina that the local people didn’t drink, in favor of taking drugs and potions of various kinds. Chicha, the local maize beer, was officially used only in religious ceremonies. After a time Quintus turned a blind eye to the illicit brewing of beer.

As for the drugs, the most common was coca, the production of which was part of the mit’a obligation. But you could grow it anywhere—it grew wild in the forest—and everybody seemed to chew it, from quite young children up to toothless grandmothers. Some of the legionaries tried it, taking it in bundles of pressed leaves with lime, and a few took to it; they said it made them feel stronger, sharper, more alert, and even immune to pain. Medicus Michael officially disapproved, saying that the coca was making your brain lie to you about the state of your body.

With time, the villagers started to invite the Romans to join in feasts to celebrate their various baffling divinities. The adults passed around the coca, smoked or drank various other exotic substances, played their noisy pan pipes, and danced what Mardina, who did not partake, was assured were expressions of expanded inner sensation, but looked like a drunken shambles to her. The children would hang lanterns in the trees, and everybody would sing through the night, and other communities would join in until it seemed as if the whole habitat was echoing to the sound of human voices.

The local people would always look strange to a Roman or Brikanti eye, Mardina supposed. The men wore brilliantly colored blanket-like tunics, and the women skirts and striped shawls and much treasured silver medallions. But they grew tall and healthy. Sickness was rare here. The medicus opined that most diseases had been deliberately excluded when the habitat was built, and it was kept that way by quarantine procedures of the kind the legionaries had had to submit to on arrival. And, if you ignored the forest-bird feathers that habitually adorned the black hair of the men, and the peculiar black felt hats with wide brims that the women sported, the people could be very attractive, with almost a Roman look to their strong features.

On the other hand, Mardina supposed, to these legionaries exiled by a jonbar hinge from their wives and families and all they knew, almost any woman would be attractive.

One by one, the legionaries began to form relationships with the women of the village. The Sapa Inca’s own clan was polygamous—although it was said that the true heirs to the empire were always born of the closest family of all, of the Inca marrying a favored sister—but the villagers, at least here in the wilds of the antisuyu, were ferociously monogamous. Quintus said only that he was pleased how few of these new loves, relatively speaking, were already married, and how few passion-fueled disputes he was having to resolve.

But he did have to mediate conversations with the legionaries and the local leaders about birth control. Contraceptives were free at the tambos, and so were abortions, though Mardina got the sense that the operations could be risky; such was the state of medicine here. Your choice about having children was up to you, but the population size was carefully monitored by the imperial authorities, and if the average birth rate of an ayllu went above two children per couple without the appropriate licenses, there would be, it seemed, penalties to pay.

Even though many of the younger local men watched Mardina, or spoke to her, or tried to bring her into the narcotics-fueled dances, she kept to herself. Some attention she got wasn’t so welcome, such as from the tocrico apu Ruminavi. She soon learned from local gossip that he was a married man with kids as old as she was, but he didn’t seem able to keep his eyes off her, and Clodia, when she visited.

For now she kept everybody at bay.

“I’m just not ready for it,” she confided once to Clodia, daughter of Titus Valerius, as they patiently weeded their way through a field of maize. Clodia was still just fifteen, but she and Mardina were closest in age in the Roman party, and the only two young women.

Clodia was more wide-eyed about the local boys. “What about that Quizo?”

“The one who always wears the hummingbird feathers?”

“That’s the one. I’d be ready for him any day of the week…”

Mardina playfully ruffled her hair. “Sure you would, and in a few years you’ll eat him alive. But for now—it’s different for you, Clodia. At least you’ve still got your father here.”

“Ha! The big boss of me. Well, you can keep him…”

Mardina said patiently, “It’s just that we’ve all been through so much. We passed through the jonbar hinge. We lost everything we knew. And even before that, I knew that my own mother was from another world again, from before another jonbar hinge, and how strange is that? Now, here we are in this strange place where nobody speaks Brikanti or Latin, and nobody’s heard of Jesu or Julius Caesar…”

“Well, I like it here,” Clodia said defiantly. “I always liked living in camp when we were at Romulus, and I wanted to train as a legionary. Now there’s nobody to tell me I can’t.”

Mardina grinned. “Well, good for you. For me, it’s just that I need to find myself here first, that’s all. Before getting lost in Quizo.”

“Very wise,” Clodia said gravely. “You take your time. But can we talk a bit more about his eyes first?”

Quintus didn’t hesitate to remind the Romans all of their true purpose here: to survive, to remember their comrades still aboard the Malleus Jesu, and to amass stores to enable them to escape someday, if they chose—or maybe to knock the Sapa Inca off his throne someday, so the men dreamed over their beer.

And, though they had had to give up any weapons at the entry hub, Quintus began quietly to have the men make their own: spears of fire-hardened wood, clubs. He negotiated with local artisans, metalworkers, for spear points. Soon there was quiet talk of getting hold of bladed weapons, swords and knives. All this was paid for in kind, usually with a squad of legionaries carrying out some brute-force task—and all beneath the notice, hopefully, of the tax assessors.

But for all the long-term scheming of Quintus Fabius and his senior men, for all the mutterings of the ColU about Earthshine and Hatches and jonbar hinges, the longer Mardina stayed here, and the more she got used to the rhythms of Inca life, the more settled she felt. The more secure. Maybe the sheer fact of getting back a routine, some basic order in her life—after that chaotic period after leaving Terra—was good for her. But the longer she stayed, the more embedded she felt in this strange but stable society.

All the Roman party saw the benefit of the Inca system about fifty days after their arrival in the antisuyu. There was a crisis; one of the big Inti windows was scarred by a meteorite strike, and had to be covered over with a tremendous steel lid while repairs were effected. That meant that a kind of night fell over a swath of countryside in the region of the habitat opposite the damaged window. Crops failed, and rain forest trees quickly started to die back. The state system, however, swung into action, and some of the legionaries, recruited for the effort, described what they saw. From all around the local area, the tambos were opened, and mit’a workers, supervised by the military, rushed to bring relief to the stricken province.

This was where the system of constantly storing excess produce paid off: this was the point of all the organization, Mardina started to see. In a way it was a distillation of the Roman system in her own history, the bargain an empire made with the nations and populations it subdued: submit to me, and I will keep you safe. Under the Incas’ almost obsessively tight control, you might have little freedom of movement, freedom of choice. But you never went hungry, thirsty, you never went cold, there was medical care when you needed it. And when disaster struck at one part of the imperial body, the rest rushed to help it recover.

But she also glimpsed what happened when things went wrong. In this empire of occupation and exploitation, the most common “crime” was an attempt to evade the mit’a tax obligations. It was a chill moment when the tax assessors came, and worked through their records, manipulating their quipus with one hand. Some, it was said, could work the stringed gadgets with their toes. They saw all and recorded all. And the perpetrators of crime, after arbitrary hearings before the tocrico apu, could be taken away from the ayllu for punishment, out of sight.

Observing all this, in the camp Quintus Fabius enacted his own regime of discipline and punishment, intending not to let a single one of his legionaries fall foul of the Inca authorities.

Worse yet, however, for many families was the forcible recruitment of the young. There was a kind of ongoing recruitment drive for off-habitat workers, who would man the asteroid mines or crew kernel-powered freighters. But there was a demand for recruits for service at the Cuzcos, or at another of the great imperial establishments—and the servants chosen were always the prettiest children, those with the sweetest nature. This service was compulsory, not volunteered like other professions.

This was an empire in which everything, including you, was owned by the Sapa Inca. In fundamental ways it was far less free than even the Roman Empire had been, back on Terra.

Even so, Mardina could see how the great machinery of state worked to sustain its citizens. She wouldn’t hesitate to grab back her own freedom if she ever got the chance. But no doubt there had been worse empires in human history—worse times and places to be alive, even if you weren’t the Sapa Inca himself.

And then there was the sheer wonder of living here, in this tremendous building in space.

There was weather. There could be days more brilliant than any summer’s day she had known in Brikanti—hotter than Rome, said Quintus Fabius, even before it was a hole in the ground. Or there could be rain, even storms. The tocrico apu claimed that these were all under the control of vast engines commanded by the Sapa Inca’s advisers, but the locals, salvaging their ruined crops after one sudden hailstorm, were skeptical about that.

On warm, clear nights, Mardina liked to sleep outside, if she could, sometimes with Clodia at her side, safe within the walls of a community that was slowly taking on the look of an Inca village embedded in a Roman marching camp. And they would look up at the “sky.” Of course, there were no stars to be seen here. There were very few aircraft, even. The only craft operating above the ground were the government-controlled “Condors” that passed along the axis region of the habitat, in the vacuum.

But the tremendous metal shell above was an inverted world, hanging above them, crowded with endlessly fascinating detail—even if the seeing through this lowland air was poor compared to how it had been on the high puna. The Inti windows glowed like pale linear moons, and Mardina could make out the blackness of forest, the pale silver of rivers and lakes. All this was cut through by the sharp lines of rail tracks and roads, connecting communities that glowed almost starlike against the background.

And sometimes, she and Clodia thought, they could make out shapes framed by those tangled lines. They were like figures traced out of the dense antisuyu forest up there by some tremendous scalpel. There was a bird, there was a spider, there a crouching human. Maybe it was just Mardina’s eyes seeking patterns where none existed, the way the ancients had always seen animals and gods among the meaningless scatter of the stars of the night sky. Or maybe it was deliberate, a touch of uncharacteristic artistry in the huge functional architecture of this artificial world.

And if that was true, maybe there were similar etchings on her side of the world, great portraits hundreds of miles in extent, yet meticulously planned. Maybe from the point of view of some witness sleeping in the open on the other side of the world, lying there pinned by the spin of the cylinder, she was a speck lost in the eye of a spider, or the claw of a bird. Somehow it was a comforting thought to be so enclosed by humanity. Sometimes Mardina wondered if she would eventually forget the wildness of the outside, of the stars.

But there was wildness enough inside the habitat, in the dense green of the rain forest jungle that circled the ayllu village. The deep hacha hacha, where the antis lived.

45

Mardina and Clodia had their first encounter with the antis on the day the strange mit’a tax assessment party came to call.

Unusually this was led by Ruminavi, tocrico apu, the Deputy Prefect himself. He arrived with the various inspectors and assessors with their quipus, and the tax collectors with their hand-drawn carts for the produce and samples they would take away—and a larger than usual contingent of soldiers in their woollen tunics and plumed helmets of steel-reinforced cane, and their armor of quilted cotton over steel plate, all decorated with scraps of gold and silver. Their only weapons were blades, whips, slings; just as in the space-going ships of the lost Roman Empire, projectile weapons and explosives were excluded from the interior of the habitat.

Mardina and Clodia, coming in from the field, recognized none of these men. Almost all the Inca soldiers, the awka kamayuq, were part-timers raised from the provinces, from ayllus like Mardina’s own community, with only a very small core standing army of specialists. But it was the practice to deploy soldiers from one province in operations in others, not their own homeland.

And Mardina noticed, as she had before, a kind of edginess in the way the soldiers walked, a sharp glitter in their eyes. The ColU speculated that this was the product of more drugs, of active agents to boost metabolism, muscle strength, even intelligence and cognition.

As this party made its way through the village, even going into some of the houses, the folk of the ayllu avoided looking into the eyes of these men, and the Roman legionaries speculated how it would be to fight these Inca soldiers.

Ruminavi, spotting Mardina and Clodia, came hurrying over to the two of them. He was dressed grandly, presumably to impress the taxpayers, in beaded and embroidered clothes and feathered armbands, and his thinning black hair braided. Even his sandals had silver studs. As almost everybody carried, he had a bag of coca at his waist.

Mardina watched him approach warily. “Do you want something of us, tocrico apu?”

“Yes, I do.” He glanced back at the party he was leading. “This is a special mit’a collection. I need you two to go find some wild coca for me.”

“Wild coca…”

“A particularly potent and valuable strain has been reported in this area.” He waved a hand vaguely at the green of the encroaching forest. “Go take a look, the two of you—you’ll know it when you see it.”

Mardina and Clodia exchanged a suspicious look. Mardina said, “With respect, apu—why us? We aren’t native to this place. The ayllu must be full of people who know more about coca than we ever will—”

“Do as I say,” he snapped. “Look, Mardina—I know you don’t trust me.” He gave her a forced smile. “But, believe me, I mean you no harm. Nor you, Clodia Valeria. I’m just a man, and a weak one at that, and I like to look… But I am here to protect you. You must go to the forest, now. And stay there until the mit’a party has left your ayllu. Now, girls, go!” And he shoved them away, before hurrying back to the soldiers and inspectors.

Clodia glanced around for her father, but Titus Valerius was nowhere to be seen. She looked up at Mardina. She muttered, “That man is like a worm.”

“He is.”

“But I have the feeling that we should trust him, just this once.”

“So do I. Come on!”

The two of them lifted their Inca-style smocks, and ran in their Roman-style sandals to the edge of the forest where Ruminavi had indicated. There they looked back at the soldiers assiduously searching the ayllu’s village, glanced at each other, and then held hands and walked into the hacha hacha.

They were plunged into darkness, as if being swallowed.

The slim trunks of the trees towered over them, like pillars in some huge temple, and the canopy of green far above was almost solid. Their ears were filled with the cries of monkeys and macaws, screeches and whistles that echoed as if they were indeed inside some tremendous building. At least the ground was fairly clear, for undergrowth could not prosper in this shade, but in the few slivers of light, flowers grew, bright and vibrant, and vines wrapped around the trunks of the trees. And as the girls’ eyes adapted to the dark, they glimpsed snakes and scorpions and swarming ants.

But they had come only a few paces into the shade of the trees.

When Mardina looked back, she saw a party of soldiers coming their way. Clodia’s pale Roman skin seemed to shine in the residual light, easily visible. Mardina whispered, “There’s no coca here. I’m sure Ruminavi meant us to hide from the soldiers. We must go farther in.”

“I know. I don’t dare.”

“Nor me. But we have to try, I think. And—”

And that was when they saw the anti girl.

Mardina’s heart hammered, and she clutched Clodia’s hand.

She was standing in the shadows, a little way deeper into the forest. Dressed only in strips of woven fabric around her chest and waist, she looked no older than Clodia. She wore a headband over pulled-back hair into which were stuffed brilliantly colored feathers. From her neck hung a pendant, pieces of tied wood that looked oddly like the Hammer-Cross of Jesu, in Mardina’s own timeline. She had a small bow with a quiver of arrows tucked on straps at her back, but her hands were open and empty, Mardina saw, in a gesture of friendship.

It was her face that was terrifying. Her skin was dyed a brilliant blue, with brighter stripes sweeping back from her nose like the whiskers of a jaguar, a monster of local myth. Feathers seemed to sprout from the skin around her nose and mouth.

She looked calm, Mardina thought, calm as a snake about to strike. Mardina herself was anything but calm.

“We should go back,” she muttered to Clodia. “This isn’t our world.”

“Are you sure? Mardina, the ayllu isn’t our world either. None of it is… Oh, come on.” Clodia took a bold step forward.

The anti girl smiled, and beckoned with her hands, an unmistakable gesture.

Clodia looked back over her shoulder. “See? I think she’s telling us to come deeper in. I think we should trust her. Oh, come on, Mardina, for curiosity’s sake, if nothing else.”

So Mardina gave in and took one step after another, in pursuit of Clodia, who followed the anti girl.

46

The Romans had learned that the Incas called these people antis, the inhabitants of the forest. Sometimes you saw them, shadowy figures running between the great trunks at the forest’s burned edge—a face scowling out of the green, with a sense of the utterly alien. The folk of the ayllus ignored them, but were careful not to probe too far into the forest, into their territory, and, probably, vice versa applied too. It was as if two entirely different worlds had been jammed into one huge container, Mardina thought.

Yet details of the antis were known. They belonged to peoples with names like Manosuyus, Chunchos, Opataris. They traded with the folk of the ayllus, providing from the depths of their deadly jungle hardwood, feathers, jaguar skins, turtle oil, and exotic plants. One of the most prized plants, the Romans learned, was a hallucinogen called ayahuasca, “the vine of the gods,” which the Incas used to make particularly potent ritual beverages. In return the antis took as payment steel axes and knives, even salt gathered from the shore of the distant ocean.

The original antisuyu had in fact been the great forest that had once swathed much of the continent of Valhalla Inferior, surrounding the river the Roman conquerors had called the New Nile, and the UN-China Culture had called the Amazon. In the histories of all three Cultures, including the Inca, the forest had eventually been mostly lost, to logging and mineral exploration. But the Incas, it seemed, as a kind of gesture to their own deep past, had transported survivors of the forest cultures into a re-created wilderness here in Yupanquisuyu, and allowed them to live out their lives much as they had since long before there were such things as empires and cities on the face of the world.

After all, Mardina learned in scraps of conversation, the antisuyu was the first barbaric land the Incas had conquered, when they pushed eastward from their stronghold on the mountainous spine to the west of Valhalla Inferior. Then, with the jungle pinned down under a network of roads and pukaras—and with the experience of such conquest behind them—they had been ready to strike out farther east, across the ocean with ships built using techniques brought to them by the probing Xin, who had made their own ocean crossings from the far west. When they had landed in Europa—the ColU thought somewhere in Iberia—the Incas seemed to have fallen upon a Roman Empire wrecked by plague, famine, civil breakdown, perhaps afflicted by some other calamity yet to be identified. And then an expansion south into Africa had begun, and then farther east still into Asia, where the Xin empire lay waiting, and the final battle for the planet had begun…

Through all this, however, the Incas had always preserved scraps of the forest where the original antis had still clung on. And in the end the descendants of those antis, no doubt utterly bewildered, had been scooped up and transported to the Incas’ new empire in the sky. This wasn’t unprecedented; the Incas had similarly taken up samples of many of the peoples that had comprised the land-based empire. It was said that over a hundred and sixty languages had been spoken in the empire, even before its expansion beyond Valhalla Inferior to a global power.

