The Long Mars

by Pratchett, Terry; Baxter, Stephen

  ‘And the result is what I see before me?’

  He shrugged. ‘Right now Next are emerging all over. Many colony worlds are in turmoil because of the great population flow from the Datum, after Yellowstone. Maybe it’s something to do with the stress of all that. Dormant genes suddenly expressing. But, and I’m sure your dim-bulb scientists have worked this out, many of the emerging Next can trace their ancestry back to Happy Landings, especially to the old dynasties, the Montecutes, the Spencers. That’s the source of the new genetic legacy.’

  And a random memory came back to Nelson: Roberta Golding, who had done so much to set up his own assignment here, was originally from Happy Landings . . .

  ‘But on the other hand,’ Paul said now, ‘we could only have arisen in the Long Earth. Happy Landings, the forcing ground, is a uniquely Long Earth phenomenon, is it not? The unconscious mixing of two separate humanoid species could never have happened on the Datum. The trolls could never have survived at all on Datum Earth, not alongside you, you clever apes, smart enough to destroy everything around you, never smart enough to understand what it is you are losing in the process . . . The trolls needed to be protected by the Long Earth, protected from you, in order that they could participate in the production of us, in such crucibles as Happy Landings.’

  ‘“Such crucibles.” Are there others?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Logically it must be so . . . Anyhow, you’re a chaplain. I thought you were here to talk about God, not Darwin.’

  Nelson shrugged. ‘I’m being paid by the hour, not by the topic. We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Do you have any views on God?’

  Paul snorted. ‘Your gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.’

  ‘Very well. And what do you believe?’

  He laughed. ‘Give me a chance! I’m nineteen years old, and in jail. We’ve had no time to address such questions, not yet. I can tell you what I feel. That God is not out there somewhere. God is in us, in our everyday lives. In the act of understanding. God is the sacredness of comprehension – no, of the act of comprehension.’

  ‘You should read Spinoza. Maybe some of the yogis.’

  ‘If we have the time we may come closer to the truth. And if we have a lot more time, we may be able to render it into a form even you dim-bulbs can comprehend.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Nelson said dryly. ‘But you say if. You’re implying you won’t be granted that time.’

  ‘Look around you.’ He waved up at the blank ceiling. ‘Look at the uniformed ape with an assault rifle up there. Or so I deduce his presence. How much time do you think the dim-bulbs will allow us?’

  ‘And do you fear that, Paul? Do you fear death?’

  ‘Hmm. Good question. Not individual death. But there are so few of us still, Nelson, that death for us means extinction of our kind. And I fear that. For all that is left unsaid, all that is left undiscovered, unexpressed. Are we done? I’d kind of like to watch some TV now.’

  Nelson paused for one second, considering. Then he rapped on the door to summon the guard.

  34

  THE CREW OF THE Armstrong I were not difficult to find, a few worlds further out from the Napoleons, and unreasonably grateful for their rescue. Maggie allowed a day’s partying to celebrate.

  Then the mission continued. The airships Armstrong and Cernan pressed on into the unknown.

  The airships had left West 5 in January. It was now May, and life on board wasn’t getting any easier, especially when they crossed through uninhabitable worlds, and the ships had to be locked down. Harry Ryan was growing quietly concerned about the state of his engines. The quartermaster, Jenny Reilly, sent Maggie depressing reports about the ships’ ability to withstand a continued push across worlds that could not provide them with even basic necessities – edible foodstuffs, oxygen, sometimes there wasn’t even potable water. The crew were exhausted, stir-crazy and increasingly fractious. Joe Mackenzie fretted about their health, the illnesses and injuries they were slowly accumulating, and the steady depletion of his medical supplies. But then, he always did.

