The Long Mars

by Pratchett, Terry; Baxter, Stephen

  ‘The only danger here came from you and your weapon. Get off my ship, you idiot.’ She deliberately turned her back. Then she approached Snowy and Mac, who were standing awkwardly side by side. ‘Good teamwork, you two.’

  The beagle nodded gravely. ‘Thank you, Captain.’

  Mac just shrugged.

  Maggie said, ‘Good work, in spite of the fact that you avoid each other like the plague. So, you going to tell me what’s going on between you two?’

  Snowy said reluctantly, ‘Matter of – honou-hhr . . .’

  ‘Honour? What about?’

  ‘Murde-hrr my people.’

  ‘Who? Mac? Are you serious? . . . Ah, look, we need to sort this out. In the meantime – Mac, with me.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  She led him to the window and looked down. She could see the snake where it had landed, twisting, struggling. ‘We’re supposed to be explorers. We only just show up here, we don’t even get out of the ship, and we start shooting. Killing. Except we didn’t kill that thing.’

  ‘No, we didn’t.’

  ‘Badly wounded, though. And it’s in a lot of pain, in my nonmedical opinion.’

  ‘Can’t disagree with that, Captain.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, get down there and fix it, that’s what.’

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that? You heard Gerry describe its life system. What do I use for anaesthetic, battery acid?’

  ‘Figure it out. You’re the doctor. Think what you might learn about the anatomy of these creatures.’ More softly she said, ‘And think what an impression you’d make on the crew, after Cutler’s performance.’

  He opened his mouth, closed it, and, very visibly, began to think. ‘Hmm. Well, if Hemingway is right about the ecosystem here, an animal like that must live off some combination of the plants’ products, regardless of what they are. I’d need Harry Ryan to knock me up canisters of hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide.’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘And I’ll need thick gloves. Thick, thick gloves . . .’ He walked away. ‘Hemingway, you’d better come give me a hand down there.’

  Maggie looked down once more at the writhing acid snake, then turned away and returned to work.

  There were more acid worlds, many more, in a belt that turned out to be millions of steps wide, a good fraction of the width of the great belt of complex water-solvent biology worlds that encompassed the Datum itself, and containing just as much diversity of form. A belt dominated by a form of life whose existence had been entirely unsuspected, before this mission.

  And still they sailed on.

  28

  SO, WITH LOBSANG’S urging to find out more about the anomalous outbreak of intelligence among mankind ringing in his ears, and with memories of previous encounters stirring in his memory, in the spring of 2045 Joshua went to see Paul Spencer Wagoner.

  Nine years after Paul had first been admitted to the Home, he was still in Madison, in fact still based at the Home. Now aged nineteen, Paul had been allowed to stay on in an informal capacity of ‘care assistant’. It had been similar for Joshua. Even as he’d grown to a young adult Joshua had needed the shelter of the Home, or so he’d felt, to keep his own stepping ability private. Did Paul, with his abnormal intellect, feel that way too?

  ‘But there was no harm in you, Joshua,’ said Sister Georgina, now an old lady, all but immobile, with a smile like a sunbeam. ‘There’s no harm in him. Inasmuch as there’s no harm in the hurricane, or the lightning strike. Nothing intentional. Not really . . .’

  Joshua had seen Paul a few times in the years since the boy had been brought here, whenever he called in to the Home. They found they shared a morbid sense of humour, and would play jokes on the long-suffering Sisters, often involving the detaching of Joshua’s artificial hand. But you had to be careful. Not all Paul’s jokes were a lot of fun for other people.

  And now, as soon as Joshua got to the Home, somehow it wasn’t a surprise to see a young girl come running out of the front door crying, and Paul Spencer Wagoner half-heartedly following her, very obviously trying not to laugh.

  Paul let Joshua take him for a coffee in downtown Madison West 5, on a pale imitation of the old Datum city’s State Street. Paul insisted on paying, however; he had a wallet full of credit cards.

  Across the table, he eyed Joshua. ‘So, good old Uncle Joshua. Honorary uncle, anyhow. Back to check up on me, are you?’

