Текст книги "The Long Mars"

Автор книги: Terence David John Pratchett

Соавторы: Stephen Baxter
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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.

The would-be assassin was English. His name was Walter Nicholas Boyd. He’d been a staunch Catholic all his life. And what he’d done, single-handed, was to build a scaffolding in Rome East 1 to match precisely the position and height of the balcony of St Peter’s, where the Pope stood to bless the crowds in the Square below. It was an obvious location for a troublemaker, but astonishingly, and unforgivably in these times of step-related acts of terror, the Vatican security people hadn’t blocked it. And Walter Nicholas Boyd had climbed his scaffolding, stepped over with his sharpened wooden crucifix, and had tried to murder the Pope. The pontiff had been badly wounded, but would live.

Now, watching the reports, Eileen began to hum a tune.

David Blessed smiled, looking tired. ‘That’s the hymn they all sing. And did those feet in ancient times / Walk upon England’s mountains green? / And was the holy Lamb of God / On England’s pleasant pastures seen? . . .’ He half-sang it himself. ‘Blake’s Jerusalem. Mr Boyd was protesting against what they are calling the Vatican’s “land-grab”, wasn’t he?’

‘He was,’ Nelson said. ‘In fact there’s a global protest movement called “Not Those Feet”. To which Eileen belongs, does she?’

Eileen, forty-four years old, a mother of two, was once one of Nelson’s parishioners – and was now once more under the care of David Blessed, Nelson’s predecessor, who, in his eighties now, had come out of retirement to care for the parish in these dark post-volcano days.

‘She does. Which is why she’s got herself into such a tangle of doubt.’

‘They are difficult times for all of us, David. Do you think I could speak to her now?’

‘Of course. Come. Let me refresh your tea.’

So Nelson gently questioned Eileen Connolly, taking her through her very ordinary story, her roles as a shop worker and mother – and then the divorce, but life had carried on, she had raised her children well. A very English life, more or less un troubled even by the opening up of the Long Earth. Untroubled, until the aftermath of the American volcano.

‘You have to move, Eileen,’ David said gently now. ‘Out into the Long Earth, I mean. And you have to take your children with you. You know how it is. We all have to go. England is bust. You’ve seen the local farmers struggling . . .’

Nelson knew the score. In this second year without a summer, the growing season even in southern England had been ferociously short. As late as June farmers had been struggling to plant fast-growing crops, potatoes, beets, turnips, in half-frozen ground, and there had barely been time to collect a withered harvest before the frosts returned again. In the cities there was hardly any activity save a desperate effort to save cultural treasures by stepping them away – although there would be a globally distributed, internationally supported ‘Museum of the Datum’ in the stepwise worlds, the governments promised; nothing would be lost . . .

David said, ‘And it’s only going to get worse, for years and years. There’s no doubt about it. Dear old England can’t support us any more. We must go out to these brave new worlds.’

But Eileen would not respond.

Nelson wasn’t sure he understood. ‘It’s not that she can’t step, is it, David? She’s no kind of phobic?’

‘Oh, no. I’m afraid it’s theological doubts that afflict her.’

Nelson had to smile. ‘Theology? David, this is the Church of England. We don’t do theology.’

‘Ah, but the Pope does, and that’s what’s got everybody stirred up, you see . . .’

Eileen looked calm, if faintly baffled, and she spoke at last. ‘The trouble is, you get so confused. The priests say one thing about the Long Earth, then the other. At first we were told it was a holy thing to go out there, because you have to leave all your worldly goods behind when you step. Well, almost all. It was like taking a vow of poverty. So for instance the New Pilgrimage Order of the Long Earth was set up to go out and administer to the needs of the new congregations that would form out there. I read about that, and gave them some money. That was fine. But then those archbishops in France started saying the crosswise worlds were all fallen places, the devil’s work, because Jesus never walked there . . .’

Nelson had read up on this in preparation for meeting Eileen. In a way it had been an extension of old arguments about whether inhabitants of other planets could be regarded as ‘saved’ or not, if Christ had been born only on Earth. Out in the Long Earth, as far as anybody knew, no humans had evolved anywhere beyond Datum Earth. So Christ’s incarnation had surely been unique to Datum Earth. In fact the body of Christ Himself had been uniquely composed of atoms and molecules from the Datum. So what was the theological status of all those other Earths? What of the children already being born on worlds of the Long Earth, their very bodies composed of atoms that had nothing to do with the world of Christ? Were they saved by His incarnation, or not?

