Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe (20 page)

LuSi said carefully, ‘Some people think that adds to the authenticity of the Backstory. I mean, the story of the Ark. The crew must have come far; maybe they could go no further, and had to stop here, however imperfect the world is, however inadequate the Ember.’

The Jennin snorted dismissively. ‘That’s not what I brought you here to see.’
 

‘I know,’ LuSi said. ‘It’s just like the starship yards at home. You argue that there is no need for a human Backstory to include evidence of a vanished alien civilisation.’

‘Well, why should it?’

She faced him. ‘You say you want me to argue with my mother over her interpretation. But she has evidence on her side. At least for the consistency of the Backstory, the logic of the Sim. For instance, the very existence of mankind on the many worlds of the Bubble. How could we have got there if a ship didn’t deliver us?’

‘Oh, there are plenty of secondary colonies. We know that. But the primary worlds, including Airtree, Windru, Urthen - mankind arose separately on all these worlds. Convergent evolution. Our form is in some sense optimal for sentient, tool-wielding creatures.’

‘But it’s not just mankind. What about the Human Suite? That’s what the ecologists call it, isn’t it?’

‘Go on. What is the Human Suite?’

‘The creatures on which we rely, the grasses, the animals. Things we eat, or that can eat us. They are always to be found on human worlds – even though we have to share every world with other forms of life. Some quite unlike ours.’

‘So what? So on each world there has been a multiple origin of life – more than one tree of life. Why not? Why should the initiation of life be unique? And as for the Human Suite – convergent evolution, once again. What else?’

‘There’s the fact that the human worlds share elements of culture. Similarities of language, we all speak something like Anglish. We even use time measures like Years and Days that have nothing to do with the turn and spin periods of a world like ours -’

‘All probably imposed by the Xaians in their ideological fervour, much more recently than the flight of any Ark from a proto-world. Certainly that’s a much simpler explanation, and one based on an event we
know
happened, from the surviving records.’ The Jennin leaned forward. ‘Look, child. I’m not expecting you to swallow my arguments today. Or ever, even. I just believe that your mother needs a countering voice.
 

‘Her pet theory, and the theological orthodoxy on this world and many others - that we are all trapped in some artificial reality - is deadening for the human spirit. The standard Backstory, about the drowning primary world, the Ark, only reinforces the idea. On the other hand the notion that the universe is just as it seems, that humanity evolved independently on all these habitable worlds, is actually simpler; we don’t
need
an elaborate secret history to explain it all ... If the Backstory is confirmed by your mother, the whole Sim hypothesis is strengthened too. Your mother is never going to be convinced by the likes of me, but at least she needs a counter-voice. She must be made to work hard to convince others, no matter what she finds out there among the stars. And that’s what I want of you, LuSi – to be that counter-voice ...’

‘Or,’ JaEm said, reading a note scrolling on a comms screen, ‘you could do that job yourself, father.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The university has just made an announcement. It is a big project, after all; the journey will take at least a century, there and back. They want a presence on board, to ensure their objectives are met. The College of Zaens is apparently going to mandate it.’

‘Mandate
what
? ... Oh. My presence on the ship?’

‘You’re going to the stars too.’ JaEm grinned at LuSi. ‘And so are we.’

They couldn’t resist it. They flung themselves at each other and embraced.

The Jennin groaned and rubbed his face. ‘Serves me right. Be careful what you wish for, in case you get it. I bet
that
saying is as old as mankind itself ...’

It took another year before the great starship
Reality Dreams
was ready to cross the interstellar gulf.
 

It took fourteen more years to achieve that crossing.

LuSi and JaEm were together on the ship; in the course of the journey they were even married. Thanks to their advanced anti-senescence science, the people of Urthen were long-lived; only a fraction of their potential lifetimes was expended.

But still, by the time the ship reached Airtree, its first destination, their youth was gone.

II

After the battle was done, the Speaker of Speakers paused by the small field hospital that tended to the wounded, and reassured the dying that death was not an end, merely a return to the frozen patterns of thoughts in the greater Memory of the Sim ...

‘Earth III’, Chapter IX

The starship
Reality Dreams
settled into orbit around Airtree.
 