  The challenge wasn’t serious, Joshua saw. Nor was it playful, quite. It was more of a probe, a test. This wasn’t the Paul Spencer Wagoner Joshua had known before. He had hardened. Joshua saw a young man who was growing up to look like his father – ordinary-looking, really, not too handsome, not too plain. His thick dark hair was his best feature. His clothing was a jumble, with no evident sense of style or colour coordination, not that Joshua was any kind of fashion guru. It looked like he had raided the spare clothing locker at the Home and come out wearing whatever suited, whatever was practical for the day.

  He had beefed up, filled out, and Joshua wasn’t surprised; no matter how smart he was, or rather because he was so smart, a kid like Paul needed to be able to defend himself physically. Once Joshua had even taken him to some sparring sessions. Joshua himself had sparred with Bill Chambers and other buddies as a boy – scenes later replayed with Lobsang, in much stranger circumstances. But Paul had scars he was always going to bear: one misshapen eyebrow, a broken nose, the remains of a nasty laceration on his neck.

  Joshua just ignored Paul’s opening sally. He asked instead, ‘So, who was she? The girl at the door. What’s the story?’

  ‘The girl?’ To Joshua’s surprise, Paul had to think for a moment before he dug up her name. ‘Miriam Kahn. Local family, met her at a barn dance. Always liked barn dances, you know.’

  ‘You? Really?’

  ‘Is it so surprising? They were always big on barn dances out at Happy Landings. Well, there wasn’t much else to do. And with the fiddle players working away, and the trolls singing their rounds . . . I mean, the events are trivial, the repetitive music, the baby steps, but it is such a joy to throw yourself into the physical from time to time, isn’t it? We are not after all disembodied intelligences. Dancing and sex. Great sport, both of them. A kind of animal madness comes over you.’

  ‘So. Is that all that Miriam Kahn meant to you? “Sport.” Is that what you said to her?’

  ‘Oh, of course not. Well, not in so many words. Joshua, we love sex. My kind, I mean. And sex between us is the best of all, a union both physical and mental, of equals.’

  And Joshua wondered: My kind?

  ‘But the trouble is there still aren’t many of us around. And so we turn to other partners. Look, Joshua, I know you’re less easily shocked than most. But that’s what I think poor Miriam picked up on. Sex with her, with one of you – well, can you imagine having sex with a dumb animal, a beast? I don’t mean some bizarre High Meggers thing, a lonely comber with his mule . . . Like mating with Homo erectus. Have you heard of that species? Fully human from the forehead down, anatomically. But from the eyebrows up, the brain of a chimp, more or less, scaled up for the bigger body. Can you imagine coupling with one of those? The animal thrill of the moment – the beautiful, empty eyes – the crashing shame you’d feel when it’s over?’

  ‘You’re telling me that’s how it was for you and this Miriam?’

  ‘More or less. But I can’t help myself, Joshua. It hurts me as much as it hurts them.’

  ‘I doubt that very much. Paul, what did you mean by your kind?’

  Paul smiled. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you, when you showed up again. I know you can keep a secret, because you kept enough of your own, didn’t you? Look – I’ll show you. I have my Stepper box. I know you don’t need one. I’ve paid, let’s get out of here—’

  He stepped away with the slightest pop of displaced air, leaving his coffee half-f
inished.

  When Joshua had first built a Stepper box of his own, on Step Day, aged thirteen, he had stepped out of the Home in the city of Datum Madison, and into forest, primeval, untouched, unexplored, as far as he could tell. Since those days, thirty years on, the Low Earths had soaked up most of the stepwise migration away from the Datum, including the big flow since Yellowstone had popped.

  But – and even Joshua sometimes forgot this – a stepwise Earth was a whole world, as big and roomy as the original, all but empty of humans before Step Day, and it could absorb a large stepping population while keeping much that was wild and primitive.

  Thus it was that, only a few steps away from West 5, in the footprint of Madison itself, Joshua found himself in a forest glade as untouched as any unexamined world in the High Meggers, in this little corner at least. It was the old trees that gave it away, Joshua always thought. If you saw a really old tree, centuries or even millennia old, bent out of shape by the vicissitudes of time and coated with exotic lichen and fungi, you knew you were in someplace no farmer had ever cleared, no logger had ever plundered.