  But despite all the niggling problems Maggie still had her eyes on the nominal target she’d been given for this mission: to reach Earth West 250,000,000. The best estimates showed that the goal was still well within the ships’ consumables budget and system lifetimes. And it was after all a prize worth achieving; once it was done everybody on board would go to their graves still cradling the memory of it. This jaunt would dwarf the famous Chinese expedition to East 20,000,000 five years ago – and it would by quite some way surpass even the one-way journey of the Armstrong I, which had ultimately reached the world of the young Napoleons, more than a hundred and eighty million steps out. That was a fantastic journey that had for too long gone unreported and needed its story told, even if it would take some of the gloss off what she’d achieved in Armstrong II.

  The trouble was that the final leg from Planet Napoleon to Good Old Quarter Billion, as she had taken to calling it, represented over a quarter of the total mission still to be completed – at least three weeks’ running time, probably more like over four. And of course they would have to come back the same way.

  And as the journey wore on, and the Earths became ever more exotic and challenging, Maggie sometimes felt as if it was only her own willpower that held the mission together.

  The latest narrow band of worlds hosting complex life, the Bonsai Belt, had terminated at around Earth West 190,000,000, and they found themselves drifting once more over endless purple scum worlds.

  Earth West 200,000,000 was another numerical milestone that Maggie used as a chance for a couple of days’ rest, recuperation, systems check. But the world itself was one of another band blighted by supercontinents, one hemisphere a vast bowl of Mars-red desert, the other a featureless mask of lifeless ocean. The oxygen levels were low here, and she couldn’t in all conscience sanction any shore parties, which did nothing to help morale. Then, beyond Earth West 210,000,000, oxygen levels once more collapsed entirely. This persisted even though, after around West 220,000,000, the supercontinent features abruptly fractured.

  And beyond that point, the crews of the airships Armstrong and Cernan encountered increasingly unfamiliar and difficult Earths.

  There were a lot more Gaps, for one thing, holes in the Long Earth that had to be cautiously, but hastily, traversed. Worlds with very exotic biota. Such as a thin band of worlds dominated by tremendous trees, trees whose slim trunks towered above the twains, and Gerry Hemingway’s best guess was that they might be three miles tall, their canopies – wonderfully, impossibly – higher than most mountains . . .

  There were worlds where the atmosphere was much thicker than on the Datum, or much thinner. The crews had to battle with the buoyancy of the ships in such unfamiliar airs, and the engineers fretted about corrosion by acidic gases, and the battering of ultraviolet from the unscreened sun.

  There were worlds with one moon, bigger or smaller than the Datum’s, or many moons, or no moons at all.

  There were even worlds where the gravity was different. On the low-weight worlds the ships floated over landscapes that generally looked more or less like the Mars of the Datum sky, with thin air and huge mountains and canyons that could span continents. In the partial gravity the airships were difficult to handle, the crew played jumping games, and the trolls hooted in dismay, tumbling. On other worlds, though, the gravity was stronger than on the Datum. Under thick blankets of atmosphere, winds scoured landscapes bare of any life but stunted-looking trees. The ships, their buoyancy inadequate, were pulled towards the ground, and if they lingered any length of time the crew complained that it felt as if packs of rocks had been loaded on their backs, like a punishment-detail training exercise.

  Hemingway had some ideas about what was going on. At the root of Earth’s formation was violence, as a cloud of dust spinning around a youn
g sun had collapsed into rocks that smashed each other to pieces – or, sometimes, collided to form bigger rocks, which in turn formed bigger rocks yet . . . Emerging from this chaos, Datum Earth with its moon had in the end been born as a result of a final titanic head-on collision between two young worlds, one Earth-sized, the other the size of Mars. It was all a series of accidents; it could have turned out lots of other ways. And now Maggie was finding sheaves of worlds so remote from her own that even that primordial sculpting had turned out differently.

  Gerry wondered what this was telling them about the nature of the Long Earth, the relation of these parallel worlds to each other, and stepping.

  ‘How far away from the Datum model in terms of Earth’s formation can you go, before it’s no longer Earth at all? We know that even if an Earth is missing altogether you can step into the Gap remaining, but at least an Earth once existed there. But what if, for instance, an Earth hadn’t congealed at all – what if we found a cloud of asteroids kept from aggregating by some nearby gas giant, say? Is that where the Long Earth would terminate at last, and no more stepping would be possible?’

