‘True enough,’ Frank said. ‘So what’s the answer?’
Sally said, ‘Mellanier—’
‘That fraud!’
‘– would say that the conservation principles work across the worlds, not just in one world. Earths A and B share their mass and momentum, so nothing overall is lost or gained.’
‘Whereas others,’ Willis said heavily, and Frank suspected he was talking about himself, ‘argue rather more convincingly that such principles can only work one world at a time. And if you step to world B, you borrow a little momentum from that world – it slows its rotation just a little – and you borrow some mass-energy from its gravity field.’
Frank said, ‘Surely you could devise tests to establish which is which.’
Willis shrugged. ‘The effects are too small. Some day it will be done. But the latter is the more appealing idea, don’t you think? That a destination world somehow welcomes you as you step in, by giving of itself. And of course you give back when you step away.’
Sally said sourly, ‘If you like your scientific hypotheses to come loaded with emotional freight – yes, I guess that would be an appealing idea . . .’
Frank could sense a lifetime of fencing going on under the surface of this quasi-technical conversation. They didn’t even share the same accent. Willis was pretty broad Wyoming, which must have caused him to be underestimated by snobbier academics, while the daughter had a much more neutral accent, as if she’d deliberately distanced herself from her origins, from her father. Frank didn’t detect any real animosity between father and daughter. They were too vivid for that, the pair of them, much too real personalities in their own right to have that kind of negative relationship. But it certainly wasn’t all positive. They were two powerful people, with a shared past, yes, respectful, but wary of each other.
‘By the way,’ Sally asked now, ‘which way’s Mars?’
Frank glanced out of the window, thought for a second, then pointed over his shoulder. ‘Thataway. It won’t show up as more than a spark for, oh, weeks yet. Then we’ll see it hanging there like an orange. It has big features, you know, the giant mountains, the canyons, visible from far away – well, you saw the images back in the auditorium. And on this Mars there’s oceans, and the green of life.’
Sally glanced at her father. ‘And is that the point of this mission? To figure out why Mars, this Mars, is warm and wet and alive?’
‘Oh, no,’ Willis said dismissively. ‘That’s trivial.’
Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘Life on Mars is trivial? Tell that to Percival Lowell. So if life on Mars is just part of the scenery—’
‘It’s life on the Long Mars that I’m after. Life, and mind, and what it might – what it must have achieved.’
Sally faced him. ‘To what end, Dad? What are you looking for – some kind of technology, like a new Stepper box? And what will you do then? Just turn it loose? Mellanier once compared you to Daedalus, the father of Icarus, the boy who used his father’s invention to fly too high and upset the gods. And that’s you all over, isn’t it? Tinker, tinker for the sake of it, caring not one whit about the consequences. The Daedalus of your age.’
Willis rubbed his chin. ‘But Daedalus is supposed to have invented the saw, the axe and the gimlet among other goodies. That’s not such a bad charge sheet, is it? And as for—’ An alarm sounded softly. ‘Ah. That’s my latest experiment. Excuse me . . .’ Stiff but oddly graceful, he swam through the microgravity to the fireman’s pole and pulled himself away to his lab area.
Frank eyed Sally. ‘You OK?’
She didn’t reply. For a long while she sat silent, withdrawn, quite unreadable to Frank.
Then she said, ‘So what could go wrong, Frank? With the Galileo. I know they put us through some of the emergency procedures. But that mostly involved us climbing into air bags and floating around helplessly, while you saved the day.’
Frank shrugged. ‘I think Al and the others figured that was all you would sit still for. And Willis even less. So we fed you the most basic stuff.’
‘OK. But I’m here now. And I’m used to relying on myself for my own survival.’
‘Sure. Well, there are plenty of contingencies we couldn’t survive at all. A massive enough meteor strike. A bad enough failure of the propulsion system during the firing phases – we do have nuclear fusion explosions going on back there.’
‘And what is survivable?’
