Roberta had endured the boredom of the preparation for this latest jaunt, the training, the suiting-up, and had written off the dull, relatively data-poor hours of exploration that lay ahead. She knew it was important to apprehend these worlds physically. The first space engineers, whose biographies she had studied closely when seeking role models for her own career, had spoken of the need for ‘ground truth’, a sampling of conditions down on the ground of some planet or moon, to confirm or refute hypotheses drawn up from orbital inspection, or through telescopic observations. Ground truth, yes. She saw the need for it. And this was a very remote world, an exotic world, despite the brevity of the journey here. They had crossed the six million worlds since the planet of the crest-roos in no more than a week, with the airships’ powerful drives propelling them forward in bursts of acceleration.
Even so she longed to be in her room on the ship, with her books and slates. Safe inside her head. But she was not there, not for now. She was here. She focused on the real, physical world around her.
They climbed a bluff, beyond which, they knew from a hasty aerial survey, was a dry valley, and the spectacle they had come to witness. The shallow climb, the effort of lifting her feet safely over the lumpy ground, soon made Roberta pant.
Jacques, monitoring her progress from the Zheng He, noticed. ‘I hope you haven’t been skimping your exercise routines.’
Roberta took a deep lungful of air. ‘I suspect the oxygen content is low.’ She could hear the trolls singing in the background, a murmur in her earpiece.
Jacques said, ‘The ship has atmospheric scientists who monitor the air quality before they crack the hatch. Turns out they’ve been watching the oxygen content fluctuate increasingly, the further out we’ve travelled. But here it’s well within breathable limits.’
Wu Yue-Sai said sternly, ‘But it did not occur to them to factor in the effects of physical exercise. That’s unfortunately typical: overspecialization of departments and insufficient communication.’
‘I believe the Captain is having words,’ Jacques said dryly. ‘If you’d rather come back in—’
‘No, we’re nearly there,’ Yue-Sai said. She glanced back at Roberta, who nodded.
And as she approached the summit of the rising ground, Roberta could hear a kind of orchestra of disparate sounds: a bass rumbling as of heavy traffic, even like tanks, mixed in with a chorus of mournful bellows, and a percussion section of impacts, of clanks and clunks. Excitement built in Roberta, and she grinned at Yue-Sai. They both ran up the remaining slope and threw themselves flat on the mossy ground, so they could see down into the valley.
Where the tortoises walked.
This was what they had landed to see. A two-way flow of the animals was packed into the valley, all lumbering along, those to the right heading north, those to the left heading south. The biggest of them were huge, like tanks indeed, or even bigger, with shells the size of small houses that were battered, scarred – some had birds’ nests built into folds and cracks on the shells, and Roberta wondered if those passengers had some kind of symbiotic relationship with their hosts. But she could immediately see that the tortoises came in a spectrum of all sizes scaling down from the big monsters, to ‘giants’ that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Galapagos Islands, to miniature sorts like the pets Roberta had seen people keep, even dwarf kinds she could have held in her hand. The smaller ones ran around the tree-trunk legs of the big lumbering monsters. The noise was cacophonous, from the squeaks of the smallest to great blasts from the titans, like the fog horns of supertankers.
Yue-Sai pointed out the little ones, and laughed. ‘The babies are so cute.’
Roberta shook her head. ‘They may not be infants at all. There are probably many species mixed up in there.’
‘I suppose you are right. And I suppose we will never know what is what.’ She sighed. ‘So many worlds. So few scholars to study them. If only we had laboratories to produce self-replicating scientists, to explore all the worlds. Ah, but we do! They’re called university campuses.’
Roberta smiled uncertainly.
Yue-Sai said, ‘You don’t get the joke? I suppose it was a little laborious. But is my English so bad?’
‘It’s not that. It’s just that, Jacques and other teachers tell me, I am too smart for most jokes.’
‘Really,’ Yue-Sai said, straight-faced.
‘There is an element of deception in many jokes, and then a reveal, of a truth which is surprising. I spot the deception too early. Which is why the comedy I prefer is—’
‘Slapstick. Anarchic humour. Those Buster Keaton films you watch. I understand now. Anyhow, all these worlds—’
‘And all these tortoises . . .!’
They had discovered a whole sheaf of worlds of this kind. The further they got from the Datum, the stranger the worlds they encountered, the stranger the ecologies. In a way, tortoise worlds might have been anticipated. On the Datum the tortoise-turtle body plan was an ancient, ubiquitous and very successful one. Why shouldn’t there have been worlds where tortoise lineages dominated?
‘In many worlds,’ Yue-Sai said, ‘even on the Datum, you’ll find tortoises behaving like this. Forming lines to get to waterholes, like the lake higher up this valley. Drinking their fill, enough to last months.’
‘But not a line a hundred miles long.’
‘No,’ said Yue-Sai. ‘And not a line running on what looks like a road, with a metalled surface.’ Not that they’d been able to get close enough to check that out. ‘And not a line with traffic police . . .’
