Long Mars (9780062297310) Read online

  {Richard Shailer}

  Dedication

  For Lyn and Rhianna, as always

  T.P.

  For Sandra

  S.B.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  Also by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

  Copyright

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  THE HIGH MEGGERS:

  Remote worlds, most still unpopulated, even in the year 2045, thirty years after Step Day. Up there you could be utterly alone. One soul in an entire world.

  It did funny things to the mind, thought Joshua Valienté. After a few months alone you got so sensitive that you thought you could tell if another human, even just a single person, arrived to share your world. One other human, maybe on the other side of the planet. The Princess and the Pea wasn’t in it. And the nights were cold and big and the starlight was all aimed at you.

  And yet, Joshua thought, even on an empty world, under an empty sky, other people always crowded into your head. People like his estranged wife and his son, and his sometime travelling companion Sally Linsay, and all the people of the suffering Datum Earth in the aftermath of Yellowstone, five years after the eruption.

  And Lobsang. Always Lobsang . . .

  Given his unusual origins, Lobsang had necessarily become something of an authority on the work known in the west as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  Perhaps its most familiar title to Tibetans was the Bardo Thodol, roughly translated as Liberation Through Hearing. This funerary text, intended to guide the consciousness through the interval between death and rebirth, had no single agreed edition. With origins in the eighth century, with time it had passed through many hands, a process that had bequeathed many different versions and interpretations.

  Sometimes, as Lobsang had surveyed the state of Datum Earth, first home of mankind, in the days, months and years after the Yellowstone super-eruption of 2040, he found comfort in the sonorous language of the ancient text.

  Comfort, compared with the news that had come out of Bozeman, Montana, Earth West 1, for example, only days after the eruption. News to which his closest friends had responded . . .

  On any ordinary day, the community growing up in this one-step-West footprint of Bozeman must be a typical stepwise colony, Joshua thought, as he pulled on his protective coveralls one more time. A bunch of Abe Lincoln log cabins cut into a forest whose lumber was steadily being worked for export to the Datum. A corral, a small chapel. If anything this copy of Bozeman lacked facilities you’d find further out in the Long Earth, such as a hotel, bars, a town hall, a school, a clinic; this close to the Datum it was just too easy to step back home for all of that.

  But this day, September 15 2040, was no ordinary day in any of the stepwise Americas. For, seven days after the big caldera had first gone up, back on Datum Earth the eruption of Yellowstone was still continuing. Bozeman, Montana, was only fifty miles or so from the ongoing blast.

  And, one step from the disaster, Bozeman West 1 was transformed. Though the day was bright, the sky blue, the grass a vivid green – no volcano skies here – the town was crowded with people, jammed into the cabins and housed in hastily erected tents or just sitting on tarpaulins on the ground. People so coated with volcano ash that they were uniformly grey, their skin, hair and clothes, like they were characters from some ancient black-and-white TV show, I Love Lucy, cut-and-pasted digitally into the bright sunlit green of this fine fall day. Men, women and children, all coughing and retching like they had 1950s smoking habits too.

  The landscape around the town, meanwhile, had been appropriated by the official types from FEMA and the National Guard, who had marked out the ground with laser beams, police crime-scene tape, even just chalk marks, to match the layouts of blocks and buildings in Datum Bozeman. Some of the outlines extended into the woods and scrubland, land as yet untamed here. The officials had numbered and labelled these blocks, and were sending stepping volunteers back to the Datum systematically, marking off computerized maps on their tablets, to ensure the whole community was cleared of people.

  In a way the whole thing was a display of the basic mystery of the Long Earth, Joshua thought. It was already a quarter-century since Step Day, when he and other kids all around the world had downloaded the spec for a simple electronic gadget called a Stepper box, and turned the knob as per instructions – and stepped, not left or right, forward or back, but in another direction entirely. Stepped into a world of forest and swamp, at least if you started in Madison, Wisconsin, as Joshua had. A world all but identical to Earth – old Earth, Datum Earth – save there had been no people in it. Not until kids like Joshua appeared, popping out of thin air. And, Joshua had quickly found, you could take another step, and another, until you found yourself striding along a whole chain of parallel worlds, with differences from the Datum gradually increasing – but not a human in sight. The worlds of the Long Earth.

  And here was the basic, harsh reality of it. Datum America was now covered by a searing blanket of volcanic ash and dust – yet here, a single step away, it was as if Yellowstone didn’t exist at all.

  Sally Linsay showed up, finishing a coffee from a polystyrene cup that she carefully placed in a bin for cleaning and reuse: good pioneer-type habits, Joshua thought absently. She was in a clean one-piece coverall, but the ash had got into her hair, the skin of her neck and face, even her ears, anywhere the FEMA facemasks and straps hadn’t covered.

  She was accompanied by a National Guardsman, just a kid, with a tablet computer. He checked their identities, the numbers on the chests of their suits, the town block they were going into this time. ‘You two ready again?’

  Sally began to fix her mask over her face once more, a breathing filter, steampunk goggles. ‘Seven days of this already.’

