Stephen Baxter - Ripples

A vision of Northland:

From the flat-topped summit of the mound, Qili looked around.

To the north he made out the island, the bay; to the south stretched away a landscape of rolling hills and valleys, glimmering with water and studded with stands of trees - a landscape green and bursting with life on this summer's day. This was Northland. He could see that Bark was right; this ridge could reasonably be called a boundary between one land and another, for the land that lay spread out before him was quite different in character from forest-choked Albia. The trees grew so dense on the peninsula that, the priests liked to say, an eagle flying high overhead could swoop from east to west, north to south, ocean to ocean, and scarce see a break in the endless canopy through to the floor, save for the occasional scrap of higher ground.

Vast ice domes had covered much of North America and central Asia. In Europe a single monstrous ice cap lay across the northern lands, stretching from Scotland to Scandinavia, in places piled kilometres thick over the buried landscapes. To the south was a polar desert, scoured by winds, giving way to tundra. At the glaciation's greatest extent, Britain and northern Europe had been abandoned entirely; no human lived north of the Alps.

At last, prompted by subtle, cyclic shifts in Earth's orbit, the climate shifted, with dramatic suddenness. Over a few decades the dirty white ice receded north. The revealed landscape, scoured to the bedrock, was tentatively colonised by the grey-green of life. Migrant herds and the humans who depended on them slowly followed, taking back landscapes on which there was rarely a trace of forgotten ancestors.

With so much water still locked up in the giant ice caps, the seas were low, tens of metres lower than in later times, and great swathes of continental shelf were exposed, all around the world.

In northern Europe, Scotland and Ireland were joined, and eastern Britain was united with continental Europe by a plain that ran from the Tyne estuary in the north down to Beachy Head in the south. This was rich terrain for the humans, who spread down the water courses and probed the thickening forests for game.

But the Earth was not at rest.

The continents are granite rafts floating on magma, the liquid rock of the mantle. The great weight of the ice had depressed the land beneath it, pushing it down into the magma. Now, released from the burden of the ice, Scotland and Scandinavia were rising up, immense, buoyant. But the land's movement was not simple, and tilting caused other areas to sink: southern England, France, the Low Countries, subsiding into the sea at a rate of centimetres a year. At the same time the seas rose steadily, filling up with chill meltwater. As a result of these processes, everywhere a complex redistribution of land and sea continued.

In Northland, from north and south the ocean probed steadily into the wide, rolling plains that still connected the British-Irish peninsula to Europe. The basic geometry of the world changed around the people, generation on generation. And, year on year, the chill oceans bit at the bare land.

7300 BC.

'And you sing songs, songs about the land. These songs too are very old.'

'Yes. After the moon of ice lifted from the world, the little mothers led the people and the animals north into the exposed land, and the people named names and sang songs about where they walked. And we still sing those songs now, about the shape of the hills, and the bend of a river.'

He frowned. 'The little mothers are gods too?'

'They are the children of the first mother. The three mothers became the gods of the land, and the coast, and the sea.'

'That's a lot of gods. It isn't as complicated as that for us. We have tree gods. We are all named for parts of trees, or things they give us - like myself, for the shade. That's all, really. Trees.'

'You surprise me.'

He pointed. 'How do the birds at that end of the flock know how to fly to keep the shape being set by the birds at the other end? It's as if, when they fly up together, they stop being individual birds and become bits of a god.'

'There was a heavy dew this morning,' she said. 'And a spider had built her web across the house's poles, at the top. It was thick with dew and it shone where the light caught it. I wanted to show it to you, but I could never have saved it. It had all evaporated away long before noon.'

'How I love this place,' he murmured.

All across the northern hemisphere, as ice melted and water ponded and gushed, the land continued to flex.

And the sea beds, too, massaged by shifting masses of water and ice, suffered their own spasms of compression and release.

Far to the north the sea bed was unstable. The world's skin shuddered. Strange weather systems gathered over the shifting sea bed, ocean storms whose rumbling thunder could be heard far away.

Given enough time, a more significant adjustment was inevitable.

