Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe (24 page)

‘Oh, don’t lecture me about scientific methods, you ninny. You always were such a silly girl, so easily distracted.’

‘Mother, by the Ember’s slow fade, I’m in my sixties now -’

‘One can generalise. One can use sophisticated statistical methods to form and test rigorous hypotheses from the most limited data sets. Of course a single clinching piece of evidence, to prove or disprove a notion, is best. But ...’ More coughing. ‘Consider this,’ she gasped. ‘We have mapped the subsurface; that’s one data set that is complete. We see what look like continental masses scattered over this world, all of them drowned, of course.’

‘I know. I’ve seen the charts.’

‘We even see evidence of continental drift, the million-Year creep of the land, driven by this world’s inner heat.’

‘Just as on Urthen,’ LuSi said reluctantly.

‘Just as on Urthen. We have taken samples of the assemblages of life, animals, plants and bacteria on each landmass.’

‘Again, necessarily limited.’

‘Yes, and also compromised by the actions of the technological civilisation which evidently prospered here before the water’s rise. Everything mixed up. And not helped either by the subsequent Years of drowning, and the action of the sharp teeth of the ocean.
 

‘But what we
have
been able to reconstruct, to some degree, has been the pattern of the evolution of life on this world. Evolution marred by extinctions, some of them evidently caused by external causes – a flaring of that big sun, perhaps, an impact from one of the big rocks that litter this untidy system. There were even extinctions caused by the collision of continents, one suite of creatures flooding over a land bridge to compete with another.’

‘Oh, this is all so partial -’

‘Do listen, child. Now, it’s well known that on every world that humanity settles, an extinction event among the native life forms inevitably follows. If must be so. If not, the world is abandoned as uninhabitable. Here too, on this world, we see traces of
recent
extinctions. Complex affairs that bear the hallmarks of human-induced events, as opposed to natural causes – the removal of most animals larger than human mass, for instance; a uniform spreading of certain scavenger creatures.’

‘That could be explained if this world was colonised from the stars before it was flooded.’

‘No! The timing is wrong. Here, as far as the best evidence shows, the extinction pattern was
deep in time
– it lasted as long before the flood as has elapsed since the flood. Don’t you see? Don’t you see, girl?’

‘I’m no girl -’

Again the coughing, but SheLu forced the words out. ‘The extinction was not all at once. It spread across this world in spasms. The pattern is just as if humanity had
evolved
on this world. Had developed the capability over hundreds, thousands of Years to compete with, eliminate, consume, other species. Had spread from landmass to landmass, island to island – spreading by ships on the ocean, most likely, it wouldn’t be like Urthen, like the worlds of the Bubble, where humanity fell suddenly from the sky. They would have pushed an extinction wave ahead of them wherever them went, an eerie forerunning of the story of human colonisation of the Bubble played out on the stage of a single world. But here, all of this occurred on a planet in which there was no alien life to push aside – the extinctions occurred within the Human Suite itself.’

‘Just as one would expect if this were the original world of mankind.’

‘Precisely. You understand at last.’

SheLu grunted, irritated. ‘Those are strong claims, mother. You will need strong evidence to back them up.’

‘That will come, that will come. To date, certainly, I have found nothing to contradict the hypothesis ...’

Without warning, the swimmer in its tank lunged. That sleek body hurtled out of the water, and a small skull, an open mouth ringed with sharp teeth, strained at the women.
 

LuSi grabbed her mother and pulled her back. For an instant, as the creature reached the top of its arc, spraying water, its face was directly before LuSi’s: a low brow, small skull, clear blue eyes, a flattened nose, a very human mouth despite the sharp teeth, and long sleek hair washed back in a streamlined pattern. It was like a child’s face, LuSi thought, a malevolent, malformed child, a thing out of a nightmare.
 

She thought she saw bloody scraps of meat stuck in those sharp teeth. She remembered the classic folk definition of the Human Suite:
whatever you can eat, or can eat you, is in the Suite
. Hello, cousin, she thought.

Then the sleek, fat-laden body fell back into the tank. With a shudder of disgust LuSi pulled a lever to release the thing back into its world ocean.