These were individuals about the size of Galapagos giants. They stood on raised islands in the middle of the two-way flow, or in bays cut into the valley walls. Some of them had belts wrapped around their shells, with pockets, pouches. They even had tools, like whips that cracked occasionally, and things that looked like simple horns to Roberta, to amplify their calls. The function of these individuals was clear: to keep the tremendous flow moving peaceably. They would dive in, horns blaring, if there was a clash, or the two-way lanes got mixed up, or a little one fell under the feet of the giants. Somehow, amid a chaotic clatter of shells, everything got sorted out.
‘We might have expected intelligence,’ said Yue-Sai. ‘I have been studying. On the Datum, people learned that tortoises could solve mazes. At least, that was when people gave tortoises a chance to solve mazes, as opposed to eating them, or stifling them in “hibernation boxes”. Perhaps there are great cities elsewhere on this world. Tortoise armies. Tortoise colleges . . . That thought makes me want to laugh, but I’m not sure why.’
‘I don’t believe we’ll find anything too advanced,’ Roberta said. ‘Not locally.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look at the wardens’ tools. They have similar functions, obviously, but differ in detail. See? The stone here is shaped differently from there. The braiding on the whip handle—’
‘So what?’
‘Tortoise culture must be different from ours,’ Roberta said. ‘Their reproduction patterns are different. If you are a tortoise you emerged from one of hundreds of eggs; you don’t know your parents; you received no parental care. Their young may not be guided through family backgrounds and formal education as we are. Perhaps they compete for a right to live, and part of that competition is learning how to make tools. But that means every generation must more or less reinvent the culture from scratch.’
‘Hmm. Thus limiting their overall progress, generation to generation. Maybe. That is a lot of supposition based on just a little data.’
Roberta had learned not to say things like It’s too beautiful a theory not to be true. Once Jacques Montecute, overstressed, had told her that she should have the slogan ‘Nobody Likes a Smart Alec’ tattooed to her forehead in reverse, so she could be reminded of it every morning in the bathroom mirror. She contented herself with saying, ‘It does fit with the likely physiology, and the evidence of the non-uniformity of the tools. But, yes, the theory needs more te
sting. It would be interesting to know what’s going on nearer the equator in this world.’
Yue-Sai did a double take. ‘Why so?’
‘Because those tortoises that solved the mazes back on the Datum were allowed to do so in warm conditions. Tortoises are cold-blooded; they shut down in the cold, to some extent.’
‘Oh. So maybe the behaviour we’re witnessing here, in the cold, is—’
‘Limited by temperature. They may be achieving much more in warmer latitudes. Do you think Captain Chen would sanction a journey south, towards the equator?’
‘And risk getting shot down by some super-tortoise? I do not think so.’ Yue-Sai packed away her equipment. ‘Time to get back to the ship.’
Before they left, Roberta glanced across the valley, to the far wall where erosion had exposed the strata of the local sedimentary rocks. She could clearly see a marine deposit, a chalky layer embedded with flints, below a bed of gravel, and then above that a few yards of peat, under the mossy ground surface. She could read the geology. This region, now elevated, had once been under the sea. Later, ice had come and gone, leaving behind the gravel, and then the peat had been laid down over millennia of temperate climates . . . This world, like all other worlds, had a story of its own, a story billions of years deep and probably not quite like any other in the Long Earth ensemble. A story that probably nobody would ever get around to unravelling, and all she would take away from this place was a few snapshots of tortoises.
She could only turn away.
Back at the airship Captain Chen was excited, and not about tortoises. ‘Finally – finally! – we have the results back from the probes we sent into the Eastern Gap. You remember, more than six million worlds back.’
‘Of course I remember.’
‘You asked us to inspect the planets, Venus and Mars. And the scientists found—’
‘Life.’
He seemed crestfallen. ‘You knew? Of course you would know . . .’
On the Mars of the missing Earth East 2,217,643, there was oxygen and methane in the air, chemically unstable gases that must have been injected by the processes of life. There seemed to be some kind of vegetative covering on the lower ground of the northern hemisphere. And in the clouds of that copy of Venus, high, cool, full of water, chlorophyll had been observed. Earth-like plants, drifting in the Venusian sky.
No, Roberta wasn’t surprised. Any Gap that could be reached by a stepping animal, even the most foolish of humanoids, was going to be a place where bacteria and other living organisms were regularly injected into space, if only accidentally, through the hole where Earth should be. Most such reluctant pioneers would die quickly, including the hapless humanoids if they couldn’t step straight back – but some hardy bacterial spores, having hitched a ride on the stepping humanoids, might survive the radiation, the vacuum. And of those spores, some might ultimately drift into the skies of other worlds, and seed them. This was panspermia, the transfer by natural processes of life between the worlds. It was thought to be possible even in the Datum universe. How much easier panspermia must be in a Gap cosmos, with a way for life to reach space so much more easily than being blasted off by an asteroid impact.
No, Roberta wasn’t surprised. She filed the confirmation away in the back of her mind, where a kind of model of the Long Earth, and all its facets, was slowly being assembled, fact by fact, deduction by deduction.
