The Long Mars

Nelson considered. ‘Once I saw Paul crying in the night. This was from the viewing walkway. I did not disturb him.’

‘I used to cry at night too.’

He considered that. ‘Do you call yourself Next, then?’

She smiled. ‘Labels like that are for youngsters. As if we’re comic superheroes. I don’t fret about labels. And I am – different. I am less developed than some others here, but, having been raised in human society for most of my life – and with good teachers – I have decided my best place is here, out in the human world, serving as a sort of – interface.’

He smiled. ‘One hell of an interface if you’re in the White House itself.’

‘I try. But my maternal grandmother was a Spencer too. I have deeper loyalties; it’s my family being discussed here. I can find ways to get the inmates out of here.’ She faced him. ‘Will you help?’

‘Of course I will help. It’s why I came.’

‘What must we do?’

Nelson thought of Lobsang, and Joshua Valienté – and what he knew of Joshua’s friend Sally Linsay, and her facility with soft places . . . ‘There are ways.’

The meeting had come to its conclusion. The delegates stood up, mingled, those in the same geographical locations shaking hands. Then, one by one, their hologram representations winked out of existence.

42

NELSON AZIKIWE CONTACTED Joshua, and Joshua contacted Sally, fresh back from the Long Mars via the Gap. And together they worked out a soft-place escape route from the Hawaii facility.

Joshua and Sally were smuggled into the base, and they started stepping out the Next inmates, one batch after another.

They tumbled through the soft places, hand in hand, Joshua and Sally and the final group of the Next.

Even to Joshua, king of the natural steppers, whenever he followed Sally Linsay through this strange network of linkages it always felt as if he was falling out of control down some kind of invisible shaft, and a cold one too, a deep chill that sucked the i

But it was fast, that was the point. Happy Landings was more than a million and a half steps from Datum Earth. From the break-out from Hawaii, following Sally and Joshua, passing from soft place to soft place, the party of refugee Next made it all the way to their destination in the equivalent of a dozen steps, no more.

And they emerged in the open air, in scrub country, no more than a mile from the centre of Happy Landings itself. Sally gave her charges a moment to get their breath, sit in the dirt, sip water from their flasks.

Joshua walked among them, checking their condition. They might be young geniuses but they were comparative stepping novices. As soon as they started recovering the youngsters began to gabble at each other in their own complex post-English rapid-fire speech. The most remarkable thing was how they would all talk at once, all of them speaking and listening at the same time. Joshua imagined megabytes of information and speculation passing between them through this crowded network of language.

Joshua was relieved this was the last party they’d had to liberate from the Pearl Harbor facility. It included Paul Spencer Wagoner himself, and his kid sister Judy, and others Joshua didn’t know so well. It was done, at last.

Joshua walked a short distance away to get his own bearings, and, climbing a bluff, he looked down on Happy Landings. He saw the squat bulk of City Hall at the centre of the community, with a few smoke threads rising from overnight hearths into the morning air, and heard the gentle rush of the river. The air was unspoiled Washington-State fresh, heavy with the scent of forest.

Sally joined him. ‘How’s the headache?’

‘Worse. I can sense them somehow, Sally. These young eggheads. A new kind of mind in the world. Or worlds.’

‘Like First Person Singular.’

‘Yeah. Not a faculty I welcome. Maybe it’s useful sometimes.’

‘I had a dose of it on Mars. Long story. So here we are, back in this creepy place.’

‘Creepy? Sally, you brought me and Lobsang here in the first place.’

‘Yes. But I always did feel there was something odd about Happy Landings. Even when I came here as a kid . . .’

She had once told Joshua how her natural-stepper family used to bring her here, and how she never felt she fitted in, and he’d read between the lines about how she had felt about that.

He nodded at the Next, engaged in their eerie super-speech. ‘Well, if all this is the product of Happy Landings, your intuition was right. But even so – you’ve crossed three million Marses, and you think this is odd?’

She shrugged. ‘The more you travel, the more you see commonalities. The whole time I was on the Long Mars we were hopping around on the flanks of big shield volcanoes—’

‘Just like Hawaii, on Earth.’

‘Right. Made me feel at home. By comparison with the company of the Next, anyhow. So what are they talking about now?’

Joshua glanced over. ‘Hey, Paul. What’s the hot topic?’

‘The soft places,’ Paul called back. ‘What their existence tells us about the higher-order topology of the Long Earth . . .’ Even as he spoke Paul was distracted by the ongoing chatter of the others, their eyes shining with enthusiasm. Reunited with his peers, he was unrecognizable from the sullen boy-man Nelson Azikiwe had described encountering in isolation in Pearl Harbor. ‘Why, just the observations we’ve been able to make during that brief journey have enabled us to extrapolate swathes of the pan-dimensional structure. We don’t have the language to describe it – we don’t even have an agreed mathematical notation to record it . . .’

Sally said with a trace of unease, ‘My father’s been the world expert on Long Earth structure up to now, before you lot came along.’

‘All things must pass, Sally,’ Joshua said.

‘Yeah.’ She pointed to a trail. ‘We’d best get them moving . . .’

The Next youngsters got to their feet.

Paul, with some reluctance, broke away from the rest and faced Sally. ‘Umm, before we move on – we want to thank you, Ms Linsay. You saved us from that prison. Maybe you saved our lives, the way things were going in there.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ Sally said in her usual cold fashion. Compared with these kids she showed her age, Joshua thought; in her late forties now. But, her body taut, her face lined and weathered, her hair greying, she was fitter than any of them, Joshua included. ‘Thank whatever benevolent deity enabled me to find a soft place just stepwise of the military facility where they were holding you. Thank Joshua, if anybody. And thank Nelson, who saw a crime being committed, as I did when I was told about it. I put a stop to it, is all.’

Paul seemed interested. ‘A crime in your judgement. Though not in the judgement of the US administration, obviously. Of the government, of the nation that defines the laws you live by.’

‘Not that I live by necessarily.’

‘So you have your own moral code? Do you believe there are universal moral values, or is it up to the individual to discover her own i

‘Paul,’ Joshua said earnestly, ‘shut up. Sally meant to say, “You’re welcome.” There are times and places for a philosophical debate.’

Sally looked over to Happy Landings. ‘Well, we’ve got bigger troubles than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We brought these kids home. But things aren’t right over there. Listen.’

Joshua stood with her. ‘To what?’

‘The trolls.’

‘What trolls?’

‘Exactly.’

And Joshua realized it now. Of all the human communities he’d ever encountered, Happy Landings was the most suffused with trolls, a place where trolls and humans lived side by side. As Paul had once told him, that was the true point of the community; that was the secret of how it worked. And wherever trolls were, they sang, all the time. This close in Joshua ought to be able to hear them in the town itself, and away from the centre, in the woods and clearings.