  Well, they hit no such terminal condition on this jaunt. But to Maggie’s mind the most remarkable Earth of all was West 247,830,855.

  This Earth was not a planet at all, but a moon: a mere moon, of a greater body. The moon-Earth was smaller than the Datum, hotter, the air denser – more geologically active, Gerry speculated, because of tidal squeezing by its big primary world. ‘It’s a mutant cross between Earth and Io, moon of Jupiter,’ he said gleefully. Yet even here they found life, and complex life at that. One drone returned a striking image of what looked like pterodactyls to Maggie, huge bony flyers swooping around an active volcano.

  And the sky was dominated by the primary, a nameless world that had no counterpart in the solar system of Datum Earth. This too was a rocky world, more like Earth than a gas giant like Jupiter, say, but many times more massive than Earth itself. It was a big angry ball that hung unmoving in the sky, though the sun wheeled beyond it; the Earth-moon was so close to the primary that it was tidally locked, with one face turned forever to the giant world. And as the primary itself turned it revealed sprawling continents, tremendous oceans, dense, smoggy air, and flaring volcanoes to match the activity on its Earth-moon.

  They stayed a full twenty-four hours to study this object. Maggie thought the crew took more amateur photographs of this world than of any other sight they’d come across, save only the wreck of the Armstrong I.

  And, most tantalizing of all, on the primary’s darkened hemisphere, they saw lights. Maybe only campfires, but still . . .

  ‘It’s maddening,’ Maggie said to Mac. ‘We’d need a spaceship to get over there. We stepped a quarter of a billion worlds to get here. And now we can’t cross a few thousand miles to go see all that.’

  Mac only smiled. ‘We have to leave something for the future to achieve. Damn, this bottle of Auld is empty. This ship is running out of single malt, just like most other essential supplies. I think I have an emergency ration in my cabin . . .’

  Bowing to a petition by the scientists, and some of the more adventurous crew, Maggie left a small party behind to explore this Earth-moon further. Then they moved on.

  35

  ON MAY 24, 2045, four months after leaving the Low Earths, the US Navy airships Armstrong and Cernan reached their nominal target of Earth West 250,000,000.

  The world itself turned out to be unprepossessing, barren, ordinary, but at least you could land on it with a facemask, walk around a little. The crew built a stone cairn, affixed a bronze plaque, set up a Stars and Stripes, took a few photographs. When Wu Yue-Sai showed images of a similar ceremony performed by the crews of the Zheng He and Liu Yang, who had reached Earth East Twenty Million, they built the cairn up a bit to make sure it was bigger than the Chinese one. The trolls looked out from the observation galleries – they weren’t about to wear facemasks to go outside – and sang a sweet barbershop-quartet kind of song, over and over as a round, that sounded as if it had been selected to celebrate the journey, about how it was mighty nice, a trip to paradise, with my baby on board . . .

  Even Douglas Black came down to the surface, with his aide Philip at his side. At Maggie’s quiet order, while he was off the ship Mac was never more than a few yards from Black, with full medical kit to hand. Black looked around, smiled, chatted, and allowed himself to be photographed alongside the crew, but refused to do any more than that. This achievement was the crew’s, he said; he was only a passenger, cargo. He did collect a handful of the local dirt, and slipped it into a plastic bag: a mundane souvenir of an unprecedented journey. Maggie rather liked his lack of ostentation.

  There wasn’t much else to do here. Some of the crew played an improvised game of golf as a tribute to Alan Shepherd, an American hero who was one of their own, a Navy man who had once played a golf shot on the moon.

  Then they turned the ships around, metaphorically speaking, to head Eastwards, and home.

  At this point Douglas Black made another rare emergence from his suite, and asked a special request of Maggie.

