The Long Mars

‘“Such crucibles.” Are there others?’

‘Oh, yes. Logically it must be so . . . Anyhow, you’re a chaplain. I thought you were here to talk about God, not Darwin.’

Nelson shrugged. ‘I’m being paid by the hour, not by the topic. We can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Do you have any views on God?’

Paul snorted. ‘Your gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.’

‘Very well. And what do you believe?’

He laughed. ‘Give me a chance! I’m nineteen years old, and in jail. We’ve had no time to address such questions, not yet. I can tell you what I feel. That God is not out there somewhere. God is in us, in our everyday lives. In the act of understanding. God is the sacredness of comprehension – no, of the act of comprehension.’

‘You should read Spinoza. Maybe some of the yogis.’

‘If we have the time we may come closer to the truth. And if we have a lot more time, we may be able to render it into a form even you dim-bulbs can comprehend.’

‘Thanks,’ Nelson said dryly. ‘But you say if. You’re implying you won’t be granted that time.’

‘Look around you.’ He waved up at the blank ceiling. ‘Look at the uniformed ape with an assault rifle up there. Or so I deduce his presence. How much time do you think the dim-bulbs will allow us?’

‘And do you fear that, Paul? Do you fear death?’

‘Hmm. Good question. Not individual death. But there are so few of us still, Nelson, that death for us means extinction of our kind. And I fear that. For all that is left unsaid, all that is left undiscovered, unexpressed. Are we done? I’d kind of like to watch some TV now.’

Nelson paused for one second, considering. Then he rapped on the door to summon the guard.

34

THE CREW OF THE Armstrong I were not difficult to find, a few worlds further out from the Napoleons, and unreasonably grateful for their rescue. Maggie allowed a day’s partying to celebrate.

Then the mission continued. The airships Armstrong and Cernan pressed on into the unknown.

The airships had left West 5 in January. It was now May, and life on board wasn’t getting any easier, especially when they crossed through uninhabitable worlds, and the ships had to be locked down. Harry Ryan was growing quietly concerned about the state of his engines. The quartermaster, Je

But despite all the niggling problems Maggie still had her eyes on the nominal target she’d been given for this mission: to reach Earth West 250,000,000. The best estimates showed that the goal was still well within the ships’ consumables budget and system lifetimes. And it was after all a prize worth achieving; once it was done everybody on board would go to their graves still cradling the memory of it. This jaunt would dwarf the famous Chinese expedition to East 20,000,000 five years ago – and it would by quite some way surpass even the one-way journey of the Armstrong I, which had ultimately reached the world of the young Napoleons, more than a hundred and eighty million steps out. That was a fantastic journey that had for too long gone unreported and needed its story told, even if it would take some of the gloss off what she’d achieved in Armstrong II.

The trouble was that the final leg from Planet Napoleon to Good Old Quarter Billion, as she had taken to calling it, represented over a quarter of the total mission still to be completed – at least three weeks’ ru

And as the journey wore on, and the Earths became ever more exotic and challenging, Maggie sometimes felt as if it was only her own willpower that held the mission together.

The latest narrow band of worlds hosting complex life, the Bonsai Belt, had terminated at around Earth West 190,000,000, and they found themselves drifting once more over endless purple scum worlds.

Earth West 200,000,000 was another numerical milestone that Maggie used as a chance for a couple of days’ rest, recuperation, systems check. But the world itself was one of another band blighted by supercontinents, one hemisphere a vast bowl of Mars-red desert, the other a featureless mask of lifeless ocean. The oxygen levels were low here, and she couldn’t in all conscience sanction any shore parties, which did nothing to help morale. Then, beyond Earth West 210,000,000, oxygen levels once more collapsed entirely. This persisted even though, after around West 220,000,000, the supercontinent features abruptly fractured.

And beyond that point, the crews of the airships Armstrong and Cernan encountered increasingly unfamiliar and difficult Earths.

There were a lot more Gaps, for one thing, holes in the Long Earth that had to be cautiously, but hastily, traversed. Worlds with very exotic biota. Such as a thin band of worlds dominated by tremendous trees, trees whose slim trunks towered above the twains, and Gerry Hemingway’s best guess was that they might be three miles tall, their canopies – wonderfully, impossibly – higher than most mountains . . .

There were worlds where the atmosphere was much thicker than on the Datum, or much thi

There were worlds with one moon, bigger or smaller than the Datum’s, or many moons, or no moons at all.

There were even worlds where the gravity was different. On the low-weight worlds the ships floated over landscapes that generally looked more or less like the Mars of the Datum sky, with thin air and huge mountains and canyons that could span continents. In the partial gravity the airships were difficult to handle, the crew played jumping games, and the trolls hooted in dismay, tumbling. On other worlds, though, the gravity was stronger than on the Datum. Under thick blankets of atmosphere, winds scoured landscapes bare of any life but stunted-looking trees. The ships, their buoyancy inadequate, were pulled towards the ground, and if they lingered any length of time the crew complained that it felt as if packs of rocks had been loaded on their backs, like a punishment-detail training exercise.

Hemingway had some ideas about what was going on. At the root of Earth’s formation was violence, as a cloud of dust spi

Gerry wondered what this was telling them about the nature of the Long Earth, the relation of these parallel worlds to each other, and stepping.

‘How far away from the Datum model in terms of Earth’s formation can you go, before it’s no longer Earth at all? We know that even if an Earth is missing altogether you can step into the Gap remaining, but at least an Earth once existed there. But what if, for instance, an Earth hadn’t congealed at all – what if we found a cloud of asteroids kept from aggregating by some nearby gas giant, say? Is that where the Long Earth would terminate at last, and no more stepping would be possible?’