It was not a huge landslip, on a planetary scale. Only a volume the size of a small country, a mass of mud entirely submerged, sliding deeper into the abyss. But an equivalent volume of water, pushed aside by the silt, had to find somewhere to go.

Those who survived called it the Great Sea.

She ran and ran, following the receding sea.

She looked south, back the way they had come, towards the northern shore of Flint Island. There were the beached animals, the dolphin and the whale. Some children had discovered the wreck of the boat and were playing around its exposed timbers. All the way back to the shore she could make out people working, the whole of Etxelur save for the very smallest children out on the sea bed, raiding it for its treasures. Black with mud, they looked like animals themselves, toiling in the dirt. But when she looked to her left and right, to east and west, she saw how the sea had exposed a swathe of landscape that ran all the way along the coast. Everywhere she saw glinting pools of remnant water, and the green of seaweed and the silvery gleam of fish, some of them heaped up into reefs that must contain whole shoals; all along the coast, from more distant communities, she saw more people venturing out into the sea bed for its pickings.

The dolphin was a big animal, sleek and muscular. It flopped as helpless as the fish, far from the sea that had betrayed it, and lifted its head with its long beak-like mouth and uttered its odd, clattering cries, a voice Dreamer had become so familiar with in her time in Kirike's boat. People were rushing to the dolphin. Dreamer heard men ordering others back to the land, to fetch ropes. A dog ran around the animal, excited, and it bit into the roughened edge of a flipper and tugged, its little paws slithering over the sea-bottom mud.

'Do you think they're trying to save it?' she asked Novu. 'Maybe they could drag it to the sea - wherever the sea has gone.'

'I don't think so,' Novu muttered.

'That man is stroking it. Looking into its eyes.'

'Apologising before he kills it and butchers it. Look at the knife he's holding.'

'Dolphins saved my life,' she murmured. 'Myself and my baby. The dolphin is her totem.' She shifted the pack on her back so she could feel her sleeping baby's weight. 'I hope the death doesn't distress her.'

There was a sound of thunder, far out away from the land. Like a tremendous stampede, returning.

The tide was coming in by the time they had made the crossing back to Flint Island and reached its north shore. More debris was washing up, Ana saw, more tree branches and roots and lumps of sod, and darker, unmoving shapes on the sand.

She climbed up onto the broken-open midden. She glanced around at the ancestors' bones, exposed and scattered by a wave which had shown as little compassion for the dead as for the living. It was a long way to bring each corpse, she thought now, when all who had survived would be busy with the simple work of staying alive. Perhaps she could work out some interim arrangement - move the bodies away from the living spaces first, and then bring them here. Yet she felt it was right that the dead should rest where the bones of her ancestors had always been laid, from the grandest matriarch to the smallest lost newborn.

She heard shouts from the beach. Dreamer had found something strange washed up, a plump form with heavy brown hair - a seal, perhaps, or some dead animal plucked by the waves from the land. Close by, Lightning was exploring another limp body.

And Novu was shouting too, jumping in his excitement and pointing out to sea.

It was a boat, Ana saw, still far out, being paddled by two figures too remote to make out. That could be her father - but his hadn't been the only boat out yesterday. She refused to get excited, not until the boat had made it to shore.

She slid down the midden's broken flank, and crossed the beach to Dreamer and her find. Dreamer stood over it, looking puzzled but excited.

It was a fat beast, four-legged, but like no animal Ana had ever seen before. It would have been short if it stood upright, no higher than chest height to Ana. Its legs were like trees stumps, its feet were round and flat, and it had a big head from which a long nose dangled - limp as seaweed now, but it looked flexible and muscular. From one side of its mouth a kind of long tooth curled, gleaming white.

Ana said, 'I never saw anything like it.'

'Nor I.' Dreamer frowned, and looked to the north, across the sea. 'But we have legends of creatures like this. With teeth like spears, and noses like snakes, and hair that was coarse and brown. They all died when the Sky Wolf smashed the world. But they were big. Taller at the shoulder than a hunter. Taller than this.'

'Evidently not all. Maybe it is a baby.'

