‘The point is that simple Stepper technology allows us to move “up” or “down” the gut, you see, along the string of worlds. But Mellanier, even before the existence of the soft places started to become widely known, argued on theoretical grounds that it might be possible to break through into an adjoining strand. Rather than walk all the way around the string, you see. An effective short cut.’
‘Mellanier. I do remember him. Face all over the media a few years after Step Day. Princeton, isn’t he?’
‘That’s him. He got a lot right, but only dipped his toe in the theoretical waters.’
‘You don’t seem to like him very much, Wotan. Why should some rival academic from Princeton get your goat?’
‘Because Claude Mellanier is a fraud who fed off the analyses of Willis Linsay, and mine, repackaged them, dumbed them down, and passed them off as his own.’
‘The man won a Nobel Prize, didn’t he, Wotan?’
‘That’s because the Nobel committee are idiots nearly as blithering as you.’
‘Also he published a bestselling book—’
‘And don’t call me Wotan. Oh, must you plant me before these pithecine buffoons, Jocasta?’
22
BY THE END OF February, the Armstrong and Cernan had passed Earth West 30,000,000. There was no particular celebration – and nor had there been a few days back, when the ships had passed 20,000,000, and so beaten the five-year-old Chinese record. Not in the public spaces anyhow, at Maggie’s quiet order.
With the sheaf of worlds dominated by crabs and other crustaceans far behind, now they passed through a band of worlds where – as the biologists discovered on scooping up samples of pond scum – not only was there no multicellular life, no animals, no vegetation, there was often no evidence of complex cellular life: that is, no cells with internal nuclei, like those of Maggie Kauffman’s own body. Only the most simple of bacteria dwelled here, in mats and banks.
The crew called these ‘purple scum worlds’.
Still, in such worlds there could be complexity, of a different sort. They found structures like stromatolites, mounds of bacteria built up layer by layer in the sunlight, mindlessly cooperating in what might on Datum Earth have been called primitive ecosystems. But after billions of years of a different evolution, there was nothing primitive about these structures. Especially not the ones that crept up on an unwary crewman, taking samples with her back turned . . .
Two days’ flight later, at around Earth West 35,000,000, after millions of scum worlds all more or less identical, they encountered another band of worlds with their own peculiarity. Here oxygen levels in the air were very low, carbon dioxide high. The airships stopped at random on one such world – Earth West 35,693,562. Biologists in oxygen masks cautiously explored the shore of an arid continent. Even by the standards of the ‘purple scum’ worlds, this was an Earth poor in life.
It took some detective work on a larger scale to figure out the cause. Under Gerry Hemingway’s prompting, Maggie authorized the launch of balloons, sounding-rockets, and one of their small stock of precious nanosat launchers, and a global map was assembled. Here, North America had united with most of the world’s other continents, rafts of granite floating on mantle currents, to form a single supercontinent – like the Datum’s Pangaea, Maggie was told, which had broken up a quarter of a billion years back. One huge continent, and nothing else but ocean.
And supercontinent worlds, it turned out – just as the Chinese had found, Maggie discovered, consulting with Wu Yue-Sai – weren’t particular hospitable to life. The continent’s vast interior was worn down and arid; it was like one gigantic Australia, with only the coastal regions showing any kind of fecundity. The expedition pushed on, across one supercontinent world after another – the ‘Pangaean Belt’, the geographers called it. They saw no sign of life more complex than stromatolites at the coastal fringes, and if some kind of exotic critter roamed the tremendous plains of some footprints of these world continents, well, Maggie was content to leave the discovery to future travellers.
The Pangaean Belt turned out to be about fifteen million worlds thick. Fifteen million: sometimes Maggie struggled to grasp the significance of such numbers. The width of the Pangaeas alone was ten times the stepwise distance between the Datum and Valhalla, for instance, a reasonable measure of the width of the Long Earth as colonized by human beings in the generation since Step Day. Yet, travelling at the airships’ nominal cruise speed, they crossed it in a week.
