The Long Mars

Meanwhile she tried to keep the crews occupied. Luckily the gondolas were big enough to allow room for physical exercise and training, even in flight. She got together with Sergeant Mike McKibben, the commander of the two chalks of marines she had on board the airships, and fixed up joint exercises to keep both contingents happy. She also allowed, with caution, some competitive sports between the two services, Navy versus marines, from squash to Scrabble, McKibben’s surprising pet love.

She did quietly order Nathan to ensure that her crews’ salaries were firewalled so they couldn’t be gambled away on the turn of a high-scoring tile.

‘Yes, Captain. Should I warn Mike McKibben to do the same for his guys?’

She gri

‘Yes, Captain.’

Even at the increased rate, it took nineteen more days before they left behind the purple scum.

Joe Mackenzie, one night towards the end of that interval, revealed to Maggie that he too was keeping a kind of log of the trip.

‘My God, Mac, is everybody on these damn ships keeping a diary? We’re like a dysfunctional White House.’

‘It’s a solitary habit, but there are worse. And, according to my personal log – you know, it’s hard to grasp the scale of what we’re doing here, because epic stepwise journeys are new, whereas we’ve been making long geographical journeys on Earth since, what? The Vikings, the Polynesians? But even so it seems to me we’re coming up on a milestone, of sorts. Look – when Armstrong flew to the moon, he was undertaking a journey on a scale that dwarfed anything in human history, or indeed prehistory. The distance to the moon, two hundred and forty thousand miles out, is about sixty times the radius of the Earth. OK? Now, Datum to Valhalla is the civilized Long Earth, as much as it’s civilized at all. That’s around one point four million steps. And sixty times that distance, stepwise, is—’

She figured it quickly. ‘About eighty-four million.’

‘Which milestone we’re due to pass tomorrow.’ He raised the glass of single malt she’d poured for him. ‘Whatever comes next for us, in comparison with other human achievements we’ve achieved our personal moon shot, Maggie.’

‘I’ll buy that. And a good excuse for a celebration,’ she said, always thinking of crew morale. ‘Let’s round it up to a hundred million. Sounds neater.’ She glanced at a calendar. ‘Looks like we’ll get there on April Fool’s Day.’

‘Seems appropriate,’ Mac said.

‘We’ll have a day’s R&R, make a couple of speeches, take photographs, plant a flag.’

‘I was thinking it would be a good place to throw out the cat. But fine, do it your way.’

23

NOT FAR PAST THE hundred-million-step milestone, the purple-scum band gave way to yet another sort of world: another band in which multicellular life had emerged. It was a welcome island of scenery after long stretches of purple scum worlds – or sometimes, for the sake of variety, green scum. Yet the creatures they encountered in these worlds were not like anything anybody had seen before.

Earth West 102,453,654: on this world the land had been colonized by things that looked like trees, but were actually, said the biologists, a kind of much-evolved seaweed. Things like sea anemones crawled over the ground, browsing. And the canopies of these kelp-like forests, and much of the world below, were dominated by a kind of jellyfish.

Jellyfish, living in trees.

These were tremendous leathery creatures, typically as massive as a troll. Their permanent habitat seemed to be the shallow sea, and while some crawled out on to the land, others flew, rocketing out of the ocean on water pumped from their mantles, and then gliding using fins protruding from their carapaces as ‘wings’ to reach the tree tops.

The canopy was laced with natural cables, like lianas but probably not. The jellyfish would descend on these cables for smash-and-grab raids on their cousins on the ground, and on other life forms like the anemones. Once the watching scientists even observed a kind of war, as one band of jellyfish from one forest clump hurled cables and nets over at another clump, and attacked in force.

All this was recorded from the air, by the human visitors. Off-duty crew spent all their spare time at windows or in the observation galleries, gazing down. Captain Kauffman vetoed any shore leave, however; the oxygen level was so low the party would have had to wear facemasks and carry tanks, and thus encumbered would have been terribly vulnerable to the predatory flying cnidarians of the branches above.

Bill Feng surprised Maggie by showing a peculiar fascination with the spectacle below – a peculiar interest in living things for a man she’d taken as a standard-issue engineer, anyhow. The Chinese said in his oddly accented English, ‘I have a military background myself, but I have never been one to cherish war for its own sake. Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own – and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?’

Maggie had no satisfactory answer.

Having logged, recorded and sampled these worlds, the ships pressed on.

Now that there was something to see out of the windows Maggie reduced the cruise rate to the nominal two million steps a day, but when this sheaf of worlds, which the biologists called the Cnidarian Belt, gave way after only a few more days’ travel to the purple scum, Maggie quietly ordered an increase in the stepping rate once again.

At Earth West 130,000,000, approximately, reached seven days after they had left the Cnidarian Belt – seven more days of purple scum – the expedition reached a new kind of world. Here a typical Earth’s air seemed depleted of oxygen altogether – there was merely a trace in an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen, carbon dioxide and volcanic gases, and that trace, Gerry Hemingway told Maggie, was probably put there by geological processes, not by anything alive. These were worlds, then, where oxygenating life had never formed in the first place, where there had been no discovery of the complex trick of photosynthesis, the use by green plants of the energy of sunlight to crack carbon dioxide to acquire its carbon for life-building, and incidentally to release excess oxygen into the air.

The airships had been designed in anticipation of such conditions. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen the great jet turbines which pushed the craft around the sky had to be fed oxygen from an internal store. Faced with a new engineering challenge to test his craft, Harry Ryan was in his element, and Maggie was fascinated; in this mode the technology was like a scramjet. But inside the gondola the air, now fully recycled by necessity, soon smelled stale.

Beneath the prow, meanwhile, the landscapes were more dismal than ever. Only a biologist could love the strange purple-crimson slicks and mounds of anaerobic bacteria that were the emperors of these worlds. Maggie quietly ordered that the accelerated stepping rate, three million steps a day, be maintained for now, but she warned Harry Ryan to be sure to watch the crafts’ onboard reserves. She didn’t want to have to try to walk back home through this.

It was the issue of oxygen, in fact, that caused her to have her first long conversation with Douglas Black since her most distinguished passenger had come on board the Armstrong.

Maggie made her way to Black’s suite of rooms. She had Mac at her side; she was here to back up the doctor’s complaints.

She’d asked for this meeting, but even on her own ship Douglas Black wasn’t a man who would come calling. And it didn’t surprise her that Black kept them waiting on his doorstep. His man Philip told them he had just woken up from a nap.

Mac muttered, ‘Damn arrogance.’