Текст книги "The Long Mars"

Автор книги: Terence David John Pratchett

Соавторы: Stephen Baxter
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

11

EARTH WEST 1,617,524: more than a million and a half worlds from the Datum, the original world of mankind, the Armstrong and Cernan hovered in a washed-out blue sky.

And below, on a green scrape amid arid wilderness on this late January day, smoke rose from the ruins of a city.

Already, just sixteen days into the journey of the Armstrong and Cernan, Maggie was far from home. She tried to picture, in a kind of human sense, just how far. For example, they had left behind the bulk of the Long Earth’s population in just a few hours. After Step Day there had been pulses of migration outward into the Long Earth, first the early wanderers, then the purposeful trekkers, and a new wave once twain technology was available and you could ride to your destination rather than walk. Then had come the mass flight from the Datum after Yellowstone, an evacuation of millions, unplanned and unprovisioned, that had overwhelmed all that had gone before.

Even following that, however, the populations of mankind were still relatively concentrated, with a bias towards the ‘centre’, the Datum and the worlds of the Low Earths. Further out there was a long, long tail, out through the thick bands of more or less similar Earths that humans had given such labels as Ice Belt or Mine Belt or Corn Belt. Valhalla, at around West one point four million, the greatest city in the deep Long Earth, was another useful marker point. That was the limit of the great twain-driven trade routes that had encouraged a certain cultural unity across the developing new worlds. More practically, it was about the furthest point at which you could expect the outernet to work.

But mankind’s colonization wavefront had spread further yet, thinning out into the still stranger, still less familiar worlds beyond Valhalla. Such as this one. Now Maggie Kauffman stood with her officers in the science section of her ship’s observation galleries, as Gerry Hemingway prepared to brief them on this world, showing imagery taken from the ground and a nanosat in orbit: tentative maps, geological and atmospheric profiles, classifications and analyses.

And all the while that ruined city was spread out beneath the ship’s prow, a tangle of dirt tracks and walls and field boundaries. It looked from the air as if it had been smashed flat and then burned out, leaving great blackened scars on the ground – though it was still inhabited, as you could tell from the smoke rising from scattered hearths. Everybody on both craft was a veteran of Yellowstone, of rescue and retrieval operations, and the devastation brought back harsh memories.

There were humans down below. The Armstrong hovered over a small huddle of bubble tents, a scraping of tyre tracks, a couple of heavy off-road vehicles. People had come to study this place. But the city itself had been built, not by humans, but by a race of alien sapients. It seemed almost incredible to Maggie to think of that, even as she stood here looking down on a city whose name, translated into human tongues, was something like ‘The Eye of the Hunter’. A city that had been built by the race called the beagles.

The three trolls were on the deck, huddled together, peering down at the ruins. They hooted their way through what sounded to Maggie like a softly sung but highly complex version of a funereal hymn, ‘Abide With Me’.

For this briefing Maggie had assembled the shore party she was planning to send down to the city. Maggie herself would lead. Wu Yue-Sai was here, as a gesture of cross-cultural friendship with the Chinese. Maggie had never encountered the beagles in person herself, but Joe Mackenzie, her chief medical officer, had relevant expertise; during the post-Yellowstone years he had actually spent time here as part of some kind of biological-stroke-cultural mission – a jaunt he’d told her virtually nothing about.

Wu looked like she was full of nothing but honest eagerness and curiosity. Mac, on the other hand, never the cheeriest of souls, glowered down at the city, almost hostile.

‘Hey.’ Maggie touched his shoulder. ‘You OK?’

‘I don’t know why you want me in this party.’

‘Because you worked here. Even though you never told me about it.’

He avoided her eyes. ‘Saw enough of this place back then. Look, why have we stopped? We’re going much further than this. It’s as if Lewis and Clark spent a week hanging out in a Chicago bar before—’

‘Well, we aren’t Lewis and Clark. We’ve got different mission objectives. You’ll see.’

Hemingway was now displaying global maps, images of this particular Earth. Maggie saw a layout of continents not very much different from those of Datum Earth, but not in quite the right places, landmasses that seemed enlarged, or smeared, even joined together: Australia was connected to south-east Asia by a fat neck of land, the Bering Strait was closed. In the heart of all the continents were the yellow-red stains of deserts. The oceans looked shrunken, and even the polar caps were diminished.