  They had logged Earth West 239,741,211 on the way through, but had not lingered long. Now they returned, for a longer stay.

  This was one of the smaller worlds, with a mere eighty per cent of Datum Earth’s gravity. On the local version of the North American craton, tremendous glacier-striped mountains strained for a sky laden with fluffy water-vapour clouds, and in the valleys impossibly spindly trees clustered. The animals too were tall, slender, graceful, even though a peculiar six-legged body plan had prevailed. This world was, according to Douglas Black, just like a Chesley Bonestell painting, and all of them save Mac had to look up that reference to see what he meant.

  When Maggie authorized shore leave, the crew loved it. Delightfully, thanks to an atmosphere that happened to be especially rich in oxygen, you could walk around with no special protection whatsoever. Harry Ryan and his engineers wandered around planning how they would span mighty gorges with graceful viaducts. Snowy was at last able to indulge his appetite for the hunt, and went bounding away. Even the trolls seemed happy here, despite the low gravity, and they sang a new song, playfully taught them by Jason Santorini: ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’.

  When the moon came up, Maggie could see the grey and the white, the lunar seas and the highlands, were all wrong. Proof, if she needed it, that this was far from home.

  But – as Douglas Black announced to Maggie as they walked in convincing-looking grass, with Philip shadowing them, and Mac silently looking on – Black intended to stay here. ‘I found my real estate, at last,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm. On this world of all the worlds, of all the possibilities for life on Earth that we saw?’

  ‘I always knew what I was looking for, Captain. I had a quite detailed specification, and my staff have scrutinized the records of every single world we stepped through. And this place fits the bill, most nearly, of all those we have witnessed. Now, I have prepared for this possibility. In my sealed cargo I have everything required to establish a home here, safe, secure, provisioned. For now I need only Philip at my side, my staff, my equipment. I would ask only of you, Captain, that you take the news of this place back to the Low Earths, announce this location, stepwise in the Long Earth and geographically – I will give you the name of an appropriate agent to handle this, although of course the regular news channels will disseminate it – and in due course others will follow me here.’

  Maggie was puzzled. But when she asked Mac’s advice, the doctor shrugged, evidently having no particular objection.

  Maggie said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth, Mr Black. You might not be alone. Some of my younger crew are thinking of jumping ship and staying here. It’s an open secret. Thanks to my XO I can tap into the scuttlebutt.’

  Black seemed delighted. ‘I would be glad of the company of young people. Of course we could assist each other . . . And are you thinking of permitting this?
’

  ‘Why not? I can’t let the manning numbers run down so far that the ships themselves are compromised, of course. But we have some slack. My mission is more about planting flags than planting colonies, but my orders don’t expressly forbid it. It would extend the US Aegis in a concrete form, a pretty long way out. And it will be an international colony, if Lieutenant Wu is serious about staying.’

  ‘Ah! That delightful young officer. She would be very welcome. Her children will be tall and slender and have big chests for the thin air. Just like the Martians of Ray Bradbury! What do you think, Captain? How about yourself? You are healthy, still young. You too could stay, build bridges, raise babies.’

  ‘Oh, I think my own duty is clear, Mr Black. It’s home for me, with my ship.’

  ‘Of course, Captain. But will you allow me one privilege? Earth West 239,741,211: an efficient but cold label. Let me name this world, as if I were its discoverer. I will name it Karakal. Please record it in your log.’

  That baffled Maggie, who had been expecting some name like Blackville.

  But Mac recognized the reference. ‘Lost Horizon. The Tibetan mountain where they found Shangri-La, in Hilton’s novel.’ He looked around. ‘Ah, I see now. That’s the clue. You picked a world of gravity so low that even a lard-bucket like me can leap like a basketball star, and oxygen levels so high the air is like wine. Of course, I should have guessed. This Earth, you hope, is going to turn out to be a machine to keep you alive. Even reverse your ageing. Like this whole world is an extension of that oxygen tent you have in your cabin! Your very own Shangri-La.’