The Long Mars (19 page)

‘Indeed. We hope that the descendants of these creatures may some day become adapted to survival in raw Martian conditions, on this Mars at least. Of course we may have to genetically engineer Earth-based grasses for them to feed on.

‘And if alpacas, why not human beings? Today, this particular Mars is like Earth at an altitude of six miles or so. The highest town on Datum Earth is in Peru, at about three miles. Humans cannot live much higher than that, permanently – or rather
we
cannot. Our children may be different.
This
Mars is almost within reach, for us, for the alpacas—’

‘For the rhubarb.’

‘Exactly. This was our mission, from the Moscow government. We Russians have always looked to the stars, and the discovery of this near-habitable version of Mars excited our scientists and philosophers greatly. We three were the vanguard; we were sent here to establish how humans might live on this world, as well as to study the life forms already extant here.’

‘The vanguard. More should have followed?’

‘Marsograd should have been a city by now – such was the plan. But your American supervolcano put a stop to that, as to all Russian ambitions. Still, we are here, and we learn much . . .’

Working pretty much single-handed, Alexei Krilov had been able to establish a great deal about the strange life forms of this relatively clement Mars.

‘I have gathered samples from diverse environments, from the deep wet valleys to the flanks of the great volcanoes where life probes at the fringes of space. The cacti have tough, leathery skin which almost perfectly seals in their water stores. The trees have trunks as hard as concrete, and leaves like needles to keep in the moisture. Do not imagine these forms of life are primitive, by the way. They survive in extremely austere environments; they are highly evolved, highly specialized, superbly efficient in their use of mass and energy.

‘Both cacti and trees photosynthesize busily – that is, they use the energy of sunlight to grow. And the photosynthesis, by the way, is a form known from Earth; as seems obvious, life on this Mars has been seeded from Earth.’

Sally frowned. ‘I don’t understand. This is the Gap. There
is
no Earth here.’

‘Ah, but there are Earths close by . . .’

When it was young, he said, Mars – every version of Mars – was most likely warm and wet, with a thick blanket of air, and deep oceans. It had been like Earth in many ways – indeed, more generous in those days, and the biologists believed that even complex life, plants, something like animals, might well have got kick-started here on this generous young world within the first billion years or so. It had taken billions more years on Earth.

But Mars was smaller than the Earth and further from the sun, and those facts doomed it. As the geology seized up and the volcanoes died back, and the sunlight got to work breaking up the upper atmosphere, Mars lost a lot of its air. Its water froze out at the poles, or receded to buried permafrost or deep underground aquifers.

‘That is how it was on the Mars of Datum Earth, and on most other versions of the planet. But here, you see,
this
Mars has evidently had a regular injection of living things from the neighbouring stepwise Earths.

‘Think about it. In our home reality, it was believed that life could be transferred between Earth and Mars, or vice versa, by the great splashes of meteorite impacts. This was called panspermia: the natural propagation of life from one world to the next. But in the Gap, well, there’s no originating Earth, but for the last few million years at least there have been stepping sapients. And every time a hapless humanoid falls from a stepwise Earth into the Gap,
it
may be destroyed by the vacuum, but some of the freight of microorganisms it carries will survive, delivered into space with so much less effort than a lethal rock splash. And some of those microbial travellers will survive to seed Mars – not just once, but again and again.’

‘I see. I think. Ticks from unlucky trolls, colonizing Mars!’

‘More likely stomach bacteria, but yes. If life gets the chance it will proliferate where the water is, in the surface ice, the permafrost, the aquifers. In time great feedback loops would be established – just as on Earth, in fact – living things mediating cycles of mass and energy, and in particular water. This Mars has very similar, if not identical, geology and physics to the Mars of the Datum. It is
life
that has made it as clement as it is, by mobilizing the water and other volatiles. Earth life helped restore the climate – and made it possible for Mars life, the older natives, to flourish. But all this is unusual, you see. Only happened because of the Gap. In the language of the Long Earth, this Mars is a Joker, an exception among Marses.’

‘But wonderful nonetheless,’ Sally said.

