Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

pressed into it.
    Teif looked around, dissatisfied. ‘We busted our balls for this? This is a City of the Living Dead?’
    Lange, daring or foolhardy, laughed at him. ‘My friend – what did you expect to find after a billion years? Buildings and streets preserved as if frozen in ice? No – this is all that time leaves behind, crumpled and crushed and changed, thousands of years of history squashed down as if crushed between the pages of a book. And if not for a fortuitous flood, none of this might have been preserved at all.’
    ‘A flood?’ Teif glanced around sceptically at the arid sandstone plain. ‘Here?’
    ‘Oh, yes. My friend, the spot on which you stand has lain deep beneath the surface of a sea – not once, but many times …’
    Xaia struggled to follow.  
    On Earth II, as on Earth, if rock was above water it eroded away, turning to pebbles and sand that washed down the sluggish rivers. But below water rock formed. On the beds of seas and lakes, all that eroded silt piled up, compressing under its own weight until the sand solidified to sandstone. Layers set down in different epochs showed as strata, subtly different bands in the depth of the rock.
    ‘The sedimentary rocks are laid down as flat as the oceans that bear them,’ Lange said. ‘But with time there are quakes and volcanic uplifts, and even the shifting of continents, though that’s not a significant factor on Earth II. The layers may be raised up above the air again, broken, buckled and bent.’ Lange walked around, miming these processes. Xaia imagined he waited all this life for such moments, a chance to show off the family knowledge to passing strangers.  
    ‘And somewhere in that process,’ Xaia said, studying the sample in her hand, ‘between the setting down of one sandstone layer and the next – this occurred.’
    ‘We think there was a river delta,’ Lange said. ‘Right here. Oh, the river itself has long since shifted its course, but you can still see traces of its valley in the oldest rocks. And on that delta, in its fertile soils, they built a city. We can’t imagine how it looked. But it was a city of buildings of stone and metal, and must have been not entirely unlike human cities on Earth II, or Earth. All this in a flash – geologically speaking, in just millennia, after aeons of emptiness.  
    ‘But the city was flooded. Inundated, suddenly.’
    ‘How?’ Manda snapped. ‘By its river?’
    ‘No,’ Lange said. ‘By the sea. Just as on Earth – the sea level rose, suddenly and catastrophically, and covered the tallest buildings. Whoever lived here had to flee or die. But, thanks to the sudden flooding, the city was more or less preserved, sitting there on what had suddenly become a sea bed. The river silt still sifted down, covering the streets and buildings, piling up until it caved in roofs and collapsed cellars. But the city was entombed, you see. And when in the aeons that followed more sandstone formed above, billions and billions of tonnes of it pressing down, the city layer was compressed, from hundreds of metres thick, perhaps, to – well, to what you see today. Millions of years are recorded in these mighty layers – and a mere few millennia compresses to less than the height of a human child. As the planet convulsed in later ages, that vast coffin was lifted up into the light and broken open.’
    Manda, to Xaia’s surprise, seemed to be imaginatively caught by this. ‘And yet you can still see what it was like, can you?’
    He winked at her, with his one good eye. ‘Come and see for yourself.’
    He led the way up the ladder, to the cave cut on the sandstone above the city stratum. They had to crawl to get inside. Xaia could see pick marks in the roof above her – and small pockmarks, deeper than the rest, where something appeared to be lodged. Lamps, perhaps? But if they were lamps they weren’t lit.
    Lange let them explore with hands and eyes, their sight adjusting to the cave’s shadows.