Ultima by Stephen Baxter Page A

said, “The development on the scraps of high ground to the south of the Thames, beyond the Isle of Dogs. That might be some version of London.”
    â€œThat is Lund,” Ari said. “The most obvious gateway to Europa, and the Roman provinces. The town was a petty community before contact with the Romans; there was no particular purpose for it. After Kartimandia it became a trading hub with the Empire, and the nearest to a Roman city in Pritanike. But it was always dwarfed by Eboraki.”
    McGregor pointed. “And what the hell did you do to Scotland?”
    Ari frowned. “We know it as Kaledon. An arena of heroic engineering.”
    â€œIt looks like you demolished mountains,” McGregor said. “Some areas look like they’ve been
melted
.”
    â€œSome have been,” Ari said. “A kernel-drive spacecraft, landing or taking off, generates rather a lot of heat.”
    â€œMy God,” Penny said. “They really have brought kernel technology down to the face of the Earth. All that heat energy dumped into the ground, the air. It’s a wonder they haven’t flipped the whole damn planet into some catastrophic greenhouse-warming event, into a Venus.”
    â€œMaybe,” Lex said, “they were lucky. They got away with it.
Just
. Perhaps there are other timelines where precisely that happened. Does that make sense, Kalinski? If there are two timelines, why not many?”
    â€œOr an infinite number.” She grinned, lopsided. “That had occurred to me too. You’re thinking like a scientist, McGregor.”
    â€œI’ll cut that out immediately.”
    Ari followed this exchange closely.
    Now the island cluster was passing away to the northwest, and the ship was sailing over the near continent—Gaul to the Romans and the Brikanti, France to the crew of the
Tatania
. The countryside, where it was spared by the sea-level rise, glowed with urbanization. But on the track of a broad river Beth made out a neat circular feature, a set of rays spanning out from it, a lunar crater partially overgrown by the green. She pointed. “What’s that?”
    Ari said, “Once a major city of the Roman province. Destroyed in a war some centuries back, by a Xin missile that got through the local defenses.”
    Penny said, “The missile—kernel-tipped? It was, wasn’t it? So it’s true. You people don’t just use kernels as sources of power on Earth. You actually use them in weapons, to fight your Iron Age wars.”
    Ari Guthfrithson frowned. “Would you have me apologize for my whole history? And is
your
history so laudable?”
    McGregor murmured, “We’re missing the point here, Penny. Forget your judgments. We need to learn as much about this world as we can while we’ve got the chance.”
    Penny nodded. “You’re right, of course, since it looks like we’re going to be stuck here.” She thought it over. “The
Ukelwydd
is following a high-inclination orbit around the Earth—around Terra. That is, the orbit is tipped up at an angle to the equator—”
    â€œThat is intentional, of course,” Ari said, “so that our track takes us over Pritanike and the landing grounds of Kaledon.”
    â€œBut that means we get to fly over a good span of latitudes. And as the planet turns beneath us, with time we get to look down on a swath of longitudes too. Give me a few hours with a slate, and I’ll capture what I can. Then with some educated guesswork maybe we can figure out the story of this world . . .”

11
    Twelve hours later Penny called her companions, with Ari, back to the observation lounge. She’d found a way to project slate images onto a blank wall, and had prepared a digest of her observations of the turning world beneath.
    She showed them landscapes of dense urbanization, the cities glowing nodes in a wider network of roads and urban sprawl.