The Long Mars

by Pratchett, Terry; Baxter, Stephen

  ‘He can only come for one of us at a time,’ Frank called. ‘He can strike at us from a distance, but this way at least one of us has a better chance. And if we keep on moving, maybe we’ll wear him down.’

  ‘Maybe. We could have just stood and fought.’

  ‘With what? This is the better way, Sally. Weaken him, finish him later.’

  ‘Dad? What can you see from up there? What’s he doing?’

  ‘Hesitating. He’s by the campsite, what’s left of it. Making another couple of passes through the wreck of the Woden, just for fun, I guess. Listen, I’ve a better idea. I’ll come down, pick one of you up.’

  Frank seized on that immediately. ‘Do it.’

  Sally said, ‘Leaving one at his mercy?’

  ‘We’ll deal with that when we get to it,’ Frank said. ‘Come on, Willis, do it.’

  Sally stopped running, breathing hard, and looked up at the circling glider. Willis hadn’t yet made his move to land, she saw. Looking back she could see the sand-yacht, the trail its runners made in the dirt, the bulky form of the whaler swathed in the survival bag. And beyond that, the smaller figure of Frank, still running awkwardly. From the point of view of her father, up there, the situation must look perfectly symmetrical, she thought. The hunter at the centre, his two prey to either side, more or less equidistant. Whoever of them Willis chose to pick up first was going to have a markedly better chance of survival than the other; she knew that, and so would Willis. So who would he choose?

  She was Willis’s daughter. She imagined that for most people that would swing it. But Willis was no ordinary father.

  Still Willis hesitated. He was actually thinking it over. Choosing between her and Frank Wood, who to save, as she waited.

  At last, with a dip of its wings, the glider came out of its banking circle, like sliding off an invisible summit in the air, and swept down towards the ground.

  Heading straight at Sally.

  In the glider, Sally and Willis watched from the air as the whaler’s yacht closed on Frank Wood, trailing plumes of red Mars dust. Frank made his last stand, lashing out with his gloved fists as the yacht made pass after pass. There was nothing they could do to help.

  Finally the crustacean jumped off his yacht, hitting the ground running, though he was obviously impeded by the layers of survival bags he wore. He leapt straight at Frank, driving his spear forward even as he completed the low-gravity stride. Frank tried stepping even now, but the crustacean went straight after him, so that the two of them strobed between the worlds, fighting in the dirt.

  Then the spear slammed into Frank’s faceplate, shattering it.

  The noise of Frank’s ragged breathing cut out of the comms link immediately, and he shuddered and toppled back.

  And Willis shifted them stepwise, over another crimson Martian plain, under an identical buttery sky. The scene of devastation and death below was gone, whisked away as if it had never happened.

  40

  THERE WAS NOTHING to say. So, at first, they said nothing.

  They were stepping West now – West, back the way they had come, back to the Mars of the Gap, and, ultimately, home.

  Sally made her way to the rear of the pressurized compartment, where a small bathroom was partitioned off. Here she opened her suit, for the first time since leaving the campsite to explore the pit – it seemed days ago, it was only hours, it was still early afternoon on Mars. She breathed in cabin air that felt suspiciously thin, with a faint tang of burning. No doubt there were leaks in the pressurized inner hull after the battering the glider had taken, on top of the hole ripped into the fuselage by the rocket-worm. They could be dealt with later. For now she just took some time to herself, to loosen her suit, wash herself down with wipes, empty her suit’s piss collection tank.

  Time away from her father.

  When she joined him again, he was still at the controls. The glider was facing geographic west, appropriately enough, and the shrunken Martian sun was starting to descend across stepwise landscapes all but identical save for the usual flickering changes of detail, the scattered rocks and craters, the patterns of shadows. His faceplate open, Willis glanced over at her, and held up a small glass vial with some kind of whisker within. ‘Some day we’ll come back out here and give Frank Wood a proper burial. Later yet, they’ll build a statue to him. A three-hundred-foot tall statue of Mars rock. And it was all for this.’

  ‘Beanstalk cable.’

