For the next few minutes he ran her through a discourse, complete with a picture show on one of his big tablets, of the treatments he was taking, not just to slow down the ageing of his body but actually to reverse it. Hormones that declined with age were replenished, including growth hormones, testosterone, insulin, melatonin, others, to let them repair and restore body functions, as they would in a youthful body. There had been attempts at genetic repair using retroviruses to make and break DNA strings, removing damaged or undesired sequences. Back in the Low Earths Black was promoting experimental methods involving stem cells to regenerate tissues, even whole organs.
He spread liver-spotted hands. ‘Look at me, Captain. I have always exercised, eaten well, avoided most vices. I have been fortunate in being spared many common illnesses. And of course my decades-long precautions against the ambitions of assassins have borne fruit, so far.’ He tapped his skull. ‘Mentally I seem as sharp as ever, my memory is good . . . But I am eighty years old; my time is running out. There is so much more to see, so much to do. Consider the mission we are undertaking right now! Can you see that I would do all I can not to leave just yet? Can you blame me?’
‘All right. But what’s that got to do with oxygen?’
‘It’s one of the therapies,’ Mac said. ‘And one of the flakier ones.’
Black inclined his head. ‘I won’t argue with a medical man. But you won’t condemn me for exploring all the options, will you? Yes, the use of excess oxygen is controversial. But – look where we are. Look out the window! There is no oxygen here, and these worlds are all but dead. It is oxygen that promotes the life force. Why, you yourself use it in extremis for a patient, do you not, Doctor? The word is “oxyology”, Captain. The use of a high oxygen partial pressure to promote healing, the rejuvenation of the body. It is cheap, it is easy, and some claim to have proof that it works, on ants and mice and so forth. Why not try it?’
Mac would have argued some more, but Maggie raised a hand. ‘I think I get the picture. But I don’t yet see what kind of “fountain of youth” you’re seeking aboard this Navy ship, Mr Black.’
He would only smile. ‘All I can say is that I will know it when I find it – if it exists.’
Maggie stood. ‘I think we’re done here. Look, Mac, we’re watching our oxygen usage closely, but we’ve a complement of ninety, and Mr Black’s consumption, given his private supply and even with his tent, is going to be only a fraction of that. We can cope, for now. But,’ she said to Black, ‘I’ll put my chief engineer on alert. And if we need to impose any kind of emergency measures I’ll have to restrict you to a regular crew allocation, sir.’
‘Of course.’ He looked faintly offended. ‘I would never let my own interests put at risk a single one of your young charges.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Is our business done? Am I allowed down from the naughty step?’
Maggie laughed gracefully, and nudged Mac until he forced a smile.
‘Then, if you’ve time, let’s have fun. Please, do sit again. Perhaps you’d like to look over the latest package of science updates prepared for me by your kind Lieutenant Hemingway. I’m sure you know it all already, but the images can be startling.’ He nodded to Philip, who got up to make preparations; soon the room’s screens filled up with curtains of purple and crimson. ‘Who would ever have imagined that life even without the power of oxygen was capable of such beauty, such inventiveness of design? Can I offer you more coffee? Or perhaps something stronger . . .’
24
AND SO, OVER THE YEARS, Joshua had kept in sporadic touch with Paul Spencer Wagoner, as the strange little boy grew up into a somewhat stranger young man. He’d felt it was a kind of duty. Joshua was probably the boy’s only contact, save for his immediate family, from his childhood in Happy Landings. Joshua Valienté was always big on duty.
But he was also curious. And in Paul Spencer Wagoner there seemed to be a lot to be curious about.
As far as Joshua could tell, Tom and Carla Wagoner had always tried their best with Paul, and his little sister Judy; certainly they had never hurt the kids. But when their marriage broke up, cracking under the stress caused by the kids, Joshua guessed, Tom was left to deal with Paul alone. And what Tom couldn’t cope with was when his son, growing in knowledge if not in wisdom, and acquiring a certain power mentally if not physically, turned on his father.
Paul was just ten when he was taken away from his father.