To Nelson it had all been a hideous mish-mash of misunderstood science and medieval theology. But he knew that many Catholics, all the way up to the Vatican itself, had been confused by such arguments. And, it seemed, members of other Christian denominations.

Eileen said now, ‘All of a sudden you started reading about these hucksters selling Holy Communion wafers from Datum Earth, which they said were the only valid ones to use because they came from the same world as Lord Jesus.’

‘They were just hucksters,’ Nelson said gently.

‘Yes, but then suddenly the Pope says that the Long Earth was all part of God’s dominion after all . . .’

Nelson had a healthy cynicism about the sudden change in the Vatican’s stance towards the Long Earth. It was all about demographics. With the continuing mass exodus from much of the planet, colonies on the nearby worlds were suddenly filling up with lots of little potential Catholics. And so, just as suddenly, all those new worlds were holy after all. The Pope had taken his theological justification from Genesis 1:28: ‘And God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it.’ The fact that God didn’t explicitly say the Long Earth was no problem, any more than it had been in 1492 that the Bible hadn’t mentioned the Americas. But you did still need to have your priests’ source of blessing deriving from the Pope, so that the Datum Vatican remained the source of all authority. Oh, and contraception was still a sin.

Some commentators marvelled at the way the two-thousand-year-old institution of the Church had survived yet another huge philosophical and economic dislocation, as it had the fall of the Roman empire that had nurtured it, and the science of Galileo, Darwin and the Big Bang cosmologists. But even some Catholics were appalled at what was called the most audacious land-grab since 1493, when Pope Alexander VI had divided the entire New World between Spain and Portugal: here was an antique ideology claiming hegemony over infinity. Hence Walter Nicholas Boyd, and his despairing cry of ‘Not those feet!’

And hence poor Eileen Connolly with her utter confusion.

‘I didn’t like what the Pope said,’ Eileen said firmly now. ‘I’ve been out there, on treks and holidays and that, in the stepwise worlds. You’ve got people building farms and homes from nothing, with their bare hands. And all those animals nobody ever saw before. No, I’d say we have to be humble, not just claim that it’s all ours.’

David said, ‘That does sound wise, Eileen—’

‘I feel angry sometimes,’ Eileen said bluntly. ‘Oh, just as angry as that fellow Boyd on the TV, probably. I sometimes think this place, Datum Earth, is so foul and messed up that it’s the source of all evil. That all the innocent worlds of the Long Earth would be better off if this place could be stoppered up, somehow. Like a big old bottle.’

David said gently, ‘You can see why I asked for your help, Nelson. People do get superstitious, you know, in apocalyptic times like these.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Over in Much Nadderby, there have been mutterings about a case of witchcraft.’

‘Witchcraft!’

‘Or possibly a demonic possession. A little boy who was brighter than the rest – eerily so. One tries to calm things down, of course. But now this nonsense from the Vatican!’ He shook his head. ‘Sometimes I feel we’re so foolish we deserve all the suffering we get.’

And Nelson, who had become a close ally of Lobsang – or, as Lobsang had put it, a ‘valuable long-term investment’ – knew that Lobsang, at least some of the time, would agree.

‘This is what I’d like you to do. Go with her, Nelson. Go out with Eileen, at least for a while. God knows I’m too old. But you . . . Go with her. Bless her. Bless the land she and her children settle in. Baptize them anew, if they wish. Whatever it takes to reassure her that God is with her, wherever she takes her children. And whatever the wretched Pope says.’

Nelson smiled. ‘Of course.’

David stood up. ‘Thank you. I’ll fetch us another pot of tea.’

Lobsang longed for his friends.

At least, in the aftermath of Yellowstone, they had been drawn back to the Datum, like emergency workers rushing towards the fire. Lobsang had welcomed their company, even when, like Joshua Valienté, they seemed to have little time for him. But as the years had worn away since the eruption, and the situation stabilized, they came back less and less, they resumed their own lives, far away once more.

Sally Linsay, for instance. Who, four years after the eruption, could have been found on a parallel world some one hundred and fifty thousand steps away from Datum Earth. Although Sally Linsay was always very, very hard to find . . .