Now, so it was said, the antis prospered in the forest as well as they had ever, and—some in the ayllu whispered cattily—most of them didn’t even know they were in some great human-made artifact in the sky.

The anti girl led them in a straight line, more or less, and Mardina tried to keep track of their route. But there were no landmarks—the trees all looked the same to her—and in the jumbled shadows she even had trouble telling which direction was which. If she could only get a glimpse of the sky, of the mirror landscape above, she’d reorient and then just walk out of this place.

Then, without warning, they broke into the light.

The clearing was perhaps a hundred paces across, and evidently created by fire, for on the ground Mardina saw the evidence of burning, blackened fallen trunks and scorched branches and a scatter of ash through which green saplings poked eagerly into the light. The air was humid and very hot. But the sky above, fringed with the green of the forest canopy, revealed a textured upside-down landscape that Mardina never would have believed could be such a reassuring sight.

In the center of the clearing was a village. Huts built of what looked like long grass stems, or maybe bamboo, were set up in a rough circle around open, trampled ground. A fire burned on a rough hearth of stones, with what looked like a large guinea pig roasting on a crude spit. Villagers sat around, poking at the fire, mending baskets, skinning another animal, talking. A handful of children dozed in the afternoon heat.

As the anti girl brought the two strangers to the edge of the village, some of the people looked around, scowled, and spoke sharply to their guide. But she replied just as sharply—and she made an alarming cutthroat gesture with one finger. Grudgingly, the adults nodded and turned away. A couple of children, naked and wide-eyed, would have come wandering out to inspect the newcomers, but they were called back sharply by the adults.

The girl turned to Mardina and Clodia, held up her hands to stop them coming any farther, and mimed that they should sit in the dirt. Then she ran into the village and returned with a couple of wooden mugs, and a handful of coca leaves that she set before them, before nodding and hurrying off.

The mugs contained what tasted like diluted beer. Mardina and Clodia drank deeply and gratefully. They both ignored the coca leaves.

Clodia groaned, “I wish they’d spare some of that roast. The smell is killing me.”

“Hopefully we’ll be out of here before we die of hunger, Clodia.”

“Maybe if I make a prayer to Jesu loudly enough, they’ll offer me His charity.”

“What do you mean?”

Clodia looked at her. “Didn’t you see that ornament around our guide’s neck?”

“Well, it looked like a cross, but—”

“And look over there.” Clodia pointed beyond the village, to the clearing’s far side, where a crude wooden cross stood, a larger version of the girl’s pendant. A kind of dummy figure made of rolled-up bales of straw hung from the cross, fixed by outspread arms, legs strapped together.

“Jesu,” Clodia said triumphantly.

“You’re right,” Mardina breathed, astonished. The cross was a double symbol of Jesu’s career, shared by Romans and Brikanti alike: of the crucifix on which the Romans had shamefully put Him to death, and of the Hammer, the carpenter’s weapon with which the Savior had led a rebellion against the forces that had oppressed His people. “A figure of Jesu, here in the forest. So we live in a world now where the technological city-dwelling empire builders are pagans, and the savages in the jungle follow Christ—”

The girl who’d brought them here came running up again now, holding her fingers to her lips to hush them. Mardina saw that the villagers were growing agitated too.

Beckoning, the girl summoned the visitors to their feet. She led them quickly back into the jungle, a good way away from the place they had come in. Once back in the forest the girl moved silent as a shadow, and Mardina and Clodia followed as best they could. Mardina judged they were heading back to the edge of the forest, and the ayllu.

And as they walked, Mardina glimpsed soldiers passing through the shadows of the trees. Led by the tocrico apu, they were heading for the anti village. No wonder the villagers were growing nervous. If Ruminavi was aware of the presence of the girls, he showed no sign of it.

The anti girl left them at the edge of the forest, and hurried away into the shadows before either of them could try to thank her, or say goodbye.

Ruminavi did not return to the ayllu that day, and Mardina had no way to question him about the whole strange incident, the reason they had needed to be hidden.

Not until the next time he returned.

47

In the Roman camp, time was recorded, by order of Quintus Fabius. From the beginning, the Romans had counted the cycle of the habitat’s artificial days and nights, measuring the time they spent in this place.

It was a month before Ruminavi came again to the village, this time alone, in his deputy-prefect finery but without his squad of soldiers. And he sought out Mardina, who was walking with Clodia with firewood from the edge of the forest.

“You two,” he snapped. “Come with me. Now.” He headed out of the village, away from the line of the road, toward the largest of the local tambos. When they didn’t follow him immediately, he glanced back over his shoulder. “Look, you trusted me last time, and you were saved, weren’t you?”

Mardina called, “Saved from what?”

“Come on, hurry…”

As they had before, they hesitated for a heartbeat. Then they dumped their armfuls of firewood and ran after him.

They caught him up by the low fence that surrounded the tambo. The imperial storehouse was a sprawling structure that was the center of a complex of buildings, including an inn for travelers, a grander hotel for visiting imperial officials, and a small rail station. At the gate, in a wall of moon rock, Ruminavi produced documentation to prove his identity, vouched for the girls, and led them into the complex to the storehouse itself.

Before the storehouse, in a shaded corner out of sight of the main complex, stood a kind of stone plinth, only a hand’s breadth high, its sides engraved with the faces of some fierce god. There were many such enigmatic structures dotted about this god-soaked artificial world, and Mardina would not have given this one much thought. But the prefect, she saw, was working a kind of key into a lock in the plinth’s surface, which he’d brushed clear of dust.

Mardina repeated, “You saved us from what, apu?”

He grinned. “Well, when I’ve saved your life again I’ll explain it all. The last sweep wasn’t satisfactory, you see, in terms of tributes for the particular mit’a we had been assigned to collect. So the Inca’s courtiers sent out the awka kamayuq parties again. And that’s what I’m saving you from…” At last the key turned. “Ha! Done it.” He got to his feet, breathless, and grasped a handle set into the surface of the plinth. “Help me, you two. Look, here are more handles, there and there.”

Clodia asked, “Help you with what? What is this thing?”

“A door in the world…”

As the three of them heaved, the plinth toppled back—to reveal a steel-walled tunnel leading down into the ground, set with scuffed rungs. There was a smell of oil, the sharp tang of electricity.

“The underbelly of the world,” Ruminavi said admiringly, and he rapped a rung with one knuckle. “Which we call the xibalba, the underworld. Two centuries old, and still as sound as when it was built. And there’s a lot of it, miles thick in some places. Down you go. I need to be last in, so I can lock us tight once more.”

Again Clodia and Mardina hesitated. Again they gave in, and followed his lead.

Mardina went first. “Just understand this, apu. I trust you only marginally more than I distrust you.”

“Understood.”

“And if any harm were to come to Clodia because of all this, her father will pull you apart like a spider in a condor’s beak.”

“I don’t doubt it—down you go, Clodia; hurry, they are close!—but it is harm to Clodia especially that I am trying to avert. Are you at the bottom? The light dazzles up here… Good. I’m on my way.”

He clambered briskly down the rungs, and pulled the lid closed. As the heavy plinth fell back in place, the lid slammed shut with an ominous clang. To seal it, Mardina saw that he turned a wheel rather than use his key—good, they had a way out of here, whatever Ruminavi did.

At the bottom of the shaft, Mardina found herself standing in a corridor dimly lit by fluorescent tubes, many of which had failed, creating islands of darkness. There were piles of litter here and there, heaps of tools, scraps of paper, a few discarded bits of clothing. The walls themselves were scuffed, dented and scarred, scratched with graffiti. It was a dismal prospect.

And the corridor seemed to run to infinity in either direction. Mardina felt Clodia’s hand slip into hers.

Ruminavi heaved a sigh. “Well, we’re safe now. Come on, there’s a rest station just down here.” He led the way, his booted feet clattering on the bare metal floor, his voice echoing. “The troops and the assessors think I’ve gone to spy out the forest. I know how long they plan to be at this ayllu; I’ll bring you back out when they are safely gone.”

They had to hurry to keep up with the apu. Mardina said, “Seems a good way to this rest station of yours.”

He snorted. “You’re not wrong. But you’ve no idea how long this corridor runs.” He pointed. “All the way back to the Hurin Cuzco hub that way; all the way to the ocean that way. This is one of the main subsurface arteries—aside from the big vehicle access ways, that is. There are even some ways that pass under the ocean to the cuntisuyu. Here we are…”

The rest station was basic, a few scuffed benches, cupboards empty of any trace of food save a few crumbs, a spigot that dispensed warm water, a quipu hanging from a nail—maybe it was a work schedule. A single light overhead made everything seem washed out, dead; Ruminavi seemed even more wormlike than usual. But if this was some kind of trap, she and Clodia had walked right into it, Mardina reminded herself.

Mardina and Clodia sat uncomfortably, nervously, side by side. Mardina asked, “What is this place, apu?”

“Can’t you guess? Maintenance—that’s what all this is for. The hull of the Yupanquisuyu is riddled with tunnels and access ports, and the tremendous equipment needed to keep the world working.”

Clodia stared. “What kind of equipment?”

“Machines that do all the things a planet will do for you for free. Consider rainfall on the hub mountains. Every drop that falls dislodges a speck of rock. In time the mountains are worn away, and all their substance washes into the sea. On the world you call Terra, all that eroded silt is compressed and heated and passed in great currents beneath the surface, until it is thrust back up to the surface, as lava from a volcano, as a stupendous new mountain of granite. And so on, all entirely natural, the very mountains rebuilt. Here, the rock would just wear away, and the ocean would clog up, huge deltas spreading out from the cuntisuyu and antisuyu rivers until they met in the middle—if we let it happen. And so we have machines to gather the eroded waste, and ducts to pipe it back to the mountaintops, and sculpting machines to spray out new rock layers… That kind of thing.” He smiled. “The architect of this world allowed himself to be called Viracocha, who is our creator god. But he was not Viracocha—or rather, the man alone was not the god, but we all are, all the generations since who have labored to keep the world working.”

Mardina tried to imagine it. “So the whole of the hull of this great ship is embedded with vast machines to maintain the world.”

“That’s the idea.”

“And where there are machines to maintain the world, there must be people to maintain the machines.”

“Hence the hatches—there are access ways near most of the larger tambos. Maintaining the infrastructure machinery is a mit’a obligation, though we do use yanakunas for the more dangerous and unpleasant work. Cleaning out the great ocean-floor silt ducts, for instance—that’s a great eater of humanity. Or the antis. They aren’t much use for anything else in terms of the mit’a, save the capacocha of course.”

Mardina didn’t know what he meant by that: capacocha.

He smiled at them. “I’ll tell you a secret. We’re planning to use your own people in the undermachinery, eventually. Well, you were miners of ice moons, or you say you were; you are used to working with complex machinery in tight spaces. And you look strong, able to endure. We haven’t done this yet because we still don’t quite trust you. We don’t want rats in the foundations of the palace, so to speak.”

Clodia said, “The antis. Who you say are no use for anything—”

“I suppose that’s unfair. They harvest certain plants and animals for us that grow wild in their forest. They are fine archers, and that can be useful. And in their way, I’m told, they help maintain the health of their forest. All that burning and cutting they do is itself part of a greater cycle.”

“They worship Jesu,” Clodia said. “As we do.”

His smile returned. “Ah, yes! You noticed that, did you? The slave god on His cross. They picked it up from you Romans, of course: those of your ancestors who once crossed the ocean to come to our country, to the antisuyu jungle. The Romans were successful for a while; they built their coastal cities and explored the river valleys. But then they, or at least your government and its legions, withdrew from our lands, leaving only relics, survivors. When our own expansion into the antisuyu came some centuries later, we learned a great deal about the lands across the sea from the babbling of the degenerate descendants of the colonists, before we took them as yanakunas or otherwise absorbed them. But the antis had encountered those wretches first, in their forest—and with the antis they did leave a more lasting legacy, which is the worship of your slave god. Perhaps it is a consolation for them now, as they endure their miserable lives in the jungle.”

Mardina glanced at Clodia. “Or perhaps it motivates them to help others. Help on which you relied the first time you saved us from the mit’a party, apu.”

“Well, perhaps.”

“But you still haven’t told us what it is you so bravely saved us from.”

“Well, more specifically, it is Clodia. You are the exact right age, and your pale color, and your beauty, child, make you a perfect tribute offering.”

Clodia looked confused and scared. “An offering for what?”

“The capacocha is part of the mit’a tribute, to the Sapa Inca. A special tribute—a gift of children. And if your child is chosen, you must give up her or him gladly, and sing songs of thanks and celebration when the end comes.”

“I don’t understand. What would the Sapa Inca want with me?”

“You would be treated very well—like an Inca, or his heir, yourself. You would see Hanan Cuzco! You would eat the finest food, drink the finest beers—”

Mardina saw it. “She would be killed,” she said. “That’s the capacocha, isn’t it? The sacrifice of children.”

He spread his hands. “It is the ancient way. You would be preserved… Your beauty would never be lost, or forgotten.”

“And this is what you saved me from.” Clodia sounded more bewildered than scared. “Why?”

Now Mardina scowled. “If you’re expecting some kind of payment in return for this, apu—”

He seemed hurt by the suggestion. “Oh, it’s nothing like that.” He looked at Clodia sadly. “I have a variety of motives. One is simple pity. You are so young, and so new to this world. It seems wrong to snatch you out of it so suddenly! And then there is Inguill.”

“The quipucamayoc?” Mardina asked. “What does she have to do with it?”

“She doesn’t want you Romans… disturbed. Not yet. She doesn’t want you rising up in rebellion, for instance, because we took your prettiest child.”

“Why not?”

“Well, she hasn’t told me. And probably for reasons you would not yet understand. But I don’t believe she’s finished with you yet.” He fished a watch out of his pocket, a crude affair of knotted string and steel springs. “Still not safe for you up there. Would you like some more water?”

48

It took some weeks, carefully counted out by Beth in the unchanging light of Proxima, for Earthshine to make himself ready for the journey to the antistellar.

Beth packed up too, in the end. She decided she would accompany him for at least some of the route he had picked out for himself—a route based, he said, on maps of the Per Ardua she had known, and which he hoped would still have some usefulness here, wherever here actually was.

But she always intended to come back, alone if need be, back to the substellar, and the starshine. She’d be able to retrace her steps; she was sure of that. And her own gear, the shelter and other survival gear, even her Mars pressure suit, were light enough for her to carry, unaided by the support unit. After all, the substellar was surely as comfortable a location to live as she’d find anywhere on the planet. And if anybody else showed up on this world—well, they’d probably make their way to the substellar as the most obvious geographical meeting point, even if they didn’t just come through the substellar Hatch in the first place.

Earthshine did have his support unit complete a survey of the substellar site before they left, purely for completeness, Beth thought. The unit sampled the soil for traces of metals or other exotic materials, and ran sonar and geophysical surveys of the area in search of deeper traces of habitation.

And, after an unpromising start, it found something. Though the surface layers were bare of artifacts or structure, there was scarring in the bedrock, traces of deep foundations, large underground chambers cut into the rock and long since collapsed. All this was buried under more recent layers of gravel and soil.

Earthshine showed her the results on a slate. “Look at the design,” he said. “The architecture, what you can make out of it. We, from the UN-China continuity, built in circles, rectangles…”

The buried remains were more like overlapping ellipses, Beth thought, connected by curving threads of long-imploded corridors.

“Once there must have been a considerable community here. Of course they would come here to the substellar; everybody comes here. It’s all gone from above ground, any toxins or radioactive debris or the like long washed away, the remnant building stone shattered to dust by the weather. But it would take an ice age to scrub away these relics in the bedrock. And Per Ardua doesn’t have ice ages, not the way Earth does, with glaciers and ice caps grinding their way across the landscape.”

“These traces could be very ancient, then.”

“Unimaginably,” Earthshine said heavily.

“Then they can’t be human.”

“Why not? Humans have been here, surely, whatever the distortion of history. You pointed out that somebody must have brought the potatoes.”

“Yes, but people first got to Per Ardua only a few years before I was born.”

“That was in the old continuity, in the UN-China history.” He glanced up at Proxima. “And you’re assuming we traveled sideways in time, so to speak, as well as across space.”

Sideways in time? What other way was there to travel? She asked him what he meant by that, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

After that, Earthshine turned his back on the substellar. It was clear he wasn’t interested in human endeavor here, however enigmatic or ancient. All he cared about was his ongoing dialogue, or undeclared war, with the beings he called the Dreamers.

And to pursue that, he had to get to the antistellar. That was his obsession, and nothing was to be allowed to distract him.

When they departed at last, Beth left behind a note, pinned under a rock on top of the Hatch emplacement. Just her name, the date they’d arrived here in various forms of calendar, and an indication of where they’d gone. You never knew what, or who, might turn up.

And so they marched, heading roughly southwest. Earthshine said they were mirroring a farside journey made by her own father with Stef Kalinski long ago, before they had disappeared into a Hatch they had found at the antistellar.

Earthshine walked tirelessly, of course, and as he had offered, they had rigged up a seat for Beth to ride on the support unit. But she mostly refused to use it. She wanted the exercise; she wanted to toughen herself up. If she was in for a solitary life on Per Ardua, it would pay to be in good condition. And also she didn’t want to get carried too far and too fast; she wanted to stay inside a reasonable walk-back limit as long as she could. So she walked, though Earthshine displayed a very authentic-seeming impatience to make faster progress.