‘Paul knows me too well,’ Tom said to Joshua, when they met at the Madison Home in the spring of 2036. Joshua was back to see how the Sisters were coping in the aftermath of the death of Sister Agnes, the previous year. ‘How I broke up with his mother,’ Tom said, ‘and she took little Judy away. By the way, Carla’s coping no better than me, I can tell you – she has just the same issues with Judy as we had when Paul grew up. And he knows how I screwed up at work. Paul saw all that, he understood far more about it than any damn kid ought to. About what’s going on inside my skull, I mean.’ He shook his greying head regretfully. ‘When he takes me apart over some flaw or foul-up, it’s – crushing. I don’t feel like a father with an uppity kid. I feel like a pet dog being punished. Totally subordinate.
‘But it’s worse when he’s deliberately cruel. Oh, I don’t mean physically, I guess I could handle that. He can slice you to pieces with words. Damn kid. And you know what the worst of it is? He does it just because he can. For fun – no, not even that. For curiosity. To see what happens when he opens you up, like cutting open a frog. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he is just a kid, but . . .’
A little digging revealed that Paul’s sister Judy had by now also been taken away from her mother. And, such was the whim of the care system, the siblings were kept apart.
Paul, meanwhile, it was clear, was not happy, not settling anywhere, and in danger of spiralling out of control. After a couple more disastrous attempts at foster care, Joshua pulled a few strings. Paul was taken into the Home in Madison, and placed under the stern but perceptive care of the Sisters.
After that, Joshua saw him more regularly. The boy remained a mystery, though, to Joshua and the Sisters, as he grew into a strange maturity.
25
WILLIS LINSAY APPEARED to be right about the stepwise geography of the Long Mars, Frank Wood observed.
Most of the stepwise Marses, at a first glance, as seen from the gliders riding in the high, thin air, were all but exactly the same. The pilots kept their dust-streaked birds hovering over their landing-site area of the Mangala Vallis, a huge arid landscape, and generally little changed from world to world, as it had been from the beginning. As Willis had predicted the only relief for Mars came from the occasional Jokers, worlds where, for some reason, there was warmth, moisture, a brief chance for any surviving life to express itself.
But all of these beneficent accidents seemed limited in time. It might take years, centuries, millennia, maybe even tens of millennia, but at last the eruptions would cease, the volcanic gases would clear, or the crater-lakes freeze over, as Mars returned to its regular state of lethal stasis. In fact, more often than they found functioning biospheres – like the world of the sand whales they’d encountered fortuitously early in their voyage – the travellers came upon traces of recently extinguished life. Aside from dust storms, not much happened on Mars; erosion was slow, and such traces could linger.
For example, about two hundred thousand steps East of the Gap, the gliders had swept over what looked like the remains of a mighty ocean that must have covered, if briefly, the plains of the northern hemisphere. Sites like Mangala showed signs of having become sea coasts, and Willis pointed out stranded beaches, what looked like a petrified forest a short distance inland, and salt plains on the dried-out ocean floor.
When they swept down for a closer look, they saw conical casts on the seabed, casts as tall as pyramids created by some immense snake – maybe a relative, in a common-origin sense, of the sand whales they’d seen before – and scattered plates like aba
ndoned armour that might have come from something like the crustacean predators. Even bones, resembling a huge ribcage as if of a whale, sitting on a dry ocean floor.
At last, on the twelfth day, some half a million steps East of their starting point, they came upon traces of sapience. They found a city.
Set upon the high land to the south of Mangala, straight-line avenues still showed under the dust, and towers loomed, tall and bone-white. But there was no sign of extant life.
They had got in the habit of swapping over crew and rotating piloting responsibilities, to keep everybody fresh and experienced, and so that the pilots got used to the quirks of both machines. The day they found the city, Frank was riding shotgun as Sally piloted Thor, while Willis flew Woden solo. And so Frank was able to take in the scenery as Sally took the bird down close to the ground, and swept towards the city.
