Текст книги "The Long Mars"

Автор книги: Terence David John Pratchett

Соавторы: Stephen Baxter
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

28

SO, WITH LOBSANG’S urging to find out more about the anomalous outbreak of intelligence among mankind ringing in his ears, and with memories of previous encounters stirring in his memory, in the spring of 2045 Joshua went to see Paul Spencer Wagoner.

Nine years after Paul had first been admitted to the Home, he was still in Madison, in fact still based at the Home. Now aged nineteen, Paul had been allowed to stay on in an informal capacity of ‘care assistant’. It had been similar for Joshua. Even as he’d grown to a young adult Joshua had needed the shelter of the Home, or so he’d felt, to keep his own stepping ability private. Did Paul, with his abnormal intellect, feel that way too?

‘But there was no harm in you, Joshua,’ said Sister Georgina, now an old lady, all but immobile, with a smile like a sunbeam. ‘There’s no harm in him. Inasmuch as there’s no harm in the hurricane, or the lightning strike. Nothing intentional. Not really . . .’

Joshua had seen Paul a few times in the years since the boy had been brought here, whenever he called in to the Home. They found they shared a morbid sense of humour, and would play jokes on the long-suffering Sisters, often involving the detaching of Joshua’s artificial hand. But you had to be careful. Not all Paul’s jokes were a lot of fun for other people.

And now, as soon as Joshua got to the Home, somehow it wasn’t a surprise to see a young girl come running out of the front door crying, and Paul Spencer Wagoner half-heartedly following her, very obviously trying not to laugh.

Paul let Joshua take him for a coffee in downtown Madison West 5, on a pale imitation of the old Datum city’s State Street. Paul insisted on paying, however; he had a wallet full of credit cards.

Across the table, he eyed Joshua. ‘So, good old Uncle Joshua. Honorary uncle, anyhow. Back to check up on me, are you?’

The challenge wasn’t serious, Joshua saw. Nor was it playful, quite. It was more of a probe, a test. This wasn’t the Paul Spencer Wagoner Joshua had known before. He had hardened. Joshua saw a young man who was growing up to look like his father – ordinary-looking, really, not too handsome, not too plain. His thick dark hair was his best feature. His clothing was a jumble, with no evident sense of style or colour coordination, not that Joshua was any kind of fashion guru. It looked like he had raided the spare clothing locker at the Home and come out wearing whatever suited, whatever was practical for the day.

He had beefed up, filled out, and Joshua wasn’t surprised; no matter how smart he was, or rather because he was so smart, a kid like Paul needed to be able to defend himself physically. Once Joshua had even taken him to some sparring sessions. Joshua himself had sparred with Bill Chambers and other buddies as a boy – scenes later replayed with Lobsang, in much stranger circumstances. But Paul had scars he was always going to bear: one misshapen eyebrow, a broken nose, the remains of a nasty laceration on his neck.

Joshua just ignored Paul’s opening sally. He asked instead, ‘So, who was she? The girl at the door. What’s the story?’

‘The girl?’ To Joshua’s surprise, Paul had to think for a moment before he dug up her name. ‘Miriam Kahn. Local family, met her at a barn dance. Always liked barn dances, you know.’

‘You? Really?’

‘Is it so surprising? They were always big on barn dances out at Happy Landings. Well, there wasn’t much else to do. And with the fiddle players working away, and the trolls singing their rounds . . . I mean, the events are trivial, the repetitive music, the baby steps, but it is such a joy to throw yourself into the physical from time to time, isn’t it? We are not after all disembodied intelligences. Dancing and sex. Great sport, both of them. A kind of animal madness comes over you.’

‘So. Is that all that Miriam Kahn meant to you? “Sport.” Is that what you said to her?’

‘Oh, of course not. Well, not in so many words. Joshua, we love sex. My kind, I mean. And sex between us is the best of all, a union both physical and mental, of equals.’

And Joshua wondered: My kind?