There was a flare in the sky, a crack like thunder. Tanz’s shuttle, coming down from the moon.
 

And Zaen SheLu collapsed, almost falling into the tank, after the swimmer. LuSi yelled for help.

The shuttle, which had been modified for the special conditions of this water world, landed on the ocean surface on skis.
 

By the time the spaceplane had drawn up to the raft it was mid-morning, and the weather had closed in; a huge storm was crackling on the western horizon, and the black boiling clouds were coming ever closer.
 

SheLu, at her own insistence, was still out in the open, sitting in a chair bolted to the raft’s deck, facing the churning sea. She was hooked up to a medical support machine, connected by wires and tubes. A nurse stood by, a young man, who periodically gave her oxygen through a mask. Other crew were setting up a shelter to protect SheLu from the weather.

Tanz Vlov clambered off the shuttle and over a short gangplank onto the raft. Vlov was huddled up in a waterproof coat, and he walked with difficulty across the deck in the wind. He carried something, a small parcel, clutched against his chest.
 

LuSi waited for him in the shelter of one of the more substantial buildings on the raft’s back.
 

When Tanz joined LuSi he said, shouting over the storm, ‘I have something to show you.’

‘To show me?’

‘And your mother. Something from the moon ...’ In the shelter of the building he shook his head, splashing drops of water. ‘By the Designers’ balls, the storms on this world are meaner than a Xaian with a grudge. Does it have to be this way?’

‘My mother says so. Something to do with the loss of weathering from the land ...’
 

It was a question of nutrients, SheLu had said. Life in any ocean – at least, Human Suite life – needed certain nutrients, calcium, silicon, phosphorus. On a world with continents and islands - dry land, like Urthen - such nutrients could be provided by the weathering of the land, the washing away of crumbled rock into the sea. On this world, when the seas rose, that mechanism was lost, quite suddenly, and there must have been a mass extinction, on the drowning land, and then in the sea. But as the percentage of oxygen in the air diminished and carbon dioxide accumulated, so the air and ocean grew warmer, trapping heat energy from the sun. All that energy was expressed in tremendous storms. And the storms churned up deep-lying sediments in the ocean, stirring up the nutrients needed for life.
 

‘So the great wheel turned once more. All living worlds seek balance,’ SheLu had said. ‘A mix of mass and energy flows that optimises the potential for life, to some degree. Here, on Urth I, when the land was drowned, there must have been extinctions. Even now the world may not be as fecund as it once was. But the storminess is one mechanism by which the great cycles of life are sustained. It’s not comfortable for us, but that’s a detail; this world, though it may have birthed mankind, is no longer
for
us ...’

‘It’s a lovely idea,’ LuSi said now, with some regret, looking over at the still form of her mother. ‘Just a shame it means it has to rain the whole time.’

Tanz glanced at SheLu. ‘She’s declining, right?’

‘Very quickly. Her systems are failing, from her eyesight to her heart. The medics are running around in a panic, but they’ve never seen anything like this before. We’re lucky to have that guy – his name’s Stabil – he once did some voluntary work in a shanty town back home, where they couldn’t afford anti-ageing; at least he’s used to the manifestations of old age. But he’s not so keen to be out in this weather.’

‘Neither am I. And neither are you,’ Tanz said acutely. ‘But you’re here for her, right?’

LuSi shrugged. ‘She may not have long. She insists on staying out here, even if it’s ending up costing her life. I resent it all, more than I can say,’ she flared now. ‘My whole life’s been pulled to pieces because of
her
ambition. She doesn’t fear death, by the way. It’s the Creed. She believes she will merely be returning to Memory. That’s what she tells me, anyhow. But now that’s she’s actually dying -’

‘You need to be near her.’

‘Not need. Duty. In case there’s anything more she wants to say.’

‘Umm. Or if there’s anything more you want to say to her.’ And he held up his package.
 

Wrapped in a thermal blanket, she saw it was small, the size of a data slate maybe, evidently rectangular but curved, like a fragment of hull plate maybe.
 

‘Less of the mystery, Vlov. What is this?’