At first they followed the valley of a river, flowing radially away from that central point. Per Ardua’s basic climate cycle was that water that had evaporated from across the hemisphere was drawn into the substellar low, rained out there, and then returned to the wider landscapes via rivers like this one. An additional cycle worked at the terminator, the band of shadow that separated the day side from the night; more rain fell from the cooling air there, to spill back toward the warmth of the starlit side.

And as they moved out from the substellar point, following the river, the landscape gradually changed. The substellar itself was at the summit of a tremendous blister of raised land, a frozen rocky tide lifted by Proxima, directly above. Per Ardua was in fact egg-shaped, if only subtly, as the tide raised a similar bulge at the antistellar point on the far side. So they descended from this upland to a broader plain, broken by eroded hills and cut through by more river valleys following radii out from the substellar center.

The nature of the vegetation changed too. The relatively lush but open forest of the substellar gave way to a more static landscape, much of it covered by tremendous leaves that blanketed the ground: a miserly gathering of all the light that poured down from a star that was still almost overhead. Beth realized that the more turbulent weather at the substellar itself must drive some change—storms would topple trees and clear the ground—and this passive light-guzzling strategy wouldn’t work there. And Beth remembered too that on her Per Ardua some ground-cover “plants” like these had in fact been “kites,” flying beings, in a sedentary phase. But not here, not now; she saw no sign that these were anything other than vegetables, clinging to the ground as stationary and stately as stromatolites.

Indeed, as she walked, she saw no sign of the kind of “animal” life that had once been common here—not that the distinction between animals and plant life here had been quite the same as on Earth—no kites, no builders, no fish-analogues in the rivers. Nothing but plants and stromatolites and simpler organisms like lichen, competing for the light. The silence of the world was profound, broken only by the wind, the occasional hiss of rain, and their own voices.

And yet they saw more traces of humanity, or at least of the world humans came from. More splashes of the brilliant green of Earth’s version of photosynthesis, standing out against the darker hues of Arduan life. These were mostly what looked like much-evolved versions of food plants, potatoes, yams, beets, soya beans, even peas and grapevines, and what looked like laver, a descendant of a genetically engineered seaweed, choking water courses. Earthshine speculated that, untended, these survivors had reverted to something like their original wild forms—the tubers of the potatoes, for instance, were much reduced from the bloated varieties favored by humans. Beth carefully selected samples to enhance her stores.

Survivors: that was what they were, terrestrial stock clinging on amid the native life of this world. And yet Beth thought she saw a kind of silent cooperation going on here. In the flood plain of one river, terrestrial potatoes covered ground that looked too damp for most Arduan life, but Arduan stems sprouted in ground consolidated by the potatoes’ roots. In an isolated forest copse she found terrestrial vines growing up the trunk-stems of Arduan trees. And so on. Even if there had been animals, the herbivores from each domain of life couldn’t have digested samples from the other; the biochemistry, coming from a common stock, was similar but not identical. But perhaps, she thought, the dissimilar forms of life were evolving deeper ways to cooperate. Just as she and her virtual grandfather were two more dissimilar life-forms finding ways to get along.

That came to an end a couple of weeks into the walk, with two hundred kilometers covered. It was when she saw her own shadow starting to stretch before her on the ground, meaning that Proxima was no longer overhead but was beginning to set, that she realized she’d come far enough.

The parting, once she’d separated out her gear, was awkward. Almost jokey.

“At least you’ll know where to find me,” said Earthshine.

“And you me.” She forced a smile. “Even if we couldn’t be farther apart on this planet. Literally.”

“That’s true,” he said gravely. “Especially taking into account the tidal bulges. When I get the chance I intend to establish some kind of communication system. Small satellites perhaps. You have comms gear—”

“In the pack you’ve given me, the slates. I know.”

They stood in stiff silence.

“Goodbye, then,” Earthshine said.

“Goodbye.”

He made a show of climbing aboard his carriage, his support unit on its recently fabricated wheels, and off he went, at last accelerating up to the speeds he’d wanted to make in the first place. It somehow comforted her to know that he was continuing to support his human virtual form.

Then she turned away, and began the long walk back, alone.

49 AD 2234; AUC 2987; AY 796

Eight months after the Romans had arrived at Yupanquisuyu, Inguill came to their ayllu. She was accompanied by officials, and a healthy squad of troops. She arrived in a cart drawn by two muscular-looking alpacas, causing a stir in the village. Such animals, it seemed, were rare in this habitat and reserved for the elite.

Such a personage as the quipucamayoc, record keeper of the empire, did not travel lightly, it seemed, and not without heavy protection. Mardina was learning that the antisuyu was thought of as bandit country, from which the Sapa Inca and his family and court were protected by layers of security: the rain forest, and then an ocean, and then the open stretches of the altiplano, and then a climb of hundreds of miles through vacuum before you came upon the fortifications of Hanan Cuzco itself… And yet here Inguill was, in the mouth of the jaguar.

The visit was a big event for the ayllu. Although Inguill and her followers had arrived entirely unannounced, the ayllu was expected to feed and house them. Tents and lean-tos were hurriedly erected—even the curaca, Pascac, the local leader, had to give up his house. Meanwhile the fastest young runners and yanakuna slaves were sent dashing to nearby communities to call in favors, and they returned with food, stashes of coca and other potions, blankets and bedding and other luxuries.

Inguill, however, seemed interested in none of this. She set up a kind of court in Pascac’s house, spent one night resting to recover from her journey, and consulting with Ruminavi the tocrico apu among other advisers. Then, through Pascac, she peremptorily summoned the senior Romans: Quintus Fabius as the obvious leader, and whoever he chose to bring with him—but, she specified, that had to include Chu Yuen the slave boy, with his mysterious pack.

Before the meeting, Quintus Fabius gathered his people outside Pascac’s house. Mardina noticed that while Quintus and his soldiers had become accustomed to wearing the readily available ayllu garb, today he and Titus Valerius had defiantly changed back into the remains of their military costume, though of course without weapons, armor or legion insignia. Mardina supposed this was some statement of cultural defiance. Mardina herself was happy to stay in the local clothes, including her round felt hat, which she’d decided was quite fetching.

Quintus spoke quietly, in rough camp Latin. “Do not translate, please, Collius. Let us not be overheard for once.” He gestured at the group. “So here we are. I suspect most of you would prefer not to be brought before this rather sinister woman.”

“Sinister and with power over us all,” grumbled Titus Valerius.

“Yes, Titus. But we are an anomaly here in Yupanquisuyu—an anomaly in this version of history…”

“True,” murmured the ColU from the usual pack mounted on a nervous-looking Chu Yuen’s back. “And from the very beginning it has been this woman Inguill, of all the Inca locals, who has seemed to have perceived that most clearly.”

“Well, she is the empire’s chief record keeper,” said Michael the medicus. “If anybody knows the history, it’s going to be her.”

“Correct,” Quintus said. “And since, as far as I know,” and as he said this he glared at Titus, “none of us have misbehaved terribly—none of us have done anything to bring ourselves to the undue attention of the authorities here, as far as I know…”

“You can rest assured about that, sir,” Titus rumbled.

“Presumably Inguill has come here to address loftier questions. Well, I suppose I was going to have to face this at some point, but at least I don’t have to be alone. So I am bringing you into the arena with me, my friends. You, Titus, the heart of the century—and its belly. You, Michael, as the nearest to a philosopher we have. You, of course, Collius, as she has requested Chu Yuen—”

The ColU said, “Even if she doesn’t know of my existence, yet, or my true nature.”

“And me?” Mardina asked, baffled. “Why am I here?”

Quintus smiled at her, reassuring. “You are here because you represent our past, Mardina. Half your blood, after all, comes from beyond two jonbar hinges. And with your youth you also represent our future—and whatever future we have depends, at least for now, on the goodwill of the Sapa Inca. I want you at my side so that Inguill sees that.” Then he surprised Mardina by clasping Chu Yuen on the shoulder. “And you, Xin. When I assigned you as the bearer of Collius it was a random choice—I was barely aware of your existence; I did not know your name, or care. Yet you have come through so much with us, and you have borne yourself and your strange burden well. I am glad you are with us today.”

Even now, Mardina saw with a twinge of sadness, the boy could not raise his eyes to meet Quintus’s. But he said, “Thank you, Centurion.”

Titus Valerius grunted, and he adjusted his cloak. “Well said, sir, as always. But aren’t you exaggerating a bit? You call this an arena. We aren’t gladiators going into combat.”

“Oh, Titus, you would never have made an officer. Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question. Come now, let’s get this done.”

In Pascac’s house Inguill sat comfortably upright on a couch, with Ruminavi on a mat on the ground on her left-hand side, and Pascac himself standing on the other, looking grave. Inguill had a kind of leather trunk open on the floor before her. Two soldiers, heavily armed, stood at ease behind her.

Ruminavi caught Mardina’s eye, and gave her a kind of wink. Uncomfortable, she looked away.

Quintus sat on a couch facing Inguill, with his own advisers arrayed behind him, sitting on the floor. Michael suppressed a grumble as he made his way down to the floor; this was a custom of the Incas, that only your leader was allowed to be at eye level with the representative of the Sapa Inca.

With everyone in place, they sat and faced each other in silence—like pieces on a game board, Mardina thought, and maybe that wasn’t an inappropriate analogy.

Dressed soberly, her eyes sharp, Inguill looked strong, in control. At last she spoke. “Well. You are wondering why I have come here, why I wish to speak to you today.”

Pascac, standing beside her, bowed from the waist. “The quipucamayoc to the Sapa Inca is always welcome—”

“Oh, hush, man. This isn’t a time for flattery, for protocol. It’s a time for truth.” She gazed at Quintus, at Titus, at Chu Yuen with his pack on the mat-strewn floor before him. “You’ll remember my first reaction to you people when you came wandering in, riding craft, your yachts, that were obviously unsuitable for the journey you described. Your unlikely story of a lost colony of Romaoi miners on an ice moon!

“I am a record keeper. A historian. A number counter. My job for the Sapa Inca is to reflect the order of his vast empire, and to play my part in enforcing that order. And I remember I spoke to you of a deeper underpinning for our need for order. Unlike you Romaoi, or what is known of your history anyhow, our gods are not nurturing gods who bring the rains in the spring and the sun in the summer. They are not upstart slaves like your Jesu, not gods of generosity and forgiveness. Our gods are gods of destruction and calamity—gods who lived at the summits of fire mountains, in the continent you call Valhalla Inferior. Gods who have to be approached in drug-induced trances and spirit flights, gods who need to be propitiated with sacrifices, of food, drink—and, yes, human blood.”

As she said that she looked pointedly at Ruminavi, who dropped his eyes.

Now Inguill leaned forward and faced Quintus. “I speak of our gods who, our theologians believe, eventually overthrew yours, in your comfortable eastern continents, and shattered your Roman Empire.” She straightened up. “The foundation of my job is maintaining order. Without order, rigidly applied, surely you can understand that the fabric of this great machine we all live in could not be maintained. As for me, I left my birth family to study at the Houses of Learning at Hurin Cuzco at the eastern hub, and then I have served the Sapa Inca in the administrative buildings of Hanan Cuzco at the western hub. I live alone. I care for my parents, my siblings, but rarely see them. For myself, order is my husband—the only one I need. He will not betray me, if I serve him well.

“Which is why you people represent such a problem to me. You are a threat to that order, and have been since the moment you have arrived.” She pointed a finger at Quintus. “Because—you—don’t—fit.”

Titus growled, “How fortunate we were to have you on hand when we arrived, then, quipucamayoc.”

Quintus shot him a warning glance.

But Inguill said, “Oh, there was no fortune involved. I look out for—anomalies. Ripples on the pond of order and calm. You could say I collect them; you could call it a passion. And when I heard the reports of your ships’ approach, I knew you were just such a ripple on my pond.”

Quintus laughed, surprising Mardina, but she saw he was trying to lift the mood, to break up the intensity. “Ha! Never heard you described as a ripple on a pond, Titus Valerius. What is it you want to say to us, quipucamayoc?”

She smiled. “I want to learn more of you. I have come to think I need to. And believe me, you need to learn more of me.

“I wish to propose an exchange of gifts. I give you something; you give me something in return. Our whole society is based on this exchange, if you think about it: you fulfill your mit’a obligations to the Sapa Inca, and in return he grants you the gift of a secure life.”

Quintus scowled. “What gift?”

She reached into her trunk and produced a Roman military belt buckle, heavy steel and brass. “Not so much a gift as returned property, I suppose. One of your men lost this when passing through the hub portals.”

Titus smacked his brow. “That fool Scorpus! I’ll tan his backside with his own belt.”

Quintus said evenly, “Hush, Titus. What of it? This is ours, but only a buckle—purely decorative.”

“Well, I don’t think that’s true, is it? You know, Tiso Inca destroyed Rome, but after that we pursued you surviving Romaoi to your eastern heartlands, beyond your capital. There the conclusion of the campaign of conquest was less destructive…”

“The provinces of Graecia and Asia Minor,” Michael said quickly.

“Yes,” Quintus murmured. “Breadbasket of the empire. The imperial troops must have pulled back there in the face of the Inca advance, tried to establish shorter frontiers.”

“Which is maybe why these Incas call us ‘Romaoi,’ which is the Greek term.”

Inguill listened to this carefully, as if filing away the words on her bits of knotted string, Mardina thought. “After the surrender, your citizens became subject to the Sapa Inca of the time. But compared to Italia, these eastern Romaoi had retained much of the fabric of their civilization, the farms, the cities—and their records. You had libraries, impressive histories. So I know much about you, you see. I can even read your peculiar language, the strange symbols you use where we use our quipus, the placement of knots on strings…” She held up the buckle. “I know what the words and numbers on this object say.” She picked out the molding: Legio XC Victrix. “The ninetieth legion, known as the victorious. Something like that? But, you see, there have been no Romaoi legions since the third century after Yupanqui. And there were never as many as ninety. Yet here is this belt buckle, five hundred years later. Here you are, in your hovels, in your field, muttering about campaigns fought and booty won, and calling this man ‘Centurion’ when you think nobody is listening.”

Quintus almost stood up in his anger, but controlled himself. “You have spies here?”

“I don’t need them. Every ayllu is riddled with yanakunas, all of whom have ears and eyes and a memory, and all of whom will tell all they know to be spared a whipping. Our inspectors sample such sources on a regular basis.” She faced him. “I think you are a fragment of a Romaoi legion, half a millennium after no such legion can exist. What do you have to say to that?”

Quintus kept a dignified silence, evidently unsure, Mardina realized, where all this was leading.

“A gift for a gift,” Inguill said now. “That is what we agreed.”

“That’s what you imposed on us,” Quintus growled.

“And the gift I want is the truth. Come now,” Inguill said silkily. “I know much of it already. I know for instance that few of you have learned our language properly—this girl, Mardina, being an exception.”

Mardina bowed her head.

“The others of you rely on prompts. As if somebody whispers in your ears. A spirit on your shoulders, perhaps, translating from the people’s tongue to Latin and back again?” She pointed at Chu Yuen. “And all of you are more confident when this boy is close by, with the pack that never leaves his presence. We are only playing a game. You. The Xin, Chu Yuen. Show me what is in your bag. I won’t take it from you. Just show me.”

Chu glanced at Quintus, and at Michael.

The ColU spoke now, from a small speaker inside the pack. “Do as she says, Chu Yuen.”

Hearing this disembodied voice, the two soldiers behind Inguill drew their weapons, short stabbing swords. Titus growled and would have got to his feet in response, had Quintus not grabbed his arm.

Quintus called, “Collius? Are you sure?”

“She already knows so much, Centurion. And in the end we are all trapped in this situation together, the Inca as much as us.”

Inguill frowned. “Trapped?”

“We are all puppets of a higher power, quipucamayoc.”

“Show yourself!”

“Chu Yuen, please…”

Chu opened his battered backpack, gingerly lifted out the ColU, and set it on the ground before Inguill. Unwrapped from layers of soft woollen packing, it was a slab of glass-like material the size and shape of a large book, Mardina thought; a constellation of lights winked in its interior, and cables, tubes and support structures protruded at its rim, obviously meant to connect this component to a larger structure, but crudely truncated.

Inguill stared. “What are you?”

“I am not human. I was made by humans. I am a device.”

“Not by artisans of the Inca.”

“No—”

“And nor by Romaoi.”

“No, quipucamayoc. A discussion of my origin will reveal much. I am a ColU. The Romans call me Collius. Once I was part of a much larger engine. My task was to farm, to dig the soil of other worlds.”

Inguill was evidently trying to master her fear, Mardina saw. “You fit into no category of thing I have seen before.”

“You are shocked, and it is understandable,” the ColU said. “Believe me, I am merely a made thing. I am like a quipu. I am a device for storing and manipulating information. I am more sophisticated—that’s all. I have machines to enable me to speak, and others that enable me to hear, through devices carried by the boy, Chu Yuen. Who serves me faithfully, by the way.”

Inguill pursed her lips. “What do you think, tocrico apu?”

Ruminavi looked just as scared as she was, but more cunning, Mardina thought. “I think that that would be a fine trophy to present to the Sapa Inca and his court. A talking jewel! And if it can sing or recite poetry—can you tell fortunes, Collius?”

“I can do far more than that, Inguill, as I think you know.”

She stared at the device. “Can you restore the order that has been lost?”

“That is my goal, quipucamayoc,” the ColU said softly. “Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson is a descendant of those I was created to serve.”

Mardina was startled to be brought into this, and blushed.

“I can understand that,” Inguill said. “Everybody needs someone to protect. To give purpose to one’s life, one’s work. For me it is the Sapa Inca, who personifies the Tawantinsuyu and the billions under his protection…”

“And billions yet unborn,” said the ColU.

“Yes. Yes, you’re right. Oh, put that thing away, boy, put it back where it’s safe.”

