‘Is that possible?’
He winked. ‘Ask your father about life on Mars.’
As the Martian night closed in, the crew of Marsograd, with Sally, withdrew to the galley, the cosiest location. Here they ate another meal, the centrepiece of which was thick steaks of prized alpaca meat, with boiled greenhouse-rhubarb for a sweet, and they drank more coffee, and more vodka, most of which Sally resisted.
Sally felt curiously drawn to these three odd fellows in their shabby hovels. They seemed to have a clear sense of mission. Maybe it was just that she had become so disillusioned with mankind, from the examples she encountered too often. The Long Earth was, in a way, too easy a place to get to; it was only after some bunch of idiots had already built their spanking new town slap in the middle of the flood plain of a stepwise Mississippi, and the waters had started to rise, or whatever, that they generally came to Sally’s attention. Whereas these Russians had come to a place that was supremely hard to survive in, even to get to, and were now showing supreme intelligence, in their slob-like way, in learning about their environment and how to live in it.
But their tragedy was of course that the country that had given them this mission had all but collapsed.
Alexei Krilov’s main beef about that seemed to be that the academies to which he would have reported his science results were moribund, if not defunct. ‘Nobody to read my papers. No universities to give me tenured posts and science prizes. Poor Alexei.’
Viktor, already drunk, snorted dismissal. ‘Academies? On Datum, whole of Russia abandoned now. Gone. Moscow under ice. Polar bears in Red Square. And parties of Chinese working their way in from Vladivostok.’
Sergei had spoken little. ‘Chinese bastards,’ he growled now.
‘Ha! We are last Russian citizens, like cosmonaut in Mir station when Union collapsed, last Soviet citizen.’
‘It’s not as bad as that,’ Sally said. ‘Sure, Datum Russia is pretty much uninhabitable now. But most of the population escaped to the Low Earth footprints. The Long Russia survives.’
Viktor grunted. ‘Sure. Where struggle to build country begins all over again. Just like after Mongols smashed Kiev. And Napoleon smashed Moscow. And Hitler smashed Stalingrad.’ He wagged his half-empty glass at Sally. ‘We Russians have saying: “First five hundred years are worst.” Cheers.’ He drained his glass, refilled it from the flask.
‘Chinese bastards!’ Sergei shouted now.
Viktor patted Sergei’s arm. ‘There, there, big fellow. Pah! Let Chinese have frozen ruins of Datum. To us, Long Earth, Long Mars – and the stars!’
They drank a toast to that. Then to the Nobel Prize that Alexei was never going to win. Then to the soul of the alpaca whose life had been sacrificed to provide the steaks they had enjoyed.
And then they tried to teach Sally the words of the Russian national anthem, in English and Russian. She crept out to go to bed at the point they’d got on to the third verse: ‘Our strength is derived through our loyalty to the Fatherland. Thus it was, thus it is and thus it always will be! . . .’
18
IT WAS A YEAR after that first meeting in Happy Landings that Joshua next came across Paul Spencer Wagoner – this time, in Madison West 5.
‘Hello, Mr Valienté!’
Joshua was standing with Sister Georgina, in the small graveyard outside the Home that his old friend had run at that point. After the Madison bombing the Home had been painstakingly reestablished here in West 5, and the new graveyard held just two stones. The most recent was for Sister Serendipity, a lover of cooking whose enthusiasms had always lit up Joshua’s young life – and who, according to Home legend, had been on the run from the FBI. It had been Serendipity’s funeral that had brought him here, in fact.
And now Paul’s bright voice, older but unmistakable, called to him from across the street.
With Sister Georgina, Joshua crossed the road. It took a while; Georgina was another veteran of Joshua’s childhood days, and was almost as old as Serendipity had been.
Paul Spencer Wagoner, now six years old, was standing there with his father. They both looked uncomfortable, Joshua thought, in new-looking Datum-manufacture clothes. But Paul had a black eye and a swollen cheek, and his dark hair looked odd to Joshua, as if roughly cut. Joshua’s own little boy, Daniel Rodney, was just a couple of months old, and the Sisters had been cooing over the images Joshua had brought home for them. And there was enough of a father’s soul in Joshua now to make him wince at the trouble Paul, still a very young boy, was evidently having.
