The Long Mars (28 page)

Sally asked, ‘What’s that grey mist? The vision’s blurred—’

‘I’m in a survival bag.’ A gloved hand appeared, pushing at a translucent wall. ‘In my pressure suit, in a bag.’

The bags were simple zip-up plastic sacks with small compressed-air units. They were meant for decompression emergencies when you couldn’t reach a pressure suit; you just jumped in a bag, zipped it up, and the released air would keep you alive for a while. You had very limited mobility, with tube-like sleeves for arms and legs to allow some capability; essentially you were supposed to wait for rescue from somebody better equipped.

‘I rigged out a few bags to provide the local air, so these whaler guys can use them.’

Sally frowned. ‘Air bags? Why do these guys need air bags? They
live
here.’

‘I’m recording this encounter in case it doesn’t work out. You might learn from my mistakes next time.’

Frank snapped, ‘Next time what?’

‘Next time you approach these guys to go in and record the monolith inscriptions for you.’ He held up his other gloved hand; it held, awkwardly, a small handheld cam, and a stack of Stepper boxes.

Sally said, ‘I understand the cam. You need to photograph the monoliths – or get the whalers to do that for you. But why the Steppers?’

‘I told you, right at the beginning of all this. Trade goods.
Steppers
– something that was going to be valuable to whatever kind of sapient we encountered. Even though you need a spacesuit to survive a single step, on these Joker Marses. Hence I’m giving them survival bubbles too . . .’

It took some pantomiming for Willis, surrounded by spear-wielding, expert-hunter, six-foot-tall crustaceans, to get over what he wanted. First he showed the whalers what a Stepper could do for them. He finished its assembly, a question of pushing a few plugs into sockets, and then turned the switch, stepped away to the hunters’ bafflement – and popped back into the world behind the lead guy, to their obvious consternation. ‘That’s it, fella. You get the idea. Imagine creeping up on Puff the Magic Dragon using one of these. Now you try. But you need to finish it for yourself, if it’s to work for you. And you’re going to need to use the survival bubbles, otherwise the Mars to either side will kill you in a breath . . .’

Only an hour later he had the crustaceans’ apparent leader in a comically incongruous plastic bubble, stepping back and forth at will, and jumping out of nowhere to alarm his buddies. Or possibly
her
buddies, Frank corrected himself. He couldn’t help noticing that one of those companions came in for particular humiliation with the new tool: some kind of rival to the leader? A father, brother, son, mother, sister? Whatever, he was jumped on, tripped, shoved, pushed over.

Sally said, ‘If these beasts bear any kind of similarity to human personalities, that guy is going to be seriously pissed at Dad for this.’

‘Yeah,’ Frank murmured. ‘That’s one angry young prince. Or whatever.’

As the morning wore on, Frank watched with increasing impatience. And at one point he thought he heard a sound like distant thunder. The sky was cloudless. Were storms even possible on this version of Mars?

The crustaceans were fast learners. They quickly grasped the potential of the technology, and soon picked up the idea that in exchange for the magic Stepper box, all Willis wanted was for them to take his handheld cam as close to the monoliths as they could get.

‘If this doesn’t work, nothing will. I also gave them seeds for the Martian cactus that powers the box. That comes from the Gap Mars, and there’s a good chance it will grow here too . . .’

‘My God,’ Frank said. ‘You just encountered these creatures. And yet within a few hours you’ve given them their own Step Day.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Willis said sternly. ‘Remember, the Stepper is only an aid to releasing an ability to step that’s innate in the first place. There
had
to be some sapient Martians who could step, or, surely, there’d be no Long Mars at all. But stepping is a lot less useful here, because the worlds neighbouring a habitable island like this are almost always going to be lethal. I’m only giving them what they have already, Frank. And besides, it’s going to take a Renaissance
and
an Industrial Revolution for these guys to be able to figure out the meaning of the Long Mars, let alone how to make decent pressure suits.’

‘But they are clearly inventive, technologically,’ Sally said.

‘And brave,’ Frank said. ‘They learn fast too—’

‘Oh well, Pandora’s box is open now. Or would you and that ass Mellanier say that’s the wrong myth, Frank? Look, we need to stay in this world long enough to get the monolith data. Then we can move on. But I suggest we get the gliders in the air soon.’

