Long Mars (9780062297310) Read online

  ‘As if I have the time to salve the ego of some old Communist apparatchik,’ Maggie grumbled in the solitude of her sea cabin.

  ‘But that’s what he is,’ said Shi-mi, curled up in her basket by Maggie’s desk. ‘You evidently checked him out. I could have done that for you—’

  ‘I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you,’ Maggie murmured to the cat, without malice.

  ‘Which is probably pretty far.’ Shi-mi stood and stretched with a small, quite convincing purr.

  She was a quite convincing cat, actually. Save for the green LED sparks of her eyes. And the prissy human-type personality she embodied. And the fact that she could talk. Shi-mi had been an ambiguous gift to Maggie, from one of the equally ambiguous figures who seemed to be watching her career with an unwelcome interest.

  Shi-mi said now, ‘Captain Chen is on his way . . .’

  Maggie checked her status board. The cat was right; Chen was in the air. Chen had insisted that the two twains needn’t land to exchange personnel; he was crossing in a two-person light copter which could easily be set down inside the Franklin, he bragged, if the US ship opened up one of its big cargo bays. These new Chinese liked nothing more than to demonstrate their technical capabilities, especially over an America still prostrate two months after the eruption. Show-offs.

  Distracted, Maggie glanced out of her cabin’s big picture window at this world, a Midwest sky big and blue and scattered with light clouds, the green carpet of a stepwise Kansas semi-infinite and flat beneath her – and all but unspoiled still, even on this Earth a single step away from the Datum. But more spoiled than it used to be. Before September, before Yellowstone, Wichita West 1 had been little more than a shadow of its Datum parent, scattered buildings of logs and blown concrete set out in a grid that roughly aped the Datum town plan. It had been typical of its type. Communities like this started out serving their Datum parents as sources of raw materials, sites for new industrial developments, and room for extra living space, sports and recreation, and so they necessarily followed their parents’ maps.

  Now, though, a couple of months after the eruption, this version of Wichita was surrounded by a refugee camp: rows of hastily erected canvas tents full of bewildered survivors, the ground littered with heaped-up drops of food and medical supplies and clothes. Twains like the Franklin, stepwise-capable airships, both military and commercial, hung in the sky like blimps over wartime London. It was a grim third-world scene, in the heart of a stepwise America.

  Of course it could have been a lot worse. Thanks to the almost universal ability that people had to step away into a parallel world from anywhere on the Datum, the immediate casualties of the Yellowstone eruption had been comparatively light. The refugees below had in fact been transferred from Datum camps they’d reached by conventional means, fleeing along Datum roads away from the central disaster zone, before being stepped away to cleaner parallel worlds. Datum Kansas was a relatively safe distance from the eruption site itself, which was over in Wyoming. But even this far out the ash was taking its toll, on eyes, on lungs. It induced conditions with names like ‘Marie’s disease’, a kind of ghastly slow suffocation – horrors that were becoming too familiar to everybody, and the medical tents on the ground were surrounded by lines of exhausted people.

  Lost in reflection, with worries about her own responsibilities nagging at her – as well as her own ever-present doubts about how well she could fulfil those responsibilities – Maggie was startled by a soft knock on her door. Chen, no doubt. She snapped at the cat, ‘Standing orders.’ Which meant: Shut up.

  The cat calmly curled up and mimicked sleep.

  Captain Chen turned out to be a short, bustling man, pompous and self-important, Maggie thought on first impression, but evidently a survivor. He’d been a party official who’d kept his position through the fall of the Communist regime, and in the Zheng He had in fact gone on to command a prestigious voyage of exploration into the Long Earth. She referred to this as she made him welcome.

  ‘A voyage which you yourself, Captain Kauffman, might have emulated by now, if not for the unfortunate circumstance of the eruption,’ he said as he sat down, and accepted an offer of coffee from Midshipman Santorini, who’d shown him in.

  ‘You know about the Armstrong II? Well, I’m not the only one whose personal plans have been disrupted by this.’

  ‘Quite so. And we are the fortunate ones, are we not?’