They quickly introduced each other. Sister Georgina shook hands with Paul and his father, who looked out of place, almost embarrassed.
Paul grinned up at Joshua. ‘Good to see you again, Mr Valienté.’
‘I suppose you deduced I’d be here.’
Paul laughed. ‘Of course. Everybody knows your story, about where you grew up. I thought I’d come visit now we live here too, in Madison.’
‘Really?’ Joshua glanced at the father. ‘I thought Happy Landings is a place people generally end up in, rather than leave.’
Tom Wagoner shrugged. ‘Well, it got a little uncomfortable for me, Mr Valienté—’
‘Joshua.’
‘My wife was the Happy Lander. Born there, I mean. Not me. She’s one of the Spencers. There are these big sprawling families in Happy Landings, the Spencers, the Montecutes. But she came to college on the Datum, in Minnesota, where I grew up. We fell in love, married, wanted kids, moved back to Happy Landings to be closer to her family . . .’
Sister Georgina prompted, ‘So what happened?’
‘Well, Happy Landings isn’t what it was, Sister. Not as happy a landing place, you might say. I think it’s been building up since Step Day. Before then it was a kind of refuge, a place where people who had kind of got lost would drift in, and stick. There were the trolls, too, which was always kind of weird to me, but you got used to them hanging around. But these last few years, with everybody stepping all over the place, people kept stumbling upon Happy Landings, and there were just too many strangers. The numbers were getting too high as well, and the trolls don’t like too many people. And newcomers – people like me – just didn’t fit any more.’
‘So you left.’
‘It was more me than Carla. She was with her family there, after all. It put us under a lot of pressure, to tell the truth. We came here, got jobs – I’m an accountant, and this is the place for jobs just now, Madison West 5 is growing fast since the nuke – but our marriage is going down a rocky road.’ He patted Paul’s head. ‘Oh, it’s OK. He knows all about it. Knows too damn much to be comfortable sometimes.’ He forced a laugh.
Now Sister Georgina touched Paul’s cheek, his eye. The boy flinched. ‘These injuries are recent,’ she said. ‘So what happened to you?’
‘School,’ Paul said simply.
Tom said, ‘Well, the butchered haircut was given him by a neighbourhood boy. The cheek was the other kids at school. The eye was one of the teachers.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Joshua said.
‘Afraid not. Guy got sacked. Didn’t help Paul. I keep telling him, nobody likes a smartass.’
‘It’s frustrating at school, Mr Valienté,’ Paul said, apparently more puzzled than distressed. ‘The teachers always make me wait for the other kids.’
Tom smiled wistfully. ‘His headmaster says he’s like a young Einstein, ready to take on relativity. But his teachers can’t teach him beyond long division. Not their fault.’
‘Mostly I sit and read. But I can’t keep quiet when I see people making mistakes. The other kids in class, or the teacher. I know I should keep quiet.’
‘Hmm,’ Sister Georgina said. ‘And these bruises are your reward.’
‘It’s like people care more about their pride than about what’s correct, about the truth. What kind of sense does that make?’
‘We’ve had worse than bruises actually,’ Tom said now. ‘Some of the parents have asked for Paul to be
removed from the school. Not just because he’s disruptive, though he is, if I’m honest. Because they’re – well, they’re scared of him.’
Sister Georgina cast a concerned look at Paul.
Tom said, ‘Look, don’t worry, we can speak frankly. He understands all this better than I do.’
‘I have been reading about people,’ Paul said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Psychology.’ He pronounced it puh-sike-ology. ‘I don’t know a lot of the words, and that slows me down. But I get some of it. People are scared of strange stuff. They think I’m not like them. Well, I’m not. But I’m not that different. One woman said I was like a cuckoo in the nest. And there was the man who said I was like a changeling, left by the elves. Not a human at all.’ He laughed. ‘One kid said I was E.T. Not from this world.’
