The Long Mars (24 page)

Willis called over, ‘That’s the low gravity for you.’

Sally said, ‘But the towers didn’t save them when the final wars came. Look down.’

Now, in the rubble-littered roadways and even inside some of the smashed buildings, Frank saw wreckage: segments of casing, articulated limbs, as if torn from some immense spider. They were made of some kind of metal, perhaps, or ceramic. These fragments were broken, crushed, blown open, and the road surfaces and walls were pitted with bomb craters. All of this was covered with a fine sheen of rust-red dust, wind-blown.

Frank asked, ‘Why do you say “final wars”?’

Sally said, ‘Because evidently there was nobody left to clean up when it was done. Many of these Joker islands-in-time must have ended in wars, mustn’t they? When the climate collapsed, the survivors would have fought over the last of the water – the last trees to burn – maybe they made sacrifices to appease their gods. All patterns familiar from Datum Earth’s history; that’s what
we’d
do. Stupidity is a universal, it seems.’

In this city like a vast cemetery, that cold remark made Frank wince.

Willis said, ‘I doubt if there’s anything more for us here. I’ll go down to take a few samples. Follow me if you like.’

Frank saw
Woden
dip towards a broad flat area outside the city. He asked Sally, ‘How about it? Need to stretch your legs?’

‘I’ll be fine. You?’

‘Skip it. I’m doing my couch yoga as we speak.’ To conserve the methane fuel they needed to launch from the ground, they were trying to minimize landings.

Sally tugged on her joystick.
Thor
’s nose lifted, and the glider spiralled into the high air. Once again the city was reduced to a toy-like diorama, with no visible trace of bomb blasts or insectile war machines.

Frank switched to the internal intercom, so Willis couldn’t listen in. ‘So, Sally.’

‘What?’

‘“Stupidity is a universal.” I’ve heard you say that kind of thing before. Are you serious?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’m only asking.’

‘Look – I didn’t
grow up
despising mankind. I had to learn it. You know my background . . .’

He knew the basics. Most of it he’d learned from Monica Jansson, who, late in her life, Sally had grown close to – close at least in Sally’s terms – when they had pulled that stunt of liberating a couple of trolls from GapSpace. And then Jansson had become close to Frank, all too briefly, before he’d lost her.

Sally Linsay had grown up a natural stepper, but from a mixed background; her father, Willis, was not a natural. Before Step Day, her mother’s family – like, it seemed, many dynasties of naturals – had, understandably, kept their peculiar superpower to themselves, but they’d used it when it suited them.

‘I was stepping when I was a little kid,’ Sally said now. ‘My uncles would go hunting in the Low Earths with crossbows and such, and they knew to watch for grizzlies. Dad was always more a tinkerer than a hunter, and he built a stepwise workshop for himself, and dug a garden. I’d take him over there and I’d help him out, and he’d make up stories and such, and play games. The Long Earth was my Narnia. You know Narnia?’

‘That’s the one with the hobbits, right?’

She blew a raspberry. ‘To me, stepping was a joy. And it was a useful experience, because I was surrounded by smart people who understood what they were doing, and used the gift wisely, and took precautions.

‘Then came Step Day, and suddenly every idiot with a Stepper box could go out, and guess what? Next thing you know they’re all drowning or freezing to death or starving, or getting chomped by some mountain lion because the little kitteny cubs were so
cute
. And worst of all is that all those idiots took not just their idiocies with them into the Long Earth, but their petty flaws too. Their cruelty. Especially their cruelty.’

‘And especially cruelty to trolls, right? I know that much about you, from when you showed up at the Gap.’

She was sitting ahead of Frank in the glider’s pilot seat; he saw her back stiffen. Predictably she had become hostile. ‘If you know all about me already, why are you asking?’

‘I don’t know it all. Just what I heard, from Monica for instance. You became a kind of rogue. An angel of mercy, helping save these “idiots” from themselves. But also—’ He sought for a non-antagonistic term. ‘You became the conscience of the Long Earth. That’s how you see yourself.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve been called many things, but not that before. Look, most of the colonized Long Earth is far from any semblance of civilization. If I see a wrong being committed—’

‘A wrong in your opinion.’

