The Long Mars (33 page)

‘When you let it happen. When you let them speak to each other at all.’

She didn’t react to that. ‘It’s important you understand what we’re dealing with, Nelson. These children represent a different order, a step change. Something new.’

‘Umm. And yet they
are
children, in our care.’

‘So they are.’

‘I think I should get settled in. I imagine there are superior officers I need to be presented to.’

‘I’m afraid so. Also you need to get through your security processing.’

‘Then I’d like to talk to some of the inmates. One at a time, to begin with.’

‘Sure. Any preference who first?’

As if at random, Nelson pointed down at Paul Spencer Wagoner. ‘That one.’

Nelson was allowed, in fact encouraged, to speak to Paul in the nineteen-year-old’s own room.

Nelson could see that made the security set-up easier to manage, but he wasn’t sure about the psychology of it. When
he
was nineteen, twenty, he hadn’t had a room of his own, but he was pretty sure that if he had, he would have seen it as an imposition to have some stranger walk in and start talking about God. This was the condition of the meeting, though, and Nelson made the best of it.

Paul’s room was only sparsely customized, by the standards of others Nelson had seen – or rather, had looked into from above. Posters on the walls: a galaxy image, exotic Long Earth beasts, a singing star Nelson didn’t recognize. On the desk, a phone, tablet, TV, though Nelson had learned that the connections you could make on these devices were sparse and tightly controlled, here in this facility.

Paul himself, slim, dark, was dressed in a black coverall. All the inmates here had to wear coveralls, Nelson had learned, but at least you got a choice of colours, and only the most defiant chose Gitmo orange. Paul evidently wasn’t the most defiant. He just sat on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around his torso, legs crossed, a blank expression on his face. A classic sulky-teenager pose.

Nelson sat opposite, on a chair. ‘I bet you didn’t choose any of this stuff,’ he said as an opener. ‘The posters and such. This is some elderly Navy officer’s idea of what people your age like, right?’

Paul returned his stare, but gave nothing back.

Nelson nodded. ‘Lieutenant Irwin, who showed me around earlier, said a lot of things about you and your colleagues in here.’

Paul snorted, and spoke for the first time. ‘“Colleagues”?’

‘But the most perceptive single word she used, in my view as far as I’ve formulated it, was this:
institutionalized
. And that’s what you’re falling back on now, right? The blank stare, the silence. The old tricks you learned to survive, in one institution or another. That’s OK. But you were lucky, you know. I can tell you there are worse institutions to fall into than the one that caught you, in the end. I mean the Home in Madison West 5.’

Paul shrugged. ‘All those nuns.’

‘Right. And Joshua Valienté. He’s a friend of mine. He sends his regards.’ Nelson stared at Paul, trying to send a subliminal signal.
You aren’t alone. Joshua hasn’t forgotten you. That’s why I’m here, in fact
. . .

Paul just smiled. ‘Good old Uncle Joshua. The magic stepper boy. Maybe
he
should be in some cage like this. What is
he
but the vanguard of a new human species?’

‘Well, in fact there are similarities. The whole Humanity First movement, that brought President Cowley to power, grew out of fear of steppers.’

‘I know. That bunch of nuts blew up Madison because of it. The nest of the stepping mutants.’ He mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Ka-boom!’

‘Can you understand people feeling that way? About you, I mean?’

‘I understand it in the abstract. The way I understand much of how you dim-bulbs think. Just another aspect of the madness that grips most of you, for most of your waking lives. It goes back to witch hunts, and even deeper. If something goes wrong – it’s somebody’s fault! Find somebody
different
to blame! Burn the demon! Fire the ovens!

‘Oh, of course they’ve come for us. They were always going to. At least this prison they put us in is secure. I suppose we should be grateful for the organized madness of the US government, which is protecting us from the
dis
organized madness of the mob. But after all, we haven’t actually
done
anything to anybody, have we? We aren’t like steppers, who could in theory walk into your child’s locked bedroom and so forth. That’s something worth fearing. All
we’ve
actually done so far is make a little money. But that was enough to condemn the Jews under Hitler, wasn’t it?’