‘Oh, yes. But not our discovery, unfortunately. The Chinese discovered a second Gap in the East, five years ago, and observed the same kind of life-spreading mechanism in that solar system. The Chinese! Typical. But even without panspermia, on
all
the Marses, we think, traces of that original native suite of complex life might survive, as spores, seeds, cysts . . . Who knows? Waiting to be woken up, like Sleeping Beauty, with a kiss of warmth and water.’

‘Is that possible?’

He winked. ‘Ask your father about life on Mars.’

As the Martian night closed in, the crew of Marsograd, with Sally, withdrew to the galley, the cosiest location. Here they ate another meal, the centrepiece of which was thick steaks of prized alpaca meat, with boiled greenhouse-rhubarb for a sweet, and they drank more coffee, and more vodka, most of which Sally resisted.

Sally felt curiously drawn to these three odd fellows in their shabby hovels. They seemed to have a clear sense of mission. Maybe it was just that she had become so disillusioned with mankind, from the examples she encountered too often. The Long Earth was, in a way, too easy a place to get to; it was only
after
some bunch of idiots had already built their spanking new town slap in the middle of the flood plain of a stepwise Mississippi, and the waters had started to rise, or whatever, that they generally came to Sally’s attention. Whereas these Russians had come to a place that was supremely
hard
to survive in, even to get to, and were now showing supreme intelligence, in their slob-like way, in learning about their environment and how to live in it.

But their tragedy was of course that the country that had given them this mission had all but collapsed.

Alexei Krilov’s main beef about that seemed to be that the academies to which he would have reported his science results were moribund, if not defunct. ‘Nobody to read my papers. No universities to give me tenured posts and science prizes. Poor Alexei.’

Viktor, already drunk, snorted dismissal. ‘Academies? On Datum, whole of Russia abandoned now. Gone. Moscow under ice. Polar bears in Red Square. And parties of Chinese working their way in from Vladivostok.’

Sergei had spoken little. ‘Chinese bastards,’ he growled now.

‘Ha! We are last Russian citizens, like cosmonaut in Mir station when Union collapsed, last Soviet citizen.’

‘It’s not as bad as that,’ Sally said. ‘Sure, Datum Russia is pretty much uninhabitable now. But most of the population escaped to the Low Earth footprints. The Long Russia survives.’

Viktor grunted. ‘Sure. Where struggle to build country begins all over again. Just like after Mongols smashed Kiev. And Napoleon smashed Moscow. And Hitler smashed Stalingrad.’ He wagged his half-empty glass at Sally. ‘We Russians have saying: “First five hundred years are worst.” Cheers.’ He drained his glass, refilled it from the flask.

‘Chinese bastards!’ Sergei shouted now.

Viktor patted Sergei’s arm. ‘There, there, big fellow. Pah! Let Chinese have frozen ruins of Datum. To us, Long Earth, Long Mars – and the stars!’

They drank a toast to that. Then to the Nobel Prize that Alexei was never going to win. Then to the soul of the alpaca whose life had been sacrificed to provide the steaks they had enjoyed.

And then they tried to teach Sally the words of the Russian national anthem, in English and Russian. She crept out to go to bed at the point they’d got on to the third verse: ‘
Our strength is derived through our loyalty to the Fatherland. Thus it was, thus it is and thus it always will be!
. . .’

18

I
T WAS A YEAR
after that first meeting in Happy Landings that Joshua next came across Paul Spencer Wagoner – this time, in Madison West 5.

‘Hello, Mr Valienté!’

Joshua was standing with Sister Georgina, in the small graveyard outside the Home that his old friend had run at that point. After the Madison bombing the Home had been painstakingly reestablished here in West 5, and the new graveyard held just two stones. The most recent was for Sister Serendipity, a lover of cooking whose enthusiasms had always lit up Joshua’s young life – and who, according to Home legend, had been on the run from the FBI. It had been Serendipity’s funeral that had brought him here, in fact.

And now Paul’s bright voice, older but unmistakable, called to him from across the street.

With Sister Georgina, Joshua crossed the road. It took a while; Georgina was another veteran of Joshua’s childhood days, and was almost as old as Serendipity had been.