‘Plenty. A smaller meteor puncture. A containable fire. An atmosphere leak, or some other failure of the air supply. A drastic power failure. In most of these situations the automatics will save us. In most of the rest, I’ll be there to deal with it. And failing that, you can talk to the Brick Moon.’
‘And if all those fallbacks fail?’
Frank grinned. ‘I’d say the primary key survival skill for you is going to be learning to put your pressure suit on, in the dark, with the air failing around you, and the emergency horns sounding like the opening bars of Doomsday. Once you’re in your suit you’ll have time to deal with the rest. Takes hours of practice to master that.’
‘Well, I guess we have hours.’
And so they started, with Sally learning every inch of the ship and its equipment and various failure modes to the best of her ability, while Willis locked himself away and pursued his own projects.
That was how it was, pretty much all the way to Mars.
14
IN HER LOG, Maggie Kauffman noted that it was only once they were past Earth West 1,617,524 – past the world of the beagles, and with that final crewmate on board – that her journey truly began.
Harry Ryan finally declared himself happy with what he described as his ‘fusion-cuisine of an engine suite’, with robust American engineering wrapped around a core of Chinese gel-based ingenuity, and he permitted Maggie to order full throttle, at last.
Maggie herself was in the wheelhouse when it began, with a few of her officers, ready for any of the multiplicity of breakdowns and disasters that Harry had predicted. Wu Yue-Sai was making notes as ever. Maggie had a fine view of the outside worlds through big panoramic windows – windows with tough ceramic shutters ready to clang shut in an instant in case of emergency.
And she watched those worlds flip by, one after the other, ever faster as the drive cut in.
At first the view was routine, if you could call anything about the Long Earth routine: just one arid world after the next in this belt of ‘Para-Venuses’, dissolving away at one per second, the rate of her heartbeat. Then the rate increased steadily, up to two Earths a second, faster, and Maggie felt her own heart beat faster in response, her body’s rhythms unconsciously tracking the music of the worlds. But as the rate increased further Maggie began to find the strobing of realities uncomfortable. They should be in no danger. It was routine now to test twain crews and passengers for epilepsy, and Doc Mackenzie had ordered everybody aboard to put themselves through a final automated screening before consenting to this engine test.
And still the worlds swept past, faster and faster. Maggie became aware that the Earths flickering below were greener than before, the sky sporadically bluer. They must already be out of the Venus belt, then. But the worlds were now flying past her vision too fast for her to make out any details, nothing save the basics of sky, horizon, land, and the steely shine of the river beneath them – a remote cousin of the Ohio, if the ships’ geographers were to be believed.
And then the worlds blurred. They reached a certain critical point when the stepping rate was faster than her vision processing system could follow, as if the worlds – each a whole Earth! – were no more than fast refreshes of a digital image. So there was no longer a sense of stepping from Earth to Earth, but more of continuous movement, of flow and evolution. The sun was a constant, hanging in a sky that was a melange of all the weathers, a kind of deep blue blandness. Below, the river spread out across its flood plain like a pale, greater ghost of itself, and forest clumps melded into a greenish mist that l
ingered over the landscape. It was no longer possible to make out any animals in the individual worlds, any birds; even the mightiest herd in any one world would be there and gone before her eyes had time to see it. Yet there was a sense of continuity, of the connectedness of all these living worlds, these actualized possibilities for Earth. All of this was sporadically illuminated, or darkened, by Jokers, exceptions to the norm, there and gone every few minutes.
And the Cernan hung constant in the sky, a reassuring companion – the work of mankind enduring against the flickering of multiple realities.
Now there was a thrum of mighty engines pushing the ship through the air, and the landscape shifted beneath the prow of the Armstrong. Continental drift was to some extent an affair of chance, and the positions of the landmasses shifted from world to world, mostly by very little, sometimes by a lot, but cumulatively by significant amounts. So the airships had to navigate geographically, trying to stay roughly over the centre of the North American craton, the antique granite mass at the heart of the continent. Again they were following the precedent of the Chinese expedition five years earlier.
Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai stood by Maggie, and boldly took her hand. ‘It is just as it was for us aboard the Zheng He,’ she said. ‘As if we see these worlds, the whole of the Long Earth all at once, through the eyes of a god.’
Only a few hours later the ships rushed across the Gap, around Earth West 2,000,000, without pausing. Harry Ryan declared himself happy with the resilience of his ships given the test of that dose of vacuum and weightlessness.
The character of the Earths did change somewhat after the Gap, when they paused to sample, image, visit. The worlds became blander, more colourless, with forest clumps dominated by huge ferns. These in turn gave way to more arid landscapes, with the vegetation restricted to the rivers and the fringes of the oceans. The worlds seemed to come in rough bands of similar types, tens or hundreds of thousands of steps wide, analogous to the Belts that had been identified by the first mappers of the Long Earth a couple of decades back.
Hemingway and his scientists tried to label and investigate a representative sample. They stopped to study features of geology, or geomorphology, or climatology – even astronomy, such as unusual features on the moon. They even checked for radio transmissions bouncing around remote ionospheres, and looked for the lights of human-lit fires, for nobody knew how far the colonization wavefront had come in the years since Step Day. The scientists reported that the basic suites of vegetation and animal types were similar either side of the great interruption of the Gap, and that was no great surprise. But they saw no stepping humanoids beyond the Gap: no trolls, no kobolds, none of the species that were common on the lower worlds. Again that was no great surprise, since, Maggie supposed, most steppers would not take the risk of crossing the Gap. But, for a veteran Long Earth traveller, it seemed strange to see worlds where there had never been trolls at all, worlds where the ecology had not been influenced by their massive presence – worlds which had never known the trolls’ long call.
On the ships sailed. Data poured in, a torrent.
But it was always life that snagged the attention. And the life they saw got odder and odder.
Most of these worlds seemed to host complex life – that is, animals and plants, more than just bacteria. But the worlds of the Long Earth differed from each other by chance, by outcomes of random events in the past that varied a little or a lot. And the great extinction events that littered Earth’s history seemed to Maggie to represent the biggest of all rolls of the cosmic dice. Even worlds closer to the Datum than Valhalla appeared to reflect different outcomes of the big impact that had ended the reign of the dinosaurs on the Datum. There, people had found strange assemblages of beasts that were like dinosaurs or not, like mammals or not, like birds or not.
But where the Armstrong travelled now, things got weirder. Maggie learned that there had been another milestone mass extinction on Datum Earth more than two hundred million years before humanity had arisen; a community crowded with the first mammals, early dinosaurs and the ancestors of crocodiles had been smashed. Now, millions of steps from the Datum, they found the consequences of different outcomes of that epochal event, jumbled ecologies where mammalian hunters tracked dinosaur-like herbivores, or insectile predators chased crocodilian prey. There were worlds with crocodiles the size of tyrannosaurs, or raptors the size of mice with teeth like needles . . .
Whatever the details, what struck Maggie cumulatively, as these first days of rapid travel wore by, was the sheer, relentless vigour of an elemental life force which seemed to seek expression anywhere it could, any way it could, on any available world – an expression in living things shaped by relentless competition, creatures breathing, breeding, fighting, dying.
It got overwhelming after a while. Maggie retreated into the familiar routine of work.
15
ON THE NINTH DAY after the inception of the Chinese drive, Maggie, writing up reports in her sea cabin, barely looked up as she sensed the airship come to a stop, once again. Another science halt; she’d be informed if it was necessary for her to know the details, or if it was thought she’d be interested.
And a day later, with the ship still halted, Gerry Hemingway called. ‘Captain, sorry to bother you. You might want to see this one for yourself.’
She checked her earthometer: Earth West 17,297,031. What the hell, she needed some fresh air. ‘I’ll be there. How’s the weather?’
‘We’re near a sea coast here. Kind of crisp, and it’s February. Bring cold-weather gear, and waterproof boots. And Captain—’
‘Yes, Gerry?’
‘Be careful where you step.’
‘See you on the access deck.’ She stood, and glanced down at Shi-mi. ‘You coming?’