‘I make sure the wrongdoers know about it.’

‘You act as a self-appointed judge, jury – and executioner?’

‘I try not to kill,’ she said, somewhat enigmatically. ‘Oh, I punish. Sometimes I deliver the perps to justice, if it’s available. Dead folk don’t learn lessons. But it depends on the situation.’

‘OK. But not everybody would agree with the value judgements you make. Or the way you assume the right to act on those judgements. There are some who’d call you a vigilante.’

‘What’s in a word?’

‘You see, Sally, what I’m struggling with is this. It was your father who did this, who
caused
Step Day. And now all these “idiots” are polluting
your
Long Earth, as you grew up seeing it. Killing the lions in your Narnia. Right? Is that the real problem? The fact that it was your own father opened it all up—’

‘What are you now, some kind of analyst?’ She was practically snarling.

‘No. But after my military service I saw a number of analysts myself, and I know the questions they ask. Look, I’ll shut up. Your business is your business. But, Sally – do good, OK? But watch that anger of yours. Think about where it comes from. We’re all a long way from home, and we rely on each other, and we need to be in control. That’s all I’m saying.’

She wouldn’t reply. She just kept flying the glider in wide, over-precise loops, until Willis had done his work and came flying up to join them.

Then, after a quick synchronization of their data stores, they stepped away, the chessboard city vanishing from beneath their prows.

26

M
ORE LIFELESS
M
ARSES
, sheaf after sheaf of them, day after flying day, broken up by landings each night on yet another copy of the Mangala landscape, and occasional pauses for exploration.

On the thirtieth day they landed for the night on a world not far short of Mars East Million – a million steps East of the Gap – and Frank Wood went for a brief walk in the dark, bundled up in his pressure suit. This night the twin stars of Earth and moon were particularly prominent, riding high in the east. This was a typical Mars, like the Mars of the Datum sky, a world about as lethal as it could get and still have any kind of similarity with Earth. But it was a pleasure for Frank to land anyhow and stretch his legs.

These walks had become Frank’s habit, uncomfortable and faintly risky as they were, a way of putting some distance between him and the Linsays. Just a few minutes each day, so Frank’s own personality had room to breathe, and recover something like its proper shape. Walks on worlds that might be forty or fifty thousand worlds apart, so far were they travelling each day, and yet all so alike – so similarly dead. On this night, as on many nights on these desolate Marses, he wondered what the point of it all was: all these empty worlds, an emptiness made worse by the brief and rare windows of habitability they found, almost all slammed shut with the finality of extinction. Was it crueller to have lived and died, or never to have lived at all?

And what was the meaning of it all – was
every
world inhabited by intelligence going to be Long like this Mars, like Earth? He imagined a sky full of threads of Long worlds, like broken necklaces drifting in some dark ocean. Maybe you could have a Long Venus – a Long Jupiter, even, if mind ever took hold there. But
why
? Why should it be that way? What was it all for? He suspected he would never find a satisfactory answer to such questions.

Just do your job, airman.

As it happened they came across traces of another near-miss civilization the very next day, only fifty thousand worlds plus change past the meaningless million-step milestone.

The crater was a few tens of miles south of Mangala itself, the glitter of metal easily visible from the air, and spotted by their image-processing software as they stepped through.

This time Frank was piloting Willis as the gliders flew over. The crater was a great bowl in the ground, deep and clear-cut, maybe a half-mile across. But its inner surface gleamed with some kind of metallic coating. From a height, Frank could see that the bowl itself was littered with inert objects, crumpled and fallen: machinery of some kind, perhaps. And some parts of the crater, and the land near by, were blotted black, as if bombed from the air by immense bags of soot. The crater appeared to be joined to a wider landscape by straight-line trails of some kind, but they were old, faint, dust-choked.

Willis growled, ‘Another close call, dammit. Another still-warm corpse. I see no movement, am picking up no signals. You want to take us down, Frank? Sally, station-keep.’

‘Yes, Dad,’ came a dry reply. Sally tolerated being ordered around by her father in situations like this, but just barely.

Frank dipped the glider’s nose. As they skated in towards the bowl of the crater, Frank noticed that swathes of the surrounding terrain were glassy, glinting in the weak sunlight as the land flowed by under the glider’s prow. He remarked on this to Willis.