  After some preliminary chatter – he said his pilot for the crossing, a Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, was being looked after in the Franklin’s galley – he got down to business. Which turned out, it seemed to Maggie, to be irritatingly ideological.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You’re refusing to carry ballot slips for our presidential election?’

  He spread his chubby hands and smiled. He was a man who enjoyed bringing complications into the lives of others, she thought.

  ‘What can I say? I represent the Chinese government. Who am I to intervene in US politics, even in a constructive way? What if, for example, I were to make some error – to fail to deliver the papers to one district or another, or lose a sealed ballot box? Imagine the scandal. Besides, from an outsider’s point of view, to hold an election in such circumstances seems frivolous.’

  She felt her temperature rising, and she was aware of the cat’s eyes on her, a silent warning. ‘Captain, it’s November in a leap year. This is the time we hold a presidential election. It’s what we do in America, supervolcano or not. I – we – do appreciate all the Chinese government is doing to help us out in this situation. But—’

  ‘Ah, but you don’t welcome my comments on your internal affairs, do you? Perhaps you’ll have to get used to that, Captain Kauffman.’ He gestured at the tablet on her desk. ‘I’m sure your latest projections match our own, concerning the future of your country. It seems likely that twenty per cent of the continental Datum USA will eventually be abandoned altogether, a swathe spanning Denver, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne. Eighty per cent of the rest is under ash thick enough to disrupt agriculture. While the evacuation flow to the stepwise worlds has been intense, still many millions remain on the Datum, and stores of food and water are rapidly diminishing – as they are even in stepwise holding areas like this, are they not? And during this winter many will starve without gifts of, for example, Chinese rice, delivered stepwise by twain, or by freighters crossing the Datum seas. You are dependent on the rest of the world now, Captain Kauffman. Dependent. And I doubt that will change any time soon.’

  She knew he was right. Her own advisers among her crew on the twain were telling her that the volcano was now having global effects, effects that were going to linger. The ash had washed out fairly quickly – though even lying on the ground it remained a problem, as Chen had said – but sulphur dioxide from the eruption was hanging around in the air as aerosol particles, creating terrific sunsets but deflecting the sun’s heat. As the Datum headed into its first post-volcano winter, temperatures had plummeted fast and early, and spring next year was going to be late, if it showed up at all.

  Yes, America would need Chinese rice for the foreseeable future. But Maggie could see that the challenge was going to be to stop ‘friends’ like China using the disaster to gain a permanent foothold in American society. Already there had been rumours that the Chinese were running tobacco into a nicotine-starved Datum America – like the Opium Wars in reverse, she thought.

  Maggie Kauffman, however, worked on the principle of dealing with the practical problems before her, and letting the wider world take care of itself.

  ‘About your ballot boxes, Captain Chen. Suppose I assign a small team of my own crew to travel with you until the election is over. They can take authority for the operation – as well as responsibility for any errors.’

  He smiled broadly. ‘A wise solution.’ He stood up. ‘And I wonder if I could send over a detachment of my own crew, in the spirit of cultural exchange. After all, our governments are already d
iscussing sharing twain technology, for example.’ He glanced around dismissively. ‘Our own ships being somewhat more advanced than your own. Thank you for your time, Captain.’

  When he’d gone, Maggie murmured, ‘Glad that’s over.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Shi-mi.

  ‘Listen. Remind me to tell the XO to sweep this “exchange crew” from toenails to eyebrows for bugs and weapons.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  ‘And smuggled cigarettes.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  In the sidpa bardo, said some versions of the Bardo Thodol, the spirit was given a body superficially like the former physical shell, but endowed with miraculous powers, with all sense faculties complete, and the capability of unimpeded motion. Karmic miraculous powers.

  Thus the vision of Lobsang embraced the world – all the worlds. Sister Agnes would probably ask if his soul was flying high above the ground.

  And, thinking of Agnes, Lobsang looked down on an unprepossessing children’s home in a stepwise copy of Madison, Wisconsin, in May 2041, half a year after the eruption . . .

  As that bad first winter gave way to a desolate spring, and America entered a long period of post-Yellowstone recovery, newly re-elected President Cowley announced that the nation’s capital was to be, pro tem, Madison West 5, replacing an abandoned Datum DC. And he was going to deliver a big speech to inaugurate the city into its new role from the steps of this world’s version of the Capitol building, a big barn of timber and blown concrete that was a brave imitation of its long-destroyed Datum parent.