‘We had a look around. Up on the moon. Nobody expected to find anything except geology, not on a rock ball like that. The expeditions were really to give the crew some time out of the ship. Recreation rather than serious exploration. But -’

‘You found something,’ she guessed wildly. ‘Human traces.’

‘Six sites with human traces, yes. All on the near side. A few more robotic. I say “robots”; there was no sign of real artificial intelligence. Gadgets, really. It was all incredibly primitive. I mean, chemical rockets for propulsion! They could only have come from within this system. This world, presumably.’

‘Six sites.’

‘There was a major impact in the centre of the near side, quite recently. A lot of splashed debris, rays; all the sites were covered over to an extent. And then you’ve got ten thousand Years of micrometeorite rain on top of that. It would take a team of archaeologists to reconstruct it all.’

‘But the explorers were humans, from this world.’

‘Oh, yes.
And this world must have been the first.
That’s what the moon evidence indicates. We checked the databases; nowhere else in the Bubble has human technology fallen back to levels as primitive as this.
This
was the world where humans rose, the first place they set out from, riding rockets that must have been little more than flying fuel tanks,’ and he shuddered. ‘Your mother must be right. And we found this, at one of the sites. Strapped to what looked like a lander leg.’ He handed her his parcel.

She unwrapped it carefully. The object was a plaque, engraved steel, pitted by micro-impacts, the images and lettering clear.
 

Tanz pointed. ‘These two circles here. We think they’re maps of this world.’

‘Yes.’ In fact LuSi recognised the continents from SheLu’s mapping. Here they were, two hemispheres side by side. ‘This was how the world must have looked before it drowned. My mother, you know, thinks that “Denva”, the headquarters of the Sim Designers, must correspond to a city on this world, long drowned. A speck on one of these continents, perhaps on higher ground. And this lettering -’

‘It’s very archaic, but we were able to reconstruct some of it
.
We can even make out some of the words. Your mother would be able to work this through better than we could, but this looks like proto-Anglish to us. I mean, the theoretically predicted root language from which all the tongues of the Bubble are derived. And some of these words look like terms the linguists have reconstructed by working their way back down the family tree of languages. Very common terms, and so enduring. Look: “Here.” “Men.” “Foot.” “Peace.” Actually we’re not sure of the meaning of that last one.’

‘“Earth,” it says. Urth?’

‘Maybe. Some of it we’ll probably never reconstruct. What was a “Nix-on”? ...’

The storm was abating now. As the weather lifted, SheLu seemed to wake, to stir. She moaned, lifted her head, raised a bony hand.

‘I need to go to her,’ LuSi said.

‘I know.’
 

He accompanied her as she walked across the deck, to her mother.
 

LuSi cradled the plaque against her chest. The bit of ancient steel smelled faintly of burning, as the patina of a surface exposed to vacuum for thousands of Years reacted with the oxygen in the air. ‘My mother wanted some crucial, convincing bit of proof,’ she said. ‘Either that mankind did
not
originate on this world. Or -’

‘Or that we did. It will probably never be possible to prove that beyond doubt. Well, not without Years of undersea archaeology. But for the layman -’

‘This plaque will be pretty convincing.’
 

They slowed as they neared SheLu.

Tanz was studying her. ‘You’re thinking of
not giving it to her
, aren’t you? But this may be your only chance to show her, to validate what she’s done.’

‘I know,’ LuSi said. The conflict in her head was almost paralysing her; it was physically hard to keep walking towards her mother, at the water’s edge. ‘But – what if she
is
validated? What will that do to humanity? I’ve come to believe Jennin PiRo was right, you know. And not just because he was JaEm’s father. The idea that humanity was born on a hundred worlds, scattered among the stars, is –
healthy
. Healthier than this, the idea that we all stem from this one place, this dead and diseased world that rejected us. Even if it is the kind of Backstory a Sim Designer might dream up.’
 

‘This isn’t the only evidence, LuSi. There is all the archaeology buried under this global ocean.’

‘Which will take generations to recover, even if this place is ever visited again. By which time we may be in a healthier state, culturally.’

‘And the plaque’s not the only relic, up on the moon.’