Chu picked up the processor unit reverently, and stowed it away in its layers of packing in his bag.

Quintus grinned. Evidently, Mardina thought, with Inguill disconcerted by the vision of the ColU, he felt more confident, more in control. “So, quipucamayoc. We are exchanging gifts. Your turn again, I think…”

“Well, let me overwhelm you.” Now she lifted a heavy frame out of the trunk; Titus had to help her lower it to the ground. Mardina studied this curiously. It was a frame of ornate wood within which fine wires ran, up, down, side to side, front to back, with knots of some kind of thread in a multitude of colors resting on the wires. Mardina saw that the positions of the wires, the knots, could be adjusted with the use of levers and switches.

Inguill saw her looking. “What do you think of this, child?”

“It’s beautiful.”

Inguill smiled. “It is. Most well-designed devices are. But what do you think it’s for?”

“It looks like a kind of quipu. I’ve only seen simple ones before, like the ones used by the inspectors when they come to assess the mit’a obligation of the ayllu. They reminded me of abacuses. This is more complex.”

“You will have to show me an abacus. But you are right, child—that’s surprisingly perceptive.”

“Thanks,” Mardina said drily.

“This is a quipu, a kind of quipu, capable of storing a large amount of information. And it can be interrogated by means of these controls.” She looked around at them. “You should not overestimate this. In Cuzco, the Great Quipu Repository is a building of four mighty towers, with jars full of quipus stacked floor to ceiling. That is our record store; this can only be a digest. Nevertheless—ColU, can you read a quipu? Could you read this?”

“With some instruction, and with the help of Chu Yuen—yes. But what will I learn?”

“It is our history,” Inguill said. “A kind of compendium, by many authors. It depicts what we know of the ages before our own history began with Yupanqui, eight centuries ago. And it tells of our glorious campaign of global conquest, including the subjugation of the Romaoi and the Xin. And finally our expansion to the planets, and even the stars, with the use of the energies of the warak’a.”

“I will study it closely,” the ColU said, “and instruct these others.”

Mardina felt unreasonably excited by this, by the gift of a history book. “We might be able to figure out the jonbar hinge—”

“Hush, child. Not yet.”

Inguill, of course, missed none of this exchange.

Titus snorted. “Well, I for one am always ready for a history lesson. Why, I remember once on campaign—”

“Be polite, Titus Valerius,” Quintus said now, watching Inguill, evidently intrigued. “I suspect it’s no accident that the quipucamayoc has given us a history text, for history is what this meeting is all about, isn’t it? History—or histories?”

Inguill nodded. “I have the feeling I know a good deal less than you do, at this moment. On the other hand I have the power to do a lot more about it. Rather than press you for a response—I have one last gift.” Again she dug into the trunk.

This time she produced a scrap of white fabric, grimy with rust-colored dust, torn from a garment, perhaps—and stained by what looked like brown, dried blood. She smoothed this out on the lid of the trunk.

Mardina leaned over to see. The fabric itself looked strange, with thick threads that were shiny where they were ripped. And stitched to the scrap was a kind of insignia, she thought, a triangle of thick cloth, edged in gold around a background field of blue-black. In the foreground was an arc of a red-brown planet, girdled by a swooping line, the schematic path of some kind of aerial craft. The craft itself was shown as a clumsy affair of tubes and boxes and shining panels, roughly stacked. Hovering over all this was an eagle, wings outstretched, holding some kind of branch in its talons—an olive? And there was Latin lettering around the edges of the triangle.

“The eagle is the best-worked element of the thing,” Titus Valerius murmured.

“That’s true,” said Mardina, entranced, puzzled.

The ColU inspected the insignia through the slate carried by Chu. “Quipucamayoc, where did you get this?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

Quintus shrugged. “Obviously not.”

“And yet here is this lettering, in the Romaoi style. Can you read this?”

Quintus picked out the words, letter by letter. “GERSHON—YORK—STONE. These mean nothing to me. Names, perhaps? But this—this is the name of one of our gods. Or at least, his Greek cousin. ARES.”

“Yes. I’ve been looking this up. Ares—the god you call Mars. And Mars is the name you gave to the fourth planet, is it not? Which we call Illapa, after an aspect of the sky god, the thunder deity. And is the eagle not an emblem of the Romaoi?”

The ColU repeated, “Inguill, where was this found?”

“Where do you think? On Illapa, of course. On Mars! Near the wreckage of a crashed craft—oh, centuries old, we think. But not far from the warak’a field, the gateway—”

The ColU said, “Gateway? Do you mean a Hatch?”

“Stop,” Quintus ordered. “We must take this one step at a time.”

Chu dropped his eyes, as if he might be blamed for the ColU’s impertinence.

“You see,” Inguill said now, “what puzzles me is this. In our history there is no record of the Romaoi reaching Illapa. Or reaching space, beyond the home world—or even, actually, mastering flight in the air. We put a stop to such ambitions when we burned their capital and subjugated their people and their territories. But you,” she said now, staring at Quintus, “you—and now we must tell each other the truth—you came from a history that was not like the one recorded in our quipus,” and she tapped the frame of the machine she had produced for emphasis. “Not like it at all. I think you came from a history where, somehow, the Romaoi survived, and prospered, and founded ninety legions, and got off the planet, and flew around the place in ships with names like Malleus Jesu—”

“You know about the ship?”

“Of course I know! Your men are hardly discreet, Quintus Fabius, at least with the women they take into their beds. So, did the eagle of the Romaoi fly over Illapa, in a ship called Ares?”

“Not that I know of,” Quintus said. He sighed, and seemed to come to a decision. “Yes, Inguill—some of us Romans did indeed fly beyond Terra. I did. And I studied the early exploration of the planets at the academy at Ostia, during my officer training. This Ares should have been a heroic legend, even if it crashed! And the evidence you produce suggests it did. But I never heard of it.”

The ColU said, “There may be another explanation.”

Inguill pursed her lips. “You mean, another history.”

“You are quick to understand, quipucamayoc. Yes, I—and Mardina’s mother—came from a different history from these Romans. Who came in turn from a different history from yours. And in that history we had space explorers who wore patches like these. Rome did not survive, not as the empire, but we still used relics of its culture—the Roman alphabet, for instance.”

“Of course you did,” Quintus said complacently.

“The eagle may have been used, not as an emblem of Rome, but of America—which was a great country in the continent of Valhalla Superior.”

“So,” Quintus said, “are you telling us that this Ares was sent to Mars by this ‘America’?”

“No,” said the ColU unhappily. “It’s not as simple as that. In my history, America never went to Mars—not with people, not alone. The first to Mars were Chinese—Xin. Other nations followed, but as a group, the United Nations, which included America. There was no Ares.”

Mardina was becoming confused.

Inguill, though, seemed to be grasping all this strangeness readily. “So this was yet another history,” she said. “One like the history that produced you, ColU. But not identical. One where this—”

“America.”

“—sent a craft to Illapa. Yet here is this patch, this scrap of evidence—the wreck of a ship, on Illapa, my Illapa. And the odd thing is—”

Ruminavi barked laughter. He looked, as if his head were spinning, to Mardina. He said, “After that list of impossibilities, you say the odd thing—”

Inguill ignored him. “The odd thing,” she persisted, “is that we would not have found this—I mean scouts from the Inca’s navy would not have discovered it—if not for the sudden appearance, in the ground of Illapa, of a field of warak’a, a portal, where none had been found before. Not before you came.”

“The portal,” the ColU said. “The Hatch. And that is the most significant thing, of all we have discussed—”

“Enough,” said Inguill abruptly. She stood, massaging her temples. “You flatter me for my ability to learn, ColU. I never thought I could learn too much, too quickly—I need air. You and you and you,” she pointed at Mardina, Quintus Fabius, and Chu with ColU, “walk with me. We will plot together, like conspirators.”

Ruminavi got to his feet too, evidently troubled. “Quipucamayoc, we are far from civilization here. I fear for your safety if—”

“Oh, don’t fuss, apu. What harm will I come to here? Save for having my grasp of reality shattered, and that has already happened. Have your soldiers follow me if you must, but keep their distance—unless any of them knows any comforting philosophy…”

50

Outside the house, Inguill led the way, striding stiffly and rapidly, heading out of the ayllu toward the forested edge of the clearing. A pair of soldiers tracked her, never more than an arm’s length from the quipucamayoc. Quintus followed a few discreet paces behind, with Mardina and Chu to either side. Chu, who probably didn’t get as much exercise as he should, was soon panting from the pace Inguill set.

But Quintus patted his back. “Don’t worry, lad. She’ll soon run out of puff. Look how stiffly she walks… She spends too long staring at her quipus—as I used to with my command papers before we came to this place and I have to play at being a farmer—it is nerves and tension that propel her, and all that will soon work itself out of her system.”

Sure enough the quipucamayoc was slowing long before she reached the forest border. She stood, panting, gazing up at the trees. The two soldiers trailing her took watchful positions, surveying the terrain.

Inguill gestured. “Look at that,” she said. “To be a tree! Tall, patient, ancient. You need never know that the sunlight on your leaves comes through Inti windows, or that the thick earth around your roots is processed rubble from a shattered moon. Let alone worry about which strand of a quipu of realities you belonged to. A tree is a tree is a tree. What do you think, Quintus? Would you be more content as a member of a forest like that?”

The centurion grinned. “Only if I was the tallest, quipucamayoc. And besides, some of my legionaries may as well be trees, for all the sense they have.”

She laughed. “Legionaries, eh? So you admit what you are.”

He shrugged, saying no more.

She walked on, at an easier pace. “Let’s sum up what we have, then. Several histories! And I had enough trouble memorizing one.” She counted them on her fingers, fingering the knuckles like quipu knots, Mardina thought. “First, my own, this glorious realm ruled by the Sapa Inca. Second, the one where you upstart Romaoi and Xin and others still squabble. Third—” She looked to Chu.

“Third,” the ColU said, “we have what we have come to call the UN-China Culture. A world of high technology, myself being an example, but relatively little expansion beyond the home world.”

“Fourth, then, the Ares history. Like yours, but with bold explorers striking early for Illapa. Very well—”

“And don’t forget the Drowned Culture,” Mardina said brightly. “My father worked that out. That makes five—”

“I don’t think you’re helping, Mardina,” Quintus growled.

“And the jonbar hinge Stef Kalinski spoke of, when she discovered she had a sister she had never suspected existed before. That’s six!”

“Thank you, Mardina.”

The ColU said, “Clearly these histories do not coexist, but they overlap, to a small degree. Scraps of one may be discovered in another.”

“Like my Ares insignia,” Inguill said.

“Yes,” Quintus said. “And like my own century, my ship, which survived one jonbar hinge.”

“And myself and my companions,” said the ColU, “who have survived two hinges… Quipucamayoc, we have taken to calling the transitions between worlds jonbar hinges. The derivation is complicated and irrelevant.”

Inguill tried out the words. “Shh-onn-barr hin-ch. Very well. A name is a name. But to label something does not mean we understand it.”

“Indeed,” said the ColU. “The replacement of one history by another is not a tidy matter. Scraps remain.”

“Do we know how these transitions are made? How one history is cleared away, like a dilapidated building ready for demolition, to be replaced by another?”

“Judging by our experiences, the termination of one history is generally accompanied by disaster. War. The release of huge energies from the kernels—which you call the warak’a.”

“Which is something to be avoided.”

“Yes—” Quintus growled, “Who is making these transitions happen is a more pertinent question, perhaps.”

“Very well—who, ColU?”

“We don’t know. Not yet. We have some clues. Inguill, you said your people on Mars—Illapa—discovered a new field of warak’a, a new Hatch—our word for the portal you found.”

“Hat-sch. Very well. We know how to build them, of course.”

“As did we,” Quintus said. “We Romans. You jam the kernels together—”

She waved a hand at the artificial sky. “Our ships roam the stars. Everywhere we go, we take the warak’a—of course, or rather they take us. And everywhere we go, we build Hatches.”

“As did we,” Quintus repeated.

“But why?” the ColU asked. “Why do you do this? Who told you to?”

Inguill glanced at the Roman, and both shrugged. Inguill said, “The warak’a are a gift from Inti, the sky god. That seems evident—a rare benison from our gods, as opposed to a punishment. And the Hatches are always found with them. Wherever we travel, we make more Hatches as a tribute to the gods. It seems to work… At least, we have not yet been punished for it, so we deduce this is the correct course of action.”

“As with us,” Quintus said. “Though you seem to be more industrious at it than we ever were.”

“Yes,” the ColU said. “That’s it. Whatever the nature of the change, whatever the cultural details, each new draft of a civilization is better at building Hatches. My culture, as far as I know, built no Hatches at all. You Romans did pretty well. And the Inca—”

“We litter worlds with the things,” Inguill said. “This is the triumph of our culture. And now I discover that we have been somehow manipulated to achieve precisely this goal? Our whole history distorted!”

Mardina studied her. “And that makes you feel…”

“Angry, child. Angry. Whoever is doing this, it is hard to believe it is a god. For what god needs a door in the ground?”

Mardina herself felt oddly exhilarated. The flood of revelations and new ideas made her feel as if she were jumping recklessly off a cliff edge, or diving from the axis of Yupanquisuyu and plummeting to the ground, laughing all the way down…

The ColU said, “Inguill, your discovery of a Hatch on Mars, Illapa, has changed everything. Because when we emerged into this time stream, past the latest jonbar hinge, it was just as a Hatch appeared on Mars. That was on the Romans’ version of Mars. This new Illapa Hatch is an obvious link to the underlying… strangeness. Well, we must pursue Earthshine—”

Inguill frowned. “Who?”

“I’ll explain. But for now we must get to Illapa.”

“How?” asked Inguill bluntly. “The imperial authorities would not allow it. Even I could not authorize it.”

“I have a plan,” said Quintus Fabius smugly.

When the centurion had explained his ideas, it took a while for Inguill to stop laughing.

“Are you insane?”

“Oh, quite possibly.”

She looked at him, smiling. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it? To lay up here in Yupanquisuyu, steal some food, fight your way out, and fly off into space, to found some new Rome of your own? Ha! No wonder you Romaoi rolled over when the Inca armies landed on your shores. Look—you won’t get as far as the ocean. The awka kamayuq patrols will stop you.”

“All right,” Quintus said angrily. “Then do you have any better ideas?”

“Well, I’m prepared to concede you need to get to Illapa, if Collius says so. We humans together need to understand the agent that is meddling with our destinies. But you’re not going to walk out of here.” She sighed. “The Sapa Inca’s advisers would do nothing to help. They are pretty fools, angling and maneuvering, of no intellect or ability. Conversely, the administrators who actually run the empire are just that—quipu-pluckers, with no imagination whatever. Which leaves the task to me—and you. For the only way you’ll do this is if I help you.”

Quintus frowned. “You would do that? How can we trust you?”

“We have no choice, Centurion,” the ColU said. “I see that now.”

“And I barely trust myself,” Inguill said, a little wildly, Mardina thought. “At the very least I will be committing a crime by smuggling you out of here—out of the light of the Sapa Inca’s rule… And at the worst, I suppose, my meddling might itself result in one of these catastrophic changes you so eloquently described. On the other hand, if I manage to slay this particular jaguar, a greater service to the empire is hard to imagine. Perhaps history will forgive me—”

“If history survives at all,” said the ColU.

“Indeed.” She stopped pacing and faced Quintus. “In some ways it is what we share that interests me, rather than what divides us. We both sail the seas of space; we both build the ColU’s Hatches. We both name planets after our antique gods. And we share other legends—so my spies inform me.” She glanced up at an Inti window. “We call the nearest star to the sun just that—Kaylla, which means ‘near.’”

“As we call it Proxima,” said the ColU. “Meaning ‘nearest’ in Quintus’s tongue.”

“And our sailors of space have a legend of the furthest star of all, where the gods lay their plans against us, or plot the catastrophes of the end of time: the pachacuti. We call this undiscovered star Karu, which means ‘far.’”

“As we speak of Ultima,” Quintus mused. “Yes. We do have much in common.”

“And is Ultima where we will find the Hatch builders? I must get back to Cuzco. There’s much to prepare if we are to pull this off, and the more time they have to fester, the more plots tend to unravel. But we need more… We need a way to divert the attention of the Sapa Inca and his advisers at Hanan Cuzco from your break-out attempt.” She looked now at Mardina. “And, given what Ruminavi has belatedly confessed to me about his mit’a collecting in your ayllu, or his failure there—if I am risking the sacrifice of everything, my career, even my life, I must ask you to risk a sacrifice too.”

Mardina frowned. “Me?”

“Not you, child. Your friend, Clodia Valeria. You must be prepared to sacrifice her. But you, Mardina, may be the key to making it happen…”

51

Before beginning the march to the ocean, Quintus Fabius inspected his troops.

As the trumpet sounded, the men of the century formed up in orderly ranks, their cloaks on their backs, their marching packs at their feet, their improvised or purloined weapons at their belts. This was the first time they had turned out as a proper century of the Roman army since arriving in this habitat.

The centurion walked the ranks, murmuring quiet words to individual men, inspecting patched and improvised uniforms—and their weapons. In return for other favors, mostly labor by burly legionaries, the local smith had eventually turned out a variety of weapons, including a decent steel gladio and pugio and pilum for most of the men. Many of them had helmets too now, simple steel bowls with a lip to protect their necks and cheeks. Few had body armor, though many wore a subarmilis, a heavy quilted undergarment designed to help with the load of a breastplate. The folk of the ayllu had done all this out of sight of the Inca’s inspectors, treating it as a kind of game, a way to get back at the overbearing tax collectors. The legionaries hid as much as they could in the open. They even had a big rock water tank that they surreptitiously used to sharpen their swords.

