The Long Mars

by Pratchett, Terry; Baxter, Stephen

  It had been Joshua’s third visit to the place Sally Linsay had dubbed Happy Landings. He’d come here the year before in the course of his exploration, with Lobsang and Sally, aboard the prototype stepper-airship Mark Twain, of the far Westward reaches of the Long Earth – a jaunt that had subsequently become known, in some fan circles at least, as ‘The Journey’. Under Sally’s guidance they had called into Happy Landings, more than a million and a half steps from the Datum, in the course of their outward-bound trek – and on the way back had called in again, with the Twain now a semi-derelict in the sky, and having lost Lobsang, after their shattering encounter with the entity they called First Person Singular. Now, a year after The Journey, Joshua had been passing through this particular world, on his way home from a brief, head-clearing sabbatical – and home for Joshua, just now anyhow, meant a Corn Belt town called Reboot, where he was going to marry Helen Green, daughter of a pioneering family.

  He couldn’t resist calling in again on Happy Landings.

  He wasn’t far from the Pacific coast in this version of Washington State. In fact this was the footprint of a Datum township called Humptulips, in Grays Harbor County. Joshua would always remember his surprise on seeing this place for the first time, a township where no township had a right to be, far beyond where the consensus at that time had it that the colonizing wavefront might yet have reached, just fifteen years after Step Day. Yet here it was.

  The town hugged the bank of its river, surrounded by tracks that cut off into thick forest. There were no fields, no sign of agriculture. Like the great city of Valhalla a few years later, this was a place where people lived off the natural fruits of the land – and especially in an area as rich as this, as long as you controlled your numbers and spread out a little, that was an easy way to live. And, by the river, in the town itself, visible even from the air during that first visit, Joshua had spotted trolls, everywhere he looked. It was a unique population, a blend of human and troll – which was maybe what made it so strange in other ways.

  Now Joshua strolled alone around the town, roughly centring on the big square by City Hall. The dusk was gathering, but as ever the square was full of smiling townsfolk, and bands of trolls singing scraps of song – people and trolls mixing casually. People nodded politely to Joshua, more or less a stranger making his third brief visit. As always it was all remarkably gentle, civilized, comfortable.

  But, paradoxically, that had made Joshua uncomfortable. The community seemed too calm. Not entirely human . . . ‘It all feels a bit Stepford Wives to me,’ was how he’d tried once to express it to Sally.

  And she’d said later, ‘Sometimes I wonder . . . I wonder if there’s something so big going on here that even Lobsang would have to recalibrate his thinking. Just a hunch, for now. I’m just suspicious. But then a stepper who isn’t suspicious is soon a dead stepper . . .’

  ‘Hey, mister.’

  The kid had stood directly before Joshua, staring up. He was five years old, dark-haired, smut-nosed, wearing clothes that were clean but just a tad too big for him and extensively patched. Typical colony wear, heavily reused. Just a kid, but something in his sharp gaze cut right through Joshua’s weary, vaguely muddled thinking.

  ‘Hello,’ Joshua said.

  ‘You’re Joshua Valienté.’

  ‘I won’t deny it. How do you know? I don’t remember seeing you before.’

  ‘I never saw you before. I deduced who you were.’ He stumbled over that word, deduced.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Everybody heard about the airship you flew in before. My parents talked about the people on board. There was a young man, and now he’s back, everybody’s talking about it. You’re a stranger. You’re a young man.’

  ‘Good work, Sherlock.’

  The kid looked puzzled at that reference.

  ‘So who are you?’

  ‘Paul Spencer Wagoner. Wagoner is my father’s name, Spencer’s my mother’s name, and Paul is my name.’

  ‘Good for you. Spencer, like the mayor?’

  ‘He’s my mother’s second cousin. That’s why we came here.’

  ‘So you weren’t born here? I thought you had a different accent from most.’

  ‘My mom came from here but my dad’s from Minnesota. I was born in Minnesota. The mayor invited us to come because we’re family. Well, my mother is. Most people come here by accident.’