You could call it Sally’s mission in life to be hard to find. Although in fact her life was full of missions, especially when it came to the flora and fauna of the Long Earth, about which she was quite passionate.

Which was why, in this late fall of 2044, she had come to an otherwise unremarkable settlement, in the middle of the Corn Belt, in a stepwise Idaho: a place called Four Waters City.

And why she was carefully placing the gagged and bound body of a hunter by the back door of the sheriff’s office.

The guy was awake while she was doing it, his piggy eyes staring at her in alarm. He didn’t know his luck, she thought. He probably didn’t feel all that lucky, but given the kind of bad luck you sometimes got when it came to the ears of Sally Linsay that you had killed a troll – a female, a mother, and about to give birth . . . At least she hadn’t cut off his trigger finger for him. At least he was still alive. And the itching that was agonizing him now, induced by the venomous spines of a very useful plant she’d discovered up in the High Meggers, was probably going to subside, oh, in a couple of years, no more. Plenty of time for him to reflect on his sins, she thought. Call it tough love.

And it was precisely because she was so hard to find that places she was known to call at – like Four Waters City, even though her visits were not frequent and certainly not regular – were so useful for getting in touch with Sally if you really, really needed to.

That was why the sheriff herself emerged from her office in the dawn chill, glanced down without much interest at the blubbing hunter, and called Sally over. Once back in her office she rummaged in a drawer.

Sally stayed outside the door. There were powerful aromas emanating from the office, a concentrated version of the colony’s general atmosphere, which she was reluctant to breathe in too deeply. This particular community had always been a culture suffused with exotic pharmacology.

At length the sheriff handed Sally an envelope.

The envelope was handwritten. Evidently it had been sitting in that drawer, in the office, for more than a year. The letter within was handwritten too, very badly, but Sally had no trouble recognizing the hand, even if she had some difficulty actually deciphering the note. She read it silently, lips framing the words.

Then she murmured, ‘You want me to go where? The Gap? . . . Well. After all these years. Hello, Dad.’

Friends of Lobsang’s like Joshua Valienté. Camping on a hillside on a world more than two million steps West of the Datum. Escaping the ongoing five-years-on disaster zone that was the Datum and the Low Earths, fleeing into the security of one of his long sabbaticals. Utterly alone, missing his family, yet unwilling to return to his unhappy home.

Joshua Valienté, who, having celebrated New Year’s Day of 2045 with nothing stronger than a little of his precious stash of coffee, woke up with a headache. He yelled into an empty sky: ‘What now?’

2

WITH HER FINAL STEP, Sally emerged a cautious half-mile or so from the fence surrounding the GapSpace facility. Inside the fence was what looked like a heavy engineering plant, blocks, domes and towers of concrete, brick and iron, some of them wreathed with plumes of smoke, or vapour from the boil-off of cryogenic fluids.

Willis Linsay, her father, had specified a particular day for her to show up here. Well, however this latest interaction with her father turned out, here she was as requested on this January day, back in this supremely strange corner of a version of north-west England more than two million steps from the Datum. On the face of it, it was a bland British winter’s day, dull, cold.

And yet infinity was a step away.

The moon was up, but it wasn’t the moon she was used to. The asteroid the GapSpace nerds called Bellos had spattered this moon liberally with extra craters that had almost obliterated the Mare Imbrium, and Copernicus was outdone by a massive new impact that had produced rays that stretched across half the disc. Bellos had come wandering out of many stepwise skies, its trajectory a matter of cosmic chance, coming close to the local Earth, or not. Bellos had completely missed uncounted billions of Earths altogether. A few dozen, like this one, had been unlucky enough to be close enough to its path to suffer multiple impacts from stray fragments. And one Earth had been hit hard enough to be smashed completely.

Things like that must be going on all the time across the Long Earth. Who was it that said that in an infinite universe anything that could happen would have somewhere to happen in? Well, that meant that on an infinite planet . . . Everything that can happen must happen somewhere.

And Sally Linsay had found this huge wound, with Joshua Valienté and Lobsang, found this Gap in the chain of worlds. Their twain had fallen into space, into vacuum, into unfiltered sunlight that hit like a knife . . . And then they had stepped back, and survived.