Shuttles, approved by the local authority, came up from the ground to transport down the passengers. Blocky winged craft powered by fission rockets for the ascent, and essentially gliders for the re-entry and landing, these were elderly, well-worn craft, beaten up by multiple flights to the edge of space. JaEm, who had devoted his life aboard the
Reality Dreams
to space engineering, looked faintly appalled at the sight of them.

But LuSi knew this was what they had to expect. Airtree was ruled by a single government, as it had been through most of its history: a theocracy built around the cult of the Sim Controllers. The theocracy was rich, but its world was technologically backward, relatively.

Even the slightly grander craft that was to transport Zaen SheLu, the Jennin PiRo, and their children LuSi and Jaem, plastered with heat-resistant tiles and holy symbols, was old and shabby and smelled faintly of urine. LuSi settled in grimly beside JaEm; nearly thirty years old now, and after fourteen years in the cavernous interior of the starship, she felt a twinge of apprehension as the shuttle parted from its lock with a rattle of opening latches.
 

Before making their descent they completed a high-inclination orbital loop around the planet, and LuSi was able to make out the main features of this world, fixing them against the maps she had studied in the years before their arrival. Like Urthen, Airtree orbited close in to its sun, so that a single hemisphere faced the light. The illuminated face was a muddle of ocean and land, and LuSi could make out great concentric bands of vegetation types surrounding the subsolar point, green fading to brown or grey, swathes of forest or grasslands or crops, or even surviving scraps of native life, she supposed, adapted to the particular conditions of light and climate dictated by the unchanging altitude of the sun in the sky. The far side, perpetually dark, seemed wholly abandoned, although history texts told of how it had been partially colonised thanks to the reflected glow of some alien technology in space, an ancient gift smashed up by the Xaians.

And above all this, LuSi saw
Reality Dreams
, patiently following its own orbit. The starship was an engineered asteroid, a bubble of glass and ice that shone green from within, like a tremendous jewel; it looked more like a small moon than a ship. It was a miracle of the ancient warp technology that had driven the ship between the stars that in flight this huge bulk was
folded away
out of spacetime into a higher dimension, so that only a warp bubble the size of a sand grain protruded into the mundane cosmic stratum. LuSi longed with all her heart to be back aboard the ship, with JaEm, in the home they had built together, with their work, their slates and models, their friends. But she knew, too, that that was a symptom of her long interstellar confinement; she was like a released prisoner longing to be locked up again.
 

Light flared beyond the cabin windows, and the ride grew briefly bumpier, the air thickening, turbulent. When the plasma glow faded, the starry sky had been replaced by a violet blue, the stars were obscured, and the starship was lost to LuSi’s view. She reached out for JaEm’s hand.

Speaker Tanz Vlov, sitting opposite them, observed this. This Airtree native, compact, shaven-headed, had been sent up in the shuttle to be their escort to the ground. Like many of his people, from a world of sterner gravity than Urthen, he was short by the standards LuSi was used to, but not exceptionally so. Despite his drab clerical garb he was a cheery, irreverent man who appeared about forty, but since anti-ageing treatments were available on this world, at least to the ruling elite, that was no real guide. Now Vlov smiled. ‘You look nostalgic.’ He spoke the Urthen tongue - or their own particular dialect of Anglish depending on how you classified it - well but with a heavy accent. ‘You miss your ship.’

‘It is our home,’ LuSi said. ‘Has been since we were both teenagers.’

‘Your home? You are married, yes? You have children?’

‘Not yet,’ JaEm said. ‘Perhaps in the next phase of the journey. Which will take another thirty years, nearly, to Windru.’

Vlov whistled. ‘Thirty more years, in a big enclosed machine. Strange to think of it.’

Jennin PiRo leaned forward, past his son. ‘It shouldn’t be strange. Not to you. This world is the capital of the Creed of the Sim! You’re a Speaker, senior in the faith. You believe that
everything
is an artefact – even the physical world, even the stars, all a dream stored in some vast machine’s frozen Memory. What is life in a starship but a metaphor for that? It should seem familiar to you ...’