Quintus came to Orgilius. The man had been a signifier, a century standard bearer, but now given a field promotion by Quintus to aquilifer, bearer of the whole legion’s eagle standard, in the absence of the rest of the Legio XC Victrix anywhere in this reality. Indeed Quintus had hired a particularly skilled local metalworker to make for them a reasonable facsimile of the old standard, given to the legion by a grateful Emperor Veronius Optatus seven centuries before. It seemed a suitable reward for Orgilius, one of the more intelligent of the legionaries, who had picked up the Quechua tongue readily and made friendships with local people, even with a few of the officials and military types who visited the ayllu. He had become a source of information upon which Quintus increasingly relied. Yes, Orgilius deserved his new honor—even if it was all Quintus had to give him.

And pride surged in Mardina’s own breast, as she waited in the ranks for the centurion to come to her.

She had spoken to the centurion long ago about her own thwarted military ambitions, on the other side of the jonbar hinge, her dream of joining the Brikanti Navy. But the recruiting of “barbarians,” as Quintus put it, into the Roman army had a long tradition. So, in the weeks since Inguill had come to call and the century had prepared for battle, the centurion had given her a lowly field commission. The tribunes had allowed her to join in the legionaries’ training routines—the physical exercises, the construction work, the fighting with wooden spears and knives. She enjoyed joining with crowds of men in the battle formations, the square, the wedge, the circle, the tortoise. In practice, in the end, Quintus had found her more useful as a quality check on the work he was having done quietly around the village. To the local people, she wasn’t as threatening a presence as the average burly legionary.

She was even put on the payroll of the imperial army, and the salary due her, nine hundred sesterces a year, was duly recorded—to be paid, she was solemnly assured, when the legion finally returned to Terra and its collegia, less tax, punishment deductions and replacement equipment costs.

Now Quintus stepped back from the ranks, and looked over his men, and up at the standard over all their heads. This bright morning, with the century drawn up in a glittering array under the light of the Inti windows, Mardina thought that at last there could be no more self-deception about the meaning of all this. The century was a military unit, and it was ready for the march.

In proud Latin Quintus declared, “Well, if I was a sentimental man, and if I didn’t know you were a bunch of lazy, bed-hopping, wine-swilling slackers, I’d say you made a pretty sight for the eye, men, even under the mother’s milk that passes for daylight in this tub of a world—you are Romans! And proud of it! And I’m proud of you!”

That was the cue for the first cheer, which Titus Valerius led, raising his stump of an arm, and Mardina joined in with the rest. But Mardina noticed that Titus kept one eye on the sky; she knew they had timed this parade for the intervals between the overflights of the vacuum-eating Condors, the Incas’ spies in the sky, and if one showed up unexpectedly, they would break up the display quickly.

“We’ve a challenge ahead of us now,” Quintus said, “the like of which no Roman has faced before.” He pointed west. “Probably a month’s march through this jungle, longer if the Sapa Inca spots us on the move and tries to do something about it.” Laughter. “Then we face an unknown ocean, an ocean that spans the waist of the world… Pah. We’ll swim it. And then on to the hub, to Hanan Cuzco, where we’ll face down the Sapa Inca himself and his decadent hordes, and we’ll carve out a destiny that nobody who lives in this rolling barrel will ever forget!”

If that was vague, it was purposefully so, Mardina knew, because the whole strategy was vague, the more so the further out you looked. To get to Mars/Illapa: that was the only clearly defined goal. The rest was going to have to be improvised, hopefully with the help of the quipucamayoc. But the centurion was rewarded with another cheer even so.

“Now, before we start,” Quintus said, “and I know very well it’s not New Year’s Day, I want us to remember who we are and what we are. No matter how far from home, we are bound to the Emperor and the Empire. And we will say the sacramentum together. Titus Valerius, lead us.”

The big warrior, who had been rehearsing this, stepped forward and boomed out the words of the soldiers’ oath: “We swear by God and Jesu, and by the majesty of the Emperor who second to God is to be loved and worshipped by humanity…”

The legionaries repeated the ancient words, as they were used to doing every New Year.

“…that we will do strenuously all that the Emperor commands, will never desert the service, nor refuse to die for the Roman state…”

The voices of the legionaries made a cavernous rumble. And when they were done they yelled and waved their gladios in the air.

Clodia Valeria ran out of the crowd of watching civilians, and hugged her father. There were catcalls at this, but Titus hugged his daughter back with his one good arm. And he exchanged a dark glance with Quintus, a glance Mardina understood, for Clodia had her own difficult duty to perform before this mission was through, as indeed did Mardina.

With the ceremony done, the parade broke up, and the men formed up into a column for marching.

The legionaries themselves, laden with their cloaks and packs, would go ahead two by two, the standard-bearer leading the column, with scouts probing the countryside. A rough baggage train formed behind. This included some of the wives the legionaries had taken from the ayllu—and one mother with a very young Roman-Inca baby. Michael the medicus walked here, with Chu Yuen and his burden at one side, and Clodia Valeria at the other. Then came some of the mitimacs who had volunteered to assist the march, carpenters, cobblers, cooks—and then a train of yanakunas, slaves used as bearers of baggage.

Mardina was surprised so many of the mitimacs, the ordinary taxpayers of the ayllu, had been prepared to come along. Well, most of their time and labor was their own to use as they pleased, and many, it turned out, had never traveled far from their home, either toward the eastern hub in one direction or the ocean in the other. Some, especially the young, were excited by the idea of joining this adventure, even if it was ill understood. In fact, Mardina suspected, some of them probably believed that this highly organized expedition led by the commanding Quintus Fabius was a fulfillment of a portion of their mit’a obligations.

When they were ready the scouts led the column out of the ayllu, to cheers, ribald whistles, even a scattering of applause. At first little children from the ayllu ran alongside, shouting and waving, and in the excitement even some of the tamer guinea pigs ran around, wondering what all the fuss was about. But the parents called their offspring back before the head of the column reached the fringe of the hacha hacha. Here the trumpets sounded, and soon anti guides materialized out of the forest, their blue-painted faces seeming to hover in the green gloom.

And that was when the grumbling started, as Titus had predicted to Mardina. She knew that many of the legionaries had never gone farther into the jungle than you needed to take a discreet piss. Now they weren’t happy at walking into the great green chamber of the forest, past the slim columns of the tree trunks, under the dense canopy that excluded so much of the light, with the antis like elusive shadows all around—and the legionaries jumped at every crack of a twig, every hiss of a snake or clatter of scorpions.

But the complaints lessened after an hour or so, when they reached a clear path—not a metalled road, it was mere dirt beaten flat by bare feet, but it was a straight path heading directly west, and all but concealed from the sky by the trees. After the confusion of the denser jungle, the column quickly formed up in good order once more, and the march to the west continued.

Another hour and they passed through an anti village, round huts built on frames of branches and walled with reeds, the people all but naked, some at work skinning animals or pounding grain or tanning leather or tending fires. The antis stared curiously at the legionaries—and they stared back with interest at the bare breasts of the women, and with horror at the elaborately pierced penises displayed by some of the men. Everybody seemed to be tattooed, Mardina thought; faces like the jaguars of local mythology peered at her from every shadow. She was poignantly reminded of the tattoo on her own mother’s face.

Soon the village was behind them, and the march continued along another straight track. Some of the walkers peeled off to fill flasks from the stream that watered the village.

This was to be the strategy, to keep to the deep forest tracks as much as possible—to exploit what the antis had built here. For this was the real anti culture. Mardina herself had seen a little of it, and from their arrival here Quintus Fabius had sent out his scouts to study every aspect of their environment. The antis were not town dwellers like Romans or Incas, but they were not savages living at random in the jungle either. The Roman scouts had found a network of settlements and trails cut or burned into the forest, neat round clearings connected by dead straight lines, all invisible from outside the forest, and mostly screened from the air by the forest canopy. And it was these tracks the Romans would follow, as far as possible, relying on the support of friendly antis as they traveled.

It might work, Mardina thought. The Inca state seemed to have an ambiguous relationship with the antis. In theory they were mitimacs, taxpayers like every other citizen of the empire. And they did make tributes when the assessors came calling, from the produce of the forest. Their wiry archers would also serve in the Inca’s army, and reasonably disciplined they could be too. On the other hand, the Sapa Inca would occasionally order his troops to make forays into the forest, seizing goods with the excuse of unpaid mit’a, or even taking antis as slaves, yanakunas—but there could be anti raids on unwary ayllus too. It was a wary relationship then, between two quite alien cultures. But on the whole the Incas seemed content to allow the antis to live their lives under the cover of their forest canopy, invisible even to the vacuum-eating Condors. And the antis were useful to the Romans now.

So here they were: Roman legionaries marching through a three-thousand-mile-long habitat in space, and Mardina was one of them. When she thought about it, she was thrilled.

They had walked about seven hours when the surveyors said they had covered twenty miles, the standard target for a marching day.

They came to a clearing, perhaps once occupied by the antis but now abandoned, with the scuffed and blackened remains of old hearths pierced by the brilliant green of saplings. The men broke formation, dumped their packs, and changed their boots for camp sandals to ease their feet. They looked exhausted to Mardina; they weren’t in as good shape as Quintus might have hoped. But they would toughen up—and their work for this day wasn’t yet done.

With the spades they carried on their packs—tools they had been allowed to keep on arrival in the habitat—the legionaries got to work creating a camp for the night. Some worked around a perimeter sketched by the surveyors, digging a ditch and building walls. Others hastily assembled spiky caltrops from fallen tree branches and scattered them around the perimeter. Soon the tents went up, sheets of heavy leather carried by the yanakunas, in neat rows along what was effectively a narrow street, with latrine ditches threading out of the camp. Meanwhile the fires were lit, the pots were set up, and the smell of cooking filled the air, mostly a broth of guinea-pig meat and vegetables and fish sauce.

Outside all this, the wives and other camp followers made their own arrangements for the night, as best they could. The glow from the Inti windows faded, and the eerie night of the habitat drew in.

Quintus Fabius sought out Mardina, where she was helping Titus Valerius and his daughter with their meal. The centurion beckoned to draw her away.

Together they walked around the perimeter of the camp. The centurion growled, “Oh! What a relief to talk decent camp Latin again, without trying to curl one’s lips around runasimi, or to have Collius whispering in one’s ear… So what do you think of your first day on the march, my newest legionary?”

That title, casually used, thrilled her. “Impressive,” she said truthfully. “The discipline, despite all the grumbling.”

“Soldiers always grumble.”

“And the way they put together this camp—”

“Centuries of tradition and years of training. But the men like their camps. It’s the same every night, as if you aren’t traveling at all—as if you’re returning home each evening to the same miniature town. Soldiers like familiarity, above all. A place they know they’ll be able to sleep in safety.” He glanced at the engineered sky. “We made good progress today.”

“Yes. I spoke to the surveyors. It’s one advantage of having a sky that’s almost a mirror image of the ground. They say it’s fifteen or twenty days’ march to the ocean, if we do as well as we did today.”

“Well, that was pretty much the plan.”

They came to a stretch of the wall that was less satisfactory than the rest; he scuffed some loose earth with his sandaled foot, and glanced around; Mardina could see he was making a mental note regarding some later discipline. They walked on.

“To tell you the truth, I’m glad to have them on the march at last. Legionaries need to be legionaries; they’re not cut out to be farmers and taxpayers—not until they retire, anyhow. We have had some discipline problems—more than you were probably aware of. Bored men squabbling over gambling games, or women, or boys. As for the positive side, I ran out of excuses to issue phalera and other wooden medals for basic camp duties. Well, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson, I’m glad you saw little of that, and I’m glad you see us at our best—doing what we do best, short of giving battle, that is.”

She plucked up her courage to speak frankly. “And you’re speaking to me like this, sir, because—”

He stopped and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Well, you know why. You have a duty of your own to fulfill, you and Clodia. Tomorrow you’ll be led out of the forest by a couple of antis, and you’ll meet the tocrico apu Ruminavi and other agents of the quipucamayoc, who will take you to a capac nan station and deliver you into the hands of the Sapa Inca’s tax collectors…”

“Tomorrow? I didn’t know it was as soon as that.”

“I thought it best not to tell you. To let you enjoy as much of this as possible.” He squeezed her shoulder harder. “You know the plan. Of all of us, yours is perhaps the most difficult duty to fulfill. Even more than poor Clodia Valeria, who I suspect understands little of this.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“You’ll do more than that, legionary,” he said gruffly, releasing her. “You’ll fulfill your orders and do what’s required of you, adhering to the oath you swore this morning.”

She stood up straight. “Of course, sir.”

“All right. Now go back and help Titus with his stew. Later I’ll stop by and make sure he remembers he has to say goodbye to his daughter in the morning…”

52

Hanan Cuzco was a great city.

Of course, Mardina had been here before, when she had first arrived at Yupanquisuyu. But so baffled had she been by the giant habitat that she had taken in little of the capital city itself.

And this was a city like no other. Mardina, who had seen Dumnona and Eboraki in Brikanti, and many of the cities of the Roman Empire, could attest to that, as she and Clodia Valeria, grimly holding hands, bewildered after a long rail journey, were led by Ruminavi through the last security cordon.

Hanan Cuzco nestled in the tremendous bowl of the western hub, a structure itself over four hundred miles across—seen from the edge, it was more like a crater on Luna, Mardina thought, than any structure on Earth. And, she saw, as they rode across the face of the hub in a comfortable seated carriage, nestling at the base of this bowl was the city, huge buildings of stone and glass, blocks and pyramids and domes set out like gigantic toys. Many of the roofs were plated with gold that shone in the light of the Inti windows. All of this was crowded around a huge central structure, that tremendous tower she remembered well, a supremely narrow pyramid that must reach a mile high.

Ruminavi, their guide, pointed out sights. “There is Qoricancha, the temple of the sun. There is Huacaypata, the main square, where the great roads cross. The big structure on the far side is Saqsaywaman, the fortress that guards the capital. All this is modeled on Old Cuzco, the Navel of the World, and yet wrought much larger…”

The great buildings, imported from Terra stone by stone, were of finely cut sandstone, huge blocks that fit together seamlessly, and without mortar. Lesser buildings had stone walls and thatched roofs, and wooden door frames in which colorfully dyed blankets hung. Here at the axis of the habitat there was no spin gravity, and she could see metal straps wrapped around the walls and roofs, to hold the buildings in place in the absence of the weight of the stones themselves. And in this city without weight, the wide streets were laced with guide ropes, many of which glittered silver, stretching across the avenues and between the upper stories of many of the buildings, as if the whole city had been draped in a shimmering spiderweb. People moved through that web, strange angular people, like spiders themselves.

Of course they were hundreds of miles above the layer of atmosphere that was plastered against the habitat’s outer wall. So the city was enclosed by a dome, barely visible, a shimmering bubble that swept up above the buildings. There were more buildings outside the air dome, squat, blockier, air-retaining structures: factories that maintained the air and water and other systems, and a number of military emplacements—no chances were taken with the security of the Sapa Inca. Mardina had taken in little of this during her first bewildered hours in the habitat. She hadn’t even noticed the dome.

And, when she stepped out of the glass-walled transport and looked around, over Mardina’s head the interior of the habitat itself stretched like a tremendous well shaft, walled with land and sea and air, a shaft thousands of miles tall.

Clodia tugged her hand. “Don’t look up. It makes you giddy.”

Mardina had looked up, and, yes, she felt briefly dizzy. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” A woman drifted before them, smiling. “It takes time to adjust if you’re used to the gravity of the suyus…”

Perhaps forty, with black hair tied back, she had an open, smiling face, though the colors of her cheeks and lips were exaggerated with power and cream. She wore a dress of some brilliantly patterned fabric, and a headband set with emeralds that offset her dark eyes. A beautiful face, beautiful clothing. But she was taller than any legionary, and spindly, as if stretched, her neck long, her bare arms like twigs, and her joints, wrists and elbows and shoulders, were knots of bone. An inhabitant of the axis, then.

Clodia’s hand gripped Mardina’s tighter.

Ruminavi laughed. “Oh, don’t be afraid. Lowlanders are often startled by the first nobles they encounter. But you should recall this from your first arrival at Yupanquisuyu. Do you remember the axis warriors, bred for the lack of weight? This is my wife. Her name is Cura—that’s easy to remember, isn’t it? She’s one of the highborn—she comes from one of the first ayllus, the dozen clans here in Cuzco that can prove lineal descent from the earliest of the Incas. So she is a useful ally for you, you see. And her half brother Villac is a colcacamayoc, a keeper of the storehouses—just as senior in the government as Inguill, but with rather different responsibilities. Villac’s responsibility is to collect the mit’a tributes and distribute the stores as necessary; Inguill’s is to count it all, across the empire. And it is Villac who will assist your comrades to get to their ship. Isn’t that marvelous?”

“But first we have to get you to the palace compound,” Cura said. She cupped Clodia’s cheek in a hand that looked to Mardina as if it was crippled with arthritis, so swollen were the joints. Clodia was clearly forcing herself not to shrink back again. Cura said, “The ceremony of the Great Ripening is not far away; many of the other blessed ones have been preparing already for many days. You are late.” She gazed into Clodia’s blue eyes, caressed her fair skin. “But there have been rumors of your beauty, child, ever since you arrived at the habitat, and then from every mit’a assessor who visited your home ayllu. They were not wrong. You are perfect. Now come, follow me. I know you are used to traveling in space, so you will find the lack of weight no problem.”

She turned and swam away, slipping gracefully through the mesh of cables, heading deeper into the city.