  ‘I know.’ Although Joshua didn’t understand how. That was another mysterious thing about Happy Landings. People somehow came unstuck in the Long Earth, and just drifted here, from all over . . .

  Once he’d tried to discuss this with Lobsang. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the network of soft places. People drift and gather, like snowflakes collecting in a hollow, maybe.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps it’s something like that,’ Lobsang had said. ‘We know that stability is somehow a key to the Long Earth. Maybe Happy Landings is something like a potential well. And it’s clearly been operating long before Step Day, deep into the past . . .’

  ‘How did it fly?’

  Again Joshua, exhausted from his journey, had allowed himself to get lost in his own thoughts. ‘What?’

  ‘The airship you came in on.’

  Joshua smiled. ‘You know, it’s amazing how few people ask that. How do you think it flies?’

  ‘It might be full of smoke.’

  ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Smoke rises up from a fire.’

  ‘Hmm. That’s not a bad try. I think the smoke is actually lifted up by hot air from the fire. And the hot air rises up because it’s less dense than cold air. Some airships, balloons anyhow, are lifted by hot air. You have to have burners under the envelope. But the Mark Twain’s envelope was full of a gas called helium. It’s less dense than ordinary air.’

  ‘What does “dense” mean?’

  Joshua had to think. ‘It’s how much amount of stuff there is in a given space. How many molecules, I guess. Iron is more dense than wood, say. A brick-sized block of iron is heavier than a brick-sized block of wood. And wood is more dense than air.’

  Paul screwed up his nose. ‘I know what molecules are. Helium is a gas.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Air is a gas. Lots of gases, mixed up, I know that.’

  Joshua started to feel nervous, like he was being led down a trail into a thickening forest. ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘I can imagine how iron is denser than wood. Do you say “denser”? I don’t know that word.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You could jam in the molecules tighter. But how does that work with gases? If the atoms are all flying around.’

  ‘Well, it’s something to do with the molecules moving faster when stuff is hotter . . .’ Joshua had never been one to bluff a kid. ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘Ask your teacher.’

  Paul blew a raspberry. ‘My teacher is a kind lady and all but she doesn’t know squat.’

  Joshua had to laugh. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

  ‘If you ask one question and then another she gets unhappy, and the other kids laugh at you, and she says, “Another time, Paul.” Sometimes I can’t even ask the questions – you know – I can kind of see it but I don’t have the words.’

  ‘That will come in time, when you grow up a bit more.’

  ‘I can’t wait around for that.’

  ‘I hope he’s not bothering you.’ The woman’s voice was soft, a little strained.

  Joshua turned to see a family approaching, a man and woman about his own age, a toddler in a buggy. The kid seemed distracted; she was singing softly, looking around.

  The man stuck out his hand. ‘Tom Wagoner. Pleased to meet you, Mr Valienté.’

  Joshua shook. ‘Everybody knows my name, it seems.’

  ‘Well, you did make quite an entrance last year,’ Tom said. ‘I do hope Paul hasn’t been pestering you.’

  ‘No,’ Joshua said thoughtfully. ‘Just asking questions I soon realized I had no answer to.’
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br />   Tom glanced at his wife. ‘Well, that’s Paul for you. Come on, kiddo, time for supper and bed, and no more questions for the day.’

  Paul submitted gracefully enough. ‘Yes, Dad.’ He took his mother’s hand.

  After a couple of minutes of pleasantries, the family said goodbye. Joshua watched them go. He became aware that the little girl, introduced as Judy, had kept up her odd singing all the way through the short encounter, and now they’d stopped speaking he could hear her more clearly. It wasn’t so much a song as a string of syllables – jumbled, meaningless maybe, but he kept thinking he heard patterns in there. Complexity. Almost like the trolls’ long call, which Lobsang was determined to decode. But how the hell could a toddler be singing out a message that sounded like greetings from a space alien? Unless she was even smarter than her precocious brother.

  Smart kids. That was another odd thing he was always going to remember about Happy Landings.

  Enough. He had looked around for a bar, and a place to stay the night. He’d left the next day.

  But he hadn’t forgotten Paul Spencer Wagoner.

