The Long Mars (17 page)

And Maggie could step over the tallest buildings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. Where she planted her feet – with great care – in streets and open areas, the crabs still didn’t seem to perceive her properly; they just scuttled sideways around her big boots.

When she looked up she saw the comforting bulks of the twains, like a reminder of reality.

‘My God,’ she said to Hemingway. ‘It’s like a model layout. I keep expecting some toy steam train to come rattling around the bend.’

Hemingway seemed to be bursting to explain it all to her. ‘Here’s as much as we have figured out, Captain. We’ve been watching for twenty-four hours now. We think
these
ones—’ He bent down and pointed to a sample.

‘The raft pilots?’

‘Yeah.
They
are the smart ones. They’re males, who seem to dominate here. These others, the bigger ones, are the females for this species – many crab species have sexual dimorphism. Umm, they also seem to be using other species as draught animals, food stock maybe, construction workers. They don’t seem to have discovered the wheel – see, they
ride
the dumber ones?

‘The buildings are made of a kind of paste, of chewed-up shell and spit; they have a particular kind of animal that specializes in producing that. You can see there’s a big food processing area over there. We can’t even guess at the function of the rest of the buildings, the districts, though some are probably residential. On the Datum, crabs like to live in hollows, in caves, even in pits they dig out of the seabed . . .’

Maggie bent to look closer at the stationary crab likenesses around the pool. ‘Crabs moult, don’t they?’

‘They do, Captain. They cast off their outer shells regularly. And maybe that’s what this is. Not sculptures, like the big guy over the palace, but moulted shells discarded by – who? The emperor, his ancestors, a line of priests? And it is a
him
, you can see by the size of the shell. And kept for ceremonial purposes here.’

‘Lots of guesswork going on here, Gerry.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Mo-hrre coming,’ said Snowy, and he stepped out of the way of the big thoroughfare that led up to the pool.

Here came a regular procession, a whole line of crabs heading for the central complex, most of them raft-pilot size but a few others in there too. Some seemed to have their shells decorated, red, black, purple, maybe with some relative of squid ink, Maggie thought. Others walking alongside clacked their pincers loudly in the air. Conversely there were others, in the middle of the crush, who looked kind of bedraggled, their shells scuffed and scarred. Some even had their pincers missing, nipped off at the joint, perhaps.

The only sounds were the clatter of pincers and the scraping of thousands of shells, a noise like sand on a window.

‘Soldier-hhrs with fallen en-hhemies,’ Snowy said, sounding almost sad. ‘Thei-hrr weapons-ss cut away.’

‘Perhaps. The kind of sight we’ve seen enough of on the Datum, in the past.’

Hemingway said, ‘Maybe those guys playing castanet aren’t making noises at random. Some crab species communicate with noises like that. On the Datum the message is usually just “That food is mine”, but here it must be more complex.’

Maggie said, ‘I wonder what fate awaits these prisoners when they reach that pool . . .’

‘Something’s happening at the palace,’ Hemingway said now. ‘Some kind of party coming out.’ He snapped at his team, ‘Make sure you record every damn moment of this.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Maggie bent down to see who was emerging from the spit-and-shell palace. One big crab in the centre of the party was surely the centrepiece of it all. His shell wasn’t marked, but he looked heavy, older, even indefinably arrogant to Maggie. He was surrounded by a circle of odd-looking acolytes, pink, vulnerable-looking . . . ‘My God,’ she said. ‘They have no shells.’

Hemingway said, ‘Maybe they’ve just moulted. When it moults the whole crab has to climb out of its old shell . . . Of course these companions look the right size to be females. In some crab species the females are mated just after moulting, when they’re softer. Hmm. I wonder if this emperor has some way to keep his harem from forming new shells. Thus keeping them sexually available for whenever he feels the urge.’

‘Ouch,’ Maggie said.

‘Yes, Captain. The procession is reaching the water.’

In the end the fate of the captives was brutal and decisive. One by one they were hurled into the pool, by the adorned soldier types. When the first captive hit the water the pool turned into a frenzy of activity, and was soon a mess of fragments of flesh and shell, and thrashing, struggling victims.

All the captives were thrown in, one by one, with horrible regularity, while the ‘emperor’ and his consorts looked on.