  ‘Yep. We got what we came for, whatever it cost us. And with this we’re going to change the world. All the human worlds.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘You better believe it. Listen, Sally. I’ve checked over the systems. With just the two of us the supplies we managed to salvage ought to be sufficient to get us home. But we have other problems. Thor’s not going to make it back, not all the way. We took too much damage. Lost too many fluids for one thing, coolants, hydraulics. Even our methane-fuel factory is failing.’

  She sat down in her couch, behind him, and shrugged. ‘She did well to keep flying at all, after a rocket attack.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, we’re going to need to ditch.’ He paused. ‘And I’ll need you to tell me where.’

  She understood what he meant. She closed her eyes and felt the stepping, the slow rhythm of it, again, again, again, one a second, like a deep pulse inside her head. And, under that, she had a vague, misty sense of the wider topology of this Long Mars, just as she always had of the Long Earth. A sense of connections.

  Her father wanted her to bring him to a soft place, a short cut in the Long Mars. There they would ditch . . .

  ‘And I’ll take you home,’ she said, completing the thought aloud. ‘Through the soft places, as Granddad Patrick used to call them. Holding you by the hand, like when I was a little kid taking you to your tool shed in Wyoming, West 1.’

  ‘That’s the best plan I got. It was only ever a fallback concept, Sally. I mean, it was a logical anticipation, but I didn’t know for sure if there would be soft places here, if you would be able to detect them, use them . . .’

  ‘Use them to save you. You and your precious cable whisker.’

  ‘Well, it is precious, Sally. More precious than anything.’

  ‘More than the life of a man like Frank Wood?’

  ‘The rights of an individual, the life of one man, are as nothing compared with the value of a technology like this. We’re talking about the destiny of the species.’

  She felt cold, sluggish, passive. As if she had to work through this one step at a time.

  ‘When you were up in the glider, and Frank and I were on the ground – we were waiting for you to choose which one of us to save. You hesitated.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘I mean, most fathers would save their daughters instinctively. Right? I think Frank would have understood. But you – you hesitated. You were calculating, weren’t you?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Here’s what I think. You weighed us up, Frank and me. Frank’s the better pilot. Given an operational glider, Frank would have been more useful to you than me. And also Frank was obviously better equipped to handle the Galileo and take us home. But you assessed the damage, and you figured, no, the glider wasn’t going to make it, you were going to need the short cuts. As for the Galileo, well, you watched me train on the emergency procedures, and I guess we’ll have support from the Russians at Marsograd when we need to fly home. We’ll cope with Galileo. But the soft places were the key item.

  ‘All of which meant you needed me more than you needed Frank. It wasn’t about family, or loyalty. Your only consideration was which of us had the greater – utility – to you at this point in the mission, given the probabilities going forward. And it happened to be me, because of the soft places. Which is why you saved me, not Frank.’

  ‘What do you want me to say—’

  She cut across him. ‘And – of course – this was why you contacted me in the first place. Summoned me to the Gap, to Mars. Your
first contact with me in years, out of the blue, out of nowhere, the father who turned the whole world upside down and went missing when I was still in my teens. It wasn’t me you needed alongside you. It was my ability you wanted. I was a backup option, in case the gliders failed. A human dowsing rod. Nothing more than that.’

  He seemed to think that over. ‘So, what’s your point? You seem to think I’ve acted unreasonably. Is that it? But, Sally, I’m not a reasonable man. Reasonable men are like Frank Wood. He just accepted it when his career choices shut down. He drove a damn tour bus at the Cape, until he heard about the Gap, somehow. Then he just drifted again, until you happened to show up with that policewoman . . . In the end he accepted his death, down there in the dirt. I’m not like Frank Wood, just accepting what the universe throws at me. I’m unreasonable. I change the universe.’

  She wasn’t angry, to her own surprise. Maybe she’d seen too much crap out in the reaches of the Long Earth to be angry at the failings of mere human beings any more. Even her father. What did she feel, then? Disappointment? Perhaps. But this was the way Willis had always behaved. Pity, then? But who for? Willis, or herself ?