‘But the trouble is there still aren’t many of us around. And so we turn to other partners. Look, Joshua, I know you’re less easily shocked than most. But that’s what I think poor Miriam picked up on. Sex with her, with one of you – well, can you imagine having sex with a dumb animal, a beast? I don’t mean some bizarre High Meggers thing, a lonely comber with his mule . . . Like mating with Homo erectus. Have you heard of that species? Fully human from the forehead down, anatomically. But from the eyebrows up, the brain of a chimp, more or less, scaled up for the bigger body. Can you imagine coupling with one of those? The animal thrill of the moment – the beautiful, empty eyes – the crashing shame you’d feel when it’s over?’

‘You’re telling me that’s how it was for you and this Miriam?’

‘More or less. But I can’t help myself, Joshua. It hurts me as much as it hurts them.’

‘I doubt that very much. Paul, what did you mean by your kind?’

Paul smiled. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you, when you showed up again. I know you can keep a secret, because you kept enough of your own, didn’t you? Look – I’ll show you. I have my Stepper box. I know you don’t need one. I’ve paid, let’s get out of here—’

He stepped away with the slightest pop of displaced air, leaving his coffee half-finished.

When Joshua had first built a Stepper box of his own, on Step Day, aged thirteen, he had stepped out of the Home in the city of Datum Madison, and into forest, primeval, untouched, unexplored, as far as he could tell. Since those days, thirty years on, the Low Earths had soaked up most of the stepwise migration away from the Datum, including the big flow since Yellowstone had popped.

But – and even Joshua sometimes forgot this – a stepwise Earth was a whole world, as big and roomy as the original, all but empty of humans before Step Day, and it could absorb a large stepping population while keeping much that was wild and primitive.

Thus it was that, only a few steps away from West 5, in the footprint of Madison itself, Joshua found himself in a forest glade as untouched as any unexamined world in the High Meggers, in this little corner at least. It was the old trees that gave it away, Joshua always thought. If you saw a really old tree, centuries or even millennia old, bent out of shape by the vicissitudes of time and coated with exotic lichen and fungi, you knew you were in someplace no farmer had ever cleared, no logger had ever plundered.

And in this glade a dozen young people, from middle teenagers to twenty-somethings, were at play.

Most of them sat around a heap of food, canned and film-wrapped, a hasty picnic. Two of them, both girls, swam naked in the small pool that was the centrepiece of the glade. And three others, two boys and a girl, were having noisy, giggling sex off in the shade of the trees. It might have been any bunch of kids at play, Joshua thought. Save for the inventive open-air sex. And save for the way they spoke to each other continually, a kind of high-speed jabber that sometimes sounded like compressed English, sometimes like the baby-talk produced by Paul’s sister Judy all those years ago, which Joshua still vividly remembered. Joshua could understand barely a word.

And they weren’t like ordinary kids in the way that the nearest of them immediately rounded on Joshua when he stepped in with Paul, all armed with bronze knives, and a couple further out with raised crossbows.

‘It’s OK,’ Paul said, hands held high. He squirted out some of the high-speed babble.

Joshua was still subject to suspicious stares, but the knives were lowered.

‘Come have a sandwich,’ Paul said to Joshua.

‘No thanks . . . What did you say to them?’

‘That you’re a dim-bulb. No offence, Joshua, but that was obvious to them already. Just from the way you looked around, with your jaw slack. Like you showed up dragging your knuckles, you know?’

‘A dim-bulb?’

‘But I also said you’re the famous Joshua Valienté, that I’ve known you since I was a little kid, that I trusted you to keep our secret. So you’re in. Not that there’s much of a secret to keep. We move the whole time, never visit the same place twice.’

‘Why do you need to do that?’

‘Well, we’ve all got scars, Joshua. If you want to know why, ask the people who gave them to us.’

‘All right. You say these are your kind.’

He grinned. ‘Actually we have a name. We call ourselves the Next. Not presumptuous at all, right? We thought about other names. The “Wide-awake”, compared with you sleepwalkers, you see. “The Next” is catchier.’

‘How did you find each other?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not so hard in the Low Earths. You people keep good records. A lot of our kind have problems at school and the like. And a lot of us have been institutionalized, one way or another, Joshua. Spent time in places like the Home, foster care agencies – in lunatic asylums, juvenile penal institutes. Also there are family names that can provide a link. Spencer, my mother’s maiden name. Montecute.’