Shi-mi sniffed. ‘Will Snowy be there?’
‘Probably.’
‘Bring me back a T-shirt.’
Maggie Kauffman stood on a sandy beach, by a gently lapping sea. She wondered if this was an inland American sea like in the Valhallan Belt, or if such labels as ‘America’ made sense any more, as the continents slid around the face of the Earth like jigsaw pieces on a tipped-up tray.
She was here with Gerry, Snowy the beagle and Midshipman Santorini whom she’d assigned as an informal companion for the beagle. Even Snowy, who generally went barefoot, was wearing heavy, improvised boots, she saw. Further away more of Gerry’s science team were recording, mapping, monitoring, staring at this unremarkable beach, the ocean, the dunes. There were two armed marines assigned by Mike McKibben, their tough-talking, Scrabble-playing sergeant. Nobody from the Navy side was sure if the marines were attached to parties like this to keep an eye on the local dinosaurs or crocodiles, or on the Navy crew, or on the dog that spoke English.
And two of the party were civilians, wearing odd-looking sensor packs on their shoulders. These were employed by Douglas Black, and sent a continuous feed back to him. Black rarely showed his face outside his cabin, but he was endlessly curious about the worlds they travelled, and liked to explore, if only vicariously.
Well, there were no crocodiles or dinosaurs here, that Maggie could see. Plenty of life in the ocean; she glimpsed fish, seaweed, the remains of some kind of shellfish on the tidal wrack. And crabs, she saw: a hell of a lot of the little bastards running around.
Gerry Hemingway was watching her. ‘Captain, we haven’t filed a formal report yet. What’s your first reaction?’
‘That I’m glad you warned me to put my boots on. These damn crabs are everywhere.’
‘OK. Fair enough. We’ve found a whole belt of worlds dominated by crabs and crustaceans. This is the most spectacular so far. Look, if you’ll indulge us, we’ll show you this step by step. It’s a way of checking our conclusions.’
‘Show me what?’
‘Follow me down to the ocean, please, Captain.’
She glanced at Snowy, who gave a remarkably human shrug, and stepped forward, very carefully.
; At the water’s edge, Hemingway splashed out a little way. ‘What about this, Captain? And this?’ He pointed at the seabed, a big patch of pink, a patch of green.
Looking closer she saw the pink was a crowd of shellfish of some kind, like shrimp, and the green was seaweed. ‘I don’t see . . .’ Then she realized that the shrimp things were corralled into a rough square, ringed by walls of stones heaped on the sea-bottom sand, and patrolled by some kind of crab no bigger than the palm of her hand. And the seaweed too was a roughly square patch, maybe six feet on a side. More crabs were working the seaweed, passing over its surface, plucking at the greenery. Working in neat parallel lines, up and down this – field?
She stepped back and looked around. The near-shore sea floor of this coastal strip, as far as she could see to left and right, was covered in rectangles and squares like this, green, pink, purplish, other colours. Now she saw it, it was obvious.
‘Oh.’
Hemingway was grinning. ‘“Oh”, Captain?’
‘Don’t get smug, Hemingway.’
‘Fa-hrrms,’ said the beagle, staring as she was. ‘Little fa-hrrms.’
‘That’s it,’ Hemingway said. ‘We’re evidently seeing careful, conscious, purposeful cultivation by this particular kind of crab. Next step. Follow me, Captain . . .’
They walked along the beach to what looked at first glance like some kind of drainage ditch cut deep into the sand, straight and long and coming out of the dunes. It ran with clear water, down to the sea. Maybe ten feet wide, the surface was cluttered with debris, Maggie saw, maybe litter from the land washed away by some storm . . .
No. She looked again. The ‘debris’ was flowing in two lanes, one washing down towards the sea, the other back up. And what she’d thought was drifting junk was mostly little squares and rectangles, none bigger than eighteen inches or so on a side, floating on the water. The ones heading downstream carried what looked like waste, empty pink shells and other garbage. The ones coming up from the sea were laden, with ‘shrimp’, with seaweed.
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