  And in this glade a dozen young people, from middle teenagers to twenty-somethings, were at play.

  Most of them sat around a heap of food, canned and film-wrapped, a hasty picnic. Two of them, both girls, swam naked in the small pool that was the centrepiece of the glade. And three others, two boys and a girl, were having noisy, giggling sex off in the shade of the trees. It might have been any bunch of kids at play, Joshua thought. Save for the inventive open-air sex. And save for the way they spoke to each other continually, a kind of high-speed jabber that sometimes sounded like compressed English, sometimes like the baby-talk produced by Paul’s sister Judy all those years ago, which Joshua still vividly remembered. Joshua could understand barely a word.

  And they weren’t like ordinary kids in the way that the nearest of them immediately rounded on Joshua when he stepped in with Paul, all armed with bronze knives, and a couple further out with raised crossbows.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Paul said, hands held high. He squirted out some of the high-speed babble.

  Joshua was still subject to suspicious stares, but the knives were lowered.

  ‘Come have a sandwich,’ Paul said to Joshua.

  ‘No thanks . . . What did you say to them?’

  ‘That you’re a dim-bulb. No offence, Joshua, but that was obvious to them already. Just from the way you looked around, with your jaw slack. Like you showed up dragging your knuckles, you know?’

  ‘A dim-bulb?’

  ‘But I also said you’re the famous Joshua Valienté, that I’ve known you since I was a little kid, that I trusted you to keep our secret. So you’re in. Not that there’s much of a secret to keep. We move the whole time, never visit the same place twice.’

  ‘Why do you need to do that?’

  ‘Well, we’ve all got scars, Joshua. If you want to know why, ask the people who gave them to us.’

  ‘All right. You say these are your kind.’

  He grinned. ‘Actually we have a name. We call ourselves the Next. Not presumptuous at all, right? We thought about other names. The “Wide-awake”, compared with you sleepwalkers, you see. “The Next” is catchier.’

  ‘How did you find each other?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not so hard in the Low Earths. You people keep good records. A lot of our kind have problems at school and the like. And a lot of us have been institutionalized, one way or another, Joshua. Spent time in places like the Home, foster care agencies – in lunatic asylums, juvenile penal institutes. Also there are family names that can provide a link. Spencer, my mother’s maiden name. Montecute.’

  ‘Happy Landings names.’

  ‘Yeah. That was the breeding ground, or one of them. We don’t fit in your world, Joshua, but at least we leave a trace as we pass through it. Having said that, there must be some who do fit in, who keep their heads down, who find a place in your society somehow. We haven’t found any of them yet. They may be aware of us . . . I guess we’ll meet up some day.’

  ‘Hmm. I’ll be honest, Paul. The way you keep saying us and you is disturbing me.’

  ‘Well, that’s bad luck for you, Joshua. Get used to it. Because it’s been obvious to me ever since I hooked up with others of my kind – for the first time since they took my little sister away, and I had no one to talk to – that we are a different kind, fundamentally. That’s not to say we haven’t had a few disputes. We’re arrogant sons of bitches; we’re all used to being the brightest in our own little circle of dim-bulbs. But when we’re together, we just race away.

  ‘Joshua, you needn’t think we’re cooking up the next atom bomb here. We’re super-smart, but right now we don’t know anything. Nothing much more than you know, I mean, and half of that’s wrong and the rest is mostly illusion . . . We’re like the young Einstein in that patent office in Switzerland, staring at an empty notebook, dreaming of flying on a beam of light. He had the vision, but lacked the mathematical tools, yet, to realize his theory.’

  ‘Modest, aren’t you?’

  ‘No. Nor immodest. Just honest. For now we’re more potential than achievement. But that will come. Already is coming, in a way.’ He glanced at Joshua. ‘I saw you watching me in the coffee bar. Wondering where the hell I got my money from, yes? It’s all legal, Joshua. We’re particularly good at mathematics, an area where you don’t necessarily need a lot of life experience to excel. Some of us came up with investment-analysis algorithms – it wasn’t hard to find loopholes in the rules, ways to beat the system. We don’t play the markets ourselves; we just found middle men to sell the software. That kind of thing – that’s how we make our money.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re playing with fire. You need to be careful.’