Hemingway said, ‘I wonder what they keep in that pool. Some kind of piranha?’

Snowy said, ‘Babies-ss.’

‘What?’

‘Babies. C-hhrab babies are let out by mother-hrr into water. Swim-mm. Find food. Not like pups, not-tt suckle.’

‘Ah,’ said Hemingway. ‘And in that pool—’

‘Babies of rule-hrr of this place. Eat enemy. Make babies-ss st-hrrong. Make them-mm fight each othe-hrr. Happens like this with us-ss. Pups tear-hhr apart fallen enemies-ss of mother-hrr.’

Hemingway and Maggie shared a glance. ‘You know,’ said Hemingway, ‘I bet you’re right. I never would have thought of it that way. It makes sense – a cultural logic deriving from the imperative of their biology.’

Snowy had to get that translated into simpler terms. But then he faced Maggie. ‘Your thought, my thought-tt, always at mer-hhrcy of blood, of body. Need other blood, other bodies, to p-hhrove thought. My blood not you-hhrs. My thought not you-hhrs.’

Maggie grinned. ‘You’re right, dammit. That’s precisely why I wanted you aboard, Snowy. Different ways of thinking, from a different biological perspective. A way to shed preconceptions we never knew we had. What is the point of the Long Earth if we can’t pool our minds?’ She studied the beagle. ‘I do hope you’re forming a more constructive impression of us, crewman, than I hear your people have on your home world.’

Snowy seemed to frown; his expression was always hard to read. ‘Con-shh . . . Cons-thrr . . .’

‘I mean,
better
. I know you look down on the way we treat our dogs. But we do cherish them, you know.’

Hemingway seemed interested in the conversation. ‘Not only that, Captain, some people think that our relationship with our dogs contributed to our own evolution. And maybe, if we follow up this experiment with Snowy, if we continue to work together in future—’

Snowy regarded him gravely. ‘Maybe humans-ss be b-hhred better-hrr than before.’

Maggie let her smile broaden. ‘Crewman, I’ll make a note in my log that you just made your first joke. Now, as for these crab critters—’ She crouched down, staring at the bloody scene playing out before them. ‘You know, we’ve got more in common with these little guys than you’d think.
We
meaning humans and beagles, at the least. Like us they’re toolmakers. Like us they build cities. Do we know if they count, Gerry? Do they write?’

‘Ah, Captain—’

‘You know, if I could find a way to recruit one of these guys on to the crew of the
Armstrong
—’

‘
Captain
.’ More urgently.

She turned. ‘What?’

He gestured, embarrassed. ‘The corner of the temple. Your, umm,
butt
. . .’

She turned and looked. ‘I demolished the west wing. Oops.’

‘They ss-see us now,’ Snowy said, looking down.

Maggie saw that the emperor character was waving his big pincers at her in a kind of comical, miniature rage, laying about him, scattering his soft-fleshed concubines. Everywhere pincers were being clattered, a rising tide of soft but persistent noise. She had offended the king of Lilliput, by brushing his palace with her ass. She tried not to laugh.

But then she felt the ground lurch.

Hemingway turned to look. ‘Umm, Captain.’

‘What now, Gerry?’

‘The big crab form on top of this building. The
really
big one.’

‘What about it?’

‘We thought it was a sculpture.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it isn’t.’

‘Then what?’

‘A moult, Captain. It’s another moult.’

‘A moult of what? Ah. Of what’s emerging from the ground over there. I see. What do you advise, Lieutenant?’

He didn’t hesitate. ‘Run, Captain!’

They ran, from a crab that burst from its burrow in the sandy ground, a crab the size of a small bear and with the speed of a cheetah, moving sideways or not.

The airships stayed three days, observing, measuring, sampling. They left behind a three-person team of volunteers from Hemingway’s department with instructions to study the crab civilization, to make contact if they could – and to survive, at a minimum.

Then they flew on.

16

F
RANK
W
OOD TOOK A
step forward, away from the MEM.

Everything was strange, all the world’s familiar elements distorted, here on Mars – on
this
Mars. The sun was shrunken but bright, and the rocks around him cast sharp shadows across the dusty crimson plain. Frank might have been standing in a high desert on Earth, but the air was thinner here than at the top of Everest. Even so this world was relatively clement. It wasn’t as bad as the real Mars – Datum Mars. It was cold, the air was thin, but not
that
cold, not
that
thin.

