The Long Mars

‘Oh, I think my own duty is clear, Mr Black. It’s home for me, with my ship.’

‘Of course, Captain. But will you allow me one privilege? Earth West 239,741,211: an efficient but cold label. Let me name this world, as if I were its discoverer. I will name it Karakal. Please record it in your log.’

That baffled Maggie, who had been expecting some name like Blackville.

But Mac recognized the reference. ‘Lost Horizon. The Tibetan mountain where they found Shangri-La, in Hilton’s novel.’ He looked around. ‘Ah, I see now. That’s the clue. You picked a world of gravity so low that even a lard-bucket like me can leap like a basketball star, and oxygen levels so high the air is like wine. Of course, I should have guessed. This Earth, you hope, is going to turn out to be a machine to keep you alive. Even reverse your ageing. Like this whole world is an extension of that oxygen tent you have in your cabin! Your very own Shangri-La.’

‘That indeed is the idea, Doctor.’

Maggie asked, ‘Can partial gravity really reverse ageing?’

Mac gri

‘Yeah, but I thought low gravity was bad for you – leaching away the calcium from your bones, wasting your muscles, messing with your body’s fluid balance . . .’

Black said, ‘That’s true for zero gravity, Captain. Partial gravity is different. Surely this world’s pull will be sufficient to keep the muscles strong, the juices flowing as they should, with appropriate diets, exercise regimes and so forth. But by allowing the body to spend less energy just fighting gravity – the cells will oxidize more slowly, the joints, the ligaments, the dubious architecture of the spine will all be stressed significantly less – there is a strong argument that life spans could be significantly extended.’

Maggie turned to her chief surgeon. ‘Mac?’

He spread his hands. ‘There’s an argument, maybe. But not a shred of hard evidence. Very little research has been done on the effects of partial gravity, and won’t be until the day we have data from long-duration stays on Mars or the moon. However, it’s Mr Black’s choice, his money.’

‘Oh, come, Doctor; at my age, my position in my life, don’t you think it’s a gamble worth taking? And it’s not just my money by the way. I’m representing a consortium of backers – none of them adventurous enough to take this trip with me, but all willing to follow, in the next year or two. They will come with their staff, their own doctors . . .’ He smiled. ‘Now do you see the vision, Captain? Among my backers are Americans, Europeans, Chinese, politicians and industrialists and investors, some, frankly, closer to the dark edge of the law than others. Old money and new – some indeed who made a fortune out of the Yellowstone aftermath, for every disaster is an opportunity for somebody. Some people, you know, got rich even out of the fall of the Roman Empire. The Long Earth is still young, and we are very wealthy indeed; with time we’ll find ways to wield our influence even from this remote world. Now if you’ll excuse me – come, Philip, we need to find a location for our first settlement and get established before the airships leave. . .’

Maggie stared after him. ‘A community of the fabulously rich, Mac. Rich and ageless, if this all works out as he dreams.’

‘Well, it might. Oxygen and low gravity – that’s quackery, probably. But they’ll be bringing in teams of researchers who’ll have nothing else to do but find something that does work.’

‘And if so it really will be a Shangri-La. Without the monks.’

Mac grunted sceptically. ‘Or a community of struldbrugs, like Gulliver’s Travels – undying but ageing, and growing more and more bitter. A gang for whom even death will no longer bring an end to their clinging to wealth and power. Think of all the monsters of history who you wouldn’t want to see still around today, from Alexander through Genghis Khan to Napoleon . . .’

‘It might not be like that. Maybe they will give us a longer perspective.’

‘Hell of a gamble if you ask me. So are you going to allow this, Captain?’

‘I don’t see I’m in a position to stop him. He’s not crew, Mac.’

‘I guess. Well, I’m glad I won’t live long enough to see what grows from the seed you planted today.’

‘You old cynic. Come on, let’s get back to the ship and go home.’

36

THE GALILEO CREW had left behind the world of the sand-whalers and the monoliths with, as far as Frank Wood was concerned, a sigh of relief.

And it was only when they were safely in the air, passing over yet more clones of dead Mars, one every second, that Frank began to relax, that the military man inside him began, grudgingly, to release his hold on events. How they had got away from ferocious fire-spitting land-dragons and harpoon-hurling sand-whalers – not to mention some kind of monstrous unseen Martian tyra

In the days that followed, while Willis paged through the screeds of images the whalers had retrieved for him from the monoliths, and Sally sank back into her own default mode of wary silence, Frank spent a lot of time asleep, nerves slowly recovering. He wasn’t as young as he used to be.

And he was only peripherally aware of the new Jokers the expedition came upon, and paused to study.

A flooded Mars, where, it looked like, the whole of the northern hemisphere was drowned by an ocean. Here beasts not unlike the sand whales roamed the land, while what looked like cities floated on tremendous rafts on the sea. ‘Fishermen’, crustacean types, came ashore in land-yachts to hunt the whales, just as on Earth land-dwellers harvested the fruit of the sea . . .

A drier Mars, whose copy of Mangala Vallis was nevertheless covered by forests, of tough, low, needle-leaved trees. Willis was tempted to linger here because he thought he saw two forest clumps in slow-motion conflict with each other: a war waged at the speed a flower grew. ‘Birnam Wood besieging Dunsinane!’ he said. But they could not afford a long enough stay to study this slow encounter properly . . .

A plain covered in rocky coils, like heaps of rope. Willis’s first guess was that these were some kind of volcanic extrusion. But when he took Thor down for a closer look the coils unwound into pillars of basalt, gaping mouths opened, and gouts of flame shot out at the hastily retreating glider: another variation on the theme of sand whale . . .

Once, Sally swore, on a moist but chill Mars, a glacial Mars, she saw a herd of reindeer, off in the northern mist, coats shaggy, antlers held high, animals much larger than their terrestrial equivalent. But the others could not see it, and the cameras could not penetrate the mist for a clear image. None of them understood what this vision, like a race memory of the Ice Age, might mean . . .

And, every so often, Frank thought he saw flickering forms in the valleys of Mangala, far below. Translucent sacs, like survival bubbles; gaunt forms like landed sand-yachts. As if they were being followed. Probably the product of paranoid dreams, he thought.

Finally, eleven weeks since the landing and nearly three million steps from the Gap, Willis Linsay said he thought he had found what he was looking for.

37

TO SALLY, PILOTING Frank in Woden, it was just another dead Mars. As seen from a high altitude the basic shape of the landscape, the tangle of Mangala Vallis below, the great rise of the Tharsis uplands to the north-east, looked much as she remembered it from spacecraft images of the Datum-Earth Mars, taken decades ago in a reality all of three million steps away.