'No. It, she, has udders. See?' The udders looked swollen with milk. 'The waves swept across the ocean. Maybe they washed this strange corpse from some distant island.' Ice Dreamer took off her sling and laid her baby down on the sand, carefully. Then she took her stabbing spear and held it over the inert animal. 'Once my people hunted your kind across the roof of the world. Yet we revered you. Now I am the last of the True People, as you perhaps, are the last of your kind. I honour you with a good death.' And she thrust the spear, as hard as she could, into the animal's side, aiming for a space between its ribs.

Ana glanced along the beach to where that boat was pulling in to shore, to be greeted by Novu. And closer by she saw what Lighting was so interested in. It was a human body, washed up from the sea, limp and unrecognisable. She began to walk that way. The dog barked in his excitement, wagging his tail. The boat landed. Novu helped one of its occupants pull it up the beach. The other occupant jumped out and came running towards her, hobbling on a damaged leg.

And as Ana neared that broken body, as she looked at the red, tightly curled hair, the strong arms splayed in death. Something in Ana died in that moment, leaving only that hard black core.

She was barely aware of it when Arga, stinking of salt, her skin burned by the sun, hurled herself into her arms. 'It's all right,' Arga said, burying her face in Ana's chest. 'You had to save the baby. It's all right.'

Lightning was whining, licking the dead man's salt-crusted face, trying to make his master wake up, as he always had before.

Dreamer said she had been thinking about what Arga had said about the Door to the Mothers' House. She had an idea what story the strange structures had to tell. So they gathered around her, Ana and Arga and Novu, sitting on the ground in the brief warmth of the sun. They worked as they listened; they had a heap of hazelnuts to shell.

Dreamer's face was strongly shadowed by the sun, and age showed in the lines around her eyes and mouth, and in the grey streaks in her tied-back hair. Yet she was still beautiful, Ana thought, strong and beautiful. No wonder her father hadn't been able to abandon this woman when he found her on that distant shore. Kirike's and Dreamer's was one story among many cut short by the Great Sea.

'I have told you how my people remember the world,' Dreamer began. 'Once the world was rich, warm. It teemed with game, huge animals, which the True People hunted. But then the Sky Wolf smashed the land in his jealousy. The world went from warm to cold in a day and a night. Many of the animals vanished, but others who liked the cold came creeping down from the north, and the True People hunted, gloriously, with their huge spear points. The world warmed again, and the big animals retreated to the cold in the north. The True People survived, but there was nothing for them to hunt, and the world swarmed with cowardly sub-men who -'

'We know this story,' Novu said gently.

'All right. But hear the pattern. The world was warm, then it became cold, then warm again. Suppose it was the same here, in your world. Once it was warm. The people here - your grandfathers - grew confident and strong. They hunted the cattle that ran here in great herds, just as they do now, in your day. Maybe that's why the cattle are remembered in some of your rituals - why it is always cattle you pursue in the wildwood challenges with the Pretani. And they built boats, big boats that sailed west, even to my country, maybe, and left the Etxelur marks on the stones of the coast. And they built the Door as a place to keep their boats safe, and from where their riches could be Given in splendour. Etxelur was great, in those days. So great that people still remember how it was.

'But then the cold came, just as in my country. There were no more cattle. The great deer came down from the north, and other animals who like the cold. The grandchildren of those who built the Door forgot what it had been for. But still the Door was magnificent. So the new people put their greatest woman, or man, into the stone house they built on the central mound: a woman riding a huge deer, the animal that fed them. They put this on top of the cattle skulls left behind by their grandfathers.' She mimed this with her hands, one palm on top of another, and she looked at Ana searchingly, seeking understanding. 'Do you see? This is how people build, the new laid down on the old.

'But then the cold turned to warm, and the great deer left for the north where they still live, so you say, Novu. The deer hunters could not live as they once had. But again, to their grandchildren the world was new. Again they forgot those who went before them, who had built the Door and why. And they started to build afresh. This time they built middens, Ana, great circular bands echoing the ancient shape of the Door - and you still maintain the holy middens on Flint Island.'

