Ari let them look. ‘We call this the “Drowned Culture”. It seems to have been a global technology, if not actually a global civilisation – perhaps there were rival empires of a similar level of development, as there are in our world today.’
‘Interesting terminology,’ Penny said. ‘Cultures. Perhaps our own history, then, was the UN-China Culture … The town plans are intriguing, if you study them, as I have. You find the same motif of circles and bars everywhere. Here to the east of the Xin mainland. Here, between Pritanike and Jutland. The “towns”, incidentally, are not systems of roads and walls but mostly extensive systems of drainage ditches and other flood-control measures – just as the Romans have built in Belgica and Germania Inferior, for example. Ways to save the land from the sea, or even to reclaim it once flooded. This seems to have been a civilisation that resisted the sea-level rise, long before that rise even reached the coastlines known to our ancients.’
‘That circle-and-bar motif,’ Penny said. ‘It reminds me of something. Youwei, could you fetch my bag?’
Kerys said, ‘I don’t see why this is so exciting. So here is a culture that evidently vanished, drowned, long before the rise of Brikanti or Rome, the traces lost under the rising sea.’
‘But it’s not as simple as that,’ Ari said, looking pleased with himself. ‘We took a closer look. The Navy teams even sent down divers. They found evidence of war. Bomb craters and burning and the like. These communities seem to have ended in a catastrophic global conflict. For we can date such things, you see, with a little ingenuity, by looking at the thickness of the marine deposits laid down over the ruins in the centuries since—’
‘Yes, yes,’ Kerys said irritably. ‘Just tell us.’
‘The problem is the date, you see. The date of their terrible war. It occurred in the twenty-first century.’
Penny stared. ‘You Brikanti use the Roman calendar.’ She glanced at Beth. ‘That’s the fourteenth century by our timeline.’
Ari pursed his lips. ‘You see the problem? Our own history is robust and complete, a heavily documented and multiply sourced account. This builds on an unbroken tradition of literacy that reaches back three millennia, if not more. There is no mention of walls and cities in the Mare Germanicum a thousand years after Kartimandia and Claudius – certainly no account of a devastating war in the twenty-first century. Xin scholars make similar observations. Here, then, is a set of evidence that does not fit into the history we know. There was another world, dominated by this Drowned Culture, which ended in a terrible war, and somehow our history was – recast—’
‘And not just yours,’ Penny Kalinski said. She was rummaging ineffectually in her bag. ‘Where is that damn slate?’
Mardina looked around the room, at her mother, at Jiang, even Kerys – at stunned faces. She touched Kerys’s arm and whispered, ‘Nauarchus …’
‘Yes, cadet?’
‘Everybody seems amazed by all this. But it’s just a bunch of old ruins under the ocean, isn’t it? What difference does it make?’
Kerys looked at her curiously, almost fondly. ‘Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.’
‘I’ve seen this before,’ Penny said now, still searching her bag. ‘Oh my memory, I should have made the connection days ago. The motif of your Drowned Culture, the circles and bars. Earthshine showed me before. When he took us all down into his bunker under Paris, before the Nail fell.’ She closed her eyes. ‘And he had a plaque on his wall, some kind of rock art, etchings in sea-corroded concrete, the first time he brought the two of us to Paris – oh, years earlier, my sister and myself. And he brought the plaque with him on the Tatania.’ At last she found her slate, tapped it with bony fingers, and showed them an image. It was a brooch, Mardina saw, a bit of stone, marked with concentric circles and a radial groove. ‘Earthshine was wearing this on Mars eight years ago. And in meetings I had with him, Before.’
Ari frowned. ‘Earthshine? Then somehow he knows about the Drowned Culture already.’
‘Yes.’ Penny pursed her lips. ‘But you don’t get it, you don’t see the bigger picture, Ari. Earthshine must have already gathered evidence of this “Drowned Culture” from Earth. From my history. Not from Terra. Do you see? It is as if our divergent histories are not organised in any kind of linear fashion, an orderly sequence, so that one gives way to the next, and then the next. They are like … ice floes on a frozen ocean, bumping up against one another in a random way. But I suppose if Earthshine is right that the kernels are wormholes – if in fact we live in a universe riddled with wormholes – then this kind of chaos is what we must expect.’
Ari looked doubtful. ‘Wormholes? I’m afraid I don’t understand.’
‘Connections across space and time, even between universes … If you have such links then causality can be violated. Cause and effect disconnected, mixed up. Even archaeology need not make sense, as we see here, because its basic logic, that whatever lies beneath the ground was put there by somebody in your own past, need not apply any more. Anything is possible; history is ragged …’
‘Chaos,’ Kerys said. ‘The signature of Loki. In whom officially, as a Navy officer in a Christian federation, I don’t believe at all.’
A junior officer burst into the room, looked for Kerys, and thrust a note into her hand. She looked over it quickly and frowned.
‘But if all this is true,’ Mardina said practically, ‘what are we supposed to do about it?’
Ari said, ‘We could ask Earthshine.’
‘Yes,’ Penny said. ‘Obviously. But what is he intending? And what has Ceres got to do with it?’
‘Maybe we’ll find out more soon,’ Kerys said grimly. ‘Just when I thought this mess couldn’t get any odder …’
Mardina asked, ‘Nauarchus? What’s happened?’
‘A Roman vessel has just returned from interstellar space. Twenty-five-year Hatch-building jaunt. And at their target system they found strangers.’ She looked round at the group.
Beth asked, ‘Strangers?’
‘They were speaking your tongue. English. Knowing about you, the Roman authorities have asked for our help.’
Beth, Jiang, Penny, survivors of the Tatania, shared stunned looks.
Kerys stood up. ‘Well, we need to deal with this. Cadet, you’re with me. I’m afraid your formal induction is going to have to wait for another day.’
She hurried out of the room, and Mardina ran to follow her.
CHAPTER 24
The Roman exploration vessel Malleus Jesu was directed to land near Lutetia Parisiorum, in Roman Gaul. And Penny and her companions were to be brought to the city to meet the ship’s strange passengers.
Penny prepared for the journey, slowly gathering her old-lady stuff, her favourite quilted blankets and duck-down slippers, the pills and ointments and mysterious poultices supplied to her by the local doctors for her various aches and pains. She wondered what strings had been pulled to achieve all this, to bring together the survivors of the Tatania, and now these other individuals found on the planet of a distant star by Roman explorers – a dialogue between two governments already wary of each other and dealing with an existential mystery that had dropped out of the sky into their hands. She supposed the calculation was that at least the encounter might yield information. And, she supposed, that was what she was hoping for too, at the minimum. What was she doing here? How did she get here? What did all this mean? … As for herself, she had long ago given up hope of ever going home again. She knew she would die here.
She hadn’t expected to see her twin sister again, however. Yet Stef’s was among the names reported by the Navy.