Nelson studied him. He was coming across now like a defiant youngster, a member of some punk-revival band, maybe, out to shock. Nelson realized he had no real idea what was going on in Paul’s head. ‘But you have the potential for much more than that in the future. Do you believe it’s rational that we should fear you?’

Paul studied him back, as if briefly interested in what he’d said. ‘Insofar as you’re capable of being rational at all – yes. Because we are a different species, you know.’

These words, delivered matter-of-factly, were chilling. ‘You mean, unlike the steppers—’

‘Who are genetically identical to the rest of you. Stepping is just a faculty, like a gift for languages, that people have more or less of. We are all potential steppers.
You
are not a potential Next. The bumbling dim-bulb scientists at this facility have confirmed what we have long known. We have an extra gene complex. This is expressed physically in new structures in the brain, specifically the cerebral cortex, the centre of higher processing. They’re studying that here too, though thankfully without cutting our heads open, at least not yet.
My
brain contains a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand synapses, just as yours does. But the connectivity seems to have been radically upgraded. In your head, the cortex is like a single sheet of crinkled layers, folded up inside the skull – spread out it would be around a yard square – with about ten billion internal connections. The topology of the cortex in my head is much more complex, with many more interconnections . . . It cannot be modelled in less than four dimensions, actually.’

‘Hence you’re a brighter bulb.’

Paul shrugged. ‘The biological definition of a species is the ability to interbreed. Our claim of species differentiation is blurred, but it is real enough.’ He smiled. ‘Do you have a daughter, Nelson?’

The question took Nelson by surprise. He remembered that living island, a woman with a red flower in her hair . . . ‘Probably not.’

Paul raised his eyebrows. ‘Odd answer. Well, if you did, she could serve as an incubator for my child. Who would be one of us, not one of you. Does that offend you? Does that frighten you? Does it make you want to kill me? Perhaps it should.’

‘Tell me how this has happened. If you understand it yourself.’

Paul laughed in his face. ‘Oh, you seek to manipulate me through challenging me. I will tell you only what the dim-bulbs in this place must already have figured out. It’s not hard, after all. I was born in Happy Landings, as you probably know. And I am a Spencer, on my mother’s side. You’ve heard of the place.’

It had loomed large in the talk of Lobsang and Joshua.

‘If you know about Happy Landings, you know about the trolls. Nelson, the secret is the trolls. Happy Landings is infested by them, and their presence has shaped that particular society. Not every human being gets along with the trolls, and vice versa. With time, there has been a selection pressure. Only a certain
kind
of human is welcomed to Happy Landings. Even some of those who are born there know, somehow, it is not for them. There is nothing mysterious about it, nothing psychic, merely a question of complex group dynamics spanning two humanoid species, humans and trolls, working over centuries – many generations, long before Step Day, as the place was accidentally populated by natural steppers. But the outcome, unplanned, unintended, is that there has been a selection for a greater human intelligence. Of course there must have been some competitive advantage. Maybe only smarter humans can accept the blessing of the company of trolls . . .’

‘And the result is what I see before me?’

He shrugged. ‘Right now Next are emerging all over. Many colony worlds are in turmoil because of the great population flow from the Datum, after Yellowstone. Maybe it’s something to do with the stress of all that. Dormant genes suddenly expressing. But, and I’m sure your dim-bulb scientists have worked this out, many of the emerging Next can trace their ancestry back to Happy Landings, especially to the old dynasties, the Montecutes, the Spencers.
That’s
the source of the new genetic legacy.’

And a random memory came back to Nelson: Roberta Golding, who had done so much to set up his own assignment here, was originally from Happy Landings . . .

‘But on the other hand,’ Paul said now, ‘we could only have arisen in the Long Earth. Happy Landings, the forcing ground, is a uniquely Long Earth phenomenon, is it not? The unconscious mixing of two separate humanoid species could never have happened on the Datum. The trolls could never have survived at all on Datum Earth, not alongside
you
, you clever apes, smart enough to destroy everything around you, never smart enough to understand what it is you are losing in the process . . . The trolls needed to be protected by the Long Earth, protected from
you
, in order that they could participate in the production of
us
, in such crucibles as Happy Landings.’