One peculiarity of their flight was that, such was the thinness of the air, the gliders needed high speed to keep aloft; that wasn’t so noticeable at high altitude, but close to ground level you whipped along like a swallow chasing a fly. So the city loomed out of nowhere, and suddenly Frank found himself racing over avenues of broken flags between towers of ivory, impossibly tall, cracked and shattered. Frank couldn’t resist it; he let out a rebel yell.
Sally grunted. ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’
‘Sorry.’
‘How’s the data capture?’
Frank glanced at a tablet beside his seat, which showed megabytes of data from imaging systems, sonar, radar, an atmospheric sample suite, pouring into the glider’s compact memory. They even had radio receivers listening out for any evidence of transmitters; Mars’s ionosphere was feeble and would be a poor reflector of radio waves, but you never knew, and it seemed remiss not to listen. ‘All in hand,’ he said. ‘Quite a place, isn’t it? From the air the city looked like – I don’t know – a chess set. From here, down and dirty, those towers look like cracked teeth. But taller than anything you could build on Earth.’
Willis called over, ‘That’s the low gravity for you.’
Sally said, ‘But the towers didn’t save them when the final wars came. Look down.’
Now, in the rubble-littered roadways and even inside some of the smashed buildings, Frank saw wreckage: segments of casing, articulated limbs, as if torn from some immense spider. They were made of some kind of metal, perhaps, or ceramic. These fragments were broken, crushed, blown open, and the road surfaces and walls were pitted with bomb craters. All of this was covered with a fine sheen of rust-red dust, wind-blown.
Frank asked, ‘Why do you say “final wars”?’
Sally said, ‘Because evidently there was nobody left to clean up when it was done. Many of these Joker islands-in-time must have ended in wars, mustn’t they? When the climate collapsed, the survivors would have fought over the last of the water – the last trees to burn – maybe they made sacrifices to appease their gods. All patterns familiar from Datum Earth’s history; that’s what we’d do. Stupidity is a universal, it seems.’
In this city like a vast cemetery, that cold remark made Frank wince.
Willis said, ‘I doubt if there’s anything more for us here. I’ll go down to take a few samples. Follow me if you like.’
Frank saw Woden dip towards a broad flat area outside the city. He asked Sally, ‘How about it? Need to stretch your legs?’
‘I’ll be fine. You?’
‘Skip it. I’m doing my couch yoga as we speak.’ To conserve the methane fuel they needed to launch from the ground, they were trying to minimize landings.
Sally tugged on her joystick. Thor’s nose lifted, and the glider spiralled into the high air. Once again the city was reduced to a toy-like diorama, with no visible trace of bomb blasts or insectile war machines.
Frank switched to the internal intercom, so Willis couldn’t listen in. ‘So, Sally.’
‘What?’
‘“Stupidity is a universal.” I’ve heard you say that kind of thing before. Are you serious?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘I’m only asking.’
‘Look – I didn’t grow up despising mankind. I had to learn it. You know my background . . .’
He knew the basics. Most of it he’d learned from Monica Jansson, who, late in her life, Sally had grown close to – close at least in Sally’s terms – when they had pulled that stunt of liberating a couple of trolls from GapSpace. And then Jansson had become close to Frank, all too briefly, before he’d lost her.
Sally Linsay had grown up a natural stepper, but from a mixed background; her father, Willis, was not a natural. Before Step Day, her mother’s family – like, it seemed, many dynasties of naturals – had, understandably, kept their peculiar superpower to themselves, but they’d used it when it suited them.
‘I was stepping when I was a little kid,’ Sally said now. ‘My uncles would go hunting in the Low Earths with crossbows and such, and they knew to watch for grizzlies. Dad was always more a tinkerer than a hunter, and he built a stepwise workshop for himself, and dug a garden. I’d take him over there and I’d help him out, and he’d make up stories and such, and play games. The Long Earth was my Narnia. You know Narnia?’
‘That’s the one with the hobbits, right?’
She blew a raspberry. ‘To me, stepping was a joy. And it was a useful experience, because I was surrounded by smart people who understood what they were doing, and used the gift wisely, and took precautions.