After the Pangaeas, fifty million worlds from home, they entered yet another purple scum belt, where at least the scattered continents provided varied scenery. The atmospheric and climate conditions were often close enough to the Datum that Maggie could authorize shore leave without significant protective clothing, and her crews of very healthy, mostly very young people could escape from the roomy but confined interiors of the gondolas. But there was nothing to do down there, nothing to see – pond scum didn’t count – and people kind of clowned around aimlessly. There was only so much fun you could get out of lobbing rocks at stromatolites.
Snowy, the beagle, was different, however. Maggie watched him stride alone across the most featureless of landscapes, his extra ordinary animal-human body held erect in the Navy uniform Maggie had had specially tailored for him, his wolf eyes glittering, his head tipped back so his nostrils could drink in the local scents. He seemed to find something of interest in every world they called at. And he kept his own log, a vocal record rigged up for him by Harry Ryan since his people mostly lacked conventional literacy. Maggie promised herself to get that log transcribed and studied. She had the feeling it would describe a voyage perceived quite differently from the human crew’s experience. Which, of course, was why Snowy was here.
She tried to talk to Mac about Snowy, and whatever problem the two of them had. All she got was stony silence, a Mac speciality when he was in the mood.
When Snowy was off the ship Shi-mi would come out of Maggie’s rooms and run around the gondola of the Armstrong, presumably letting off steam in her own way, and submitting to being spoiled a little by the crew. Save for Mac, of course.
They pushed on, thousands upon thousands of steps. Even Jokers seemed sparse out here. Maggie fretted that the journey was turning into a kind of experiment into mass sensory deprivation. An unexpected hazard for a pioneer, she thought.
At first they kept the nominal cruise speed at a little over two million steps a day, achieved by stepping at fifty steps per second for around twelve hours’ run-time per day. Maggie was mindful that she was running two essentially experimental ships here, and Harry Ryan – backed up by his Chinese counterpart Bill Feng with whom, after initial suspicion, he had formed an unlikely buddy-buddy partnership – was resistant to any change to his preplanned test routines. But Maggie pushed Harry to up the running time to eighteen hours a day, enabling a transit rate closer to three million steps daily, rather than two. That still allowed for two hours’ downtime for the engine in the average watch, and she permitted Harry to have one full day per week without any stepping, for tests and overhauls on both boats.
Meanwhile she tried to keep the crews occupied. Luckily the gondolas were big enough to allow room for physical exercise and training, even in flight. She got together with Sergeant Mike McKibben, the commander of the two chalks of marines she had on board the airships, and fixed up joint exercises to keep both contingents happy. She also allowed, with caution, some competitive sports between the two services, Navy versus marines, from squash to Scrabble, McKibben’s surprising pet love.
She did quietly order Nathan to ensure that her crews’ salaries were firewalled so they couldn’t be gambled away on the turn of a high-scoring tile.
‘Yes, Captain. Should I warn Mike McKibben to do the same for his guys?’
She grinned. ‘Let’s see if he thinks of that for himself.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
Even at the increased rate, it took nineteen more days before they
left behind the purple scum.
Joe Mackenzie, one night towards the end of that interval, revealed to Maggie that he too was keeping a kind of log of the trip.
‘My God, Mac, is everybody on these damn ships keeping a diary? We’re like a dysfunctional White House.’
‘It’s a solitary habit, but there are worse. And, according to my personal log – you know, it’s hard to grasp the scale of what we’re doing here, because epic stepwise journeys are new, whereas we’ve been making long geographical journeys on Earth since, what? The Vikings, the Polynesians? But even so it seems to me we’re coming up on a milestone, of sorts. Look – when Armstrong flew to the moon, he was undertaking a journey on a scale that dwarfed anything in human history, or indeed prehistory. The distance to the moon, two hundred and forty thousand miles out, is about sixty times the radius of the Earth. OK? Now, Datum to Valhalla is the civilized Long Earth, as much as it’s civilized at all. That’s around one point four million steps. And sixty times that distance, stepwise, is—’
She figured it quickly. ‘About eighty-four million.’
