And then there was the inarguable fact that a handful of young, unarmed, untrained Next had been able to bamboozle experienced Navy officers, capture a twain, and slaughter many of its crew and abandon the survivors. That incident proved that these Next could be a real and present danger, the military officers argued. There had even been some incidents on Hawaii, attempts at manipulation by the imprisoned children here. Some of the marine guards had had to be rotated; others were in counselling. ‘Real Hannibal Lecter stuff,’ said DoD.
Protests to counter that perception, such as the assertion from the Homelands Security representative that individuals later proven to have Next characteristics had quietly, unannounced, done heroic work in helping the post-Yellowstone rescue and recovery efforts, sounded feeble in comparison.
Nelson felt increasingly uncomfortable as he listened. ‘I don’t like the subtext to all this. What’s been said beneath the words: they aren’t like us, and that’s why we need to destroy them. That’s what they’re really saying. My own background—’
‘South African,’ Roberta murmured. ‘I know. You are sensitive to such undertones. And you are right to be. America, indeed mankind, has undergone revolutions of the spirit in the last generation, from the discovery of the Long Earth to Yellowstone – and now this. People retreat to default positions in such circumstances. Protect what they have.’
‘“People.” Dim-bulbs, you mean?’
She didn’t respond to that. ‘Within the administration itself there has been a kind of emotional coup. Everybody knows that it was the undercurrent of resentment against steppers cresting in the Humanity First movement that gave President Cowley his power base in the first place.’
‘It seems to me Cowley himself has grown beyond that. He reaches for the centre ground. He wouldn’t have got re-elected otherwise.’
‘True. But behind the scenes, some of the President’s closest aides and advisers from those days are still around. Perhaps the stain lingers even in the President’s own soul. And that darkness has come to the fore, in this different context, under the pressure of events. There is a gathering mood to do something. To strike. It is nothing to do, really, with questions of national security, and still less the survival of the species. Such a policy is believed to accord with the perceived public mood. And perhaps it does. People need scapegoats. Ah, the conference may be coming to its conclusion . . .’
The President’s Science Adviser summed up the position, the options, and the mood in the room. ‘This place “Happy Landings”. This is the source, you say?’
‘The nest,’ growled the CIA. ‘The genetics confirms it.’
‘One source,’ said the FBI. ‘No doubt there are others. But many genetic linkages trace back to Happy Landings. Right now it is a primary hub.’
‘OK.’ The Adviser turned to Davidson. ‘And our relevant assets, Hiram? USLONGCOM is your domain.’
‘The Armstrong II and Cernan are the best ships we got. They can be out there in days.’
The DoD grunted. ‘Those ships carry some serious weaponry; we made sure of that before they went off into the dark. Admiral, just make sure your troll-lover Captain Kauffman is forced to ship out Ed Cutler too. Then we might have a serious card to play . . .’
Nelson said, ‘What kind of weaponry? . . . Good Lord. They’re actually considering a military response, aren’t they?’
Roberta said evenly, ‘The conclusion is as I anticipated. The game is nearly played out.’
‘And what of the inmates here? What will be done with them? Nothing good, I imagine. Certainly they will never be freed.’
She turned to him, her face serious, intent. ‘They are young, you know. For all their arrogance, their difficulty. I am like them – I know you see it.’
He did see it now. He thought that she must need iron self-control to keep up camouflaging behaviour in the high-intensity hothouse of Madison West 5, the new DC.
‘I was once enough like them to understand. How it is to be different, how it is to be surrounded by blank faces and empty heads, to know there is nobody you can talk to, no parent, no teacher, no way you can empty your head of the insights rattling inside it. And to be frightened, almost all the time.’
‘Frightened?’
‘The Next can read people, remember, with an acuity you dim-bulbs lack. They look at an adult and it is as if they are reading that person’s mind. They can clearly see the indifference, the malevolence, the lust, the calculation, behind the smile. All this is very visible even to the smallest, most helpless child. We see the world clearly. We have no illusions,’ said Roberta bleakly. ‘We are too intelligent to be comforted by any of your stories, your gods and heavens.’
