The Long Mars

‘All of which meant you needed me more than you needed Frank. It wasn’t about family, or loyalty. Your only consideration was which of us had the greater – utility – to you at this point in the mission, given the probabilities going forward. And it happened to be me, because of the soft places. Which is why you saved me, not Frank.’

‘What do you want me to say—’

She cut across him. ‘And – of course – this was why you contacted me in the first place. Summoned me to the Gap, to Mars. Your first contact with me in years, out of the blue, out of nowhere, the father who turned the whole world upside down and went missing when I was still in my teens. It wasn’t me you needed alongside you. It was my ability you wanted. I was a backup option, in case the gliders failed. A human dowsing rod. Nothing more than that.’

He seemed to think that over. ‘So, what’s your point? You seem to think I’ve acted unreasonably. Is that it? But, Sally, I’m not a reasonable man. Reasonable men are like Frank Wood. He just accepted it when his career choices shut down. He drove a damn tour bus at the Cape, until he heard about the Gap, somehow. Then he just drifted again, until you happened to show up with that policewoman . . . In the end he accepted his death, down there in the dirt. I’m not like Frank Wood, just accepting what the universe throws at me. I’m unreasonable. I change the universe.’

She wasn’t angry, to her own surprise. Maybe she’d seen too much crap out in the reaches of the Long Earth to be angry at the failings of mere human beings any more. Even her father. What did she feel, then? Disappointment? Perhaps. But this was the way Willis had always behaved. Pity, then? But who for? Willis, or herself ?

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You are a man who changes the universe. But you’re also my father—’

‘Grow up,’ he snarled.

And so Sally took her father back through chill tu

At the Gap Mars, Viktor and Sergei and Alexei made them welcome once more, though they were saddened by the loss of Frank.

Then Sally and Willis crossed space, back to the Brick Moon and GapSpace. Aside from dealing with necessary business, they had no significant conversation, in the weeks it took them to reach home.

Immediately on her return, Sally sought out Frank Wood’s family. She hated such obligations. But she knew there was nobody else who would tell how he died.

And she visited the grave of Monica Jansson, in Madison West 5, to tell her too.

That was when she got a message from Joshua Valienté.

41

IT WAS THE end of August, and the return of the Navy airships USS Neil A. Armstrong II and USS Eugene A. Cernan from their expedition into the remote Western reaches of the Long Earth, that precipitated the crisis for the Next children in their prison-hospital at Hawaii. Because Captain Maggie Kauffman and her crew brought home the ‘Napoleons’ who had destroyed the Armstrong I. Monsters who were immediately identified as Next.

Nelson suspected it was simply the image of the rogues’ leader, who called himself only David, that did the most damage to the cause of the Next. This was not some institutionalized, broken child, like Paul Spencer Wagoner and the rest. David was an adult, tall, arrogant, commanding, defiant as he stared out of the cage into which his captors put him, gazed into the lenses of the news cameras. A Napoleon indeed, a daunting superman.

Around David and his kind, inchoate fears crystallized. Something had to be done about the Next. The question was, what?

A conference call was hastily set up, involving senior staff at the Pearl Harbor base as well as administration officials in such secure locations as had survived across the post-Yellowstone continental US. On Hawaii, the meeting was projected in a complicated hologrammatic conference room, an expensive piece of kit.

It seemed inevitable to Nelson that even in the mid twenty-first century, even after the huge dislocation of the last few decades, most of the delegates were white, middle-aged men.

Nelson himself wasn’t allowed to contribute unless specifically invited in the course of the discussion, but he was allowed to watch from a glass-walled booth. To his surprise he found himself sharing the booth with Roberta Golding, who he knew had come to Hawaii supposedly on her own fact-finding mission. He had met her in person once before, at a party thrown by Lobsang just before the Yellowstone eruption. But they had not spoken then; she had been very young. Now she had played a part in arranging his own cover here. He supposed it was coincidental that Roberta was here in person when the Armstrong crisis blew up. But then he reminded himself that Golding herself was from Happy Landings . . . Maybe it was no coincidence at all. Secrets colliding with secrets. What was her true role? How much did she believe he knew of all this?

As they took their seats Nelson introduced himself; Roberta responded coolly, but pleasantly enough.

‘Quite a set-up,’ Roberta said, as they watched the conference delegates file in, or coalesce from clouds of pixels.

‘Yes. I imagined you’d be in there with them.’

‘Oh, this is far above my pay grade. And it’s mostly military, you’ll notice. The President’s Science Adviser is chairing the session, and she’s one of the few not in uniform.’

‘Indeed. Reminds me of nothing so much as a Cold War military bunker. Oh, sorry.’ Golding was only around twenty years old herself – only a little older than Paul Spencer Wagoner, he reflected. ‘Maybe that’s too dated a reference for you.’

‘No, no. I have studied the period. Perhaps the most perilous of all manifestations of dim-bulb madness.’

Her obviously deliberate use of the Next term ‘dim-bulb’ startled him, and he looked at her with his perceptions of her shifting rapidly.

The Science Adviser called the meeting to order. She a

Admiral Hiram Davidson, chief of USLONGCOM, was head of the chain of command that had controlled the mission of those Navy ships, and he spoke first, giving a brief rehash of what Captain Kauffman and her crew had found out there in the reaches of the Long Earth, and what they’d done about the ‘ragged-trousered Hitlers’, as he put it, that they’d shipped home. ‘As to what’s going on in this base right here, for a summary of that I want to bring in Lieutenant Louise Irwin . . .’

Irwin spoke well, concisely, intelligently, even with a degree of compassion. She briefed the delegates on what had been learned of the Next in the time they’d been under surveillance in this controlled facility, and – as she reported more cautiously, under pressure of follow-up questioning – what had been surmised of their potential. Apparently unawed by the stuffed shirts around her, she neither condemned nor supported the Next; rather she gave a cool assessment of their intellect, their psychology, their capabilities. Even so, Nelson thought – or perhaps because of her analytical tone – she made the Next children sound pretty scary.

Roberta murmured, ‘I’ve spoken with Irwin a few times. The inmates here have been lucky to have her around.’

‘I’d second that,’ Nelson said.

‘Anyhow, so much for the background briefings. Now the debate begins . . .’

Somewhat to Nelson’s surprise, the next speaker, the head of DARPA, an advanced research agency responsible to the Department of Defense, spoke quite passionately in favour of protecting the Next. He was a stout, red-faced man, a classic desk-jockey type; his rather visionary words didn’t fit his image, Nelson thought, as he began to speak.