‘Yeah,’ Willis replied. ‘And look in the crater.’

As they skimmed over the bowl one more time, Frank saw that the crater’s inner surface appeared to have been coated with sheets of some kind of metal, but the lining was extensively damaged, torn away by explosions – and melted, in part. ‘Radiation weapons? Lasers?’

‘Something like that. I think this may have been some kind of telescope – like Arecibo, rigged up in the natural bowl of the crater. If the surface was mirror-like, maybe it was optical. You’d get a great view of Earth with a thing like that, given its location.’

They flew deeper into the bowl itself now. Frank was wary of any surviving superstructure, but he saw nothing: the destruction had been comprehensive. Piled up in the bowl’s depths was a tangle of smashed equipment, much of it of elaborately sculpted metal. At first he could discern no signs of life, no biology down there. But then he made out shards of chitin that looked vaguely familiar.

‘Put us down,’ Willis said. ‘We may as well take a few samples. Sally, stay aloft . . .’

They came down a short distance from the mirrored pit, and walked over.

When they clambered down into the pit itself, clumsy in their pressure suits, the deep cold seemed to intensify. At the bottom, there was no sign of recent activity; a layer of windblown dust seemed undisturbed. Willis snipped a few samples of metal components, the reflective surface, the chitin-like remains.

Frank said, ‘This shell stuff looks familiar. Like traces of the crustaceans we’ve been seeing from the beginning.’

‘So it does. There is a certain consistency, isn’t there? I’m thinking of what we’ve seen: the crustaceans, the whales. A kind of common palette; maybe we’re going to find distorted versions of those families wherever we go, differently evolved.

‘I think I see how it would work . . . You have a rapid evolution of life forms, species, families, genera, while Mars is young. Pretty much identical on every world of the Long Mars. But then a given Mars shrivels, and whatever survives has to hibernate, aestivate. Mostly Mars stays dead, but on Jokers like this the root stock takes its chances when they come, adapting in different ways depending on the details of the environment. An endless reshaping of the same primordial stock – variations on the theme of whales and crustaceans, and maybe other sorts we’ve yet to identify.’ As he spoke Willis kept working, patiently studying the melancholy debris. ‘I’ll run this through the assay gear on the glider.’

‘I take it the tech artefacts you’re looking for aren’t here.’

‘No. Disappointingly. Though this is the highest culture technologically we’ve encountered.’

‘You’ll know it when you see it, will you, whatever it is?’

‘You can bet on it.’

‘How do you even
know
this thing exists?’

Willis didn’t look up from his work. ‘This is Mars. On such a world it’s a logical necessity.’

Frank knew that they were all getting on each other’s nerves anyhow, but this deliberate obscurity of Willis’s increasingly niggled him. What was he, a chauffeur who couldn’t be trusted with the truth? ‘Secrecy and certainty, huh? Those traits have helped your career, have they?’

Willis just ignored him, which annoyed him even more.

‘Sally compared you to Daedalus. I looked him up. In some versions of the story he invented the labyrinth on Crete, where they kept the Minotaur. Problem was, he didn’t think through the consequences. Made the labyrinth so intricate it was hard to pin down the beast if you needed to slay it. Not only that, it had a design flaw. With a simple ball of thread you could make a trail to find your way out – Daedalus never thought of
that
.’

‘Is this storytelling going anywhere, Wood?’

‘Maybe you are more like Daedalus than you think. What will you do with this bit of Martian tech, if you find it? Just unleash it on the world, like the Stepper box? You know, you and Sally, father and daughter, you both treat mankind like it’s some unruly kid. Sally slaps us around the back of the head when she thinks we’re misbehaving. And you, your way of teaching us responsibility is to hand us a loaded gun and let us learn by trial and error.’

Willis thought that over. ‘You’re just sore because you’re an old space cadet. Right? Step Day stopped you from getting to fly around in the space station measuring the thickness of your piss in zero gravity, or whatever those guys did up there for all those years. Well, bad luck for you. And whatever
we
do, at least we have mankind’s best interests at heart. Me and Sally, I mean. Now. Does this conversation have any point, Frank?’