Nelson considered. ‘Once I saw Paul crying in the night. This was from the viewing walkway. I did not disturb him.’
‘I used to cry at night too.’
He considered that. ‘Do you call yourself Next, then?’
She smiled. ‘Labels like that are for youngsters. As if we’re comic superheroes. I don’t fret about labels. And I am – different. I am less developed than some others here, but, having been raised in human society for most of my life – and with good teachers – I have decided my best place is here, out in the human world, serving as a sort of – interface.’
He smiled. ‘One hell of an interface if you’re in the White House itself.’
‘I try. But my maternal grandmother was a Spencer too. I have deeper loyalties; it’s my family being discussed here. I can find ways to get the inmates out of here.’ She faced him. ‘Will you help?’
‘Of course I will help. It’s why I came.’
‘What must we do?’
Nelson thought of Lobsang, and Joshua Valienté – and what he knew of Joshua’s friend Sally Linsay, and her facility with soft places . . . ‘There are ways.’
The meeting had come to its conclusion. The delegates stood up, mingled, those in the same geographical locations shaking hands. Then, one by one, their hologram representations winked out of existence.
42
NELSON AZIKIWE CONTACTED Joshua, and Joshua contacted Sally, fresh back from the Long Mars via the Gap. And together they worked out a soft-place escape route from the Hawaii facility.
Joshua and Sally were smuggled into the base, and they started stepping out the Next inmates, one batch after another.
They tumbled through the soft places, hand in hand, Joshua and Sally and the final group of the Next.
Even to Joshua, king of the natural steppers, whenever he followed Sally Linsay through this strange network of linkages it always felt as if he was falling out of control down some kind of invisible shaft, and a cold one too, a deep chill that sucked the innermost heat out of his body: the toll exacted by the universe for this miraculous fast transit.
But it was fast, that was the point. Happy Landings was more than a million and a half steps from Datum Earth. From the break-out from Hawaii, following Sally and Joshua, passing from soft place to soft place, the party of refugee Next made it all the way to their destination in the equivalent of a dozen steps, no more.
And they emerged in the open air, in scrub country, no more than a mile from the centre of Happy Landings itself. Sally gave her charges a moment to get their breath, sit in the dirt, sip water from their flasks.
Joshua walked among them, checking their condition. They might be young geniuses but they were comparative stepping novices. As soon as they started recovering the youngsters began to gabble at each other in their own complex post-English rapid-fire speech. The most remarkable thing was how they would all talk at once, all of them speaking and listening at the same time. Joshua imagined megabytes of information and speculation passing between them through this crowded network of language.
Joshua was relieved this was the last party they’d had to liberate from the Pearl Harbor facility. It included Paul Spencer Wagoner himself, and his kid sister Judy, and others Joshua didn’t know so well. It was done, at last.
&
nbsp; Joshua walked a short distance away to get his own bearings, and, climbing a bluff, he looked down on Happy Landings. He saw the squat bulk of City Hall at the centre of the community, with a few smoke threads rising from overnight hearths into the morning air, and heard the gentle rush of the river. The air was unspoiled Washington-State fresh, heavy with the scent of forest.
Sally joined him. ‘How’s the headache?’
‘Worse. I can sense them somehow, Sally. These young eggheads. A new kind of mind in the world. Or worlds.’
‘Like First Person Singular.’
‘Yeah. Not a faculty I welcome. Maybe it’s useful sometimes.’
‘I had a dose of it on Mars. Long story. So here we are, back in this creepy place.’
‘Creepy? Sally, you brought me and Lobsang here in the first place.’
‘Yes. But I always did feel there was something odd about Happy Landings. Even when I came here as a kid . . .’
She had once told Joshua how her natural-stepper family used to bring her here, and how she never felt she fitted in, and he’d read between the lines about how she had felt about that.