‘Why?’

‘I think I’m learning to read these guys’ body language. They seem a little anxious. Remember how I speculated about what kind of predator could make a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-long animal grow armour plate? That thunder you thought you heard a while ago – I heard it too – that ain’t thunder . . .’

30

E
ARTH
W
EST
170,000,000, and more. It was May now; the expedition was in its fourth month.

Around the patient, solid forms of the
Armstrong
and
Cernan
, strangeness shivered, in worlds gathered in great sheaves. Worlds where the only oceans were shrivelled, briny lakes in wildernesses of rock. Worlds where the continents had never formed, and the only dry land was a scattered handful of volcanic islands, subsiding into tempestuous seas. Worlds where different forms of life itself had prevailed.

Gerry Hemingway and Wu Yue-Sai were concocting a probabilistic theory about the prevalence of complex life in the Long Earth based on the statistics they were gathering. Almost all Earths had life of some kind. But only around half of all Earths had atmospheres enriched by oxygen from photosynthesis, and only one in ten hosted multicellular life, plants and animals. Perhaps the stepwise geography they were mapping represented something like the history of life on Earth in time, projected across the higher-dimensional spaces of the Long Earth. On Earth it had taken billions of years for full photosynthesis to be evolved, and multicellular life was, relatively speaking, a late arrival. The more complex the life, the harder it was to evolve. Maggie didn’t pretend to follow this argument, and thought it was probably premature to jump to conclusions anyhow.

Around Earth West 175,000,000 they again found a divergence from the simple-cell purple scum worlds. There was complexity in this island of worlds, but not at the level of a cell, or groups of cells, but at a more global scale. There would be a whole lake, even a sea, swarming with microbial life, yet all linked in hierarchies of communities, all contributing to a single, compound, protean life form. Fifteen years back the Valienté expedition had discovered one such entity, in retrospect freakishly close to the Datum: the beast Joshua Valienté had called First Person Singular, of a type that had since been named ‘Traversers’. Maybe this band of worlds was the ultimate origin of such creatures.

Given Valienté’s experience, the airship crews knew to be cautious here.

And still the ships plunged on into the unknown. Maggie was fascinated by the evolving panoramas of land, sea and sky she glimpsed through the windows of the observation galleries, and intrigued by the closer-up glimpses of the worlds they stopped at to sample in more detail. Yet, as they flew on, day after day, something in her recoiled from the bombardment of strangeness. And longed to come to some terminus.

On Earth West 182,498,761, Maggie watched an expedition of spacesuited crewmen explore yet another distant relation of North America, rich with intricately complicated and entirely unfamiliar life forms.

Gerry Hemingway arranged for one specimen to be brought up to the
Armstrong
. This was set up in a lab deep in the bowels of the gondola, with lamps that simulated the local daylight, under a plastic dome in which the methane-rich, oxygen-depleted local atmosphere could be reproduced. When he was ready, Hemingway invited Yue-Sai, Mac and Maggie to come and inspect his latest display.

They gathered around and peered down, frowning. Under the air dome, in a tray of local soil, stood what looked like a small tree, with a woody trunk and purple leaves. A yellowish thread was wrapped around the trunk, and yellow-white flowers poked out among the purple.

‘It’s like bonsai,’ Mac said.

Yue-Sai laughed. ‘Yes, as developed by some fellow on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the Japanese for you!’

‘Just tell me what you see,’ Hemingway said, reasonably patiently.

‘A tree,’ Maggie said briskly.

‘Exactly. Though not remotely related to any tree species on the Datum, now or in the past.’

Mac said, ‘But like all trees it’s competing for the light. So it’s photosynthetic. I suppose you could tell that from the purple and yellow leaves, the little flowers.’

Hemingway said, ‘Yes. So, on this world there are clearly multicelled forms, and some of them are photosynthesizers. But look closer at this specimen. They are
both
photosynthetic.’

Maggie scratched her head. ‘They? Both?’

‘Both the life forms you see here.’

Yue-Sai leaned closer to the dome. ‘Actually it looks like a tree being attacked by something like a strangler fig.’