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You are a man who changes the universe. But you’re also my father—’

  ‘Grow up,’ he snarled.

  And so Sally took her father back through chill tunnels, the soft places of the Long Mars.

  At the Gap Mars, Viktor and Sergei and Alexei made them welcome once more, though they were saddened by the loss of Frank.

  Then Sally and Willis crossed space, back to the Brick Moon and GapSpace. Aside from dealing with necessary business, they had no significant conversation, in the weeks it took them to reach home.

  Immediately on her return, Sally sought out Frank Wood’s family. She hated such obligations. But she knew there was nobody else who would tell how he died.

  And she visited the grave of Monica Jansson, in Madison West 5, to tell her too.

  That was when she got a message from Joshua Valienté.

  41

  IT WAS THE end of August, and the return of the Navy airships USS Neil A. Armstrong II and USS Eugene A. Cernan from their expedition into the remote Western reaches of the Long Earth, that precipitated the crisis for the Next children in their prison-hospital at Hawaii. Because Captain Maggie Kauffman and her crew brought home the ‘Napoleons’ who had destroyed the Armstrong I. Monsters who were immediately identified as Next.

  Nelson suspected it was simply the image of the rogues’ leader, who called himself only David, that did the most damage to the cause of the Next. This was not some institutionalized, broken child, like Paul Spencer Wagoner and the rest. David was an adult, tall, arrogant, commanding, defiant as he stared out of the cage into which his captors put him, gazed into the lenses of the news cameras. A Napoleon indeed, a daunting superman.

  Around David and his kind, inchoate fears crystallized. Something had to be done about the Next. The question was, what?

  A conference call was hastily set up, involving senior staff at the Pearl Harbor base as well as administration officials in such secure locations as had survived across the post-Yellowstone continental US. On Hawaii, the meeting was projected in a complicated hologrammatic conference room, an expensive piece of kit.

  It seemed inevitable to Nelson that even in the mid twenty-first century, even after the huge dislocation of the last few decades, most of the delegates were white, middle-aged men.

  Nelson himself wasn’t allowed to contribute unless specifically invited in the course of the discussion, but he was allowed to watch from a glass-walled booth. To his surprise he found himself sharing the booth with Roberta Golding, who he knew had come to Hawaii supposedly on her own fact-finding mission. He had met her in person once before, at a party thrown by Lobsang just before the Yellowstone eruption. But they had not spoken then; she had been very young. Now she had played a part in arranging his own cover here. He supposed it was coincidental that Roberta was here in person when the Armstrong crisis blew up. But then he reminded himself that Golding herself was from Happy Landings . . . Maybe it was no coincidence at all. Secrets colliding with secrets. What was her true role? How much did she believe he knew of all this?

  As they took their seats Nelson introduced himself; Roberta responded coolly, but pleasantly enough.

  ‘Quite a set-up,’ Roberta said, as they watched the conference delegates file in, or coalesce from clouds of pixels.

  ‘Yes. I imagined you’d be in there with them.’

  ‘Oh, this is far above my pay grade. And it’s mostly military, you’ll notice. The President’s Science Adviser is chairing the session, and she’s one of the few not in uniform.’

  ‘Indeed. Reminds me of nothing so much as a Cold War military bunker. Oh, sorry.’ Golding was only around twenty years old herself – only a little older than Paul Spencer Wagoner, he reflected. ‘Maybe that’s too dated a reference for you.’

  ‘No, no. I have studied the period. Perhaps the most perilous of all manifestations of dim-bulb madness.’

  Her obviously deliberate use of the Next term ‘dim-bulb’ startled him, and he looked at her with his perceptions of her shifting rapidly.

  The Science Adviser called the meeting to order. She announced that the group had been convened by President Cowley as a ‘Special Contingency Task Group’, in response to the evidence returned by the crews of the Armstrong and Cernan, and other data relating to the Next, including the study of the internees here at Hawaii. The objective of the session was to make recommendations to the administration concerning next steps.