He nodded at the Next, engaged in their eerie super-speech. ‘Well, if all this is the product of Happy Landings, your intuition was right. But even so – you’ve crossed three million Marses, and you think this is odd?’
She shrugged. ‘The more you travel, the more you see commonalities. The whole time I was on the Long Mars we were hopping around on the flanks of big shield volcanoes—’
‘Just like Hawaii, on Earth.’
‘Right. Made me feel at home. By comparison with the company of the Next, anyhow. So what are they talking about now?’
Joshua glanced over. ‘Hey, Paul. What’s the hot topic?’
‘The soft places,’ Paul called back. ‘What their existence tells us about the higher-order topology of the Long Earth . . .’ Even as he spoke Paul was distracted by the ongoing chatter of the others, their eyes shining with enthusiasm. Reunited with his peers, he was unrecognizable from the sullen boy-man Nelson Azikiwe had described encountering in isolation in Pearl Harbor. ‘Why, just the observations we’ve been able to make during that brief journey have enabled us to extrapolate swathes of the pan-dimensional structure. We don’t have the language to describe it – we don’t even have an agreed mathematical notation to record it . . .’
Sally said with a trace of unease, ‘My father’s been the world expert on Long Earth structure up to now, before you lot came along.’
‘All things must pass, Sally,’ Joshua said.
‘Yeah.’ She pointed to a trail. ‘We’d best get them moving . . .’
The Next youngsters got to their feet.
Paul, with some reluctance, broke away from the rest and faced Sally. ‘Umm, before we move on – we want to thank you, Ms Linsay. You saved us from that prison. Maybe you saved our lives, the way things were going in there.’
‘Don’t thank me,’ Sally said in her usual cold fashion. Compared with these kids she showed her age, Joshua thought; in her late forties now. But, her body taut, her face lined and weathered, her hair greying, she was fitter than any of them, Joshua included. ‘Thank whatever benevolent deity enabled me to find a soft place just stepwise of the military facility where they were holding you. Thank Joshua, if anybody. And thank Nelson, who saw a crime being committed, as I did when I was told about it. I put a stop to it, is all.’
Paul seemed interested. ‘A crime in your judgement. Though not in the judgement of the US administration, obviously. Of the government, of the nation that defines the laws you live by.’
‘Not that I live by necessarily.’
‘So you have your own moral code? Do you believe there are universal moral values, or is it up to the individual to discover her own inner truths? Do you follow Kantian imperatives or—’
‘Paul,’ Joshua said earnestly, ‘shut up. Sally meant to say, “You’re welcome.” There are times and places for a philosophical debate.’
Sally looked over to Happy Landings. ‘Well, we’ve got bigger troubles than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We brought these kids home. But things aren’t right over there. Listen.’
Joshua stood with her. ‘To what?’
‘The trolls.’
‘What trolls?’
‘Exactly.’
And Joshua realized it now. Of all the human communities he’d ever encountered, Happy Landings was the most suffused with trolls, a place where trolls and humans lived side by side. As Paul had once told him, that was the true point of the community; that was the secret of how it worked. And wherever trolls were, they sang, all the time. This close in Joshua ought to be able to hear them in the town itself, and away from the centre, in the woods and clearings.
But the trolls had gone. It was an eerie echo of 2040, when in response to wider disturbances the trolls had withdrawn from all the human worlds . . .
‘Trouble’s coming,’ he said. ‘But what kind of trouble?’
Sally looked up at the sky. ‘Maybe that kind.’
Two huge airships had materialized right over their heads, their heavy envelopes emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes, their plated undersides bristling with observation ports and weapons. Having arrived stepwise, the ships turned their vast prows towards Happy Landings. Joshua felt a warm downdraught of air from their turbines.
The Next youngsters gaped. Then they picked up their scant belongings and began to hurry towards the town, Paul and his sister Judy leading the way, hand in hand.
43
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the Armstrong and Cernan took up station over Happy Landings, Captain Maggie Kauffman summoned Ed Cutler, Captain of the Cernan, over to her sea cabin aboard the Armstrong. ‘We need to discuss your note,’ had been her only order.
