‘Thank you, Kerys,’ he said dully, and indistinctly, Mardina thought. K-chh-er-yssh. ‘How you enrich my life, Beth Eden Jones. In so many ways.’
‘Maybe you should have stayed away from me in the first place,’ Beth snapped back.
‘Perhaps … but I could not resist. Even from the beginning, when we found your ship, the Tatania. I thought you were so beautiful. And a woman born under the light of a different star, in a different history altogether! That was why I fell in love with you.’
‘You didn’t love me,’ Beth said, and she sounded desolate to Mardina. ‘You loved the idea of me.’
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘It wasn’t like that. After all, we did manage to bridge the vast divergence in our cultures, did we not? For a time at least. We married – or would have, if we could have resolved the legalities. And we had a daughter! Here she is, standing before us. A child who is a product of two different histories.’
Mardina pouted. ‘You make me sound like some exotic cross-breed.’
Penny cackled. ‘True enough. You’re a mongrel, child. A mongrel in space and time.’
Kerys touched Mardina’s hand. ‘Ignore all this, cadet. Where you came from doesn’t determine who you are, and that’s true for any of us.’
Mardina forced a nod. ‘Thank you, nauarchus.’
Ari said now, ‘I have always remained fascinated by the question of your origin, what it means for all of us. And that question has become more urgent in recent years.’
‘Why? What’s changed?’
‘Earthshine,’ Penny said grimly. ‘That’s what.’
‘He is long established on Mars,’ Ari said. ‘He could not be dislodged, even if we tried, I believe. And for years he’s been moving Höd, a tremendous mass, around our planetary system. Of course he has a stated objective to bring Höd to Mars, to use its substance to enrich that planet. It was always going to take years, decades, to nudge such a huge body into the correct trajectory. But now he’s stopped filing reports to the Navy on the burns he directs the crews to make, the trajectory adjustments. The crew managing the kernel banks, driving the thing in its slow approach to Mars, are nominally Navy, but it’s become clear their loyalty has drifted to Earthshine. He seems to have promised them extraordinary wealth, power, on a transformed Mars of the future. As a result we can no longer predict the path of Höd, not in precise detail. This creature has accrued extraordinary power over us, in just a few decades. And you brought him here—’
‘You released him,’ Penny pointed out.
‘Some of us who remember the old faiths think he is Loki returned,’ Ari said with a smile distorted by his injuries. ‘Loki, on the loose among the planets, and planning a devastating trick.’
Beth shook her head at that. ‘I don’t think he would see it that way. I heard him talk about those old legends – as they existed in our timeline anyhow. He sees himself as opposing Loki.’
Kerys frowned. ‘That’s interesting. And to him, who is Loki?’
Penny said, ‘The Hatch builders, of course. Whoever gave us the kernels. Whoever’s meddling with our history.’
Ari said, ‘mythic monsters aside, it is Earthshine’s actions that have motivated me to dig deeper into this question of the adjusted histories. Because this was the origin of Earthshine, this extraordinary threat.’ He glanced at Penny. ‘Whether you were prepared to cooperate with my investigations or not.’
Penny smiled, a tired old-lady smile, Mardina thought.
Ari said, ‘What intrigued me particularly about Penny’s own account was not the great leap across realities that she seems to have made aboard the Tatania. It was the smaller, subtler adjustment that she suffered in her own personal history, when a Hatch was first opened on Mercury. An odd case. Nothing but a twist to a personal history.
‘But what is interesting to me was that Penny and her sister managed to find evidence of that limited history change. I mean, other than the memory of Stef Kalinski, who remembered a previous life without a sister. Physical evidence, their mother’s grave marker in Lutetia Parisiorum – or the equivalent city in Penny’s reality – bearing an inscription that mentioned Stef alone, and not the sister. Do you see? A scrap, a trace left behind by an adjustment that was evidently – untidy. Well, with that as a lead, it occurred to me that perhaps, given we have evidence of at least two of these history changes, this world of ours might contain evidence of others. Why not?’
Beth said, ‘And you’ve been looking?’
‘I have. I began a search of archives, of reports from historians and archaeologists. Looking for evidence of structures, documents, even mere inscriptions that might not fit the accepted history. But I soon found I was not working alone.’ And he looked again at Penny.
Penny smiled. ‘Guilty as charged. Now it can be told. I always had an ulterior motive when I set up my Academy of Saint Jonbar. Yes, I taught them mathematics, physics, as per my charter. But I always ran other classes too. History, for example. I claimed that I was using those courses as much to educate myself about your history as the students. But I always tried to make the students think about other possibilities – counterfactuals. Which is an English word that has now been adopted into your language. I see it pop up in scholarly articles.’
‘Yes,’ Kerys said drily. ‘Along with much speculation about the identity of Saint Jonbar.’
‘Who never existed,’ Penny admitted. ‘Not even in my own reality. It’s a term from popular culture, from fiction. A jonbar hinge is a point where history pivots – where the path forks. Well, I always hoped that I would create at least a few bright young scholars who would be predisposed to work in this area. And to look for the kind of evidence Ari describes. We haven’t yet succeeded—’
‘But I have,’ Ari said.
Mardina was no scholar, and usually hated all talk of Before, especially on such a day as this. But she found all this vaguely exciting. ‘It’s like a mystery story.’
Ari smiled at his daughter. ‘It is, isn’t it? And what’s really exciting is that, in time, I found some clues.’
‘Clues?’
‘Not on land, but suitably, for a seafaring nation, under the oceans. Mardina, could you please pass my satchel?’
Penny grumbled, ‘About time you got to the point, druidh.’ She shuffled over to see better.
The satchel contained maps that Ari spread out over the Deputy Prefect’s table. He held his bandage to his mouth, but even so a few spots of bloodied saliva spattered on the parchments.
‘These show coastlines and oceans, as you can see,’ he said, gesturing. ‘It’s well known that the levels of the oceans have risen since, say, the time of Kartimandia. We have historical accounts of inundations and land abandonments, and everybody is familiar with drowned settlements off the modern shores – not least in Pritanike, where vast swathes of land have been lost. But this is true all around the world. In recent centuries the archaeologists have turned their interest to such remains, and have commissioned Navy vessels to support them in their research.
‘Now, in addition to the towns and roads and so forth that we expected to find, given what we read of them in the historical accounts, we have also mapped some much more enigmatic structures, further out from shore. Naturally these are difficult to explore and map—’
‘Spare us your scholarly caution,’ Kerys said. ‘Show us.’
‘The most striking remains are in the Seas of Xin, and in the ocean off our own north-east shore, the Mare Germanicum …’
Mardina and the rest, including Penny who hobbled over with Jiang’s help, crowded around the maps. Mardina saw structures in the offshore oceans, sketched by hand on the printed maps: what looked like tremendous walls, dykes, canals, and what might have been town plans of a particularly stylised kind, concentric circles cut through by radial passages.