The air here was cold, but Sally sucked at it until the oxygen made her drunk. She had lived through that fall into the Gap once. And now, was she really planning to go back?

Well, she had to. For one thing her father had challenged her. For another, people were working in there now. In the Gap, in space. And this was their base, one step short of the Gap itself.

The sea breeze was the same as she remembered, from her last visit with Monica Jansson five years ago – back in a different age, the age before Yellowstone. The big sky, the call of birds, were unchanged. Otherwise she barely recognized the place. Even the fence before her had developed from a flimsy barrier into a regular Berlin Wall, all concrete and watchtowers. No doubt the interior of the facility itself was riddled with intensive anti-stepper security.

The purpose of all this industry was evident. She could already see the profile of one rocket, elegant, classic and unmistakable. This really was a space launch facility. But it was not like Cape Canaveral, in the finer detail. There were no towering gantries, and that single rocket she spied was short, stubby, nothing like the great bulks of a shuttle or a Saturn V – surely inadequate for the task of climbing up out of Earth’s deep gravity. But it didn’t need to beat Earth’s gravity, that was the point; that rocket would not be launched into the sky but stepwise, into the emptiness of the universe next door.

Overall, instead of being endearingly backyard-rocketship amateurish as it had been, the facility and its approaches now looked like one big engineers’ playground. The Gap had become big business these last few years, she knew, as governments, universities and corporations back on the Datum had gradually woken up to the potential of the place. Now hoardings shouted the names of every major technical outfit Sally could think of, from Lockheed to IBM via the Long Earth Trading Company – and including the Black Corporation, of course. This had become probably one of the most crowded stepwise locations beyond Valhalla, the greatest city of the High Meggers.

Which was one reason she hadn’t come near the place for years. And why it was hard to take a single pace forward, like she had a phobia. She reflected that Joshua Valienté would do better in this situation. Good old Joshua now seemed quite at home in moderately cramped social situations like this, while she was ever more a loner and a hardened misanthrope.

But it was her father who had summoned her here, and nothing could change him, for better or worse. Willis Linsay, dear old Dad: creator of the Stepping box, a gadget probably stolen out of the box from under Pandora’s nose and released into an unsuspecting world. That was Dad all over, tinker, tinker. If you couldn’t find him, just head towards the explosions and the wail of ambulances . . .

And as she stood there, reluctant, conflicted, uncertain, here he came, walking boldly out of the compound to meet her. How had he known she was here? Oh, of course he would know.

He was taller than she was – she had always had more of her mother’s colouring and body shape – and thinner than ever, like a man built of nothing but sinews and bone. After her mother had died he’d seemed to live on nothing but brandy, potatoes and sugar, for years.

He slowed as he approached her. They stood there, wary, eyeing each other.

‘So you came.’

‘What do you want, Dad?’

He grinned, a slightly deranged expression she remembered too well. ‘Same old Sally. Down to business, eh?’

‘Is there any point me asking what you’ve been doing – hell, since you turned the world upside down on Step Day?’

‘Pursuing projects,’ he murmured. ‘You know me. You either wouldn’t understand or you wouldn’t want to know. Suffice to say it’s all for the common good.’

‘In your opinion.’

‘In my opinion.’

‘And is there some new project that you brought me here for?’

‘Here?’ He glanced around at the GapSpace installation. ‘Here is only a waystation, en route to our ultimate destination.’

‘And where’s that?’

He said simply: ‘The Long Mars.’

Sally Linsay was used to wonder. She had grown up stepping, as a child she had walked into uncounted alien worlds. But even so, as her father spoke those words, she felt the universe pivot around her.

They were met at the compound gate by a guy her father introduced as Al Raup. While his scalp was shaven, a thick black beard sprouted from his chin, giving Sally the odd impression that his head had been rotated around the axis of his stub nose and re attached upside down. He wore canvas shorts, grubby sneakers with no socks, and a black T-shirt too small for his belly with a faded slogan:

SMOKE ME A KIPPER

He might have been any age between about thirty and fifty.

He stuck out his hand. ‘Call me Mr Ttt.’ Tuh-tuh-tuh.

She ignored the hand. ‘Hello, Al Raup.’

Willis raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, Sal, play nice.’

‘Come, let me show you around my domain . . .’