Arga frowned. 'But why didn't they build on top of the Door?'

'The sea covered it over. Perhaps it happened in a night and a day, like the cold that destroyed my people, like the Great Sea. But still it is remembered, in the shape of the middens.' She touched Arga's belly and smiled. 'And in the sign of Etxelur, in the tattoo you will wear some day, Arga, when your blood tide comes.' She shrugged. 'That's my story.'

'We can never know if this is true,' Novu said practically.

'Of course not.'

'Perhaps you are drawing too much on the memories of your own people. Perhaps the warm and cold were not the same here.'

'Perhaps not. How can we ever know?'

'But,' Ana said, 'it makes sense.' She felt deeply excited by this story of layers of time, of boat makers and deer hunters, a world warm and cold and warm again. On impulse she hugged Arga. 'What a wonderful story we have been given. A gift from the past. And it's all thanks to you, Arga.'

Arga submitted to the hug but soon wriggled free. 'The question is, what do we do now?'

'What do you mean?'

'We've found the Mothers' Door. It's drowned, under the sea. But it's our treasure. So we can't leave here. We can never leave this place -'

Ana said slowly, 'You're right. We would forget. Living somewhere in the south or in Pretani, mixed up with the snailheads and all the others, we would forget the Door - forget who we are.'

They could not leave.

But how could they stay?

Novu said, 'My people in Jericho pride themselves on doing what's never been done before.'

'That might be true in Jericho,' Arga snapped at him. 'It's not the way people think here. "Why can't we just get on with living our lives, and let the world be?"'

Ana looked at her sharply. 'You're quoting somebody.'

'Yes. But I won't say who,' Arga said bravely. 'She wouldn't want to get in trouble with you, Ana. But that's what she said, that's what she thinks, and that's the way people think here. We never bothered the world before; we just took what it could afford to give us. Why should we change now?'

'Because,' Novu said simply, 'the Great Sea nearly scraped us all off into the ocean - and nearly killed you, Arga. It's a case of either taming the world, as you tame this little dog, or running away like the snailheads.'

Jurgi stiffened. 'You shouldn't repeat stuff like that outside. People are uncomfortable if they feel they are defying the little mothers. They wouldn't like it.'

'And nor would the snailheads,' Dolphin put in.

'Or the dogs, even,' Kirike said, and he leaned over to pat the stirring Thunder.

'But he's right,' Ana said. 'We have to build the dykes and drain the Bay Land. Either that or run away. What we have to do is find a way to keep on doing that. Arga, you said this friend of yours wouldn't speak up because she's frightened of me.'

'Yes. I'm sorry to say it.'

'Don't be. I don't mind being scary if it gets the job done.' She smiled, and just for a heartbeat her face lit up with youth, or a memory of it, Dolphin thought, an echo of the girl she must once have been. 'If my father could see what's become of me! Or my mother ... I don't mind of they fear me. I don't mind if they love me. I mean, if they think I'm here to look after them, to keep them alive and safe.'

'Many do, I think,' Jurgi reassured her. 'Most, I'm sure.'

She said thoughtfully, 'I have to be bigger than they are, in a way. As a parent is bigger than a child. Bigger in spirit and wisdom, not physical strength. Then they will follow me - but how far?'

For an age yet the chthonic convulsions would continue. Small matters of geological chance would determine the future shape of land and sea: the release of stresses in the unburdened continental plates, the precise way the ice caps melted after their rough sculpting by the stray comet fragments. Small, random events, trivial on a planetary scale, yet with huge consequences for the humans who struggled to survive.

In Northland, as the seas rose, perhaps the flooding from north and south would continue, until the ocean broke through from north to south, separating Britain from Europe with a tongue of ocean.

Or perhaps humans could make a difference.

Time would tell.

Qili remembered how Northland had been. He found he didn't like the idea of growing up in the shadow of a monument - to have his whole life shaped by a cause conceived by a bunch of old people because of something that had happened long ago. He found he was grateful to have grown up where he did, free to roam and do what he liked on the vast plains of the World River estuary.

He turned away, and began the long walk home.