Then, on second thoughts, she asked Joe Mackenzie to join them.
Before the officers arrived, Shi-mi rubbed up against her leg. ‘Why Mac?’
‘Because I feel I need a voice of sanity.’
‘I’m a voice of sanity.’
‘Yeah, right. Just keep out of the way.’
‘Oh, I always keep out of Mac’s way . . .’
Mac arrived first, in his green medical scrubs, straight from work, crumpled, informal. ‘What a circus this all is,’ he said as he threw himself into a seat. ‘That idiot Cutler.’
‘I agree, a circus. But it’s what we have to deal with. Want a drink?’
Before he could reply, in walked Captain Edward Cutler, carrying a small briefcase. He was in full uniform, and insisted on standing to attention and saluting.
Mac grinned sourly. ‘About that drink, Captain. You got any grain alcohol and rainwater? That’s your poison, isn’t it, Ed? Got to think about the purity of your bodily fluids.’
Cutler frowned. ‘I have literally no idea what you’re talking about, Doctor.’
Maggie glared at Mac. ‘I do. Not the time for old movie jokes, Mac. At ease, for Christ’s sake, Ed. Sit down. Just tell me again what you put in your note.’ A handwritten memo delivered to Maggie personally by Cutler’s XO, Adkins, evidently a trusted officer.
‘Well, you read it, Captain—’
‘You really have a tactical nuke aboard the Cernan?’
Mac gaped. ‘What the hell are we talking about here?’
‘We’re talking about a nuclear weapon, Doctor. Which I didn’t even know we carried until we got here. Which, it seems, we also carried all the way to Douglas Black’s new Shangri-La and back again, entirely without my knowledge. Which Ed Cutler knew we had all along . . .’
‘It has about the firepower of a Hiroshima.’ Cutler pushed the briefcase across the desk to her; she didn’t open it. ‘The enabling mechanism is in the case, along with a copy of my orders. It’s self-explanatory. You’ll need one other officer to authorize its use, but that’s your choice, doesn’t have to be me.’
‘Oh, it’s nice to know I have some leeway.’
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nbsp; ‘I’m just the delivery system, if you will.’ He was clearly glowing with self-righteousness, and the sheer pleasure of fulfilling his covert orders.
Mac said, ‘Let me make sure I got this clear. We carried this damn bomb—’
‘And a maintenance facility for it.’
‘It gets better. All the way to Earth Quarter Billion and back?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t specifically loaded for this mission, to be brought to this place. To Happy Landings.’ He said the silly name as if it were heretical. ‘It was meant to provide you with an option, Captain. In case of a certain kind of threat.’
‘What the hell kind of threat demands a nuke?’ Mac growled.
‘An existential threat. A threat to the whole human species. The mission planners had no clear idea what that might prove to be, Captain. They had no idea what was out there in the Long Earth in the first place – what threats we might encounter, what trouble we might stir up.’
Maggie said, ‘I can imagine a lot of threats against which a nuke would be no use at all.’
‘True. As I said, Captain, the intention of the orders was only to give you an option, and my task was to ensure that option was in place when you needed it.’
‘In your judgement.’
‘In my judgement, yes. The choice was always yours, however. To use it or not. Admiral Davidson was always clear that a twain Captain has a great deal of autonomy, being so far out of contact with the chain of command, was he not? So it is with this.’
He was right about that, of course. Before Step Day the armed forces, like everybody else, had got used to a wired-up world where you could speak to anybody, anywhere, with a delay of only fractions of a second. But when the great dispersal across the Long Earth had come, all that had broken down. Maggie in the remote High Meggers had been as out of touch with USLONGCOM as Captain Cook had been with the Admiralty in London, when he stopped at Hawaii. And old models of distributed command dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries had had to be dusted off. Yes, Maggie had a vast amount of autonomy out in the field; she’d been trained to face decisions like these.
The Long Mars Page 31