Paul Spencer Wagoner, now six years old, was standing there with his father. They both looked uncomfortable, Joshua thought, in new-looking Datum-manufacture clothes. But Paul had a black eye and a swollen cheek, and his dark hair looked odd to Joshua, as if roughly cut. Joshua’s own little boy, Daniel Rodney, was just a couple of months old, and the Sisters had been cooing over the images Joshua had brought home for them. And there was enough of a father’s soul in Joshua now to make him wince at the trouble Paul, still a very young boy, was evidently having.

They quickly introduced each other. Sister Georgina shook hands with Paul and his father, who looked out of place, almost embarrassed.

Paul grinned up at Joshua. ‘Good to see you again, Mr Valienté.’

‘I suppose you
deduced
I’d be here.’

Paul laughed. ‘Of course. Everybody knows your story, about where you grew up. I thought I’d come visit now we live here too, in Madison.’

‘Really?’ Joshua glanced at the father. ‘I thought Happy Landings is a place people generally end up in, rather than leave.’

Tom Wagoner shrugged. ‘Well, it got a little uncomfortable for me, Mr Valienté—’

‘Joshua.’

‘My wife was the Happy Lander. Born there, I mean. Not me. She’s one of the Spencers. There are these big sprawling families in Happy Landings, the Spencers, the Montecutes. But she came to college on the Datum, in Minnesota, where I grew up. We fell in love, married, wanted kids, moved back to Happy Landings to be closer to her family . . .’

Sister Georgina prompted, ‘So what happened?’

‘Well, Happy Landings isn’t what it was, Sister. Not as
happy
a landing place, you might say. I think it’s been building up since Step Day. Before then it was a kind of refuge, a place where people who had kind of got lost would drift in, and stick. There were the trolls, too, which was always kind of weird to me, but you got used to them hanging around. But these last few years, with everybody stepping all over the place, people kept stumbling upon Happy Landings, and there were just too many strangers. The numbers were getting too high as well, and the trolls don’t like too many people. And newcomers – people like me – just didn’t fit any more.’

‘So you left.’

‘It was more me than Carla. She was with her family there, after all. It put us under a lot of pressure, to tell the truth. We came here, got jobs – I’m an accountant, and this is the place for jobs just now, Madison West 5 is growing fast since the nuke – but our marriage is going down a rocky road.’ He patted Paul’s head. ‘Oh, it’s OK. He knows all about it. Knows too damn much to be comfortable sometimes.’ He forced a laugh.

Now Sister Georgina touched Paul’s cheek, his eye. The boy flinched. ‘These injuries are recent,’ she said. ‘So what happened to you?’

‘School,’ Paul said simply.

Tom said, ‘Well, the butchered haircut was given him by a neighbourhood boy. The cheek was the other kids at school. The eye was one of the
teachers
.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Joshua said.

‘Afraid not. Guy got sacked. Didn’t help Paul. I keep telling him, nobody likes a smartass.’

‘It’s frustrating at school, Mr Valienté,’ Paul said, apparently more puzzled than distressed. ‘The teachers always make me wait for the other kids.’

Tom smiled wistfully. ‘His headmaster says he’s like a young Einstein, ready to take on relativity. But his teachers can’t teach him beyond long division. Not their fault.’

‘Mostly I sit and read. But I can’t keep quiet when I see people making mistakes. The other kids in class, or the teacher. I know I should keep quiet.’

‘Hmm,’ Sister Georgina said. ‘And these bruises are your reward.’

‘It’s like people care more about their pride than about what’s correct, about the truth. What kind of sense does that make?’

‘We’ve had worse than bruises actually,’ Tom said now. ‘Some of the parents have asked for Paul to be removed from the school. Not just because he’s disruptive, though he is, if I’m honest. Because they’re – well, they’re scared of him.’

Sister Georgina cast a concerned look at Paul.

Tom said, ‘Look, don’t worry, we can speak frankly. He understands all this better than I do.’

‘I have been reading about people,’ Paul said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Psychology.’ He pronounced it
puh-sike-ology
. ‘I don’t know a lot of the words, and that slows me down. But I get some of it. People are scared of strange stuff. They think I’m not like them. Well, I’m not. But I’m not
that
different. One woman said I was like a cuckoo in the nest. And there was the man who said I was like a changeling, left by the elves. Not a human at all.’ He laughed. ‘One kid said I was E.T. Not from this world.’