‘Potato farmers,’ the ColU said. ‘Just as in the Andes in the time of the Incas. Our Incas. There they farmed all the way up to the snow line.’
Ruminavi frowned at the unfamiliar names. But he said, ‘Just as in the old country, we built mountains here as residences for our gods. The country is littered with shrines.’
‘Yes, the Incas came from the high lands,’ Mardina said. ‘I remember that from my own history, of what the Xin and the Romans found when they fought over Valhalla Inferior. There had been a mighty empire spanning the continent, but armed only with bronze swords and armour of leather …’
‘Just as the Europeans of my UN-China Culture discovered,’ the ColU said. ‘And destroyed. Here, however, the Incas evidently prospered. They overthrew Rome, they went out into space, and they brought their culture with them – indeed, they recreated it. Andean mountains, built of lunar rock perhaps.
‘Inguill called this habitat Yupanquisuyu, which means the Country of Yupanqui. And Cusi Yupanqui, at least in my culture’s timeline, was the man who truly established the Inca empire. He conquered vast swathes of territory, and established the empire’s legal, military and social structures. Yupanqui was their Alexander the Great, and it is as if this vast habitat is called “Alexandria”. So Yupanqui must have lived here too, in this reality; the histories must have been roughly consistent until that point – though, evidently, Rome survived to be defeated. I need to see the quipus, you know.’
‘The what?’
‘The frame of strings that quipucamayoc Inguill carried. That was, and evidently still is, the way the Incas kept their records. Somewhere in this artefact there must be a library, banks of knotted strings telling the story of this empire all the way back to Yupanqui himself. If only I could see it …’
Quintus Fabius had been listening. He said drily, ‘I’ll see what can be arranged, Collius. In the meantime it seems to me that this box of glass is slowing.’
In the last moments the transport entered another, lower bank of cloud that blanketed a green-tinged landscape.
Instructed by Ruminavi, the passengers picked up their gear and lined up by a side door. The axis warriors from the hub, fragile-looking in gravity, remained carefully strapped into their couches, but they kept the blunt muzzles of their ugly-looking weapons trained on the Romans. Meanwhile, waiting outside the door was another squad of soldiers to take over their supervision, heftier-looking types, their clothing gaudy, their dark faces stern and suspicious.
Mardina could see it would be just a short walk to the next transport, which was a kind of carriage on rails, one of a series, pulled by a heavy engine at the front. The rails of the track swept down the flank of the mountain.
‘Ah,’ the ColU said as he was carried out by Chu, ‘another railway system. A universal, it seems, across the timelines, common to all engineering cultures. Quintus, please ask Ruminavi what powers it – what is the motive force behind the engine?’
It took some moments of interrogation before the answer was extracted from the apu, and at that Quintus had to flatter him to make him brag about the mighty achievements of the Incas. The train, which he called a caravan, ran on the capac nans, the roads of the gods, which spanned this habitat from end to end. Ruminavi said the engine, which had a name something like ‘llama’, was powered by a warak’a, derived from an old Quechua word for ‘sling’ – and which turned out to be the Inca term for a kernel …
But Mardina, as she stepped out of the carriage, stopped paying attention to mere words. This steep mountainside was choked with green and swathed in mist, the moisture dripping from the crowding vegetation. The air was damp and fresh – but thin, hard to breathe, and she had a sense of altitude. Above her head, patchy clouds obscured her view of the higher mountains, which lifted islands of green into the air, like offerings. And beside the path that led to the railway, flowers bloomed in thick clusters with vivid colours, yellow, orange and purple, and tiny birds worked the flowers, flashes of brilliant blue.
The apu was watching her. He seemed to be admiring her show of interest, at least in comparison to the soldiers who stamped along the trail, already complaining about the state of their feet in a full gravity. ‘Cloud forest,’ he told her, a term that took some translating by the ColU.
‘And I suppose there’s a big band of this too all around the rim of the world.’
‘That’s how it’s designed. Come. It gets even prettier further down. All of this in a box in space.’ But he smiled at her a little too intensely, as if drinking in every detail of her face, her skin.
Mardina drew away and walked back to her group.
Once aboard the train they had to wait a full hour before it was ready to pull away.
There were many coaches bearing passengers, but the legionaries were herded into rougher carts evidently intended for freight. The Romans grumbled as they settled down, complained about the thinness of the air, the food grudgingly supplied by Inca troops – fruit, meat, water – supplemented by biscuits and other rations they’d brought in their packs from the Malleus. And, as soldiers always did whenever they got the chance, they tried to sleep.
Meanwhile more trains came rolling into the hub station from the habitat interior, laden with goods, foodstuffs, timber. The ColU speculated that some of these goods must be meant for export from the habitat, perhaps to other space colonies, as well as supplying the big hub cities.
At last the train pulled away.
At first the descent was alarmingly steep and rapid. Looking ahead, sitting on a wooden bench and with her head resting against a window, Mardina saw that they soon descended below the level of the cloud forest and into more open air. Now they emerged from the last foothills of the mountains and came to a flat plain – flat at least in the direction of travel – marred by ranges of low hills and gouged by the valleys of sluggish rivers. This land was the puna, the prefect said. The great plain itself was uninspiring, Mardina thought, as they sped across it, nothing but grass and shrubs on arid land. But if Mardina looked sideways she could distinctly see the upward curve of the landscape, as if she was travelling through some tremendous valley. Sparks of artificial light and palls of smoke on those sloping walls must mark townships, and she saw the iron glint of rail tracks and roads.
And there were people everywhere, farming the land in great fields and on terraces. The buildings they lived in were unassuming hut-like structures, although the larger townships featured complexes of massive warehouses that the apu said were tambos, imperial facilities for storing food. Every so often they saw a larger structure yet, compounds surrounded by walls with multiple terraces like huge steps. These were pukaras; they were obvious fortresses. Their walls were of a rough, dark stone that the ColU speculated might be rock from the dismantled moon.
But some features of the landscape were less recognisable, to a Brikanti eye. At rail junctions and springs, even on particular outcroppings of rock, there were small shrines that the Incas called huacas, with carved idols, poles, cairns, hanks of human hair – once, even what looked like a mummified human hand. It was as if the landscape was permeated by the presence of gods and spirits. Away from the sparse human settlements it was as if nothing existed on this eerie plain but the train on its track, and the markers of the gods.
Quintus had a conversation with the apu, steadily interrogating the little official about the nature of the world.
The ColU summarised this for Mardina. ‘This engineered landscape, the puna, is the equivalent of what was called the altiplano in my culture. In Valhalla Inferior, this was a plain of tremendous extent, very amenable to cultivation. And high, two miles or more above the level of the ocean. Just as it seems to be here, judging by the thinness of the air. Again they recreate their culture from Terra.’