Sister Georgina frowned. ‘Well, look – this is a time when people are scared anyhow. The coming of stepping was a big change for all of us. And now we’ve had the nuclear attack and everybody’s been affected by that. At times like this people want scapegoats, somebody they can comfortably hate. Anybody different will do. That was why people blew up Madison.’
Joshua nodded. ‘When I was a kid I always tried to keep my own step ability hidden. I felt the same, I knew how people would react if they knew, if they thought I was different. Sister Georgina here can tell you about that; she was there. And that was on the Datum. Out in the Long Earth, I’ve seen it for myself, you have a lot of small, isolated communities. People are growing up superstitious, more than in the big Datum cities—’
To Joshua’s surprise, Paul’s response was angry, almost a snarl. ‘At least in Happy Landings there were other kids like me. Smart, I mean. Not here. Here they’re all dumb. Well, I’d rather take a few punches from the kids at school than be like them.’
Tom took his son’s hand. ‘Come on, we did what we came for, you said hello to Mr Valienté, now we need to let these good people get on with their day . . .’
Joshua said Paul could come and see him any time he could find him, wherever he ‘deduced’ where Joshua was. And Sister Georgina offered Tom any support the Home could give him, and his unhappy family.
When they’d gone, Joshua and Sister Georgina exchanged a look. The Sister said, ‘This place Happy Landings has always sounded odd to me, from your descriptions. Whatever’s going on there, I hope our modern generation of witch-hunters don’t find it any time soon . . .’
19
THE TWO GLIDERS, Woden and Thor, sat side by side on the red dust of Mars.
The gliders were spindly constructions, supremely lightweight. Their wings were long – fifty or sixty feet, each wing longer than the entire fuselage – wings surprisingly narrow and sharply curved, which was something to do, Sally learned, with managing the flow of the very sparse Martian air. But the slender hulls of the gliders had been intelligently designed, Sally discovered as they got the ships loaded up, with a lot of room for food and water, surface exploration gear, inflatable domes for temporary shelter, spares and tools to maintain the gliders themselves – and some items that surprised her, such as emergency pressure bubbles, each big enough for one human, and little drone aircraft to act as eyes in the sky.
And, poking around the hulls, Sally discovered that each ship carried a whole stack of Stepper boxes, ready to be fitted out with Martian cacti.
Willis was proud of the design, and bragged about it at length. ‘You can guess the design principle. These gliders will be our equivalent of twains back on the Long Earth. We’ll ride in the sky as we step, safely above any discontinuities on the ground – ice, flood, quakes, lava flows, whatever. Airships would be no use in this thin air – they’d have to be too big to be practical, and we don’t have the lift gas anyhow. But the gliders are based on designs that have successfully flown at ninety thousand feet on the Datum, which is about the air pressure on the local Mars – higher on this Mars, of course . . . The gliders will only step the way twains step – a controlling sapient does the stepping, that is the pilot, metaphorically carrying each ship stepwise. We probably won’t travel too far laterally. We’ll do a lot of circling. That way, if we crash, there’s at least a chance that we could step on foot back to the MEM. Another failsafe option. Right, Frank?’
Before they launched, Sally said she had two questions. ‘Two ships, right?’
‘Well,’ Frank said, ‘we could carry three persons in one ship at a pinch. We’re taking two ships for backup.’
Sally thought almost fondly of Lobsang. ‘You can never have too much backup.’
‘Right,’ said Frank.
‘Two gliders, then. We need two pilots, from the three of us.’ She looked at them. ‘So, question one: who’s driving?’
Frank and Willis both put their hands up.
Sally shook her head. ‘I won’t waste my time arguing with two old-guy control freaks like you.’
‘You’ll get your turn,’ Willis said. ‘We’ll need to rotate.’
‘Sure. I’m happy to ride shotgun. Do I get to choose who I ride with?’ And before they could answer she snapped, ‘You got the short straw, Frank.’
‘That’s all I need. A back-seat driver.’
‘Don’t push your luck, Chuck Yeager . . . And, Dad, here’s my other question – why all the Stepper boxes?’
‘Trade goods,’ he said simply. He wouldn’t expand further.