  Joshua reached for his own mask. ‘It won’t be finishing any time soon, I’m guessing.’

  ‘So where’s Helen now?’

  ‘Back at Hell-Knows-Where.’ The National Guard kid raised his eyebrows, but Joshua was talking about his home off in the High Meggers, a community more than a million steps from the Datum, where he lived with his family: Helen, his son Dan. ‘Or on the way there. Safer for Dan, she says.’

  ‘That’s true enough. The Datum and the Low Earths are going to be a mess for years.’

  He knew she was right. There had been minor geological e
vents in the Low Earths, mirroring the big Datum eruption, but the ‘mess’ in the young worlds had been made by the vast spilling of refugees from the Datum.

  Sally eyed Joshua. ‘I bet Helen wasn’t happy that you refused to go back with her.’

  ‘Look, it was tough on us. But Datum America is where I grew up. I can’t just abandon it.’

  ‘So you decided to stick around and use your stepping superpowers to help the afflicted.’

  ‘Don’t give me that, Sally. You’re here too. Why, you grew up in Wyoming itself—’

  She was grinning. ‘Yeah, but I don’t have a little wife trying to draw me away. Big argument, was it? Or just one of her long sulks?’

  He turned away, fixing his mask with an angry tug on the straps at the back of his head, pulling up his hood. She laughed at him, her voice muffled by her own mask. He’d known Sally for ten years now, since his own first exploratory jaunt into the deep Long Earth – only to find Sally Linsay was already out there. Nothing much about her had changed.

  The National Guard kid positioned them by a strip of police tape. ‘The property you’ll be going into is right ahead of you. A couple of kids came out already, but we’re missing three adults. Record of one phobic. Family name Brewer.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ Joshua said.

  ‘The United States government appreciates all you’re doing.’

  Joshua glanced at Sally’s eyes, behind her mask. This boy was no more than nineteen. Joshua was thirty-eight, Sally forty-three. Joshua resisted the temptation to ruffle the kid’s blond hair. ‘Sure, son.’ Then he snapped on his head torch and reached for Sally’s gloved hand. ‘You ready?’

  ‘Always.’ She glanced down at the hand holding hers. ‘You sure that fake paw of yours is up to this?’

  His prosthetic left hand was a legacy of their last long journey together. ‘More than the rest of me, probably.’ They hunched over, knowing what was to come. ‘Three, two, one—’

  They stepped into hell.

  Ash and pumice pounded their shoulders, their heads, the ash like diabolic snow, grey, heavy and hot, the pumice coming in frothy pebble-sized chunks. The falling rocks hammered on a car in front of them, a mound already heaped up with ash. The background noise was a steady dull roar that drowned out their speech. The sky, under Yellowstone ash and gas and smoke from a plume that by now climbed twenty miles into the air, was virtually black.

  And it was hot, hot as a pioneer town’s forge. It was hard to believe the caldera itself was all of fifty miles away. Even out as far as this, some said, the falling ash could melt again and flow as lava.

  But the property they’d come to check out was right before them, as in the Guard’s plan, a one-storey house with a porch that had collapsed under the weight of the ash.

  Sally led the way forward, around the buried car. They had to wade through an ash fall that was feet deep in places, like a heavy, hot, hard snowfall. Its sheer weight was only the beginning of the problems the ash caused. If it got the chance the stuff would abrade your skin, turn your eyes into itching pockets of pain, and scrape your lungs to mincemeat. Give it a few months and it could kill you, even if it didn’t just crush you first.

  The front door seemed to be locked. Sally didn’t waste time; she raised a booted leg and kicked in the door.

  Wreckage clogged the room within. Joshua saw in the light of his lamp that the load of pumice and ash had long overwhelmed this wooden-framed structure, and the roof and loft space had fallen in through the ceiling. This living room was cluttered with debris, as well as with grey drifts of ash. At first glance it seemed impossible that anybody could be left alive in here. But Sally, always quick to assess a new and confusing situation, pointed at one corner where a dining table stood, square and stout and resistant, despite a thick layer of ash on its own upper surface.

  They pushed their way through. Where their booted feet scraped away the debris, Joshua glimpsed a crimson carpet.

  The table was shrouded with curtains. When they pulled these aside they found three adults. They were just mounds of ash-grey clothing, their heads and faces swathed with towels. But Joshua soon identified a man and a woman, middle-aged, maybe fifties, and one woman who looked much older, frailer, maybe eighty years old; slumped in a corner, she seemed to be asleep. From the toilet stink that came out of this little shelter, Joshua guessed they’d been here some time, days perhaps.

  Startled by Joshua and Sally in their nuclear-alert-type masks, the middle-aged couple quailed back. But then the man pulled away a towel to reveal an ash-stained mouth, red-rimmed eyes. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Mr Brewer? My name’s Joshua. This is Sally. We’ve come to get you out of here.’

  Brewer smiled. ‘Nobody gets left behind, eh? Just like President Cowley promised.’

