“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 organized 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 anymore. 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.
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 favorite 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.
And what were they to do about Earthshine?
As she finished her preparations, she had no doubt Earthshine was very well aware of all that was going on, and would be monitoring closely.
They were to travel from Eboraki, in the north of what Penny would have called England, to a city called Dubru on the south coast. And from there they would cross into Gaul.
With Jiang and Marie Golvin, Penny was brought from her lodgings at the Academy by a coach to a transport hub to the south of the city. The place was a clash of technological eras, with a cobbled road bearing horse-drawn traffic leading to a railway terminus, and splashes of scarred concrete where stood slim needles, kernel-driven ships of air and space.
“You know, I realize now in fact that I’ve traveled little since I got here,” Penny said as Marie helped her down from the coach. “Twenty years since the jonbar hinge brought us here, and I’ve barely left the city. I’ve spent more time off the planet than traveling on it, probably.”
Marie gave her an arm to lean on. “Well, why travel when you are immersed in strangeness every time you open your door?”
“True, true.”
Marie was in her forties now, plump, graying, a mother of three; she still worked with Penny at the Academy, and in fact had long since taken over many of Penny’s administrative duties. Penny depended on Marie in many ways—and, she believed, Marie had found a reasonable happiness in her life here, with her husband Rajeev, even though they were all so far from home.
With servants from the Academy handling their luggage, they walked slowly to the railway terminus, a sprawling roof over multiple platforms, a tangle of lines spreading away in the distance. The architecture seemed very familiar to Penny; there was a certain inevitable economic and engineering logic to rail technology, it seemed. But Brikanti trains ran on gleaming monorails supported by elegant Roman-style viaducts, and their locomotives were powered by kernels, a handful of the mysterious wormholes in the heart of each engine. The train itself was a suspended tube of metal and glass. Penny was relieved to see there was an escalator to lift her up.
They had a carriage to themselves at the heart of the train, a roomy space centered on a broad table, brightly lit through big picture windows. It was almost like a dining room, Penny thought. Marie and Penny were in fact the last to arrive. Here were Beth and Mardina, Beth looking resentful, and a rather more complex expression on Mardina’s face; she seemed uncertain, withdrawn. And here were Kerys and Ari Guthfrithson—Ari sitting a respectful distance away from his estranged wife and daughter.
Kerys stood to welcome Penny, and helped her get settled in her seat between Marie and Jiang, and called a servant to bring drinks. Kerys had been put in nominal charge of this peculiar mission, and if the nauarchus was irritated to be dragged once again into all this jonbar-hinge strangeness, she didn’t show it.
The train slid smoothly out of the station and into watery sunlight.
They soon passed beyond the city limits, heading south, and Penny looked down from above at scattered suburbs of roundhouses, set in a wider landscape of farmed fields, horizon-wide expanses of wheat and other crops, tended by huge machines that weeded and watered. The individual farming machines didn’t run on kernels; there was an extensive grid of cables to carry power from central stations. There were people around, of course—this culture didn’t have machinery smart enough to direct itself—but only a few worked in the fields.
Marie said, “The Academician was saying that she hasn’t traveled much since she came here.”
Kerys smiled. “Your first time on a train, Penny?”
“Not quite. But I suppose I’ve never thought very much about the nature of your transport systems. Your history, you know, diverged from ours so long ago that much is unfamiliar from the foundations up. Pritanike never had the Romans here…” Even the Brikanti towns didn’t map onto the ones she was familiar with. For example, Stonehenge here was the center of a major urban sprawl and transport junction, a very modern city that seemed to have continuous cultural roots going back almost to the last Ice Age. “Also you don’t have automobiles”—she used the English word—“by which I mean small vehicles under the control of individuals.”