Mardina and Clodia followed Cura easily, as they passed along a broad avenue lined with huge buildings. Glancing back, Mardina saw that Ruminavi was following them too, with four bony axis warriors bringing up the rear of the party. Though this was the periphery of the city, people hurried everywhere, scrambling through the cobweb, mostly dressed in bright, colorful fabrics, some clutching bundles of quipus. This was a capital city, Mardina reminded herself, the administrative center of an empire the size of a continent, as well as a solar system full of mines and colonies too; many of these tremendous buildings must be hives of offices every bit as busy as the Navy headquarters at Dumnona.

Clodia was staring, wide-eyed. Mardina remembered she’d had little experience of city life.

Mardina squeezed Clodia’s hand. “You’re doing well.”

“I know. Considering I know what it is Cura thinks I’m ‘perfect’ for.”

“It won’t come to that. The plan, remember… But you’re brave, even so.”

Clodia snorted. “I’m the daughter of Titus Valerius. Of course I’m brave.”

They passed one particularly ornate building, a kind of flat-topped pyramid on top of which a figure sat on a throne—a statue, Mardina supposed, decked with fine clothes and jewelry. Two axis warriors hovered over the statue, like protective angels.

The girls slowed, distracted by the sight.

Cura said, “Look at that stonework! Hand cut, and each stone fits its neighbor as well as two palms pressed together.”

“Is this the palace?” blurted Clodia.

Cura smiled. “Well, it’s a palace. It is the home of Huayna Capac, one of the greatest of the Incas.”

Mardina frowned. “The Sapa Inca—I thought his name was Quisquis.”

“So it is, the latest Inca—distant descendant of Huayna Capac, of course, separated by seven or eight centuries… My chronology is poor.”

“I don’t understand,” Mardina admitted.

“I think I do,” Clodia said. “I heard of this. When the Sapa Inca dies—”

“The Sapa Inca does not die,” Cura said firmly. “He lives on in his palace, he has a household of servants, and he is reunited with his ancestors and descendants on feast days.”

Clodia stared at the figure in the throne. “How many palaces like this are there?”

Ruminavi knew the answer to that. “Thirty-eight.”

“Thirty-nine Incas, then. Thirty-nine emperors since Yupanqui.”

Mardina stared into the mummy’s painted face. Here was a tough warrior who had built an empire with tools of stone and bronze, and long after his death had been lifted into a realm he could never have imagined.

“This is my future,” Clodia said. “To become like this.”

Ruminavi smiled. “A malqui, stuffed and preserved? Not if the plan works out.”

Once again Clodia slid her hand into Mardina’s.

53

The Roman century came to the ocean coast at a beach, not far from the delta of a great river.

Quintus Fabius ordered his men to stay in the cover of the forest rather than move out into the open. Grumbling, they complied, and began the daily process of establishing camp—for the twenty-first time on this march, they had fallen just a day behind the schedule the centurion had set for them.

Quintus himself, ordering Chu Yuen with Collius to accompany him, walked out into the light, onto the sandy beach. They were close to the marshy plain of the delta, where tremendous salt-loving trees plunged deep roots into the mud. The river was a mighty one, draining a swath of this half-cylinder continent, the antisuyu, and when Quintus looked ahead he could see the discoloration of the freshwater pushing far out into the ocean brine.

And when he looked up to left and right, in wonder, he saw how the ocean rose up beyond what ought to have been the horizon, splashed with swirls of cloud, tinged here and there by the outflow of more huge rivers—and merging at last in the mists of the air with the other half of this world sea, which hung like a steel rainbow above his head.

Inguill, with a couple of Inca soldiers, was waiting for him here, as Quintus knew she would be. “You’re late.”

He shrugged. “Within our contingency. There’s plenty of time left before—”

“Before time runs out for Clodia Valeria?”

Tall, thin, pale, intent, she looked out of place on the beach, in this raw natural environment. She belonged in an office, Quintus thought, her fingers wrapped in those bundles of string she read. But she was in command.

She turned now and pointed. “Down there are your transports over the ocean.”

Quintus saw a series of craft drawn up on the sand, flat wooden frames with sails furled up on masts. “Rafts?”

“They are adequate. They are built by the Chincha, who are a people who once lived on the western coast of the continent you call Valhalla Inferior. Now they live here. Their rafts are of balsa and cotton. They were the best sailors in our world, until the Xin came calling on our shores in their mighty treasure ships. The Chincha craft will suffice to carry you over to the cuntisuyu if the weather over the ocean stays fine—as it is programed to do.” She glanced up at a sky empty of Condors. “And of course you will be less conspicuous than in any other form of transport. On the far side you will be escorted to a capac nan station. There are freight wagons sufficiently roomy to hide your men, all the way to the hub. It won’t be comfortable, but you will be safe enough and will not be betrayed.”

“Well, we’ve trusted you this far.”

“And I, you,” she said drily. “Some would say I have already betrayed the Sapa Inca, my only lord, simply by keeping secrets from him.”

“Speaking of secrets,” the ColU said now, “I have studied your records, quipucamayoc. I believe I know the nature of the jonbar hinge that separates your reality from ours.”

They both turned to the slave who bore the ColU. He dropped his gaze as always.

“Tell me,” Inguill snapped.

“Yes,” Fabius said with a grin. “Tell me where we Romans went wrong! Perhaps I can put it right beyond the next hinge.”

“There was nothing you could have done. Nothing anybody could have done. There was a volcano, Quintus. A devastating explosion on the other side of the world. This was some hundred and eighty years before the career of Cusi Yupanqui, Inguill, your empire builder.

“The Romans and the Brikanti were already in the Valhallas, the Romans for more than a century. Inguill, your own culture had yet to rise up, but already there were civilizations here—cities, farms. The Romans planted colonies in the antisuyu forest, but had only minimal contact with the continent’s more advanced cultures.

“Then the volcano erupted, on this world. A great belch. The site of immediate devastation was far away, but the ash and dust and gas must have wrapped around the planet.”

Inguill’s eyes widened. “I know something of this. The Tiwanaku, later a people of our empire, who lived by a great high lake, wrote in their chronicles of a ‘dry fog’ obscuring the sky, of crops failing, of swaths of deaths. All this they wrote down in their histories, which our scholars retrieved in turn when the conquest came.”

The ColU said, “These western continents suffered, then. But because of vagaries of wind directions and seasonal changes, the eastern continents suffered far more—Africa, Asia, Europa. I have found little evidence for what happened to the Xin. But, Quintus, Rome was grievously damaged. There was mass famine within the Empire, and invasions by peoples from the dying heart of Asia, who brought plague. The Empire never recovered its former strength, and certainly abandoned its holds in the Valhallas, giving up its wars there with the Brikanti.

“And meanwhile, in Valhalla Inferior, under Cusi Yupanqui and others, the Intip Churi rose up—”

“And when we began to push into the jungles of the antisuyu, we found Roman colonies.”

“Yes. Though much degenerated, they preserved some of the skills and traditions of the old world. The Incas took what they wanted from these Roman relics—notably the secrets of the fire-of-life and of iron-making. The Incas’ strongest metal before this contact was bronze. I doubt that a trace of the blood of those Romans survives today, Quintus. But their legacy transformed the Incas.”

“All because of a volcano,” Quintus said heavily. “And I wonder if those devils who require us to build their Hatches had something to do with that. For all these changes in the fabric of the world seem to be accompanied by huge violence, vast destruction.”

Inguill smiled coldly. “The intervention of destructive gods. We know all about that, Quintus. Well—history is fascinating to me, as you both know. But it is the future that concerns me now. Will you be ready to disembark in the morning?”

They wandered along the beach, discussing details.

Later, Chu Yuen murmured to the ColU, “You did not tell them all that you had learned, Collius.”

“I told them what was necessary. I considered that a fee to be paid to the quipucamayoc for her assistance with this flight.”

“But the evidence Inca philosophers have found of kernel energies at the volcano site—your suggestion that the eruption was made even worse by yet another war inflicted on mankind by the technologies of the Hatch builders—Quintus almost guessed it.”

“They don’t need to know that. Not now, not today. Inguill and Quintus must work together; they have much to achieve. I don’t want them to feel helpless.”

“Do you feel helpless, Collius?”

“Not I, Chu Yuen. Not I. Come now, we’ll go back to camp. You must be hungry after the day’s march…”

54

The palace of the Sapa Inca was, Mardina learned, not so much a palace at all as a city in itself, a fortified town within a town. Protected on all sides by thick stone walls faced with green tiles and sheets of gold, it was shielded from above by a stout steel grill, and by squads of axis warriors wearing some kind of rocket pack who flew continually in pairs over the compound—Cura said there was even an air shelter to be pulled over the whole compound should Cuzco’s main dome fail.

But Mardina and Clodia were led past barriers and guards, straight into this most secure of sanctuaries. They were guided along a kind of ornate tunnel to a central block, and then through corridors and halls whose walls were covered with bewildering displays of colored tiles, some depicting people or animals, others showing only abstract designs.

It was here they said goodbye to Ruminavi for now, but his wife Cura rushed them along. “We must hurry,” said Cura. “It’s a shame not to give you time to take in everything better. But there will be time later… And a shame of course that you’re not more appropriately dressed, but that will be forgiven.”

Clodia said, “These are the best clothes we have, from the ayllu.”

“Believe me, nothing you brought will be suitable for Hanan Cuzco. And conversely, you will be given everything you need here.”

“But our luggage—”

“That will be kept in storage until it’s time for Mardina to leave. That’s the official plan at least…”

The girls exchanged glances at that. Mardina would be leaving, then, not Clodia, if the Incas got their way.

They came to a heavy door, armored, guarded and evidently airtight, and passed into another chamber of dazzling beauty through which they hurried, dragging themselves along rails and ropes. The deeper in they moved, Mardina noted, the more people they encountered. They all seemed slim and tall—even those not obviously axis-adapted—elegant, dressed in colorful finery, with elaborately prepared hair. Most had huge golden plugs in their earlobes. Many were very beautiful, even the servants, and Mardina remembered how the prettiest children of the provinces were taken away from their families to serve here. In the lack of gravity, they swarmed and swam in the air. To Mardina, rushing after Cura, it was like passing through a flock of exotic birds.

And where the girls from the ayllu passed, there were stares and sneers and pretty laughter behind raised hands. Mardina glowered back.

Clodia said, “There seem to be many soldiers here. I thought everybody loved the Sapa Inca—”

“Who protects and feeds them—of course they do,” Cura said. “It’s his family that’s the trouble. On the death of an Inca, his successor should be chosen by a council of the panaqas, factions within the family. But Incas generally have many sons by many wives—although the children by his full sister should have precedence. So while an Inca is healthy there is squabbling and maneuvering to gain his favor and that of the panaqas; when he starts to fail there is frantic negotiation among the factions; when he dies the succession can often degenerate into a bloody contest; and even when a winner is announced—”

“People hold grudges,” Mardina said. “I’m told it’s often like that for the Roman emperors, or was, before.”

Cura smiled. “Educated people try not to worry about it. The bloodshed generally doesn’t extend beyond the court itself. And it is a way of keeping the line strong; only the toughest survive.”

Now they had to work harder, pushing through crowds that were mostly streaming ahead the way they were going.

“I’m getting winded,” Mardina said. “What is it we’re going to see?”

“Why, it’s the procession of the Inca himself. You’re lucky to have arrived on such a day, to see it in your very first hour here. Once a month he travels around Cuzco—I’m surprised you haven’t heard of this even out in the antisuyu.”

Mardina glanced at Clodia. “I think most people out in the country gossip about who stole whose potato, rather than goings-on at court.”

“Well, that’s their loss. And this particular month, every year, the Sapa Inca comes to the Hall of the Gaping Mouth.”

“What’s that?”

Cura smiled. “You’ll see.”

She led them through one last entrance—huge doors flung open—into a hall containing another three-dimensional crowd, more colorful, gorgeous people flying weightlessly everywhere, and axis warriors aloft, eyeing the populace suspiciously. The hall in some ways was like any other they’d passed through, brilliantly lit by vast fluorescent lanterns, the walls glittering with colored tiles.

But the floor here was different, for it was panelled with vast windows that showed the blackness of space below—a scattering of stars, a brighter point that might be a planet, the whole panorama slowly rotating as seen from this axis of the habitat.

Mardina was entranced. The vacuum itself was only a pace or two away. “We must be at the lowest level of the palace—the outer hull. What a sight…”

“Look, Mardina,” Clodia said.

“Makes me almost nostalgic—”

“Look. Above the windows, farther down the hall…”

Mardina looked up, drifting into the air to see over the crowd. Now she saw that to the floor’s central window panes were attached upright glass tubes, a dozen of them. And in each of the tubes was a person—young, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen years old maybe, six boys and six girls. Their clothes looked expensive, their faces gleamed with oils, and each wore a dazzling headband studded with precious stones. All drifted weightless in their bottles. And each passively looked out with an empty expression, confused, even baffled, Mardina thought, as if they had no idea what was happening to them.

Clodia’s observation was terse. “They look fat.”

Cura said, “Well, of course they do. They have enjoyed the Inca’s hospitality—oh, for a month or more, since their selection for this procession. And of course only one will be chosen.”

“For what?”

But before Cura could answer there was a blast of horns. The people swarming in the chamber pressed back against the walls and ceiling as best they could.

And through this living archway a procession advanced.

First came a party of men and women dressed in brightly colored tunics in identical chessboard patterns. They moved in as stately a way as possible, Mardina thought, given they needed to use ropes and guide rails to advance. They glared at anybody in the way; they physically pushed people back or had the warriors remove them. They even swept bits of debris out of the air.

“Every one of them, even performing those menial tasks,” Cura breathed, “is a noble, a highborn…”

Next came a troop of noisy musicians, drummers and singers and players of horns and panpipes, and dancers who wriggled and swam in the air.

Following them came warriors, dressed in armor of heavy plates and with crowns of gold and silver on their heads. The armor, in fact, looked too cumbersome to wear in combat, and it took the soldiers a visible effort to propel their bulk through the air.

And then came a kind of litter, pulled through the hall by dozens of men and women in bright blue uniforms. The man carried in the litter looked almost lost in a heap of cushions to which he was strapped by a loose harness. His clothes were even more dazzling than his attendants’; it looked to Mardina as if his jacket had been woven of the feathers of gaudy rain forest birds. He wore a gold crown, and a necklace of huge emeralds, and a headband from which hung a delicate fringe, over his forehead, of scarlet wool and fine golden tubes. He was younger than Mardina had expected, slim, and not very strong-looking; perhaps the family faction he had behind him was tougher than he was.

Still, he was the Sapa Inca.

Cura pushed Mardina’s head down. “You don’t look him in the eye,” she said. “Nobody looks him in the eye unless he acknowledges them.”

From her peripheral vision, Mardina saw the Sapa Inca throw something out of his carriage. They were birds, she saw, a dozen small songbirds perhaps, but they were unable to fly in the lack of weight, unable to orient; flapping and tweeting, they spun pitifully.

Then one exploded, burst in a shower of feathers.

“One,” said Cura breathless. “They dose their feed with explosive pellets. It’s quite random—”

Another rattling explosion, a gasp from the crowd.

“Two!”

And another. The tiny feathers hailed down close to Mardina’s face this time.

“Three!”

And then a pause—a pause that lengthened, and Mardina seemed to sense, under the noise of the music, a vast collective sigh, as the remaining birds struggled in the air.

“That’s it! Just three of twelve! The selection is made—number three it is. Look, Mardina, Clodia, the third compartment along…”

Mardina saw the one Cura meant. Standing on the window, above the vacuum, the third bottle contained a girl, slightly younger-looking than the rest, but just as bewildered. Just for a heartbeat she seemed to be aware that everybody in the hall, including the Sapa Inca, was looking at her. Fear creased her soft face.

Then a hatch opened beneath her. The puff of air in her bottle expelled her in a shower of crystals—frost, Mardina realized, condensing from the vapor in the warm air. Already falling into space, the girl looked up, her mouth open. Just for an instant she seemed not to have been harmed. Then she tried to take a breath. She clutched her throat, struggling in the air like a stranded fish, and blood spewed from her mouth.

All this just a few Roman feet from Mardina. People crowded so they could see her through the windows. They laughed and pointed, and some imitated the girl’s helpless, hopeless struggle, as she receded from the window.

“You are not of our culture,” Cura whispered in the ears of Mardina and Clodia. “But can you see why this is done? Yupanquisuyu seems strong, solid. Yet just an arm’s length beyond this window lies death—the Gaping Mouth. The Sapa Inca reminds us all of what will become of us if we fail to maintain the integrity of the habitat, even just for an instant. And it is just as the gods hover, angry, cruel, vengeful, an arm’s length in any direction from our world. It is only the Sapa Inca and the order he imposes that excludes them from the human world. Do you see? Do you see?” She stroked Clodia’s head. “And do you begin to see, now, child, why it is that you must die?”

The ejected girl had stopped struggling, to Mardina’s relief. She drifted slowly away from the habitat, and then, as she fell out of the structure’s huge shadow, she flared with sunlight, briefly beautiful.

55

Quintus Fabius walked to the crest of the ridge with Inguill the quipucamayoc, Michael the medicus, and a handful of his men: Titus Valerius, Scorpus, Orgilius the aquilifer with his standard, and Rutilius Fuscus, the century’s trumpeter.

Once more, in the light of the new day, Quintus inspected his position. They were close to the hub here, having completed, with Inguill’s help, their surreptitious journey from the western coast of the ocean by train and other Inca transports. They were in the foothills that characterized this part of the habitat—but just here they were in a relative lowland, a wide valley cut by a river fed by glacial melt. And beyond, the hub mountains rose up, clinging to the steel face of the hub itself.

“Certainly this ridge is the highest ground in the area,” Quintus observed.

“You’re right about that, sir,” Titus rumbled. “The surveyors confirm what you can see for yourself.”

“Perhaps there was once flooding here,” Quintus mused. “Even a lake. Some of these landforms have a streamlined gracefulness. Is that possible, Inguill?”