‘Happy Landings names.’

‘Yeah. That was the breeding ground, or one of them. We don’t fit in your world, Joshua, but at least we leave a trace as we pass through it. Having said that, there must be some who do fit in, who keep their heads down, who find a place in your society somehow. We haven’t found any of them yet. They may be aware of us . . . I guess we’ll meet up some day.’

‘Hmm. I’ll be honest, Paul. The way you keep saying us and you is disturbing me.’

‘Well, that’s bad luck for you, Joshua. Get used to it. Because it’s been obvious to me ever since I hooked up with others of my kind – for the first time since they took my little sister away, and I had no one to talk to – that we are a different kind, fundamentally. That’s not to say we haven’t had a few disputes. We’re arrogant sons of bitches; we’re all used to being the brightest in our own little circle of dim-bulbs. But when we’re together, we just race away.

‘Joshua, you needn’t think we’re cooking up the next atom bomb here. We’re super-smart, but right now we don’t know anything. Nothing much more than you know, I mean, and half of that’s wrong and the rest is mostly illusion . . . We’re like the young Einstein in that patent office in Switzerland, staring at an empty notebook, dreaming of flying on a beam of light. He had the vision, but lacked the mathematical tools, yet, to realize his theory.’

‘Modest, aren’t you?’

‘No. Nor immodest. Just honest. For now we’re more potential than achievement. But that will come. Already is coming, in a way.’ He glanced at Joshua. ‘I saw you watching me in the coffee bar. Wondering where the hell I got my money from, yes? It’s all legal, Joshua. We’re particularly good at mathematics, an area where you don’t necessarily need a lot of life experience to excel. Some of us came up with investment-analysis algorithms – it wasn’t hard to find loopholes in the rules, ways to beat the system. We don’t play the markets ourselves; we just found middle men to sell the software. That kind of thing – that’s how we make our money.’

‘Sounds like you’re playing with fire. You need to be careful.’

‘Oh, we’re careful. It’s not as if we need to spend much anyhow. Not for now, not until we figure out what we’re going to do, where we’re going to go . . . Look, Joshua, one reason I brought you here is because I thought you would understand. For us to gather like this – it’s not about mathematics or philosophy, or making money or whatever, not even about the future. It’s just about being with others like ourselves. Can you imagine how it was for a kid like me, alone? To be surrounded by a bunch of upright apes with minds like guttering candles, and yet who had built this vast civilization full of rules and a crushing weight of tradition, none of which makes any sense if you just look at it . . . And having to act like you’re the same as everybody else. Then, can you imagine what it’s like, for the first time in your life, to find people who can keep up with you? For whom you don’t have to slow down, or explain – or, worse yet, pretend? Where you can just be the way you need to be?’

Joshua met Paul’s intense stare, trying not to flinch. Paul was just a not particularly well-turned-out nineteen-year-old boy. His face was smooth, young, his brow clear. But his eyes were like a predator’s eyes – like the eyes of a cave lion, and Joshua had encountered plenty of those out in the Long Earth in his time. He had met at least one super-intelligent entity before, he reminded himself, in Lobsang. But even Lobsang’s artificial visages showed more empathy than he detected in Paul’s gaze.

Joshua was afraid, and he was determined not to show it.

To break the moment Joshua glanced over his shoulder, where the three-way coupling, uncomfortably noisy for him, was still going on. ‘I can see you also get a lot of hot sex.’

‘Well, that’s one thing. When I’m with Greta or Janet or Indra, it’s not like it is with a dim-bulb girl, like poor Miriam Kahn. It’s real, it’s the whole of me engaged with the other, not just my hormones expressing themselves. We don’t even have to obey your rules, your taboos.’

‘I can see that.’

‘People fear us because we’re smarter than them. I guess that’s natural. But what they don’t see is that we’re fundamentally not interested in them, you know? Not unless they’re standing before us, getting in our way. It’s each other that fascinates us. Enriches us. And I thought you would understand because you were special too, weren’t you, Joshua? When you were my age, or younger. You thought you were the only natural stepper in the world.’