54
UNDER THE PROW of the airship Shillelagh as it ploughed West, the worlds ticked by, one every second, with hypnotic regularity. Bill paused the journey at recognized Jokers: at the anomalous worlds, flaws in the fabric of the Long Earth, where on a conventional journey travellers would hurry past, unseeing, eyes averted.
Even in the relatively generous, relatively settled worlds of the Corn Belt, in which could be found Reboot, Helen’s family’s home, there were Jokers. Early in the journey Bill stopped briefly at Earth West 141,759, where the multi-channel radio receiver he kept running constantly blared out warnings in a multitude of languages and code formats. Quarantine, Joshua gathered through blistered eardrums: because it was the source of some particularly virulent pathogen, this whole world was under a quarantine administered by the UN, along with staff from the US’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Any travellers should keep away from designated areas; otherwise they would be arrested, any materials impounded and destroyed, and they would be kept in confinement until decontamination procedures had been completed . . . It was a relief to move on and leave it behind.
‘Are they serious, Bill? Can you really quarantine a whole Earth?’
‘You can try. But how serious they are is another question. We have come across a few nasty viruses out in the Long Earth. Populations of birds and pigs, or birdy creatures and piggy creatures, are always reservoirs of bugs likely to be able to cross over and infect humanity, just as it’s always been on the Datum. And you’d expect humans to have no immunity to such a disease coming from a stepwise world. The greatest threat is to the Datum and the Low Earths, of course, with their dense populations and travel networks. But Cowley and his gang of eejits use fears like this to whip up hostility to combers and trolls, like each one of us is a Typhoid Mary. You know, on worlds like this, they get doctors to volunteer to go in there and support trapped travellers, only to have their Stepper boxes confiscated, and they find they’re not allowed out again . . .’
On they swept, with regular stuttering pauses.
Jokers weren’t a lot of fun. Many were scenes of devastation one way or another: usually a lifeless ground under a sky that might be either obscured by ash or dust, or else glaring and empty, ozone-free, cloudless, a fierce blue. Bill had Just-So back-stories for many of these shattered worlds, pieced together from travellers’ tales, comber legends, and occasionally some actual science field work.
The most common cause of such collapses, Joshua started to learn, was an asteroid impact. On long enough timescales, it was as if Earth drifted around inside a cosmic pinball machine. Bill lingered briefly at one heavily damaged world, West 191,248. The impact, only a couple of years back in this case, in central Asia, had been far from here; life close to ground zero was devastated, but the world as a whole was suffering under an asteroid winter.
But there were other types of calamity waiting to pounce. Earth West 485,671: a world locked in an Ice Age that had turned into a runaway glaciation, perhaps caused by the solar system drifting through a dense interstellar cloud that blocked the sun’s light. Here the oceans were frozen down to the equator; the ice-shrouded landscapes glared brilliant white in sunlight that poured down from a blue sky empty of clouds, save for wisps that Bill said were probably carbon dioxide snow crystals. But the depths of the ocean, warmed by the Earth’s inner heat, would stay liquid, and life would survive in dark underwater refuges until the volcanoes warmed the world again.
Earth West 831,264: here Joshua looked down on a rust-coloured, Mars-like landscape evidently bare of life, save for occasional streaks of purple slime. The air itself was stained red by the dust raised by incessant windstorms.
‘What the hell happened here?’
‘A gamma-ray burster. Well, that’s our best guess. Probably caused by a kind of massive supernova, the collapse of a supermassive star into a black hole. Could have happened anywhere within thousands of light years. A storm of gamma rays would have stripped away the ozone layers and then fried the surface life.’
‘Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’
‘What’s that, Josh?’
‘Just a stray memory of Sister Georgina.’
‘In the long term life always bounces back one way or another. But there’s always the chance,’ Bill said with gruesome relish, ‘that we might step over on to some world just at the moment the big rock falls, or whatever. What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird, is it a plane – d’oh!’
Joshua, oppressed by these charnel-house worlds, didn’t feel much like laughing. ‘We’re still s
earching for Sally, right?’
‘We’re doing our best,’ Bill said. ‘That kobold did say he believed the trolls were hiding out in some Joker or other. The bad news is there are a lot of Jokers. The good news is there are a lot of combers out in those Jokers already.’
‘Hiding from the man. Just like Sally.’
‘That’s the idea. Before we set off I sent word on ahead. I’m still hoping that if she’s spotted, somebody will put the word out. There are a lot of radio hams out here; it’s a good way to keep in touch across an undeveloped world. We’d hear them as we pass through. Of course some worlds are so badly beat up there is no ionosphere, and that theory breaks down.
‘You really can’t plan too definitely when it comes to combers. It’s the nature of the beast. Combers! Some call them ridge runners or jackpine savages or mountain men, or hoboes or okies. In Oz they call ’em bushwhackers, the Brits say travellers. Once, in some parts, they were called wanderers. And you were the Wanderer, back then. Though not any more, buddy, you betrayed your own legend when you settled down to bake bread with the missus.’
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