  Joshua glanced around. ‘You look like you did pretty well here. Supplies, stuff to keep the ash out of your mouths and eyes.’

  The man, Brewer, forced a smile. ‘Well, we did what the sensible young lady said.’

  ‘What “sensible young lady”?’

  ‘Came around a couple of days before the ash fall really kicked in. Wore kind of pioneer gear – never gave us her name, thought she must be from some government agency. Gave us smart advice about survival, very clear.’ He glanced at the older woman. ‘She also told us very clearly that the planetary alignment was nothing to do with it, and this wasn’t a punishment by God, and my mother-in-law seemed to find that a comfort. Didn’t take much notice of her advice at the time, but we remembered come the day. Yeah, we did OK. Although we’re running out of stuff now.’

  The middle-aged woman shook her head. ‘But we can’t leave.’

  ‘You can’t stay,’ Sally said harshly. ‘You’re out of food and water, right? You’ll starve to death if the ash doesn’t kill you. Look, if you don’t have Stepper boxes we can just pick you up and go—’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Brewer said. ‘We sent away the kids, the dog. But Meryl – my mother-in-law—’

  ‘Extreme phobic,’ the woman said. ‘You know what that means.’

  That stepping between the worlds, even if Meryl was carried over, would invoke such a reaction in her that it could kill her, unless a cocktail of appropriate medications was quickly administered.

  Brewer said, ‘I’m betting you’re out of phobic drugs already over there, where you’re taking us.’

  ‘And even if not,’ said his wife, ‘the young, the healthy will be prioritized. I won’t leave my mother behind.’ She glared at Sally. ‘Would you?’

  ‘My father, maybe.’ Sally started to back out of the crowded space. ‘Come on, Joshua, we’re wasting our time.’

  ‘No. Wait.’ Joshua touched the old woman’s arm. Her breath was a rattle. ‘What we need to do is take her someplace where they do still have drugs. Somewhere away from the ash cloud zone.’

  ‘And how the hell do we do that?’

  ‘Through the soft places. Come on, Sally, if there was ever a time to use your superpower it’s now. Can you do it?’

  Sally expressed her irritation with a glare through her obscuring facemask. Joshua stuck it out.

  Then she closed her eyes, as if sensing something, listening. Feeling out the soft places, the Long Earth short cuts only she and a few other adepts could use . . . Joshua’s idea was that Meryl could be carried, via the soft places, to someplace other than a stepwise Bozeman, to someplace where the medications would be more freely available.

  ‘Yes. All right. There’s a place a couple of blocks from here. In two steps I can get her to New York, East 3. But, Joshua, the soft places are no easy ride, even if you aren’t old and frail.’

  ‘No choice. Let’s do it.’ He turned back to the Brewers to explain.

  And the whole house seemed to lift.

  Joshua, crouching under the table, was thrown on his back. He heard timbers crack and fail, and the hiss of the ash making still more inroads into the house.

  When it settled, Brewer’s eye
s were wide. ‘What the hell was that?’

  Sally said, ‘I’m guessing the caldera’s collapsed.’

  They all knew what that implied; after seven days everybody was an expert on supervolcanoes. When the eruption finally finished, the magma chamber would collapse inward, a chunk of Earth’s crust the size of Rhode Island falling down through half a mile – a shock that would make the whole planet ring like a bell.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Joshua said. ‘I’ll lead you.’

  It took only seconds for Joshua to step the Brewers out of the house, and safely over into the impossible sunshine of West 1.

  And, just as Joshua stepped back into the Datum ash to help Sally with the mother, the sound from the caldera collapse arrived, following the ground waves. It was a sky-filling noise, as if all the artillery batteries in the world had opened up just beyond the horizon. A sound that would, eventually, wash around the whole planet. The old lady, propped up by Sally, her dressing gown stained grey, her head obscured by towels, whimpered and clapped her hands to her ears.

  Joshua, in the middle of all this, wondered who the ‘sensible young lady’ in the pioneer gear had been.

  The Bardo Thodol described the interval between death and rebirth in terms of bardos: intermediate states of consciousness. Some authorities identified three bardos, some six. Of these Lobsang found most intriguing the sidpa bardo, or the bardo of rebirth, which featured karmically impelled visions. Perhaps these were hallucinations, derived from the flaws of one’s own soul. Or perhaps they were authentic visions of a suffering Datum Earth, and its innocent companion worlds.

  Such as an image of dreamlike vessels hanging in a Kansas sky . . .

  The US Navy airship USS Benjamin Franklin met the Zheng He, a ship of the Navy of the new Chinese federal government, over the West 1 footprint of Wichita, Kansas. Chen Zhong, Captain of the Chinese ship, claimed to have concerns about the role he was expected to undertake in the ongoing relief effort in Datum America, and an exasperated Admiral Hiram Davidson, representing an overstretched chain of command – well, everybody was overstretched, as the fall of this disastrous year of 2040 turned into winter – had mandated Maggie Kauffman, Captain of the Franklin, to take time out of her own relief efforts to meet with the man and discuss his concerns.