The quipucamayoc shrugged. “The history of this landscape is of course a question of engineering, not of nature. I do know the landscape artists allowed the country to evolve through stages of its own, letting it form as naturally as possible. We are always aware of the limits of our knowledge. Give the gods of nature room to do what they do best—that was the guiding principle. So, yes, perhaps it was once a lake, in some early stage of its forced formation.”

“Engineering.” Quintus looked to where the mountains rose, one range after another, waves of granite topped by gleaming ice—ranges that curved upward, very visibly, to left and right, as if he were peering through some distorting glass. “Yes, one can never forget that this place is an artifact. Now, down to business. War, quipucamayoc, is all about the details—about place and time. As for the place: so, Titus—will this do for you?”

“The highest ground for miles around, sir, as you say. Let them come to us.”

“And as for the timing—”

Inguill said, “Ruminavi has reported to me that the capacocha ceremony is to go ahead this afternoon, as previously scheduled. Meanwhile my contact Villac the colcacamayoc is ready with the permissions and passes to get your party out through the hub portals to your space yacht.”

Michael said, “I can confirm that we managed to get messages out to the Malleus Jesu. We had men volunteer for the details that wash the Inti windows—the details work all day, every day. As the ColU predicted, the little transmitters and receivers in the earpieces it uses to speak to us were sufficient to exchange communications with the Malleus through the window glass. Trierarchus Eilidh knows what we’re doing; we made a final check last night and she’s ready for the pickup.”

“Good,” said Quintus. “So all we need to do is get the travelers up to the portal and ready to go. Oh, and fight a battle against the army of the Sapa Inca. So, medicus, what of the men?”

Michael shrugged. “The whole of this continent, the cuntisuyu, is at a higher altitude than the antisuyu where we’ve been living—miles higher. The air is that much thinner. However, we’ve rested here seven days. You’ve kept the men very fit. I’d judge that they are acclimatized—and they are as ready as they’ll ever be to fight.”

Inguill frowned. “Should I be impressed?”

“You should,” Quintus said. “You see, quipucamayoc, though a battle itself may seem an arena of chaos to you, victory comes through planning and positioning, as well as reacting to circumstances during the combat.”

“Like the chess you have taught me.”

“That’s the idea. And I’m hoping that your generals, who are used to facing nothing more challenging than rebellions by unarmed, untrained, undisciplined villagers, might prove as poor strategists as you are a chess player. We’ll make our stand here. This may be no more than a skirmish—but it may also be the last battle a Roman army unit will ever wage. Aquilifer, set your eagle standard.”

“Yes, sir,” Orgilius said proudly.

Inguill anxiously scanned the sky, looking for Condors. “The imperial authorities will see that display.”

“Let them see us. The die is cast, as Julius Caesar once said.”

Titus Valerius stepped forward. “There’s one detail, sir. If we’re to give battle, you need an optio. Somebody who’ll be there to kick the arses of the men in the rear ranks, and hold the formation for you. Now, Gnaeus Junius is of course off on the Malleus Jesu. So if I may, I’d like to volunteer for the job. Just for the day, you understand; I’m not angling for a field promotion or a rise in pay—”

Quintus clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Titus. But if you were to be taking part in this fight today, I’d turn you down; I’d want you at my side in the front rank, one wing missing or not. You’re certainly not getting a pay rise.”

Quintus saw complicated expressions chase across the man’s face. “Thank you for that, sir. But—are you saying I won’t be in the century when we give battle?”

“I’ve a much more important task for you, Titus. Remember—the battle we fight today is only a diversion. The whole purpose of this is to get Collius, and your daughter and her companion, Mardina, out of this habitat, and then to Mars, where—well, as I understand it, Collius intends to challenge the strange entities at war over human history. Now, Titus, when everything blows up, I need somebody in place, up in Cuzco at the habitat exit, to make sure the final escape takes place. And indeed to provide protection on the way. Although if it does turn into a battle up there, we’ll have failed.”

“That’s where you want me to go, then, sir? But how?” He glanced down at himself. “I am an overweight one-armed Roman legionary in uniform. I might be spotted, you know, even by these slow-witted Incas. I remember once on campaign—”

Inguill said smoothly, “We’ve worked this out, your centurion and I. I’m going up shortly myself. I’ll be on hand, with Villac and our other allies, to make sure Collius’s party get to where they need to be. And you’ll be at my side, Titus. As my yanakuna, my slave. A punishment for some outrageous behavior or other.” She grinned. “You’re ugly enough, and surly enough, to make that convincing.”

Titus looked doubtfully at Quintus. “My place is at your side, sir.”

“No, Titus. Your place is at your daughter’s side. Take care of Clodia. After all, she is putting her own life at risk in this game we play today, as much as any man of the legion. And, remember, I won’t be leaving this place.”

“You won’t?”

“Of course not,” Inguill said. “We can get a handful of you out, but there’s no way we can break out fifty men.”

Quintus said, “And their wives and, in one or two cases, young families. It was always a dream that we would all be able to leave. No, the men’s place is here, now, Titus, where Jesu in His wisdom has delivered us. And my place is leading them.” He peered into Titus’s eyes. “I can see you haven’t thought it through this far. Well, I wouldn’t have expected you to. Trust me, Titus. Do as I say. Your daughter isn’t coming back here, ever—so just be at her side, wherever she goes next, and protect the rest. That’s your duty now.”

Titus was visibly struggling with this. But he growled, “Very well, sir.”

Inguill blew out from puffed cheeks. “Well, thank Inti that’s resolved. We need to get moving, before it’s too late. Look…” She pointed upward. “Your activities have been noticed, at last.”

A Condor craft hung high above the air, a very obvious eye in the sky.

Quintus grinned. “The moment approaches, then.” He clasped Inguill’s hand. “You must go. Goodbye, then, quipucamayoc—I appreciate all you’ve done for us.”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t see it as a betrayal of the Sapa Inca emperor, you know, as much as a challenge to these history-eating monsters we all face.”

“I understand that. And so we’re on the same side. Go now—you too, Titus Valerius, and make sure you tell that daughter of yours what a fine Roman I believe she has grown up to be. Now let’s get the century drawn up. Don’t want them thinking it’s a Saturnalia, do we? Give them a blast of the horn, Rutilius Fuscus…”

56

There were a dozen, in all, Mardina had slowly learned, as their days had passed in chambers of unimaginable luxury. A dozen victims of the planned sacrifice. Or, depending how you looked at it, a dozen children privileged to have been selected for the capacocha ceremony, selected for the glory of living forever, in the unblinking gaze of Inti.

And today was the first time they had all been brought together. Today, the day on which their young lives would be ended—mercifully enough, Cura had assured her, they would never know, never feel anything. “Why, what with the drugs and drink and rich food, some of them have been barely conscious for days…”

Mardina struggled for self-control.

The ceremony was to take place in the temple called the Qoricancha. This was a pyramid of bloodred stone, topped by layers of green, sky blue, and a chapel of some pink stone at the very top.

Mardina, with Clodia and the other sacrificial victims, were led hand in hand through a courtyard filled with sculptures of gold: trees, flowers, hummingbirds frozen in flight, even a llama with a shepherd, as if a garden had in an instant been dipped in the liquid metal. The victims, floating in the air, many already drug-addled, stared at all this as if they could not believe their eyes.

Then they were taken inside the pyramid, and into a grand chamber whose walls were lined with gold and silver plates and crowded with shrines to the gods, and niches where, it appeared, the corpses of more dead Incas resided. Over their head was a roof set with stars and lightning bolts wrought in silver. For a moment they were left alone, staring at the latest wonders.

Then a solemn young woman led them all down through an open door set into the richly carpeted floor—and then down, down through tunnels lined with precious metals and lit by oil lamps. They were brought at last to yet another room set in the basement of Hanan Cuzco, another chamber with vast windows offering a view of space. Beyond the window this time Mardina could see detail, shelves of some kind splashed with bright sunlight and fixed with scraps of faded color—human figures, like dolls, perhaps; the details were hard to make out.

It was here that the ceremony would be performed, and everybody who counted would want to be here, and finely dressed people were already pouring in. The place was soon crowded. But the twelve children with the priests and doctors who attended them were guided to the heart of the ornate mob, along with the personal companions they had been allowed to bring into Cuzco—in Clodia’s case, that was Mardina, and Mardina in turn clung to Cura.

And with the children in place, here came the Sapa Inca himself, once more borne on his enormous litter, and his orderly bands of attendants and bearers, all highborn themselves—and wherever the Inca went, a mob of courtiers followed, colorful, swooping through the weightless environment of the axis, each of them striving to catch the eye of the Inca or one of his senior wives or sons. As ever, grim blue-faced axis warriors, their long limbs like knotted rope, slid through the crowds, watching, listening.

In all this, however, the twelve children were the focus of attention, as they had been for days.

Attendants now gently led them forward to a row of elaborate seats, almost like thrones themselves, into which they were loosely strapped by embroidered harnesses. The children had been brought here from all over the habitat, Mardina knew, and represented many of the ethnicities controlled by the empire. There was even an anti girl, the tattoos on her face still livid, a child who had been even more baffled and disoriented than the rest, so alien was the city environment to her, let alone the details of this exotic ritual.

And yet, seeing them side by side, there was a sameness about all the children now, even the anti girl—even Clodia Valeria, who had come here from another reality entirely, from beyond the jonbar hinges. For days—if not weeks or months in some cases—the children had been fêted here in Hanan Cuzco, just like those other blessed children in their bottles, and treated with alcohol, maize corn, expensive meats and seafood, even exotic drugs, all of which luxuries, Cura said with some envy, were usually reserved for the most senior of the elite. As a result they had all put on weight, their skin had taken on a kind of glossy sheen, and the drugs had made them passive, dull-witted, hard to scare and easy to manipulate.

Now the shelf Mardina had noticed earlier outside the window began to move, a platform that rose up before the row of slackly gazing children and the excited courtiers behind them. One of the priests began to declaim in the courtly, antiquated version of Quechua that seemed to be reserved for moments like this, a dialect Mardina found impossible to understand, even after months of studying the language in the ayllu.

Cura murmured, “He is describing the terrible glory of Inti, and of the creator gods who give us life, and can take it away. These children are privileged because they will live forever in the eye of Inti, never aging as we will, never growing ill or frail—never dying—”

The anti girl screamed. It was a shrill, terrible sound that cut through the fog of words, Mardina’s own confusion.

And now she saw why the girl had screamed, what she had seen beyond the window. That lifting platform bore, not dolls or dummies as she had imagined—it was a row of children, all around sixteen years old, all richly dressed, with elaborately painted faces and coiffed hair. They lay on their backs, their hands clasped on their bellies. In fact they looked as if they were asleep, their beautiful faces relaxed, at peace.

Mardina, stunned, leaned forward and stared through the window, from side to side. She saw hundreds of children, hundreds of beautiful corpses, stacked on a very long platform. Bodies in vacuum.

Cura whispered, “The artistry is great, as you can see. The children are put to sleep with the utmost gentleness, and the work of the mummification begins immediately. The greatest skill is in delivering faces to look so natural, so peaceful… Then the malquis are lodged outside the hull, outside the air, so that no corruption can ever taint them. Thus they begin their second life, undying and preserved forever in the vacuum.”

“You’ve forgotten why we’re here,” Mardina muttered.

Cura glanced at her, and something of the worshipful radiance left her face. “You’re right, of course…”

The anti girl started to struggle against the harness that restrained her. The priests tried to calm her, but some of the other children were stirring now, becoming disturbed. One slightly younger boy started to cry. The disturbance was spreading out through the wider circle of courtiers, Mardina saw.

“Now or never,” she murmured to Cura.

Cura nodded. Stealthily, while the attendants were distracted, she began to loosen Clodia’s harness.

And Mardina pulled a headband from Clodia’s brow. She had patiently rehearsed this with Quintus and Michael, over and over before they had come here, and rehearsed it in her head daily ever since. The band, a gift from the Romans’ anti allies, was an array of brilliant blue feathers taken from rain forest birds, the whole contained within a near-transparent cast-off snakeskin. Now she held the band at one end with thumb and forefinger, and carefully slipped off the transparent skin with her other hand, being sure not to touch any of the feathers.

Then, almost casually, she cracked the band in the air, like a miniature whip.

All the feathers came loose and flew away, a linear cloud that quickly dispersed, heading into the crowd of courtiers, in the general direction of the Sapa Inca in his litter. In the weightless conditions the feathers flew in dead-straight lines, but quite slowly, given air resistance. Even now the priest spoke, his voice like the ringing of a bell, and the attendants tried to calm the children.

It seemed to take an age before the first of them brushed the hand of one of the children’s doctors. The instant it touched him he spasmed, his eyes rolled, foam erupted from his mouth—and he drifted, unconscious.

The feathers were coated in a forest toxin that, Mardina had been assured, was potent in the short term, harmless in the long term. And it evidently worked.

Nobody in the wider crowd seemed to notice at first. But when two more courtiers succumbed, and then four, and eight, and people called out, crowded back, yelled in alarm. And still the feathers, almost unseen, drifted among the people with their powerful touch.

In the enclosed space of the windowed hall, the panic started quickly. People screamed and pushed for the exits. From nowhere, it seemed, axis warriors flew out of the air and plastered their bodies over the litter of the Sapa Inca, protecting him with their own flesh, and Mardina saw that some kind of armor, like blinds of steel plate, snapped closed around the litter. Meanwhile the bearers positioned themselves to get the litter out of this place of sudden confusion and dread.

And Mardina, with a passive Clodia clasped in her arms, followed Cura out of the chamber, entirely unseen.

Outside, Inguill was waiting for them. She beckoned. “Come. Your father is waiting, child.” She hurried away.

57

Quintus Fabius, gladio in hand, walked along the front line of his century. He grinned fiercely, and let the men joke with him, nodding their heads in their heavy helmets—those who had helmets at all. Keep them alert during this period of waiting, keep them relaxed—that was the trick.

And check their position and formation.

This ridge, wider than it was long, was deep enough for four ranks. Below the front rank was a respectable slope, up which the Inca were going to have to advance before they even got to the Romans. The legionaries were in an open formation, as they had long drilled, with the ranks offset so the men were standing in an alternating pattern that Quintus thought of as like a chessboard, all the men standing on imaginary black squares and leaving the white clear, so they had room around their bodies to deploy their weapons and support each other.

Some were sitting, and Quintus didn’t blame them for that—save your energy, as long as you responded smartly when the trumpet blast came. Others were eating, hunks of meat or forest fruit. And the men grinned and made hushing gestures, fingers to lips, as Quintus approached one man, Marcus Vinius, a tough fighter when the battle got going but known throughout the century for his laziness around the camp. Now Marcus was sitting cross-legged on the ground, his wooden shield resting on one shoulder, his pilum spear propped on the other, his big bearded head resting in one hand—fast asleep. His neighbor raised his own pilum, as if to clatter it against his shield.

“No,” Quintus murmured. “Leave him be. If a man can fall asleep in a situation like this, he’s braver than all of us. He has to give up his pilum, though. And you, Octavio. You know the rules—no pila today. Because the pila kill, and we’re not here to kill if we can avoid it. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

The centurion walked on to the rear of the century to find Scorpus, hastily installed in the role of optio, stalking the back line, a bristling example of Roman discipline waiting to pounce on miscreants. Meanwhile the medicus, Michael, had set up a kind of open-air hospital farther back from the line. He stood ready with blankets and bandages and his surgeon’s kit of tools, as well as a rack of vials of potent painkiller drugs, extracted from the flowers of the anti forest. He had assistants, a couple of injured legionaries invalided out of the fight, and some of the soldiers’ wives. Quintus nodded to him, and the Greek nodded back. Michael was no coward, Quintus knew, and he was no opponent of the military, which he had grown up seeing impose order throughout a sprawling Empire. But no medicus, having taken an oath to at minimum do no harm, could relish such a moment as this.

And still the Incas did not come.

Quintus stalked back to the left of his front line, to where Orgilius the aquilifer stood with his standard at the appropriate place. Quintus had a small farwatcher tucked in his belt; he lifted the leather tube now to look down on the ranks of Inca warriors, and their commanders at the rear. The soldiers in their units, drawn up in a reasonably orderly way, all looked much the same to him, in their woollen tunics, their helmets of steel with wooden overlays, their armor of quilted cotton with sewn-in metal panels. Their helmets especially glittered with silver and gold decorations. The commanders at the rear were gathered around a table on which rested some kind of model. The senior officers wore red and white tunics with discs of gold glittering on their chests.

“Walk with me,” Quintus snapped to the aquilifer. He led Orgilius back to his own command position, at the front rank’s right-hand end. “I know it’s not tradition, but I want you to stay close today, Orgilius, and advise me. After all, we are fighting a foe unknown in Roman history—except, presumably, for some long lost skirmishes in the mountains of Valhalla Inferior, when we pushed these people out of the way to get at the Xin, our true foe. And you have learned as much about them as any of us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, there’s more of them than us,” Quintus said. “That’s the most basic observation.”

“But we have the advantage of position. And probably experience.”

“I know that, Orgilius. And there’s no sign of them using their projectile weapons, is there?”

“No, sir. It’ll be hand to hand. Sensible in a spacecraft; you don’t use projectiles or fire-of-life weapons. Just like the great days of the Empire.”

Quintus grinned. “Let’s hope it stays that way—and that it does turn out to be a great day, for us. What are those generals doing at the back? What kind of toy are they playing with?”

“The model on the table is their version of a map, sir. They mold it in clay, so you can see the nature of the ground.”

“Hmm. Well, that’s not an entirely stupid idea.”

“Their field commander is called the apusquipay. Supposedly a relative of the Sapa Inca, sir. They have a hierarchy of command—”

“The Incas would.”