She glowered at him, but said no more. This kind of secretiveness was typical – the way he’d known all about the Long Mars before they’d even come here, the way he’d been working with the Russians on Mars who he hadn’t mentioned until they landed, the secrets of Mars itself – ‘Ask your father about life on Mars’ – and now these Steppers, carried for a contingency he clearly foresaw but wouldn’t discuss. He’d been this way since she was a teenager; it was a way of keeping control, and it had always made her coldly furious.
But she’d known all about his personality when she signed up for this jaunt. The time to challenge him would come, but not yet, not yet.
Frank was focusing on the flight. He said sternly, ‘We’re going to take this in stages. We’re going to suit up fully, in case of cabin leaks, and we’re going to make our very first step on the ground. Then, if all goes well, we’ll launch and step further in the air.’
Willis scowled. ‘OK, Frank, if you insist. Safety first.’
‘That’s the way to stay alive. Let’s get on with it.’
On their last night, the Russians insisted on taking them all over to Marsograd, served them coffee and vodka and black bread with some kind of algal paste, and made them watch a movie, called White Sun in the Desert. Viktor explained, ‘Old cosmonaut tradition. Movie watched by Yuri Gagarin before historic first flight in space. All Russians remember Gagarin.’
Frank fell asleep during the movie. Sally just sat through it, trying to avoid conversation with her father.
In the small hours, in the dark, they were driven back to the gliders in the Russian rover. They arrived a little before dawn. The MEM was a silent hulk in the dark, sending reassuring status messages to Frank’s tablet, waiting to take them home.
They clambered out of the rover, and the Russians rolled away.
In their already familiar pressure suits the three of them crossed to their aircraft, and boarded. Soon Sally found herself sitting in a cramped bucket seat, looking at the back of the helmeted head of Frank Wood, in the pilot’s bucket seat in front of her.
Even before this first limited trial Frank insisted on running a few more ‘integrity checks’ before going any further.
Then he called back, ‘OK, let’s do this. The ground test first. Thor, this is Woden. You hear me over there, Willis?’
‘Loud and clear.’
‘Sally, I have my Stepper box; I’ll do the stepping. For now I’ll carry you and the ship. OK?’
‘Copacetic, Captain Lightyear,’ Sally said.
‘Yeah, yeah. Just take this seriously; it might keep you alive a little longer. Willis, on
my zero. Three—’
Before he’d got to ‘two’ Willis’s ship had winked out of existence.
Frank sighed. ‘I knew he’d do that. Here we go—’
Stepping on Mars, Sally discovered, felt just like stepping on Earth. But the landscape beyond the hull of the glider changed dramatically, a more significant difference than most single steps on the Long Earth, unless you fell into a Joker.
Around the two gliders, still sitting side by side on the ground, the basic shape of the landscape endured, the eroded remains of the Mangala valley, the rise to the north-east that was the beginning of the great bulge of Arsia Mons. But aside from that there was only a plain of dust littered with wind-sculpted chunks of rock, under a sky the colour of butterscotch. No life here.
The MEM, of course, and the tyre tracks left by the Marsokhod, had disappeared.
Frank theatrically tapped one of the display screens before him. ‘Air’s all gone. Pressure down to one per cent of Earth’s, and – yep, it’s mostly carbon dioxide. Just like our Mars.’
They clambered out cautiously. In the thin air Sally found her pressure suit inflated, subtly, making it stiffer to move around in. Frank and Sally checked each other’s suit, checked the glider cab. They took care over this, at Frank’s insistence; a failure of their gear over in the Gap Mars would have been survivable – here, probably not. The average Mars was lethal. Unprotected, Sally would be killed by the lack of air, the cold, the ultraviolet. Even the cosmic rays sleeting through the thin atmosphere inflicted a radiation dose equivalent to standing five miles from a nuclear blast, every six months.
Frank looked east, to the rising sun, holding up his hand to shield his faceplate from the glare, until he found a morning star. Earth, Sally realized, a feature missing from the sky of the Mars of the Gap. Frank opened a hull hatch and pulled out a small optical telescope and a fold-out radio antenna.
Willis came walking over from his own glider. ‘At last, this is an authentic Mars. Just like our own. The way Mars is supposed to be.’
The Long Mars Page 15