  Joshua Valienté was sitting in the parlour of the Home, staring at TV images of an empty presidential podium. He was here ostensibly to visit with fifteen-year-old Paul Spencer Wagoner, an extremely bright and extremely troubled kid who Joshua had first encountered in a place called Happy Landings, many years ago. Joshua had been instrumental in getting Paul into the Home after his family broke up. But Paul was out right now, and Joshua couldn’t resist tuning in to the sight of a President, in Madison.

  Cowley bounced up on to the stage, all teeth and hair, under a rippling Stars and Stripes – the new holographic version of the flag, enhanced to reflect the reality of the nation’s stepwise extension into the Long Earth.

  ‘I’m amazed he’s actually here,’ Joshua said to Sister John.

  Sister John, born Sarah Ann Coates and once, like Joshua, a resident of the Home on Allied Drive in Datum Madison, now ran this relocated institution. Her habit was as always clean and pressed. Now she smiled and said, ‘Amazed at what? That the President chose Madison for the new capital? It is about the most mature city in the Low Americas.’

  ‘Not just that. Look who’s up there on the stage with him. Jim Starling, the Senator. Douglas Black.’

  ‘Hmmph,’ said Sister John. ‘They should have invited you. As a local celebrity. As cheeseheads go, you’re famous: Joshua Valienté, hero of Step Day.’

  Step Day, when every kid in the world had built a Stepper box and immediately got lost in the forests of wild parallel worlds. In the vicinity of Madison it had been Joshua who had brought the lost children home – including Sarah, now Sister John.

  Joshua said ruefully, ‘I always kind of hope people have for gotten. Anyway they’d probably kick me off the podium because I’m so grimy. Damn ash, no matter how hard I scrub I can never get it out of my pores.’

  ‘Still going back to the Datum on rescue missions?’

  ‘We are going back, but there’s nobody left to rescue. Now we’re reclaiming stuff from the abandoned zone close to the caldera, across Wyoming, Montana, the Rocky Mountain states. It’s surprising what’s survived: clothing, gasoline, canned food, even animal feed. And we bring out anything technical that looks usable. Cellphone masts, for instance. Stuff we’ll need for the recovery efforts in the Low Earths. Most of the workers are impressed labour from the refugee camps.’ He grinned. ‘They fill up their pockets with any money they find. Dollar bills.’

  Sister John snorted. ‘Given the way the economy’s tanked and the markets have crashed, those bills would be more useful burned to keep warm.’

  He made to reply, but she shushed him as Cowley began his speech.

  After a routine opening, all welcome and wisecracks, Cowley summed up the situation of America and the Datum world, eight months after the eruption. As winter turned to spring, things weren’t getting any better. The global climatic effects had locked in. The monsoon rains in the Far East had failed last fall. Since then, pretty much everywhere across the world north of the latitude of Chicago – Canada, Europe, Russia, Siberia – had endured the most savage winter anybody could remember. Now a matching calamity was already unfolding below the equator as the southern-hemisphere winter arrived.

  All of which meant that a new world had to be planned for.

  ‘Well, now, we got through this first winter living off the fat of the past – of the pre-volcano days. We can’t afford to do that no longer, because it’s all – used – up.’ Cowley emphasized that with hand-chops on his podium. ‘And nor can we rely on food imports from our neighbours and allies, who have been more than generous so far, but who have their own problems, this cold summer. And hey, Uncle Sam feeds himself. Uncle Sam looks after his own!’

  Cheers from the polite crowd gathered before the podium, and applause from the group of dignitaries behind Cowley on stage. As the camera panned across their faces Joshua noticed among Cowley’s aides a very young woman – no older than late teenage – slim, dark, sober, smart enough but dressed in what Datum folk tended to call ‘pioneer gear’: leather skirt, jacket over what looked like a hand-me-down blouse. He recognized her; she was called Roberta Golding, from Happy Landings. He’d met her last year at a school in Valhalla, the greatest city of the High Meggers, where, in now-remote pre-Yellowstone days, he and Helen had taken their son Dan as a prospective student. She’d seemed ferociously intelligent then, and if she was working in Cowley’s administration in some kind of position as senior as it appeared at such a young age then she was proving her potential.