‘Not
attacked
. . . I’m not being fair. I’ve had the benefit of a full biochemical analysis of these specimens. Lieutenant Wu, on our Earth all life is based on DNA. Yes? We share DNA and its coding system and so on with the humblest bacterium. So we can say that all life on the Datum derives from a single origin. Even to get to that point, the DNA-life origin, there had to be earlier selections, by various evolutionary processes: the selection of a set of amino acids to work with, twenty out of the many possible alternatives, the choice of what kind of DNA coding to use . . . But other choices were possible. There may have been other origins of life, based on different choices. If so, those other domains were wiped out by our kind, the triumphant survivors.’

Mac grunted. ‘Genocide, even at the root of the tree of life. So it goes. Hemingway, I’m guessing from your big build-up that things are different here.’

‘They are. There are two life forms, under this dome. The tree is based on DNA like our own, and amino acids like our own set. But the other, the “fig”, has a
different
suite of aminos. It uses a different genetic coding, with some of the information carried in a DNA variant, the rest in proteins—’

‘Wow.’ Mac straightened up. ‘Life from
two origins
survived here?’

‘So it seems. Who knows how or why? Perhaps there was a refuge, an island . . . For one thing the fig’s chirality is different. Organic molecules aren’t symmetrical; we describe them as left-handed or right-handed. All
our
aminos are left-handed. The aminos in the “tree” are left-handed. The aminos of the “fig” are right-handed.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘So what? What does that mean?’

Mac said, ‘I guess a left-hander couldn’t eat a right-hander.’

‘Well, it couldn’t digest it,’ Hemingway said. ‘They could destroy each other. But look what they’re actually doing.’ They bent to see again. ‘The fig is using the tree for support. You can’t see another detail – in their tangled-up root systems the fig pays the favour back by bringing nutrients to the tree.’

‘It is cooperation,’ Yue-Sai breathed. ‘No genocide here, Doctor. They work together to live. Cooperation, across two domains of life! What a wonderful discovery. My faith in the universe is restored.’ She playfully patted Hemingway on the shoulder. ‘There, you see! If two alien beings such as this can cooperate for their mutual benefit, why not us Chinese and you Americans?’

‘I was born Canadian, not American,’ Hemingway said, uninterested. He bent closer to the intertwined plants.

Maggie came to an impulsive decision. ‘Let’s leave this busy guy to his work. Mac, come with me.’

Mac raised an eyebrow. ‘Problem, Captain?’

‘Yeah,’ she said privately. ‘This issue with you and Snowy – enough with the frosty glares and moody silences. It’s festered long enough, and I need to know what the hell the problem is.’

‘What’s brought this on now? Was it that tree and the strangler fig, living in harmony? You’ll start singing “Ebony and Ivory” next.’

Glowering at him, she said nothing.

He sighed. ‘Your sea cabin?’

‘You bring the single malt.’

Shi-mi insisted on sitting in. Maggie insisted she stay out of sight, under the desk.

And, making it clear he resented being ordered to do so, Mac told Maggie the full story.

‘Here’s the main thing you got to remember, Captain,’ Mac began, as he sipped his malt: his favourite, Auld Lang Syne. ‘We meant well.’

‘“We meant well.” My God, I wonder how many sins have been justified by that line?’

‘Look – this all happened in 2042, ’43. A couple of years after Yellowstone. At that time the
Franklin
was still running Low-Earth relocation missions . . .’

As Maggie remembered too well. Military twains with their holds full of wide-eyed refugees, men, women, children, being taken away from their volcano-smashed homes and deposited in entirely unfamiliar worlds . . .

‘If I recall you had about a year away from the
Franklin
.’

‘Yeah,’ Mac said, ‘before I was called back to advise on the fitting-out of the new
Armstrong
and
Cernan
. You were somewhat busy, Maggie. And you didn’t ask any close questions about what I’d done with my year away.’

‘Hmm. Nor did I check the crew files. No need in your case. So I thought.’

‘You wouldn’t have found much, not without digging. The outcomes were kind of covered up . . . Maggie, I was sent to West 1,617,524.’

She knew that number, and wasn’t surprised. ‘The beagles’ Earth. Snowy’s world.’