‘“Such crucibles.” Are there others?’

‘Oh, yes. Logically it must be so . . . Anyhow, you’re a chaplain. I thought you were here to talk about God, not Darwin.’

Nelson shrugged. ‘I’m being paid by the hour, not by the topic. We can talk about whatever you want to talk about.
Do
you have any views on God?’

Paul snorted. ‘
Your
gods are trivial constructs. Easy to dismiss. Animistic fantasies or mammalian wish complexes. You are lost children longing for papa, and casting his image into the sky.’

‘Very well. And what do you believe?’

He laughed. ‘Give me a chance! I’m nineteen years old, and in jail. We’ve had no time to address such questions, not yet. I can tell you what I
feel
. That God is not
out there
somewhere. God is in us, in our everyday lives. In the act of understanding. God is the sacredness of comprehension – no, of the
act
of comprehension.’

‘You should read Spinoza. Maybe some of the yogis.’

‘If we have the time we may come closer to the truth. And if we have a
lot
more time, we may be able to render it into a form even you dim-bulbs can comprehend.’

‘Thanks,’ Nelson said dryly. ‘But you say
if
. You’re implying you won’t be granted that time.’

‘Look around you.’ He waved up at the blank ceiling. ‘Look at the uniformed ape with an assault rifle up there. Or so I deduce his presence. How much time do
you
think the dim-bulbs will allow us?’

‘And do you fear that, Paul? Do you fear death?’

‘Hmm. Good question. Not individual death. But there are so few of us still, Nelson, that death for us means extinction of our kind. And I fear
that
. For all that is left unsaid, all that is left undiscovered, unexpressed. Are we done? I’d kind of like to watch some TV now.’

Nelson paused for one second, considering. Then he rapped on the door to summon the guard.

34

T
HE CREW OF THE
Armstrong I
were not difficult to find, a few worlds further out from the Napoleons, and unreasonably grateful for their rescue. Maggie allowed a day’s partying to celebrate.

Then the mission continued. The airships
Armstrong
and
Cernan
pressed on into the unknown.

The airships had left West 5 in January. It was now May, and life on board wasn’t getting any easier, especially when they crossed through uninhabitable worlds, and the ships had to be locked down. Harry Ryan was growing quietly concerned about the state of his engines. The quartermaster, Jenny Reilly, sent Maggie depressing reports about the ships’ ability to withstand a continued push across worlds that could not provide them with even basic necessities – edible foodstuffs, oxygen, sometimes there wasn’t even potable water. The crew were exhausted, stir-crazy and increasingly fractious. Joe Mackenzie fretted about their health, the illnesses and injuries they were slowly accumulating, and the steady depletion of his medical supplies. But then, he always did.

But despite all the niggling problems Maggie still had her eyes on the nominal target she’d been given for this mission: to reach Earth West 250,000,000. The best estimates showed that the goal was still well within the ships’ consumables budget and system lifetimes. And it was after all a prize worth achieving; once it was done everybody on board would go to their graves still cradling the memory of it. This jaunt would dwarf the famous Chinese expedition to East 20,000,000 five years ago – and it would by quite some way surpass even the one-way journey of the
Armstrong I
, which had ultimately reached the world of the young Napoleons, more than a hundred and eighty million steps out.
That
was a fantastic journey that had for too long gone unreported and needed its story told, even if it would take some of the gloss off what she’d achieved in
Armstrong II
.

The trouble was that the final leg from Planet Napoleon to Good Old Quarter Billion, as she had taken to calling it, represented over a quarter of the total mission still to be completed – at least three weeks’ running time, probably more like over four. And of course they would have to come back the same way.

And as the journey wore on, and the Earths became ever more exotic and challenging, Maggie sometimes felt as if it was only her own willpower that held the mission together.