  ‘Oh, we’re careful. It’s not as if we need to spend much anyhow. Not for now, not until we figure out what we’re going to do, where we’re going to go . . . Look, Joshua, one reason I brought you here is because I thought you would understand. For us to gather like this – it’s not about mathematics or philosophy, or making money or whatever, not even about the future. It’s just about being with others like ourselves. Can you imagine how it was for a kid like me, alone? To be surrounded by a bunch of upright apes with minds like guttering candles, and yet who had built this vast civilization full of rules and a crushing weight of tradition, none of which makes any sense if you just look at it . . . And having to act like you’re the same as everybody else. Then, can you imagine what it’s like, for the first time in your life, to find people who can keep up with you? For whom you don’t have to slow down, or explain – or, worse yet, pretend? Where you can just be the way you need to be?’

  Joshua met Paul’s intense stare, trying not to flinch. Paul was just a not particularly well-turned-out nineteen-year-old boy. His face was smooth, young, his brow clear. But his eyes were like a predator’s eyes – like the eyes of a cave lion, and Joshua had encountered plenty of those out in the Long Earth in his time. He had met at least one super-intelligent entity before, he reminded himself, in Lobsang. But even Lobsang’s artificial visages showed more empathy than he detected in Paul’s gaze.

  Joshua was afraid, and he was determined not to show it.

  To break the moment Joshua glanced over his shoulder, where the three-way coupling, uncomfortably noisy for him, was still going on. ‘I can see you also get a lot of hot sex.’

  ‘Well, that’s one thing. When I’m with Greta or Janet or Indra, it’s not like it is with a dim-bulb girl, like poor Miriam Kahn. It’s real, it’s the whole of me engaged with the other, not just my hormones expressing themselves. We don’t even have to obey your rules, your taboos.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘People fear us because we’re smarter than them. I guess that’s natural. But what they don’t see is that we’re fundamentally not interested in them, you know? Not unless they’re standing before us, getting in our way. It’s each other that fascinates us. Enric
hes us. And I thought you would understand because you were special too, weren’t you, Joshua? When you were my age, or younger. You thought you were the only natural stepper in the world.’

  ‘Yeah.’ And it wasn’t until he was twenty-eight years old, in fact, when he’d met Sally Linsay, that Joshua had first fully understood that he wasn’t alone, that there were whole families of secret steppers out there, if you knew where to look.

  ‘Maybe you remember how it felt to have to hide, to pretend. And what you feared they might do to you, if they found you out. Well, you’ve told me as much.’

  ‘OK, Paul. Look, I appreciate you trusting me this far. Showing me all this – showing me yourselves. I know it cost you to do this, that you’re taking a risk. Maybe going forward I can help you some more.’

  Paul grunted, sceptical. ‘How? By being the latest in a long line to tell us how we have to “fit in”?’

  ‘Well, maybe. But I’m Joshua Valienté, king of the steppers, remember. Maybe I can find you a better place to hide. The Long Earth’s got a lot of room. And I can show you a better way to live out there. Ways to set traps and snares, to hunt.’

  ‘Hmm. Let me think it over—’

  But there was no more time for talk. Because that was when the cops arrived.

  There were twenty of them, maybe more, an overwhelming number, and they just stepped right on into the forest glade. They seemed to have everything spied out. They jumped on the kids, and took away or smashed their Stepper boxes. Joshua saw just one girl, evidently a natural stepper, get away, but a couple of cops headed off after her too.

  Joshua had heard of this kind of tactic, evolved by the Low Earths’ police and military after three decades of dealing with steppers, and their ease of escape and evasion. You did your surveillance. You went in hard, without hesitation, without warning, with overwhelming force. You immediately took away the Stepper boxes from those who used them before they had a chance to react. And you made natural steppers helpless, usually by rendering them unconscious immediately. The theory was brutal, and the reality, if you were on the end of it, even more so.