The Long Mars

‘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

MORE LIFELESS MARSES, 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 i

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 i