The Long Mars

Sally said, ‘I understand the cam. You need to photograph the monoliths – or get the whalers to do that for you. But why the Steppers?’

‘I told you, right at the begi

It took some pantomiming for Willis, surrounded by spear-wielding, expert-hunter, six-foot-tall crustaceans, to get over what he wanted. First he showed the whalers what a Stepper could do for them. He finished its assembly, a question of pushing a few plugs into sockets, and then turned the switch, stepped away to the hunters’ bafflement – and popped back into the world behind the lead guy, to their obvious consternation. ‘That’s it, fella. You get the idea. Imagine creeping up on Puff the Magic Dragon using one of these. Now you try. But you need to finish it for yourself, if it’s to work for you. And you’re going to need to use the survival bubbles, otherwise the Mars to either side will kill you in a breath . . .’

Only an hour later he had the crustaceans’ apparent leader in a comically incongruous plastic bubble, stepping back and forth at will, and jumping out of nowhere to alarm his buddies. Or possibly her buddies, Frank corrected himself. He couldn’t help noticing that one of those companions came in for particular humiliation with the new tool: some kind of rival to the leader? A father, brother, son, mother, sister? Whatever, he was jumped on, tripped, shoved, pushed over.

Sally said, ‘If these beasts bear any kind of similarity to human personalities, that guy is going to be seriously pissed at Dad for this.’

‘Yeah,’ Frank murmured. ‘That’s one angry young prince. Or whatever.’

As the morning wore on, Frank watched with increasing impatience. And at one point he thought he heard a sound like distant thunder. The sky was cloudless. Were storms even possible on this version of Mars?

The crustaceans were fast learners. They quickly grasped the potential of the technology, and soon picked up the idea that in exchange for the magic Stepper box, all Willis wanted was for them to take his handheld cam as close to the monoliths as they could get.

‘If this doesn’t work, nothing will. I also gave them seeds for the Martian cactus that powers the box. That comes from the Gap Mars, and there’s a good chance it will grow here too . . .’

‘My God,’ Frank said. ‘You just encountered these creatures. And yet within a few hours you’ve given them their own Step Day.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Willis said sternly. ‘Remember, the Stepper is only an aid to releasing an ability to step that’s i

‘But they are clearly inventive, technologically,’ Sally said.

‘And brave,’ Frank said. ‘They learn fast too—’

‘Oh well, Pandora’s box is open now. Or would you and that ass Mellanier say that’s the wrong myth, Frank? Look, we need to stay in this world long enough to get the monolith data. Then we can move on. But I suggest we get the gliders in the air soon.’

‘Why?’

‘I think I’m learning to read these guys’ body language. They seem a little anxious. Remember how I speculated about what kind of predator could make a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-long animal grow armour plate? That thunder you thought you heard a while ago – I heard it too – that ain’t thunder . . .’

30

EARTH WEST 170,000,000, and more. It was May now; the expedition was in its fourth month.

Around the patient, solid forms of the Armstrong and Cernan, strangeness shivered, in worlds gathered in great sheaves. Worlds where the only oceans were shrivelled, briny lakes in wildernesses of rock. Worlds where the continents had never formed, and the only dry land was a scattered handful of volcanic islands, subsiding into tempestuous seas. Worlds where different forms of life itself had prevailed.

Gerry Hemingway and Wu Yue-Sai were concocting a probabilistic theory about the prevalence of complex life in the Long Earth based on the statistics they were gathering. Almost all Earths had life of some kind. But only around half of all Earths had atmospheres enriched by oxygen from photosynthesis, and only one in ten hosted multicellular life, plants and animals. Perhaps the stepwise geography they were mapping represented something like the history of life on Earth in time, projected across the higher-dimensional spaces of the Long Earth. On Earth it had taken billions of years for full photosynthesis to be evolved, and multicellular life was, relatively speaking, a late arrival. The more complex the life, the harder it was to evolve. Maggie didn’t pretend to follow this argument, and thought it was probably premature to jump to conclusions anyhow.

Around Earth West 175,000,000 they again found a divergence from the simple-cell purple scum worlds. There was complexity in this island of worlds, but not at the level of a cell, or groups of cells, but at a more global scale. There would be a whole lake, even a sea, swarming with microbial life, yet all linked in hierarchies of communities, all contributing to a single, compound, protean life form. Fifteen years back the Valienté expedition had discovered one such entity, in retrospect freakishly close to the Datum: the beast Joshua Valienté had called First Person Singular, of a type that had since been named ‘Traversers’. Maybe this band of worlds was the ultimate origin of such creatures.

Given Valienté’s experience, the airship crews knew to be cautious here.

And still the ships plunged on into the unknown. Maggie was fascinated by the evolving panoramas of land, sea and sky she glimpsed through the windows of the observation galleries, and intrigued by the closer-up glimpses of the worlds they stopped at to sample in more detail. Yet, as they flew on, day after day, something in her recoiled from the bombardment of strangeness. And longed to come to some terminus.

On Earth West 182,498,761, Maggie watched an expedition of spacesuited crewmen explore yet another distant relation of North America, rich with intricately complicated and entirely unfamiliar life forms.

Gerry Hemingway arranged for one specimen to be brought up to the Armstrong. This was set up in a lab deep in the bowels of the gondola, with lamps that simulated the local daylight, under a plastic dome in which the methane-rich, oxygen-depleted local atmosphere could be reproduced. When he was ready, Hemingway invited Yue-Sai, Mac and Maggie to come and inspect his latest display.

They gathered around and peered down, frowning. Under the air dome, in a tray of local soil, stood what looked like a small tree, with a woody trunk and purple leaves. A yellowish thread was wrapped around the trunk, and yellow-white flowers poked out among the purple.

‘It’s like bonsai,’ Mac said.

Yue-Sai laughed. ‘Yes, as developed by some fellow on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the Japanese for you!’

‘Just tell me what you see,’ Hemingway said, reasonably patiently.

‘A tree,’ Maggie said briskly.

‘Exactly. Though not remotely related to any tree species on the Datum, now or in the past.’

Mac said, ‘But like all trees it’s competing for the light. So it’s photosynthetic. I suppose you could tell that from the purple and yellow leaves, the little flowers.’