‘Yeah.’ And it wasn’t until he was twenty-eight years old, in fact, when he’d met Sally Linsay, that Joshua had first fully understood that he wasn’t alone, that there were whole families of secret steppers out there, if you knew where to look.

‘Maybe you remember how it felt to have to hide, to pretend. And what you feared they might do to you, if they found you out. Well, you’ve told me as much.’

‘OK, Paul. Look, I appreciate you trusting me this far. Showing me all this – showing me yourselves. I know it cost you to do this, that you’re taking a risk. Maybe going forward I can help you some more.’

Paul grunted, sceptical. ‘How? By being the latest in a long line to tell us how we have to “fit in”?’

‘Well, maybe. But I’m Joshua Valienté, king of the steppers, remember. Maybe I can find you a better place to hide. The Long Earth’s got a lot of room. And I can show you a better way to live out there. Ways to set traps and snares, to hunt.’

‘Hmm. Let me think it over—’

But there was no more time for talk. Because that was when the cops arrived.

There were twenty of them, maybe more, an overwhelming number, and they just stepped right on into the forest glade. They seemed to have everything spied out. They jumped on the kids, and took away or smashed their Stepper boxes. Joshua saw just one girl, evidently a natural stepper, get away, but a couple of cops headed off after her too.

Joshua had heard of this kind of tactic, evolved by the Low Earths’ police and military after three decades of dealing with steppers, and their ease of escape and evasion. You did your surveillance. You went in hard, without hesitation, without warning, with overwhelming force. You immediately took away the Stepper boxes from those who used them before they had a chance to react. And you made natural steppers helpless, usually by rendering them unconscious immediately. The theory was brutal, and the reality, if you were on the end of it, even more so.

And, cuffed himself, pushed to the ground, Joshua was able to see who had betrayed them, those Paul had called my kind, the Next. It was Miriam Kahn, who Joshua had last seen brokenhearted and running from the Home.

She pointed coldly at Paul. ‘That’s him, Officer.’

29

LONG MARS, one point five million steps East, as near as dammit. More than forty days into this stepwise trek.

And suddenly the crimson plain below the gliders was full of action.

Frank was at the controls of Thor, with Sally sitting behind him. Frank’s first glimpse was of dust rising from charging vehicles, a herd of some tremendous beasts racing, a glint of metal – and fire, fire shooting out like flame-throwers in the Vietnam jungle.

Frank’s first reaction was to pull on his joystick, lifting the nose of the glider up and away. He yelled to Willis in Woden, ‘Climb! Climb! We don’t want that flame weapon to reach us!’

‘Roger that,’ Willis replied more calmly. ‘But I don’t think that’s a weapon, Frank. Take a closer look.’

When he had the glider climbing smoothly, Frank did take another look, through a panel on his console with an image he could zoom in with a touch. He saw again those big animals (how big? – his mind recoiled from making an estimate) fleeing over the plain, some kind of herd of them – maybe a dozen, big and small, adults and children. From above they looked like storybook dinosaurs, massive bodies with long necks, long tails balanced front and back, and galloping legs. ‘They’re like sauropods, maybe,’ he suggested.

‘Maybe. But those “sauropods” are bigger than anything we ever had on Earth,’ Willis said. ‘I’m recording a total length of two hundred and fifty feet, from nose to tail. Like eight blue whales laid end to end. Total height about fifty feet. A lot bigger than even Amphicoelias, which, I’m reading now, was the largest sauropod on Earth. That’s Martian gravity for you. And they’ve got a dozen pairs of legs each. No wonder they’re so fast. Also armoured, with bands of shell on their backs.’

Sally said, ‘Those sand whales had a dozen pairs of flippers. Same anatomy.’

‘I think they’re this world’s versions of the sand whales. Descendants from some common root. Look at the necks, like tubes, and those wide mouths. And – oh, my word—’

One of the big beasts stopped and turned, skidding in the dust of what looked like another dried-up lake. It rose up, uncurling its body so two, three, four sets of limbs were off the ground, and lifted its mighty neck to grow tall, and it loomed over the vehicles following it – Frank hadn’t got a good look at them yet – and it opened that big sand-whale mouth and belched a gout of flame. The fire licked down at the hunters, whose vehicles turned and scattered.

