Текст книги "The Long Mars"

Автор книги: Terence David John Pratchett

Соавторы: Stephen Baxter
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Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

{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 events 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 eyes 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.

‘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 discussing 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.