‘Which milestone we’re due to pass tomorrow.’ He raised the glass of single malt she’d poured for him. ‘Whatever comes next for us, in comparison with other human achievements we’ve achieved our personal moon shot, Maggie.’
‘I’ll buy that. And a good excuse for a celebration,’ she said, always thinking of crew morale. ‘Let’s round it up to a hundred million. Sounds neater.’ She glanced at a calendar. ‘Looks like we’ll get there on April Fool’s Day.’
‘Seems appropriate,’ Mac said.
‘We’ll have a day’s R&R, make a couple of speeches, take photographs, plant a flag.’
‘I was thinking it would be a good place to throw out the cat. But fine, do it your way.’
23
NOT FAR PAST THE hundred-million-step milestone, the purple-scum band gave way to yet another sort of world: another band in which multicellular life had emerged. It was a welcome island of scenery after long stretches of purple scum worlds – or sometimes, for the sake of variety, green scum. Yet the creatures they encountered in these worlds were not like anything anybody had seen before.
Earth West 102,453,654: on this world the land had been colonized by things that looked like trees, but were actually, said the biologists, a kind of much-evolved seaweed. Things like sea anemones crawled over the ground, browsing. And the canopies of these kelp-like forests, and much of the world below, were dominated by a kind of jellyfish.
Jellyfish, living in trees.
These were tremendous leathery creatures, typically as massive as a troll. Their permanent habitat seemed to be the shallow sea, and while some crawled out on to the land, others flew, rocketing out of the ocean on water pumped from their mantles, and then gliding using fins protruding from their carapaces as ‘wings’ to reach the tree tops.
The canopy was laced with natural cables, like lianas but probably not. The jellyfish would descend on these cables for smash-and-grab raids on their cousins on the ground, and on other life forms like the anemones. Once the watching scientists even observed a kind of war, as one band of jellyfish from one forest clump hurled cables and nets over at another clump, and attacked in force.
All this was recorded from the air, by the human visitors. Off-duty crew spent all their spare time at windows or in the observation galleries, gazing down. Captain Kauffman vetoed any shore leave, however; the oxygen level was so low the party would have had to wear facemasks and carry tanks, and thus encumbered would have been terribly vulnerable to the predatory flying cnidarians of the branches above.
Bill Feng surprised Maggie by showing a peculiar fascination with the spectacle below – a peculiar interest in living things for a man she’d taken as a standard-issue engineer, anyhow. The Chinese said in his oddly accented English, ‘I have a military background myself, but I have never been one to cherish war for its own sake. Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own – and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?’
Maggie had no satisfactory answer.
Having logged, recorded and sampled these worlds, the ships pressed on.
Now that there was something to see out of the windows Maggie reduced the cruise rate to the nominal two million steps a day, but when this sheaf of worlds, which the biologists called the Cnidarian Belt, gave way after only a few more days’ travel to the purple scum, Maggie quietly ordered an increase in the stepping rate once again.
At Earth West 130,000,000, approximately, reached seven days after they had left the Cnidarian Belt – seven more days of purple scum – the expedition reached a new kind of world. Here a typical Earth’s air seemed depleted of oxygen altogether – there was merely a trace in an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen, carbon dioxide and volcanic gases, and that trace, Gerry Hemingway told Maggie, was probably put there by geological processes, not by anything alive. These were worlds, then, where oxygenating life had never formed in the first place, where there had been no discovery of the complex trick of photosynthesis, the use by green plants of the energy of sunlight to crack carbon dioxide to acquire its carbon for life-building, and incidentally to release excess oxygen into the air.
The airships had been designed in anticipation of such conditions. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen the great jet turbines which pushed the craft around the sky had to be fed oxygen from an internal store. Faced with a new engineering challenge to test his craft, Harry Ryan was in his element, and Maggie was fascinated; in this mode the technology was like a scramjet. But inside the gondola the air, now fully recycled by necessity, soon smelled stale.
