Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manda and the warriors of the guard touched their weapons.
 

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

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

‘Not as far as I could see.’

‘Then restrain him.’

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

Manda paused, uncertain.
 

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

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

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

And a dull crump echoed from the cliff face.

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

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

Chan laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

Chan retched.
 

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

‘Proving he’s a liar,’ Manda said.
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manda howled like a dog. ‘North?’

‘North!’

VI

‘Earth II is unstable.’

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

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

And Xaia was not yet home.

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

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

‘Because the world is unstable?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘It wobbles.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Go on where? … Never mind.’

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

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

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

‘The Dead.’

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

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

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

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