The sky was brownish towards the horizon, but a deep blue if Frank tilted back to see the zenith, though that was tricky in his surface suit with its warm padded layers and enclosing facemask. Somewhere in that sky should have been Earth, a morning star close to the sun. Not here. Not in the universe of the Gap.

He tried another step.

Moving was dreamlike, somewhere between walking and floating. After weeks of weightlessness he was taking time to recover. His body fluid distribution was all off, and his muscles felt feeble despite the hours on the treadmill. His sense of balance was off too, so that this strange new world swam around his head, uncomfortably. But with every step he took, he felt that little bit stronger. This was Frank Wood, aged sixty-one, walking in the Mangala Vallis, an equatorial site with a name given it by NASA mappers from the Sanskrit word for the planet Mars, and if Indo-European was the root of most western languages it might be the oldest surviving name for Mars of all . . . The first human on Mars!
A
Mars, anyway. Who’d have thought it?
This
was a moment that made up for all the years of disappointment when the space programme had shut down after Step Day, and the strain of the flight itself, the weeks of the cruise with no company save a semi-psychotic father-and-daughter tag team, and finally the hair-raising descent to the ground in the Mars Excursion Module, an untried aircraft descending into a virtually unknown atmosphere. None of that mattered, for he’d lived through it all, and he was
here
. Frank whooped, and he did a little jig, and his boots kicked up Martian dirt. And he was
not
going to screw the pooch.

Sally’s voice murmured in his earpiece. ‘Hey, Tom Swift. Follow the checklist.’

Frank sighed. ‘Copy that, Sally.’

He got to work.

First he turned to face the MEM.

The lander was a so-called ‘biconic lifting body’, a fat-bellied plane sitting on frail-looking skids, its heatshield tiles and leading edges scorched from the atmospheric entry. Frank walked back to the ship and took a small TV camera from a fold-down platform, and after some fumbling fitted it to a mount on his chest. He took out the flag kit, a fold-out pole and the flag itself in a polythene bag.

Then he set off again, pushing mankind’s exploration of this new Mars a few paces further. ‘I’m walking away from the lander now. I’m going to work my way over into the sunlight.’ Once he was out of the MEM’s long shadow he turned around, letting his camera pan across the landscape.

‘The picture’s a little blurred, Frank. You’re going too fast on your sweeps.’

Obediently Frank slowed his rotation. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under his boots. Out here he could see no signs of disturbance from the landing, no dust thrown up by the big wheels. The soil under his feet was virgin: the sands of Mars, by God.

Away to the west Frank saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from him. Maybe the lip of a crater. Frank walked that way, further from the MEM.

‘Don’t get out of sight,’ Sally warned.

Frank stopped at the lip of the crater. A few dozen yards across, the crater was a shallow, regular bowl, its rim sharp and fragile. In its base ice glinted, looking as if it was a crust over liquid water. And all around the pool were lumpy forms like footballs, smooth-skinned, tough-looking, and faintly green under a patina of rusty dust.

‘They’re like cacti,’ Frank said excitedly. ‘Are you seeing this, Sally? Just as we glimpsed in the lander photos – obviously hardy, desiccation-tolerant – but
no spikes
.’ That strange feature struck him immediately. ‘I guess there are no Martian critters likely to run up and chomp them for their moisture.’

‘You’re off the checklist again, Frank.’

‘Is that all you can think of, even now?’

‘It’s your checklist. I’m just following it.’

‘All right, dammit.’

It took him only a moment to set up the telescopic flagpole, and to drive its sharpened tip into the compacted ground. Then he took the Stars and Stripes from its bag, folded it out, and fixed it to the pole. The flag was the enhanced holographic kind, symbolizing the US Aegis. This was a good enough site for the little ceremony, overlooking this Martian garden. Frank set his TV camera on the ground facing him, and made sure he was in the eyeline of the MEM. ‘Can you hear me, Sally?’

‘Get it over with.’

Frank straightened up and saluted. ‘March 15, AD 2045. I, Francis Paul Wood, do hereby claim this land, and all the lands and stepwise footprints of this Mars, as legal territory of the United States of America, to be a dominion of the United States of America, subject to its government and laws—’