‘There’s your napalm thrower, Frank,’ Willis said.

‘A fire breather,’ Sally said. ‘What a sight.’

‘Just as well it can’t fly,’ Frank said practically.

Willis, in Woden, snorted. ‘Probably just igniting methane from its digestive system.’

Frank forced a laugh. ‘In the service, I knew a guy who lit his farts with a cigarette lighter.’

‘Don’t spoil the magic,’ Sally said. ‘That’s the nearest thing to a dragon I’m ever likely to see.’

‘And think about it,’ Willis said. ‘For some reason this Mars is evidently full of life, and vigorous life. Why would a beast that size need armour plating, and a flame-thrower? Imagine its true predators.’

‘True predators?’

‘As opposed to those hunters down below, Frank. And by the way – too late about avoiding being seen.’

Frank, with an effort, looked away from the big beast at bay.

The little flotilla of vehicles behind the flame-breathing dragon scattered and slowed, and as the dust settled around them Frank made out details. The vehicles weren’t carts, they had no wheels; they were more like sand-yachts, sail-driven, riding on some kind of skid system. The dust-coated structures looked so primitive technologically he guessed they were made of wood, or some local equivalent. Their occupants, two or three to a yacht, were nothing remotely like humans. They were crustaceans, a form familiar from other encounters, but in this particular evolutionary arena they had developed supple armoured bodies, long manipulating limbs that held weapons: spears, bows perhaps.

And, yes, the gliders had been seen. Frank saw what looked like raised chitinous fists waving, even a spear thrown in futile threat into the air.

He said, ‘I’m guessing we don’t go down there.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Sally. ‘And look over there.’ She pointed over Frank’s shoulder.

There were more hunters chasing more land-dragons, further away across the plain, oblivious, it seemed, to the presence of the gliders in the sky. As one party caught up with a fleeing beast, Frank saw spears protrude from its hide, and ropes fixed to the spears hauled a handful of yachts along in its wake. It must take some skill to plant a thing like a harpoon between those armour plates. One boat turned over, scattering its occupants, and Frank got a glimpse of the skids, which were white as ivory.

He said to Sally, ‘Those skids look like bone. Maybe these guys are like the old nineteenth-century whalers who used to build bits of the beasts they brought down into their boats . . . Sally, what’s that you’re singing?’

‘It’s called “Harpoon of Love”. Just a stray memory – never mind.’

Willis growled, ‘And look ahead, to the north.’

Frank levelled the glider and looked that way, away from the bloody commotion below him. And he saw, standing up from the smooth flatness of the seabed, a series of dark bands, slender, vertical, black against the purplish sky of this world.

Monoliths. Five of them.

All this was too much for Frank to take in. ‘I don’t believe it. Land-dragons? Crustacean whalers in sand-yachts? And now this?’

Sally said, ‘What, would you prefer another dead Mars?’

‘I’m at the limit of my scope’s resolution,’ Willis called back. ‘And this damn air is full of dust, and moisture. But I think those slabs bear some kind of inscription.’

Frank said wildly, ‘What inscription? Prime number sequences? A build-your-own-wormhole instruction manual?’

‘Something like that, possibly,’ Willis said, reasonably patiently in the circumstances. ‘The legacy of the Ancients.’

Sally snapped. ‘What are you talking about? What Ancients?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Frank said with a smile. ‘This is Mars. This is the story of Mars, which is always an old world, old and worn down. There are always monuments left behind by the Ancients, the vanished ones, enigmatic inscriptions . . .’

Willis growled, ‘Let’s stick to reality. We’re not going to know any more until we take a copy of those inscriptions back home for a proper analysis.’ His glider tipped towards the monoliths. ‘We have to get in there and record it all, maybe take a sample of the monolith material itself. Then we’ll go on—’

‘After finding this you want to go on?’

‘Sure. This is wonderful. But it’s not what I came looking for. And—’

Behind him, Sally cried out. ‘Ow, Jeez, my head . . .’

An instant later, Frank felt it too.

For the rest of that day, they tried every way they could think of to get close enough to the monoliths to record their surface images. But something was blocking their approach.

