The Long Mars

At last they were ready.

Willis went up first, in Thor this time. That was yet another precaution by Frank; he kept two warm bodies on the ground ready to help in case the first flight attempt ended in a crash. Willis put his glider through banks and turns and rolls, testing out responses in a way that would have been impossible in the thicker air of Gap Mars.

When they’d got through that programme and Willis reported he was happy, Frank and Sally climbed aboard Woden and took off in their turn. The methane rockets were noisy and gave a firm shove in the back.

But soon they were gliding, high over Mars.

They flew in silence broken only for Sally by her own breathing, and the whirr of the miniature pumps in the pressure suit pack she’d stowed behind her couch. There wasn’t a whisper from the Martian air that must be flowing over the glider’s long narrow wings. The cabin was a glass blister that gave a good all-round view, and Sally found herself sandwiched between a cloudless yellow-brown sky and a landscape below of much the same hue. Lacking any contrasting colour to the universal buttery brown, from above the landscape looked like a model, a topographic representation of itself chiselled out of soft clay.

From up here she could make out the distinctive form of Mangala Vallis, as she’d studied it in maps en route to Mars, a complex network of valleys and gullies flowing out of the higher, more heavily cratered ground to the south. It very obviously looked as if a great river had once run here, leaving behind bars and levees and islands, carved out and streamlined by the flow. But the water was just as obviously long gone, and the landscape was clearly very old. The valley features cut across the most ancient craters, huge worn ramparts that would have graced the moon – but the islands and levees were themselves stippled with younger craters, small and round and perfect. Unlike Earth, Mars was geologically static, all but unchanging, and had no mechanisms to rid itself of such scars.

The horizon of Mars, blurred a little by the dust suspended in the air, seemed close and curved sharply. And to the north-east she saw the land rising up, and imagined she saw the mighty flank of Arsia Mons looming into her view. Mars was a small world but with outsized features: volcanoes that stuck up out of the air, a valley system that sprawled around half the equator.

Nowhere in this landscape did she see a glimpse of life, not a speck of green, and not a drop of water.

‘When do we start stepping?’

‘We already have,’ Frank said. ‘Look down.’

Although the gross features of the landscape below the banking gliders endured – the horizon, the mighty carcass of Arsia, the outflow cha

‘Dust storm,’ called Willis.

‘Yeah. Not very comfortable,’ Frank replied. ‘But we’ve got no vents to clog, no engines to choke. These storms can last months.’

‘But we don’t need to stick around to see it,’ Willis said.

They snapped into the buttery sunlight of the next world, and the next. The Marses slid past below, one every second.

As they flew on, things became relaxed enough that Sally was able to loosen her faceplate and open her suit. The stepping was no faster than the old Mark Twain, the prototype stepper airship she rode across the Long Earth with Lobsang and Joshua Valienté fifteen years ago, no faster than a modern commercial cargocarrier, and a lot slower than the fastest experimental craft, or even the best military ships. But it was fast enough, she thought, for this journey into the utterly unknown.

Except that it seemed like a journey into the utterly identical. There were simple step counters in the cabin, and she watched the digits pile up as time passed: sixty worlds a minute, over three thousand an hour. At that rate, on the Long Earth, they would have crossed over sheaves of Ice Age worlds, fully glaciated planets, within the first hour or more; after ten hours or so they would be crossing into the so-called Mine Belt, a band of worlds with quite different climates, arid, austere . . . Even on smaller scales the Long Earth was full of detail, of divergence. Here there was nothing, nothing but Mars and more Mars, with only the most minor tinkering with detail at the margins. And not a sign of life anywhere: dead world after dead world.

She did, however, notice an odd sensation at times, a sense of twisting, of being drawn away . . . She knew that feeling from her jaunts on the Long Earth: it was a sense that a soft place was near by, a short cut across the great span of this chain of worlds. She supposed that to someone like Frank that would seem unimaginably exotic. To Sally, these subtle detections gave a glow of familiarity.

The gliders flew on, banking like great birds in the empty skies. They had set off not long after dawn. As the Martian afternoon wore on, Sally decided to try to sleep, asking Frank to wake her when they got to Barsoom.

20

AS IT HAPPENED, Sally slept only a couple of hours before she was woken, not by Frank, but by another sudden lurch of the glider. She sat up with a start, reaching for her faceplate.

The cabin seemed dark, and she wondered if they had fallen into another storm. Then she realized that it was merely that the sun was low, setting in the west, and the colour was draining from the sky – but that colour, in this particular world, was a kind of bruised-purple, not the usual dusty brown.

Frank and Willis were talking quietly over the comms. Frank said, ‘Flying into this world with its thicker air was like slamming into a wall. Worse than the dust storm. We didn’t anticipate that.’

‘Yeah, but the gliders are coping.’

‘Possibly we could rig some kind of cut-out, so we don’t step further. Or maybe go up to higher altitude, where the air will never get catastrophically thick . . .’

As they talked Sally surveyed her surroundings. They were banking over a plain of dust and broken rock, not far north of the mouth of the enduring Mangala feature. In nearly twelve hours of travelling they had crossed more than forty thousand worlds, Sally saw, glancing over Frank’s shoulders at the instruments. And now this, something new and different. The air here was thicker, and oxygenated, and contained water vapour. It wasn’t as generous an atmosphere as Gap Mars, but more so than any other they’d passed through since, it seemed.

And on the ground below there was movement.

At first Sally, peering down, saw what looked like ripples in the dust, but ripples that slid and evolved as she watched. The low sun cast long shadows which made this diorama easy to follow.

Then a kind of body emerged from the dust.

She saw a gaping mouth, then a tubular carcass, coated with chitinous plates that glistened in the low sunlight. It was almost like watching a whale surface from the sea. Then that great mouth opened wide, scooping in the sand. Now Sally saw more such shapes emerge from the ground, none of them as large as the first: young, perhaps, immature versions. They glided through the dust, propelled by flippers; Sally counted a dozen pairs of limbs on the big leader.

‘Life on Mars,’ she breathed. ‘Animal life.’

‘Yeah,’ Willis called. ‘Like whales in a sea of dust, filter-feeding. And there’s no Gap here. This may have some common root with the life of the local Earth. But it’s a very remote relation indeed.’