Ultima
by Stephen Baxter
To all my extended family
In the heart of a hundred billion worlds—
Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse—
In the chthonic silence—
There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.
But time was short, and ever shorter.
In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.
Part One
1
AD 2227; AUC (Ab urbe condita, After the Founding of the City) 2980
“Danger, Yuri Eden! Danger!”
“ColU? What’s the emergency? Another Prox flare? We need to get to the shelter.”
“Be calm, Yuri Eden. You are no longer on Per Ardua.”
“Beth. Beth and Mardina. Where—”
“Your daughter and her mother are far from here.”
“Far?… Are they safe?”
“That I cannot tell you, Yuri Eden. We must carry on in the presumption that they are.”
“So why did you yell ‘danger’ in my ear?”
“It was the only way to wake you, Yuri Eden. The drugs the medicus has been prescribing for you are rather random in their effects, although they are satisfactorily strong.”
“So you lied, right? Since when was an autonomous colonization unit programmed to lie?”
“I fear I have exceeded the parameters of my initial programming rather extensively by now, Yuri Eden.”
“You know, I feel like I’m blundering down a dark corridor. And I open one door after another, trying to make sense of it all. But I’m safe when I’m asleep…”
“Take your time, Yuri Eden.”
“Medicus. That word… I’m still on that damn Roman tub, aren’t I?”
“We are still guests aboard the Malleus Jesu, yes.”
“And—ow!”
“The medicus would advise you not to try to sit up, Yuri Eden.”
“When I sleep, I forget. The crap growing inside me. I forget it all.”
“It’s still here. But so am I, my friend. So am I. Here with you.”
“Well, I can see that. So why the hell did you wake me?”
“You asked me to. Well, to be precise, you asked me to witness and record your last will and testament. I can do that for you. But you have been asleep many hours, Yuri Eden. I thought it best to wake you before—”
“Before the time comes when I never wake up at all, right?”
“It was Stef Kalinski’s suggestion.”
“Ha! It would be. How is she, by the way?”
“The last time I communicated with her she was drinking hardened legionaries under the table. Anything to get the taste of the Romans’ disgusting fish sauce out from between her teeth. That is close to a direct quotation.”
“She’ll outlive us all. Her and her impossible twin, probably.”
“I hope to learn that someday. Yuri Eden, we must press on—”
“Before I pass out again. It’s OK, old pal. May I have a glass of water?”
“Of course…”
“So. My last will and testament. What kind of legal form can we use that will be recognizable in the Roman system? Whatever the hell that is, two thousand years after the Empire was supposed to have fallen. It’s not as if I have much to leave to anybody anyhow. Only the stuff we walked through that final Hatch with.”
“Including myself.”
“Including yourself, buddy. It’s strange to think of you as property but I guess that’s how it is.”
“I am only an AI, Yuri Eden. And in this… different reality… human beings are property, some of them. Some even on this interstellar vessel. So I am less of an exception than you would imagine here. We cannot change such things, Yuri Eden.”
“Maybe not. But my instructions are clear enough. If Stef survives me, my share of you, in the Romans’ eyes, is to go to her. If she doesn’t survive me, you go to Beth, on Earth, if by some miracle you can find her.”
“Quintus Fabius has promised me he will make sure of it, Yuri Eden, with the support of the legion’s collegia.”
“So, let’s begin. I was born in 2067, old style. Getting on for a hundred and sixty years ago, then. Even though I have only lived—”
“Sixty-two years, Yuri. The name your parents gave you—”
“Is irrelevant. I was born in North Britain. My parents were both members of the Heroic Generation, who struggled to save the world from the climate Jolts of the previous decades. Well, they succeeded. And before the prosecutors caught up with them, they had me cryo-frozen at age nineteen. Just as well they never saw me revived on Mars, a century later.”
“Your name, though…”
“Some joker called me ‘Yuri’ when they hauled me out of the cryo tank.”
“Very well. And after a year on Mars—”
“I was caught up in an ISF sweep, with a little help from the Peacekeepers at Eden. Who were sorry to see me go.”
“You are being sarcastic.”
“Yeah, flag it. Found myself waking up again, aboard the ISF ship Ad Astra. A kernel-driven interstellar hulk full of press-ganged losers like me. I made myself popular once more…
“So I spent—what, twenty-four years?—on Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri. With Mardina Jones, and our baby Beth, and you, ColU. Struggling to stay alive. We found others, other ‘colonists’ stranded as we had been, and we fought our way to the Hub of the world, the substellar. There we found— ”
“A Hatch.”
“A step through, just that, and we were back on planet Mercury, across four light-years. So, everything changed yet again, for humanity, for me. I had taken Mardina and Beth home, and that’s where they stayed…”
“But you couldn’t stay with them.”
“For me, it was go back to Ardua, or face jail. So, back to Ardua it was, with Stef Kalinski at my side. Who has her own issues with all of this, by the way.”
“Are you tiring, Yuri Eden?”
“Don’t fuss, ColU. I hate it when you fuss. Back to the story. So, on Ardua, the UN started to clamp down, just like it had in the solar system, because war was brewing up. A war to be fought with kernel-powered ships, over the lodes of kernels on Mercury…”
“Yuri Eden?”
“Still here, ColU.”
“Do you remember how we drove to the antistellar point? The darkest, coldest place on Per Ardua, in the deepest shadow of Proxima. Where we found, among other mysteries, another Hatch.”
“Yes, the Hatch. And we stepped through, Stef and I, and you. We found ourselves under the light of another star. And there was a man, in a cloak and a helmet, striding toward us…”
Quid estis?
“Yes. Do you remember, Yuri Eden?”
Quid agitis in hac provincia?…
2
AD 2222; AUC 2975
The intruders at the Hatch emplacement were first spotted by sharp-eyed Arab navigators aboard the Malleus Jesu. In their quiet chambers aboard the interstellar craft circling high above this world, the Arabs, doubling as observers and mapmakers here at the destination, routinely scrutinized the area around the Hatch through their farwatchers. The newly minted Hatch was the key objective of the mission, after all, and deserved surveillance and protection.
And now Centurion Quintus Fabius himself was in the air, on the way to investigate.