LuSi was used to this kind of goading from the Jennin. Vlov’s reaction seemed to be a commonsense one; he winked at her, and grinned. ‘Of course nothing is real. But the Sim Controllers created us for a purpose, a purpose expressed through how we live our lives. And we must live those lives as if it
were
all real. What else is there to do?’

LuSi’s mother, meanwhile, was entirely uninterested in the conversation. SheLu was dressed in her own world’s version of clerical garb, the plain steel-grey robe of a Zaen, a priest of the Sim, and her hair, while not shaven close, was cut short and neat. She was in her sixties now but her ageing treatments had preserved her at around thirty; seeing her in the unfamiliar light of this new world, LuSi saw how her skin was just a little too taut, her eyes a little too clear.
 

She peered out of the small window beside her seat, as the shuttle banked and turned in the air. In the ocean beneath was an island, the largest of a chain, a speck of land directly under the suspended star. The shuttle dipped low over this, heading north towards the shore of a continent called Seba, where they would make landfall.
 

‘And that is the island you call the Navel?’

Vlov didn’t need to look to see. ‘At the Substellar, yes. Just like Urthen, from what I hear, our world huddles close to its sun, which is a small, cool star – as stars go, anyhow. But at least it is a star! I can’t imagine living in a sky full of a big fat gassy bag of a
planet
...’

‘There is a monument,’ murmured SheLu. ‘On the island. But it is a mighty wreck.’

So it was, LuSi saw, when she got a chance to look. The island seen from above was a scarred mass of docks, dwellings, temples and pathways, all centred on a tremendous pillar – a pillar that was smashed, melted in places, with great fallen blocks larger than some of the buildings at its feet.

‘The work of the Xaian Normalisation,’ SheLu guessed.

‘Yes,’ said Vlov. ‘Once it was called the Eye. The monument itself was Substrate. Which is what we call the relics of an older technology found by humans on this world when they arrived.’

JaEm asked, ‘Older?’

His father said dryly, ‘Alien.’

‘We had nothing which could scar it, break it. We could build on top of it, or around it, and so we did. It is said that the Xaians used a starship drive to dismantle such features, here, at the Antistellar, at the Poles, even in orbit.’

SheLu shuddered. ‘Warp technology brought to a planet’s surface. What barbarism.’

‘Before the Xaians came, the monument was dedicated to the veneration of the Sim Controllers.’

‘But if that’s so,’ PiRo said, ‘why would the Controllers not simply reverse the damage and restore the monument? It would take only a Word, after all.’

Vlov, unperturbed, just grinned. ‘But the pilgrims continue to come here even so. Perhaps the wreckage adds another layer of lustre, of romance. The Controllers don’t need to fix it, you see. It works fine just as it is.’

PiRo stared at him, and laughed. ‘There you have it, Zaen SheLu. Why do we never see any signs that the Controllers intervene in their Sim? Because they choose not to. A perfectly closed and irrefutable argument!’

‘If you say so,’ SheLu murmured, indifferent. LuSi thought she heard her mother mutter prayers to the Controllers as the shuttle began its final approach.

Much of this world chimed with echoes of LuSi’s home planet.
 

They landed near the shore of a continent called Seba, which in Urthen lore was the name of one of the giants who built the Ark. The landing facility was close to a city called New Denv, a name not so terribly far from Denva, the legendary home of the Sim Designers. Then they were transported to the largest coastal town, near the southern coast of Seba, called Port Wils. It stood on a mighty river of the same name. The name Wils was like a half-remembered fragment of the story of the Son of the giants who had extracted the Ship’s Law from the Will, the semi-incarnate purpose of the Designers themselves.
 

Maybe all this did reflect some common origin, of a star-scattered mankind, LuSi wondered. Or maybe it was all an artefact of the great cultural smearing-out delivered by the Xaian Normalisation in the course of its hugely destructive rampage across the Bubble. Or maybe it really was an artefact of the world’s nature as a simulation, with these common elements being used and reused by the Designers on one world after another – their signatures, some speculated. One thing was sure; all this needed a deeper explanation than Jaem’s father’s austere but supremely rational notions of evolutionary convergence.