  Admiral Hiram Davidson, chief of USLONGCOM, was head of the chain of command that had controlled the mission of those Navy ships, and he spoke first, giving a brief rehash of what Captain Kauffman and her crew had found out there in the reaches of the Long Earth, and what they’d done about the ‘ragged-trousered Hitlers’, as he put it, that they’d shipped home. ‘As to what’s going on in this base right here, for a summary of that I want to bring in Lieutenant Louise Irwin . . .’

  Irwin spoke well, concisely, intelligently, even with a degree of compassion. She briefed the delegates on what had been learned of the Next in the time they’d been under surveillance in this controlled facility, and – as she reported more cautiously, under pressure of follow-up questioning – what had been surmised of their potential. Apparently unawed by the stuffed shirts around her, she neither condemned nor supported the Next; rather she gave a cool assessment of their intellect, their psychology, their capabilities. Even so, Nelson thought – or perhaps because of her analytical tone – she made the Next children sound pretty scary.

  Roberta murmured, ‘I’ve spoken with Irwin a few times. The inmates here have been lucky to have her around.’

  ‘I’d second that,’ Nelson said.

  ‘Anyhow, so much for the background briefings. Now the debate begins . . .’

  Somewhat to Nelson’s surprise, the next speaker, the head of DARPA, an advanced research agency responsible to the Department of Defense, spoke quite passionately in favour of protecting the Next. He was a stout, red-faced man, a classic desk-jockey type; his rather visionary words didn’t fit his image, Nelson thought, as he began to speak.

  ‘Before we convened I consulted some colleagues here, including representatives of the National Science Foundation, NASA, and also some members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee.’ DARPA nodded to other wise heads present. ‘And we all agree there are potentially great scientific benefits to be derived from this situation. If there is some kind of speciation event going on here – and that very much remains to be demonstrated – well, consider how much we might learn of humanity, our common genetic heritage, the nature of natural selection.

  ‘And if these “Next” individuals do indeed have intellectual capacities considerably above the norm, then who knows what we might learn from them directly? I don’t just mean new technologies and so forth, advanced mathematical techniques maybe
. . . I mean ideas. Remember, even human history shows that what may seem an “obvious” discovery to one culture may bypass another altogether, such as the discovery of writing, or the use of the wheel. As an example, think about this. With open mind and simple but systematic observations of the natural world, one of the ancient Greeks or Romans, Pliny for example, could easily have come upon the theory of natural selection – a simple but brilliant idea. Instead we had to wait two millennia for Darwin and Wallace. Who knows what progress we might have made if Pliny had got there first? And who knows what other obvious-in-hindsight notions we have missed?’

  A representative of the Department of Defense grunted at that. ‘Pliny? Who the hell was he? I always said you guys in DARPA are a waste of money. Listen, I’ll tell you the only thing we’ll learn from these screwed-up wiseacres, if we give them a chance. And that’s how to serve them.’

  A CIA chief responded, ‘Well, that’s not necessarily true, General. Not if we can control them. Imagine the defence applications of super-brains.’

  ‘If we can control them.’

  ‘Granted,’ said CIA. ‘And there are options to achieve that. They’ve already been chipped. I mean, implanted with trackers.’

  Nelson stiffened; he hadn’t known that, and he was sure the inmates hadn’t known either.

  DoD grinned. ‘Ought to implant them with weaponized chips. That’s the way to control them.’

  CIA looked faintly disgusted. Then he went on, ‘But we need to think of the wider picture. This is an issue for humanity, not just America. The Chinese are going to have their own “Next” too. The Russians. The rising nations of the equatorial belt on the Datum. We need our Next to counter theirs.’

  The DoD laughed out loud. ‘So what are we getting into, an arms race of the Brainiacs?’

  The Science Adviser intervened. ‘We seem to persist in describing these young people as a danger, a threat. Is that necessarily so?’

  That generated a buzz of conversation. On the anti-Next side, delegates pointed to their private, non-decipherable languages. The fact that they had already been making money by producing investment-analysis algorithms that defied existing market safeguards. The fact that they looked like us, that they were an insidious, insider threat, cuckoos in the nest, like an alien invasion from within our own DNA . . .