‘Then came Step Day, and suddenly every idiot with a Stepper box could go out, and guess what? Next thing you know they’re all drowning or freezing to death or starving, or getting chomped by some mountain lion because the little kitteny cubs were so cute. And worst of all is that all those idiots took not just their idiocies with them into the Long Earth, but their petty flaws too. Their cruelty. Especially their cruelty.’
‘And especially cruelty to trolls, right? I know that much about you, from when you showed up at the Gap.’
She was sitting ahead of Frank in the glider’s pilot seat; he saw her back stiffen. Predictably she had become hostile. ‘If you know all about me already, why are you asking?’
‘I don’t know it all. Just what I heard, from Monica for instance. You became a kind of rogue. An angel of mercy, helping save these “idiots” from themselves. But also—’ He sought for a non-antagonistic term. ‘You became the conscience of the Long Earth. That’s how you see yourself.’
She laughed. ‘I’ve been called many things, but not that before. Look, most of the colonized Long Earth is far from any semblance of civilization. If I see a wrong being committed—’
‘A wrong in your opinion.’
‘I make sure the wrongdoers know about it.’
‘You act as a self-appointed judge, jury – and executioner?’
‘I try not to kill,’ she said, somewhat enigmatically. ‘Oh, I punish. Sometimes I deliver the perps to justice, if it’s available. Dead folk don’t learn lessons. But it depends on the situation.’
‘OK. But not everybody would agree with the value judgements you make. Or the way you assume the right to act on those judgements. There are some who’d call you a vigilante.’
‘What’s in a word?’
‘You see, Sally, what I’m struggling with is this. It was your father who did this, who caused Step Day. And now all these “idiots” are polluting your Long Earth, as you grew up seeing it. Killing the lions in your Narnia. Right? Is that the real problem? The fact that it was your own father opened it all up—’
‘What are you now, some kind of analyst?’ She was practically snarling.
‘No. But after my military service I saw a number of analysts myself, and I know the questions they ask. Look, I’ll shut up. Your business is your business. But, Sally – do good, OK? But watch that anger of yours. Think about where it comes from. We’re all a long way from home, and we rely on each other, and we need to be in control. That’s all I’m saying.’
&nb
sp; She wouldn’t reply. She just kept flying the glider in wide, over-precise loops, until Willis had done his work and came flying up to join them.
Then, after a quick synchronization of their data stores, they stepped away, the chessboard city vanishing from beneath their prows.
26
MORE LIFELESS MARSES, sheaf after sheaf of them, day after flying day, broken up by landings each night on yet another copy of the Mangala landscape, and occasional pauses for exploration.
On the thirtieth day they landed for the night on a world not far short of Mars East Million – a million steps East of the Gap – and Frank Wood went for a brief walk in the dark, bundled up in his pressure suit. This night the twin stars of Earth and moon were particularly prominent, riding high in the east. This was a typical Mars, like the Mars of the Datum sky, a world about as lethal as it could get and still have any kind of similarity with Earth. But it was a pleasure for Frank to land anyhow and stretch his legs.
These walks had become Frank’s habit, uncomfortable and faintly risky as they were, a way of putting some distance between him and the Linsays. Just a few minutes each day, so Frank’s own personality had room to breathe, and recover something like its proper shape. Walks on worlds that might be forty or fifty thousand worlds apart, so far were they travelling each day, and yet all so alike – so similarly dead. On this night, as on many nights on these desolate Marses, he wondered what the point of it all was: all these empty worlds, an emptiness made worse by the brief and rare windows of habitability they found, almost all slammed shut with the finality of extinction. Was it crueller to have lived and died, or never to have lived at all?
And what was the meaning of it all – was every world inhabited by intelligence going to be Long like this Mars, like Earth? He imagined a sky full of threads of Long worlds, like broken necklaces drifting in some dark ocean. Maybe you could have a Long Venus – a Long Jupiter, even, if mind ever took hold there. But why? Why should it be that way? What was it all for? He suspected he would never find a satisfactory answer to such questions.
The Long Mars Page 18