Beneath the prow, meanwhile, the landscapes were more dismal than ever. Only a biologist could love the strange purple-crimson slicks and mounds of anaerobic bacteria that were the emperors of these worlds. Maggie quietly ordered that the accelerated stepping rate, three million steps a day, be maintained for now, but she warned Harry Ryan to be sure to watch the crafts’ onboard reserves. She didn’t want to have to try to walk back home through this.
It was the issue of oxygen, in fact, that caused her to have her first long conversation with Douglas Black since her most distinguished passenger had come on board the Armstrong.
Maggie made her way to Black’s suite of rooms. She had Mac at her side; she was here to back up the doctor’s complaints.
She’d asked for this meeting, but even on her own ship Douglas Black wasn’t a man who would come calling. And it didn’t surprise her that Black kept them waiting on his doorstep. His man Philip told them he had just woken up from a nap.
Mac muttered, ‘Damn arrogance.’
‘Let’s just play it low key for now, Mac, and see what he has to say for himself . . .’ And then the door opened.
Black had a team of aides, but only one servant on hand today, Philip the overbearing bodyguard, who gave the two officers a quick guided tour of Black’s suite, glaring at them throughout.
The suite, a grand name for a set of cabins which Black had fitted out at his own expense, was less luxuriously appointed than Maggie had expected. There was a small galley, for Black insisted on having his food prepared for him exclusively, from fresh ingredients where possible – evidently Philip was also the chef. The lounge area was equipped with deep, adjustable chairs and couches, and a bank of information-processing gear, screens, tablets, storage units.
At first glance Black’s bedroom looked to Maggie like a compact intensive care unit, with one big gadget-laden bed draped in a transparent curtain – it was effectively an oxygen tent, Mac murmured – and surrounded by monitors and drip-feeds, even what looked like a telesurgery robot arm. One small cot in the corner, behind a light partition, must be where Philip slept, on guard twenty-four seven.
It was the oxygen tent, Maggie knew, that Mac had an issue with.
Black, at ease in his lounge, sitting in a massively engineered wheelchair, wore a loose, comfort
able-looking kimono jacket, silk trousers, slippers. Even in the enclosed submarine-hull artificiality of the gondola he wore his sunglasses. He smiled, his wizened face creasing, as he himself poured them rather good coffee. ‘So – welcome to my lair, Captain Kauffman. That’s the sort of thing people expect me to say, isn’t it? Shall we get down to business? I’m aware that your doctor here has been taking an interest in my welfare, but I have brought my own medical establishment, as you can see.’
‘But,’ Mac growled, ‘on this ship, where I’m chief surgeon, you do fall under my purview nonetheless.’
‘Of course. I bow to your authority; it can be no other way.’
Maggie said, ‘I’m afraid that’s where the friction is coming from, sir. Specifically your use of oxygen.’
‘Captain, I have assured Doctor Mackenzie that I have brought my own supply, my own replenishment and recycling equipment – it’s like a regular little spaceship in here.’
‘You nevertheless are plugged into the ship’s supply,’ Mac said. ‘It’s inevitable, an engineering constraint. And you, sir, are using up a hell of a lot. Captain, I wouldn’t have raised it, but since right now there’s no spare oh-two outside the hull, we need to discuss this.’
‘I don’t understand, Mr Black,’ Maggie said. ‘Why are you using all this oxygen?’
Mac broke in, ‘To fill his hyperbaric chamber all day and all night. You saw the tent over his bed, Captain. He lives in the damn thing, breathing air with an oxygen content whole percentage points above the Datum Earth level.’
‘OK.’ This sounded nothing but kooky to Maggie. She’d had a long day before this meeting, but she wished now she’d got herself better briefed. ‘I’m no medic. Why would you want that, Mr Black?’
‘For the most profound of reasons. To regain the one thing that all my money can’t buy me – not yet, anyhow. You joked about my searching for the fountain of youth, Captain. Well, in a sense – so I am.’
The Long Mars Page 17