“—all the way up to the aucacunakapu, the head of the army, who never leaves Hanan Cuzco.”

“What about their forces? They all look the same to me in those uniforms. Except for those lads with the painted faces.”

“Antis, sir. Specialist archers. Most of the rest are awka kamayuq, taxpayers fulfilling their mit’a. Like conscripts, or a reserve. But again, they have specialties depending on which nation they’re from. The antis use bows and arrows, the Wanka carry spears and slings, the Cuzquenos have bolas and clubs and maces.”

“Ah. I can see the weapons. Like our specialist auxiliaries. You did tell me much of this before—”

“It always helps to see it for yourself, doesn’t it, sir?”

“Indeed it does. The central units seem to have a more standard weapons kit—clubs, axes.”

“They call the axes chambis. Some have whips that they call chacnacs. Those lads are probably huamincas. Veterans, specialist soldiers—not mitimacs—based near Hanan Cuzco, or maybe Hurin Cuzco, or at any rate at the feet of the hubs.”

“All right. But still they don’t fight—we’ll run out of light at this rate.”

“Sir, it might just be that our trick is working. If the girls have managed to create some kind of rumpus up in Cuzco, the top levels of command are going to be distracted, if not paralyzed.”

“Yes. I have a feeling that thinking for yourself is even less welcome in the Inca setup than it is in the Roman.”

“Also they like their rituals. Before a battle they generally have a couple of days of sacrifices, fasting. We haven’t given them a chance to do that.”

“I’ll send a note of apology on behalf of the Emperor.”

“I know how to get them going, sir.” It was Marcus Vinius, stepping tentatively from his second rank through to the front.

“Marcus Vinius! Good of you to wake up and join the party.”

“Sorry about that, sir. But I was having this lovely dream. I had this anti woman in my arms, slippery as a snake she was, and then—”

“All right, soldier,” snapped Orgilius. “Get to the point. What are you doing stepping out of your rank?”

“Told you, sir. I know how to get those Incas mad.” He went to the front of the ridge, set down his sword and shield—and lifted up his tunic, exposing bare legs above the strapping of his boots. “Hey! Pretty boys! Here’s what I think of you!” He pranced up and down, flashing his legs and pulling his tongue, and the men behind him hooted and jeered.

Orgilius grinned. “Actually he’s right, sir. That’s a grievous insult to any Inca.”

And, indeed, Quintus saw that Marcus’s antics were evoking a response from the Incas. Some of the soldiers, and one or two of the command team, were staring, pointing at the Romans. He rubbed his chin. “Well, Achilles had his heel… All right, Marcus Vinius, back to your rank. Now then, front rank, shields and weapons down on the ground; you saw the man…” He grabbed his own tunic. “Follow my lead. Now!”

The entire front rank bared their legs and capered, while their comrades in the rear ranks rattled their swords on their shields, and yelled abuse in whatever Quechua words they knew. Only Orgilius, with his eagle standard on its staff beside him, stood back, laughing with the rest.

It seemed no time at all before the Incas’ clay trumpets began to be blown, their sound like the voices of monsters drifting across the broad valley.

Quintus picked up his shield and sword. “That’s it, lads. Come at us in a rush, with your blood up, and your commanders already uncertain of themselves and now itching at the humiliation… Well done, Marcus Vinius, well done—”

“Sir!” snapped Orgilius. “Missiles on the way!”

Without waiting to see for himself, Quintus stepped back into the front rank. “Close ranks! Shields up! Come on, you slugs, move, move!”

He heard the hoarse voice of Scorpus, his field optio, yelling for the back rows to get into formation. Soon it was done—there was a roof of interlocked shields over the Romans’ heads, and a wall before them.

Quintus crouched to see out. The missiles were arrows coming from the right, and stones from the left, for now falling short. He called over to Orgilius, “So they’re sending in their auxiliaries first. Archers and slingshots—”

“The antis and the Wanka, sir.”

“Just what I’d have done, if I had any.”

The mood had changed in heartbeats. Nobody was laughing now, nobody posturing. The men huddled determinedly under their wooden shields, each looking to his companions for mutual aid. Quintus heard one man noisily vomiting, and that was a good sign; that was normal too. He glanced out again. “They’re closing… ”

Now the projectiles fell on the shields, clattering, battering. The stones from the slings were a harmless hail, though they made you keep your shield up, but the arrows were heavier, and came from a greater height. To Quintus, holding up his own shield, it felt like each landed with a blow like a punch to his shield-bearing arm. The shields had been the best he could get made at the ayllu, but they were only wood, and some of the arrows in the storm that fell found a weak spot, or a gap in the wall. He heard the ghastly, meaty sound of arrows hitting flesh, and men screamed and fell—but the ranks closed up immediately to close the gap. Flowing like oil, he saw with approval, glancing back, just like oil.

“The auxiliaries have stopped advancing, sir,” Orgilius called through the noise. “Here come the infantry, the veterans, right up the slope toward us. But the auxiliaries are keeping up the fire.”

“Then we’ll have to fight with shields raised,” Quintus yelled back. “Hear that, you men? We’ve trained for this; you all know what to do.”

“Just as well old Titus Valerius isn’t here, though, sir,” called Marcus Vinius. “With that one arm of his. You couldn’t even strap a shield to his stump. Why, he’d be better off fixing it to his—”

“All right, Marcus,” Quintus snapped, huddling under his own shield, his arm rapidly tiring as the pelting of arrows continued. “Save the jokes for the Incas when we have them on the run.”

“Right you are, sir—”

“The huamincas are closing,” Orgilius yelled. “Almost in range.”

Quintus shouted, “Front rank, ready. Make every blow count, men; there’s more of them than us—for now! But remember, aim to injure, not to kill. Injure, don’t kill…”

That was a hard command for any experienced legionary to absorb—and that was why the men’s precious pila, which killed from a distance, had been banned for this encounter—but Quintus, even as he had prepared for this clash, had been thinking of the longer term, of a time when he would need to argue for mercy for his legionaries, who, after all, were never going to leave this place, whatever the outcome of the battle. If they could show restraint now, they might be shown tolerance in the future.

And here came the Incas, at last.

“Advance!” yelled Orgilius. “Front rank advance, advance!”

With the rest of the front line, Quintus raised his shield so he could see, and he ran down the slope with the rest of the front rank of the Romans, twenty or thirty paces, shields lowered. They slammed into the lead Inca warriors. Their sheer momentum and the advantage of height helped the Romans halt the Inca charge, and even push their foe backward down the hill, back into their own ranks, which turned into a confused crowd of struggling men.

The fight closed up in a static line, a bloody friction.

Trying to keep his shield in the air against the arrows and slingshot stones that still flew, Quintus hacked with his gladio at the man in front of him, aiming for the bare legs under the armored tunic. He struck flesh and the man fell—but another took his place, standing on the torso of his still-alive comrade, and Quintus found himself parrying blows from a long-handled axe with his sword. The Incas had whips, too, and the crack of one such weapon caught him across the back. But the trick was to step inside the arc of the whip so it became useless, and to close with the man himself.

There were men at his back now, the second rank of Romans, not pushing hard but yelling support, and prodding with their swords. When a Roman did fall, a man from the rank behind stepped up to take his place, and the third rank filled in behind him, just as they had been trained. Even as he fought, hacking at what felt like a solid mass of Inca flesh in front of him, Quintus was aware of the wider formation of his men, how they kept their shape, the chessboard pattern, designed to give each other room to swing the gladio, or thrust with the pugio. Quintus could even hear, over the screaming cacophony all around him, the raucous voice of Scorpus still yelling at the rear rank to keep its formation, not to press, to keep the shape, to plug the gaps.

This battle was worth the fighting—he’d understood that as soon as he’d grasped the nature of the strange history-switching conspiracy web in which humanity seemed to be enmeshed. All they could do was fight, in the end, he and his men. But if in fighting this miniature campaign—even if none of them survived, in the end—if the last of the Legio XC Victrix did something to loosen the grip of that terrible empire-toppling abstract force of which the ColU had spoken, he knew in his heart, in his guts, it was worth it.

Quintus Fabius, the commander, had done all he could. He’d prepared and equipped his men, found the best position to give battle, led the line to the best of his ability. Now there was only the fight. Around him there was a roar, a confluence of war cries and the screams of the wounded and dying, and still the air was full of arrows and stones, any one of which could kill him in a second, and still the terrible erosion of the clashing front ranks continued. In battle it was always the same. It felt like a training exercise right up until the moment the lines closed. Even then you felt invulnerable—the other man would be hit, but not you—and you feared fouling up more than the weapons of the enemy. But there were moments when you faced a foe, and you looked in his eyes, and it was as if only the two of you existed, your war was yours and his alone. So Quintus slashed and stabbed and swung, and held up his shield, and tried to ignore the tiring of his arms, and the pain of the small wounds he’d already taken, a scrape to the belly, a niggling stab in the shin; he would fight on with his men until he could fight no more.

The clay trumpets of the Incas sounded, a ghastly sound.

The fighting continued at the front, but Quintus could see that the rear Inca lines were pulling back—in good order, but retreating back down the steep slope of the ridge.

Quintus yelled to his trumpeter, “Give the order! Fall back!”

There were three short blasts in response, and then the Romans stepped back warily from the last of the Incas. Warily, and wearily too; one man stumbled over a still-warm corpse behind him.

Quintus, breathing heavily, his gladio clasped in his bloody palm as if glued there, sought out Orgilius. The man was sitting on the ground, he seemed to have been hamstrung, but he had not abandoned the eagle. Quintus crouched beside him. “Aquilifer? Do you know what’s happened?”

For answer, Orgilius pointed to the sky.

Quintus looked up, and saw a Condor, a great black bird, dipping into the atmosphere above him, the leading edges of its wings still glowing from the air friction. It fired a shell that trailed white smoke. At the peak of its trajectory the shell exploded with a crack that reached Quintus’s ears a heartbeat after the flash of light. He winced; he couldn’t help it.

Orgilius, obviously in pain from his wounded leg, forced a grin. “I think that was more noise than destruction. But still—”

“But still, it’s a projectile weapon of the sort that’s supposed to be banned in here. These Inca—just like the Romans! You never use a fire-of-life weapon inside a spacecraft, until you do. So the adults have shown up, and we children must put away our toys.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Trumpeter! Signal that we’re standing down.”

Orgilius looked over the field. “I think there’s a party of their leaders coming over, sir.”

“I’m not surprised. Come on, aquilifer, let’s get you to the medicus.” He got an arm under Orgilius’s shoulders and helped him to stand, on one leg. “You, Marcus Vinius—carry the eagle for us. We’ve got a lot of talking to do, I suspect, and I need you to help me do it, Orgilius. But now, we have to make our peace. After all, we’ve nowhere else to go, have we?”

“No, sir,” Orgilius said, “that we haven’t.”

“Maybe if we fought well enough, they’ll let us join the huamincas.”

“It was all worth it, wasn’t it, sir?”

“If they got away, Titus and the rest. If the Malleus was able to pick them up. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know if they succeeded in what they’re trying. Not unless we’re scrubbed from history altogether.”

“But we wouldn’t know about that either, sir, would we?”

“I certainly hope not, aquilifer.”

“And as for Titus and the others—”

“On their way to Mars by now, I hope. But for us it’s blood and broken heads, as ever. Let’s find that Greek doctor for you; I’m sure he’s having a relaxing afternoon… Now all I’ve got to do is find one of their generals to put his foot on my neck. Have I got that right, Orgilius? That’s how they can tell you’ve surrendered…”

A few days later Quintus, languishing in an Inca cell, received a message, sent with farspeaker by Titus Valerius, picked up by a legionary working on an Inti window, and then smuggled to the centurion in the Inca pukara where he was being interrogated, or negotiating, depending on your point of view.

The plan had worked. And after escaping from the confusion of the Hanan Cuzco hub, it took the Malleus Jesu only a few days to reach Mars.

58

Stef Kalinski had to be helped out of the testudo rover, and through the improvised airlock into the dome that long-gone Inca explorers had set up over the Hatch they had discovered. Even once she was safely inside the dome, she stumbled and had to be caught by Mardina and led to the rest of the party.

“Damn Martian gravity,” Stef growled. “Neither one thing nor the other, neither a proper weight nor weightlessness, so a person my age can get around without inconveniencing herself.”

Mardina laughed. “But, Stef, if you can’t even get out of the testudo without a struggle, how will you manage the great leap between the worlds through—that?”

Stef glanced around to get her bearings, here on the Mars of the Incas, a heavily mined but intact Mars—very unlike the Mars that had been wrecked by Earthshine at the terminus of the lost Roman-Brikanti history. The Malleus had been landed close by, and over they had come in the testudo. Aside from the rover tracks back to the ship, this Mars, in this area anyhow—a copy of the ancient landscape of the Terra Cimmeria—looked pristine, to Stef’s eyes. Pristine and untouched, save for this damn Hatch that shouldn’t be here, and the unmanned emplacement around it. Now, holding Mardina’s arm, Stef walked over to the Hatch itself.

It was just another emplacement, a rectangular plate marked with the circular seam of the Hatch itself, the surface blank and featureless, in another kernel field. Just like the one she’d first been brought to on Mercury long ago, and in a different history entirely. Just another mundane impossibility.

Already the Malleus crew had loaded into the dome a pile of equipment and supplies, anonymous boxes and trunks under woollen blankets, which Stef briefly inspected. Most obviously, there were none of the Romans’ clumsy, brass-laden, Jules-Verne-type pressure suits. The feeling among the Romans was that the Hatch builders wouldn’t send you somewhere you couldn’t survive. And besides, none of their supplies would last long in a nonhabitable environment. It was all or nothing. There was a stove, however, a compact steel box that would serve as a heater or an oven, a technology the Roman army had developed for campaigns in wintry climes. It was without an obvious fuel source—and Stef was surprised, and somehow appalled, to learn that it was powered by a single kernel, an interstellar miracle of deadly potency stuffed inside a gadget you could dry your socks on.

Stef looked around at the party gathered here in the dome. The ColU was in its pack on the back of Chu Yuen, of course. The other would-be travelers included herself, Clodia, Titus, Mardina—and Ari Guthfrithson, the druidh from Brikanti—and, to everybody’s surprise, Inguill the quipucamayoc from Yupanquisuyu, who had insisted on traveling with them from Hanan Cuzco. Of those who weren’t intending to travel onward through the Hatch, Gnaeus Junius, acting commander of the Malleus, stood by, with his trierarchus Eilidh, others of his crew—and Jiang Youwei.

They all looked at her expectantly.

Stef said, “You all seem to be waiting for me to speak. What, because I’m the oldest? If Quintus Fabius was here, he’d be taking charge, you know, optio.”

Gnaeus Junius shrugged. “I am not Quintus. I wish I were. I only wish to complete this mission.”

“Yes. Unlikely as it seems. It still seems impossible that we can have got those girls out of the clutches of the Incas as we did.”

“But into whose clutches,” Eilidh said, “as you put it, some of us will have to return. After all, we have nowhere else to go in this system save Yupanquisuyu.”

“You will be made welcome,” Inguill said now. “You know about the messages I sent to Cuzco, trying to explain all this… The Inca’s advisers won’t understand it all now, but with time, and your help, and the evidence I’ve left behind, it will make sense. I am sure Quintus Fabius and your companions will be pardoned.”

Eilidh said, “And we can all become good citizens of the Inca empire.”

“There are probably worse fates,” Mardina said. “Look on the bright side. At least you’re too old to become a mummy and stuck on a ledge in the vacuum forever.”

“Nor am I pretty enough,” said Eilidh drily.

“But you, Inguill,” Stef said. “You’re sure you want to come? The rest of us have a personal investment. I have studied Hatches all my adult life. The ColU is—well, it’s on a mission. Besides, we are all already displaced. This history, this Inca Culture, is your home.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps. But you know nothing of the court of Cuzco. The Sapa Inca is a weak boy, and the faction behind him is crumbling. His life expectancy is not long—and nor, as a consequence, is that of his key appointees, such as myself. That’s one reason to try something new.

“And besides, I have been talking to Ari Guthfrithson. Like him, I have become fascinated by the mystery of the Hatches, and whoever it is we build them for. I am seduced, perhaps, by the idea of the power being wielded here. Once, I never imagined any entity could be more powerful than the Sapa Inca. Now…”

Stef studied her, and Ari. “Mardina goes in search of her mother. Beth was only trying to go home, as she saw it. Whereas you, Ari, have abandoned your home, abandoned everything you know, for the sake of this ambition. And you too, Inguill. I’m not sure these are the healthiest reasons for progressing with this. I think I’ll keep an eye on you two.”

“But I go in search of Beth too,” Ari said. “Look—I don’t care what you think of me, Mardina. Yes, I’m just as fascinated by the enigma of the jonbar hinges as Inguill here. I was a druidh, a scholar too, remember. Why, if not for me, none of you might have had the chance to be here at all. You might all have vanished into nonexistence when Earthshine triggered the hinge—”

“Very well,” Mardina said. “You’re forgiven, Father. Just shut up, all right?”

“And you, Jiang,” Stef said. “You’re sure you want to stay?”

He shrugged. “There is more for me here, Stef. Though I feel a loyalty to you, as to your departed sister. Just as these people are the last free Romans in an Inca reality, so I am the last free Xin. I want to find my people. I believe there are colonies in the Yupanquisuyu. I would seek them out.”

“There are worse missions in life,” the ColU said gently.

Gnaeus glanced around. “There’s no reason to delay further.”

Clodia was staring at the Hatch. “And I think it’s ready for us.”

Stef turned to see. The Hatch surface, which had been blank and featureless, was now marked at its rim by a string of indentations: the imprints of human hands.