If they flew in, or even if they landed and tried to walk in, they all suffered blinding, agonizing headaches. Sally was reminded of the pressure Joshua Valienté claimed he had felt in the presence of the huge entity they knew as First Person Singular. Or the way the trolls were repelled by the density of human consciousness on Datum Earth. Evidently humanoids shared some kind of faculty, a sensitivity to mind – a faculty that these hypothetical ‘Ancients’ were able to manipulate.

Willis tried to trick the mechanism by moving to a stepwise world, moving in closer to the monolith site, and stepping in – but the pain nearly disabled him, even stepwise where there was no direct trace of the monoliths.

They tried sending in their drone aircraft, but another defence strategy came into play. The little planes were just pushed away, physically, as if by an invisible hand in the air, until they reached some limit beyond which their automatic guidance cut back in, and they would turn and try again. Willis wanted to try sending in one of the gliders under remote control, but the others vetoed that.

‘Whatever is written on there,’ Frank sadly concluded, ‘it’s not meant for us. Those Ancients of yours are keeping us out, Willis.’

‘Oh, we’re not beaten yet. We’ll find a way.’

They landed a safe distance away from the sand-whalers.

Later, as the light was fading, as they were setting up a bubble tent for the night, Sally pointed to the north. ‘Look. At the feet of the monoliths. My eye was caught by something . . . I see a dust trail. And are those sand-yachts?’

They were, Frank confirmed, by looking through binoculars held up to his pressure-suit faceplate. Three, four, five of the whalers were rushing past the base of the monoliths as if they didn’t exist. ‘They aren’t even slowing down.’

Willis said, ‘Infuriating. Those sand-whalers have absolutely no idea what they’re dealing with here. The monoliths are just a feature of the landscape to them.’

‘Which,’ Sally said, ‘might be why they can get so close.’

Frank said, ‘Maybe the monoliths are meant for them, some day – not us. Listen, I’m satisfied we’re far enough from those whalers that they won’t bother us tonight. But you don’t take chances. I think we should keep some kind of watch in case those guys come visiting.’

‘Agreed,’ Sally said.

Willis stood there, still in his pressure suit, thinking. ‘We ought to send up one of the gliders. Just to make sure they don’t sneak up on us.’

Frank considered. ‘That seems excessive, Willis. A drone will do just as well.’

‘No, no.’ He strode off. ‘I’ll take Woden. Better to be sure . . .’

Of course there was no stopping him. And of course he’d lied. He’d had no intention of serving as some aerial sentry.

Once he had Woden in the air, there was absolutely nothing Frank and Sally could do to stop him turning the glider’s nose south, towards the main party of whalers.

‘He hasn’t even got the comms system on, damn him,’ Frank growled, frustrated, twisted up with anxiety. ‘What the hell’s he doing?’

Sally seemed calm. ‘Gone to find a way to get those images he wants,’ she said. ‘What else? That’s what my father does. He goes and gets what he wants.’

‘He’ll get himself killed, that’s what he’ll go and get. He’s your father. You seem cool about it.’

She shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

Frank shook his head. ‘If you fix up the tent, I’ll go check over Thor. Make sure we’re ready to go get him out of there fast if we need to.’

‘Fair enough.’

In the end Willis didn’t make his approach to the whalers until first light.

Frank, who had spent a fretful, sleepless night swathed in his half-closed pressure suit, was wakened by a soft beep from the comms system. ‘Sally. He’s online.’

She sat up immediately; she always slept very lightly.

‘Go ahead, Willis—’

Frank found himself staring at a screen image of the upraised carcass of a giant insect-like creature, taller than a man when it stood upright. Over a tough-looking exoskeleton it wore belts and bandoliers containing tools, loops of rope, and it held a spear in three, four of its multiple limbs, a spear with a rope attached: a harpoon. All this was seen through a greyish mist. And the creature was pointing the spear straight into the camera.

‘Convergent evolution,’ Willis’s voice murmured.

‘Willis?’

‘You’re seeing what I’m seeing, through my helmet cam. Convergent evolution. That harpoon might have come from a Nantucket whaling ship. Similar problems demand similar solutions.’

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.