  And he hadn’t forgotten Happy Landings either. And, in the year 2045, he thought of it again, considering Lobsang’s suggestion that out there in the Long Earth there could be incubators of a new kind of people. What would such an incubator be like? What would it feel like?

  Like Happy Landings, maybe?

  13

  A BOARD THE GALILEO the hab module was divided into three levels, and while there were common utilities, such as a galley, toilet and zero-gravity shower, and such universal essentials as closed-loop air and water recycling systems, the designers had assigned a whole level to each of the three crew to serve as his or her personal space. And in the hours and days that followed their booster firing, and their launch into interplanetary space from the Brick Moon, the wisdom of that design was impressed on Frank Wood.

  The Galileo’s motley crew wasn’t going to be a particularly sociable bunch.

  Oh, they cooperated over their chores. There were shared maintenance duties: clean the dust filters, check the air balance, scrub down the walls to prevent the mould and algal infestations that tended to grow in untended corners in the absence of gravity. Sally and Willis accepted with good enough grace the work rotas Frank volunteered to draw up. They also quickly got used to the routine of meal preparation, most of it based on Russian space cuisine of decades past: there were tins of fish, meat and potatoes, dried soup and vegetable purée and fruit paste, nuts and black bread, and coffee, tea and fruit juice in bulbs . . . Some crews would have invested a lot of energy in coming up with inventive menus with those limited ingredients, Frank knew. Not the crew of the Galileo. Frank also insisted that they all kept up a routine of physical training, to offset the effects of weeks of weightlessness on their performance when they got to Mars. They had a treadmill, and elasticized frames to stress their muscles and bones. This alone occupied hours for each of them every day.

  But that left plenty of spare time in each twenty-four-hour cycle – time father and daughter seemed to use, at first anyhow, to get as far from one another as possible.

  Willis Linsay immediately disappeared into his own agenda of research and experimentation, using the computer gear and small laboratory he had installed on his personal deck. He seemed entirely unperturbed by being thrown into interplanetary space.

  His daughter, meanwhile, a solitary type too, withdrew into herself. She slept a lot, exercised ferociously over and above the required minimum, read for hours using the onboard e-library she’d helped stock. Willis Linsay played a lot of music: Chuck Berry, Simon and Garfunkel. This antique stuff, echoing around the hab module, seemed to disturb Sally. Frank guessed this was the soundtrack of her childhood, and not particularly welcome to have back.

  Even though Frank had known Sally from the days of the troll incident at GapSpace years back, he barely got a word out of her, at first. He sensed apprehension in her, however, despite her hard-nut exterior. He had to remind himself that she had actually discovered the Gap in the first place, along with Joshua Valienté and Lobsang. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that she didn’t seem to know why she was here, why her father had brought her along on this jaunt.

  As for Frank himself, he was just thrilled to be out here. For the first few days he gave himself up to a kind of triumphant joy. He’d been to the Brick Moon before, a number of times. Now he was in deep space, at last. Going to Mars! A Mars anyhow.

  And the scenery, at least at first, was spectacular. Seen from outside, the Brick Moon was a bulbous cluster surrounded by sparking lights and swarming activity – and when the Galileo’s fusion rocket opened up he watched that huge, busy complex fall away like it was dropped down a well. A spectacular sight, yes, but it would always be one of Frank’s biggest regrets that unlike the astronauts of NASA’s heroic age he would never see the Earth itself from space. Of course that was the point. At the Gap you didn’t need to escape from the Earth to reach space, because there was no Earth. But it did kind of diminish the spectacle.

  However, after the first few hours, once the Brick Moon was out of sight, he had the consolation of the stars, any direction you looked away from the sun, an infinity of them. Frank liked to sit in his portion of the hab module peering out into that endless drop, letting his ageing eyes become accustomed to the blackness, his pupils widening to their fullest. And he would make out another peculiarity of this particular stepwise reality: a band of soft dusty light spanning the zodiac, the sky’s equator. All this washed past his view, for the whole stack of the ship was rotating on its axis with slow grandeur, a measure taken to equalize the heating of the raw sunlight.