Raup swiped them through the security barriers, and they walked into the compound. Sally heard the growl of heavy vehicles, smelled brick dust and wet concrete, and saw giant cranes loom over holes in the ground. Workers wandered around in yellow hardhats. In some cases she saw ‘danger: radioactivity’ signs, and that was new since she’d last visited. Nuclear rockets under develop ment maybe?

She did notice a party of trolls labouring at a concrete mixer, apparently happy enough. Sally cared little for technology, or people, compared with animals.

‘So,’ Raup said. ‘Welcome to Cape Nerdaveral, Marsonauts!’

‘You’re exactly the type I remember from my last visit here,’ Sally snapped at him.

‘Ah, yes. When you snatched those trolls.’

‘When I liberated them. Glad to see your kind hasn’t gone extinct with the corporatization of this place.’

Raup waved fat fingers. ‘Ah, well, we geeks were here first. We figured out the basic parameters of how to use the Gap, we started the construction of the Brick Moon and sent over a few test shots, all before anybody even noticed we were here.’ His accent might have been middle American, but he had a strangulated, showy way of speaking, with looping vowels and over-precise consonants. She had an odd sense that he had already rehearsed in his head almost everything he said, in case he ever had an audience to use it on. ‘We’re no innocents. We filed a few patents. But in the end the corporate guys had no interest in screwing us over. Easier to buy us out; we were relatively cheap, in their terms, and we had expertise they needed.’ He grinned. ‘We Founders are all dollar millionaires. How cool is that?’

Sally couldn’t have cared less, and dismissed his bragging.

In among the gargantuan industrial facilities she saw sprawling residential blocks, bars, a hotel, a cinema-cum-theatre, a lot of casinos and gaming houses, and shadier-looking establishments she guessed might be strip joints or brothels. And there was one modest chapel, she saw, built of what looked like native oak, with a small graveyard set out within a low stone wall: a reminder that space travel was a dangerous occupation even here.

‘I can see you have plenty of chances to spend all those dollars.’

‘Well, that’s true. It’s something like an Old West mining town,’ Raup said. ‘Or maybe an oil rig. Or even early Hollywood, if you want a more glamorous example. Actually you have to watch your step these days.’

‘He means, there’s organized crime,’ Willis murmured. ‘Always drawn to places like this. There have already been a few murders, over gambling debts and the like. One way to do it is to just drop you into the Gap without a pressure suit, and no Stepper box. Sleeping with the stars, they call it. That’s why there’s such a security presence now: policing the criminal element, and watching out for saboteurs.’

Raup said, ‘But it’s still a cool place to be.’

Sally just dismissed that remark.

At the heart of the complex they walked down a kind of central mall lined with office blocks, brand new, concrete gleaming white and unstained. Raup led them to a low, flashy building marked with a bronze plaque: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN AUDITORIUM. There was a crowd at the doors and Raup had to produce passes to enable them to jump the line. He said apologetically, ‘We built this for Walter Cronkite-type news conferences. Our corporate masters insisted. Normally it’s deserted. But you’re in luck, Ms Linsay; the scuttlebutt is that the Martian rainstorms have cleared enough for the Envoy mission controllers to attempt a landing this very day. So it’s a good chance to show off to you what we’re doing here.’

Sally glanced at her father. ‘Rainstorms? On Mars?’

‘It isn’t our Mars,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

Raup led them into a central auditorium, with rows of benches before a lectern, the walls coated with big display screens. The place was full of chattering technicians and scientist types. For now the wall screens were blank, but smaller screens and tablets around the room showed grainy colour images being put through various enhancement processes. Sally glimpsed fragments of landscapes, grey-blue sky, rust-red ground.

‘Wow,’ Raup said, seeing the screen images, for once not sounding like he was simulating the emotions he expressed. ‘Looks like they did it, they landed the Envoy. The first time we made it, to this copy of Mars.’

‘Envoy?’

‘A series of unmanned space probes.’ Raup drew her attention to hard-copy images on the wall: trophy pictures of chunks of a planet, taken from space. ‘The first couple of Envoys to Mars were flybys, and these are the pictures we got. Today’s was the first actual landing, a necessary precursor to the manned missions that will follow. The very latest pictures, live from the Mars of the Gap!’