“It’s all right, Mardina. But, look—no, I’m afraid we can’t wait. Because once this ceremony is done, you’ll be gone, won’t you, Mardina? Lost in your career, lost in Ymir’s Skull. And the opportunity to talk will be lost. And we must talk, you know.”
“About what, for Jupiter’s sake?”
“About—what is the English word you use? Before, Beth.”
Beth shook her head. “That’s all gone. This is our life now—here in Brikanti, in this world of Romans and Xin. There’s been nothing new to say about all that old stuff for twenty years, not since we stepped off the Tatania.”
“I’m afraid that’s no longer true, Beth,” Penny said tiredly. “If it ever was. I don’t know what Ari has to tell you today. But part of it’s my fault. The Academy of Saint Jonbar. I always hoped it would bear fruit… Now it has.”
“What kind of fruit? What are you talking about?”
“And then there’s Earthshine,” Penny said doggedly. “Earthshine. He’s been holed up on Mars for decades. Now—well, now he may be making his move.” She glanced up at Kerys. “Ask the Navy types about Ceres. Höd, as they call it here.”
The Deputy Prefect had been listening with commendable calm to all this. But now he intervened, speaking directly to Kerys: “What’s going on, nauarchus?”
“I don’t know, sir,” she said honestly, looking warily at Ari. “I feel as if the druidh here has handed me an unexploded bomb, and I don’t quite know what to do with it.”
Skafhog tapped a pen against his teeth. “One hour,” he said briskly, standing up. “I’ll let you get all this family nonsense out of your systems in one hour—or not,” he said severely to Mardina, “in which case all you’ll be seeing of the Navy, young woman, will be lights in the sky.”
“Yes, sir,” Kerys said with some relief. “You’re being very indulgent.”
“I am, aren’t I? Get on with it.” And he stalked out of the room, with his official scrambling behind.
When he’d gone, Ari smiled around at them. “Well. I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here today.”
Beth punched him square in the face.
23
“Hold still,” said Kerys. She was crouching before Ari, dabbing at the wreckage of his mouth. “I think the bleeding from your cheek has stopped.”
“I should hope so. That spirit stung.”
“You’re lucky we had the right stuff to hand. Then again the Navy is used to handling scuffles—even in its headquarters, even in the heart of Dumnona. Now, I want to put some ointment on the swelling under your eye…”
“Ow!”
“If you wouldn’t keep yakking, I could get it done. And you have a dislodged tooth. I’ll push it back in its socket for now—”
“Yow!”
“You need to see a dentist. Again, you’re in the right place. The Navy has the best dentists in all Brikanti; we can’t afford to send out crews on years-long missions with rotting teeth… There. Hold this compress against your face until you get better attention.”
“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 crossbreed.”
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 shook his head. “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?”