  Oddly Joshua was reminded of that family he’d helped out of Bozeman not long after the eruption had begun, and how they’d mentioned a ‘sensible young lady’ in ‘pioneer gear’ who’d come around with good advice. Could that have been Roberta herself? The description fitted. Well, as far as he was concerned, the more sensible advice humanity got at a time like this the better . . .

  Joshua tuned back into the President.

  With the pre-Yellowstone stores exhausted, Cowley said, now was the time to plant the crops and grow the food that would feed them all in the coming winter, and beyond. The problem with that was that the Datum growing season this year was predicted to be brutally short, thanks to the volcanic cloud. And meanwhile the infant agricultural economies on the stepwise Low Earths, none of them established longer than a quarter of a century, didn’t have anything like the capacity yet to take up the challenge. Why, barely a fraction of all that stepwise land had even been cleared of virgin forest yet, on any of the new Earths.

  So there would be a ‘Relocation’, a new programme of mass migration, organized by the National Guard, FEMA, Homelands Security, and facilitated by the Navy with their twains. Before the eruption the Datum had hosted more than three hundred million Americans. Now the target would be that no stepwise world would try to support, this first year, more than thirty million – which was about the population of the US in the middle of the nineteenth century. And that meant spreading millions of people further out stepwise, out across a band of worlds at least ten wide, East and West. And, meanwhile, on all the settled worlds they would be ferociously clearing land for agriculture. All of this would have to happen this summer. For sure, Joshua thought, they were going to need whatever tools and hand-me-down clothes and whatnot he and the rest of the reclamation effort could retrieve from the shattered Datum.

  ‘It will be a movement of people to dwarf the biblical Exodus,’ Cowley said. ‘It will be an opening
up of a new frontier that will make the expansion into the Old West look like clearing my grandmother’s front yard. But we are Americans. We can do this. We can and will build a new America, fit for purpose. And I can tell you this. Just as I promised you that nobody would be left behind under the shadow of that infernal ash, so I promise you now: in the difficult seasons ahead, nobody will go hungry . . .’ The remainder of his words were drowned out by whoops and cheers.

  ‘Have to admit he does this well,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Yes. Even Sister Agnes says he’s grown into the role. Even Lobsang.’

  Joshua grunted. ‘I remember Lobsang predicting a super-eruption, more than once. Blow-ups like that accounted for some of the Jokers we found out in the Long Earth, the disaster-blighted worlds. But he didn’t see Yellowstone coming.’

  Sister John shook her head. ‘In the end he had no more insight than the geologists on whose faulty data he had to rely. And he couldn’t have stopped it anyhow.’

  ‘True.’ Just as Lobsang had claimed to have been unable to avert a terrorist nuclear strike on Datum Madison itself, a decade earlier. Lobsang was evidently not omnipotent. ‘But I bet that doesn’t make him feel any better . . .’

  In the sidpa bardo, the spirit body was not a thing of gross matter. It could pass through rock, hills, earth, houses. By the mere act of focusing his attention, the locus that was Lobsang was here, there and everywhere. But increasingly he wished to be at the side of his friends.

  Friends like Nelson Azikiwe, who sat in the rectory lounge in his old parish of St John on the Water . . .

  Nelson’s host, the Reverend David Blessed, handed him another brimming mug of tea. Nelson was grateful for the warmth of the drink. This was August of 2042, in southern England – less than two years after the Yellowstone eruption – and outside it was snowing. Once again, autumn had come horribly early.

  The two of them studied the third person in the room, a local woman called Eileen Connolly, as she sat before the big TV screen, watching the news report as it was repeated over and over. Three days after the assassination attempt at the Vatican, the key audio and visual clips were dully familiar. The deranged scream: ‘Not those feet! Not those feet!’ The horror of the brandished weapon, a crucifix with a sharpened base. The Pope’s frail white-clad figure being dragged away from the balcony. The assassin vomiting helplessly as stepping nausea belatedly cut in.