  After a couple of weeks, Sally took to emerging from her own space and joining Frank by his windows. Frank was no psychologist, and took a robust view of interpersonal dynamics; in his view it didn’t matter if a crew bonded all the way to Mars or not, just so long as they got there in one piece. And he certainly wasn’t going to get caught up in what looked to him like a very peculiar father-daughter relationship. So, when Sally showed up, Frank would acknowledge her presence with a nod, but kept his own counsel. Let her talk in her own time, or not.

  It was the end of the second day of this tentative companionship before she spoke meaningfully to him.

  She pointed at the band of zodiacal light. ‘Asteroids, right?’

  ‘Yeah. You can see something similar at home – I mean, in the skies of the Datum. But there’s more asteroids here. A whole extra band, actually, between the orbits of Venus and Mars.’

  She thought that over. ‘Oh. The wreckage of Dead Earth, the planet Bellos smashed.’

  ‘That’s it. But it’s not wasted. We’re out there already, in little dinky rocket ships, mining those fragments of planet for water, hydrocarbons, even iron from what used to be the Earth’s core. Easily accessible. And we’re manufacturing rocket fuel. Eventually, the plan is, we’ll be independent of materials brought over from the stepwise worlds altogether. Some people are planning to live out there, on the asteroids themselves. Mind you, others find it kind of morbid that we’re feeding off the ruins of a devastated world.’

  Sally shrugged. ‘I think I lost my capacity for sentimentality a long time ago. Ever since I came across evidence of a few Donnerparty disasters out in the reaches of the Long Earth. Butchered human bones. This is just another kind of cannibalism, I guess.’

  She said this with such flat finality that Frank had to look away, shuddering.

  ‘Come on, Frank. You’re tougher than that. Whatever it takes to survive, right?’

  ‘Sure. So.’ He forced a smile. ‘How are you finding the trip so far?’

  She thought that over. ‘Surprising, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Surprising?’

  Loosely strapped into her chair, she touched the hull wall. ‘For a start, this is kind of a bigger rocketship than I imagined we’d need.’

  ‘Well, the technology’s incredible. We’
re driven by a stream of tiny fusion bombs, pellets of deuterium and hydrogen that are made to detonate by a laser barrage, hundreds of bomblets every second going off behind a big pusher plate. We plan to use it in stacks to assemble more ambitious missions further out, to Venus, even Jupiter maybe—’

  ‘Slow down, Apollo 13, you’re hyperventilating.’

  ‘Sorry. This stuff’s been my life’s work. My boyhood dreams before that.’

  ‘My problem is I don’t see why you need a rocket at all. I thought the Gap saved you from all that.’

  Frank said, ‘Well, to get to Mars from the Datum, you’d have to climb out of Earth’s gravity well first. That’s why you need a Saturn V, even to get to the moon. Using the Gap we don’t need a Saturn V to get away from Earth. But we do still need a rocket for the Mars transfer.

  ‘You have Earth and Mars following their circular orbits around the sun, OK? Even when you’re in free space at Earth’s orbit, you need a boost from some rocket or other to add at least seven thousand miles per hour to your speed to get up into an elliptical transfer orbit, as we call it. You coast all the way to Mars’s orbit, and then you need another squirt, six thousand miles an hour this time, to slow down at Mars. And then you land. The whole thing is reversed when you come home. Actually our ICF rocket will provide a lot more push than that minimum.’

  ‘I guess that’s all logical enough.’

  ‘Except,’ called Willis Linsay, ‘that you skipped over the real mysteries behind all this.’

  Frank turned to see Willis swimming up the fireman’s pole that ran along the axis of the hab module. He asked, ‘Which are?’

  ‘How does conservation of momentum work between the stepwise worlds? Or indeed conservation of mass? Sally, if you step from Earth A into Earth B, sixty-some kilograms of mass suddenly disappear from A and appear in B. How come? Mass, like momentum and energy, is supposed to be conserved. These are basic principles of physics – without which, incidentally, this firecracker of a rocketship wouldn’t work at all.’