Gerry Hemingway said, ‘Some of the climatologists call these worlds Venusian, or Para-Venusian . . . It’s all about water. Datum Earth and Venus seem to be at two ends of a band of possible water content levels, for planets like ours. Our Earth has a lot of surface water in its oceans, of course, and in the air, and cycling around in the mantle. Venus may have started out with a similar water lode but lost it all early on. A world like this is somewhere on the spectrum between the two – significantly drier than Earth, not as dry as Venus. There is life here, even complex life, even sapients, but it’s sparse, isolated. The early Long Earth explorers, including the first Valienté mission, missed this exception. And its inhabitants. Well, you would, unless you took the time to survey the whole planet.’

Yue-Sai shook her head. ‘We always rush, rush across the Long Earth. So we did on the Zheng He. So we will on this wonderful craft! One always wonders what one misses, simply through not having time enough to see. So many worlds, so many wonders.’

Hemingway said, ‘It was only five years ago that the indigenous sapient culture was discovered. Since then, despite the demands of the Yellowstone crisis, an international consortium of universities has funded stations of observers and contact specialists: linguists, cultural analysts. You see one such camp below. And we contacted the local sapients.’ He hit a tab, and the map on his tablet lit up with a scattering of dots, spread around the fringes of the continents, and along the main water courses. ‘Here are the main communities we’ve detected so far. They tend to be small in extent but densely inhabited. That’s something to do with the beagles’ biology; they like to live in close bands. But they have links of communication and trade that span the continents.’

‘And war,’ Mac said sourly. ‘Their wars span continents too.’

‘War, yeah. We understand something of the political landscape. The beagles are grouped into Packs, which roughly correspond to our nations – or maybe what we think of as our races. The North American Pack is ruled by a Mother, as they call her, who’s on the west coast, not far from San Francisco Bay. There are local, umm, fiefdoms, each ruled by a Daughter or Granddaughter of the Mother. It’s a matriarchy, as you can tell from the language. Males are warriors, workers – breeding partners. Subordinate. Though there’s no difference we can detect in levels of intelligence between the sexes.

‘And they do have devastating wars. They come in cycles, as far as we can tell from some preliminary archaeology, and their own accounts of their history. A war, and the resulting plagues and famine, causes a population crash, but when the numbers recover, war comes again. Mostly the infighting arises within individual Packs. The basic motivation is Granddaughters trying to displace Daughters, and Daughters trying to displace a Mother. Inter-Pack war seems less common. But in the worst cases you get flare-ups covering a continent – hell, maybe the whole planet for all we know. Afterwards they just build everything up all over again, using the same sites, building slap on top of the smoking ruins. This latest war, however, the first since humans were here on hand to witness it, seems to have been tougher than most.’

Maggie expected Mac to comment on that. Instead he just kept staring out of the window.

‘You must have seen something of this,’ she murmured. ‘Everybody on this boat seems to have secrets to keep from me. You too, Mac?’

Still he would not react. She turned away, obscurely hurt.

‘Thank you, Gerry,’ she said now. ‘OK, folks, we have a mission to fulfil here, as you’ll see. Let’s get down there and get it done.’

They landed close to the in-situ researchers’ huddle of tents.

The senior academic, an Australian called Ben Morton, known to Mac – he couldn’t hide that from Maggie – was waiting to meet them. A haunted-looking older man, Morton barely acknowledged Mac, before he offered to drive them in the researchers’ only vehicle into the beagle town, the Eye of the Hunter.

They bumped along an uneven track, past clumps of forest of low, gnarled trees, like ferns perhaps, and fields roughly delineated with straggling dry stone walls. What looked like grass was cropped by animals: not sheep or cattle or goats, but things like fat deer, and a kind of beefy flightless bird. Some of the fields were tended by workers who went upright, on two legs, swathed in rags and bearing walking staves. Maggie didn’t get too close a look. At first glance they looked human – and after all, humans came in a variety of body shapes. But look again at these workers and, elusively, subtly, they didn’t appear quite right, the head too large, the waist too low, the eyes set too wide apart.

Her companions took in all this, Hemingway in nervous silence, Mac with a kind of resentful glare. Maggie was growing sure that there was something specific he was keeping from her about his experience here.

Wu Yue-Sai was making notes on a small tablet.

Many of the farms had been looted, burned out, destroyed, Maggie saw from the beginning of the ride. And the evidence of war became more obvious as they approached the heart of the city, and certainly once they’d passed within its low, largely broken-down walls. She suspected the buildings here, of wood and daub, would always have looked irregular, even unfinished to a human eye, and they were oddly set out, clustered along straggling dirt streets – no grid pattern here. But now they were smashed, burned, only a few roughly repaired.

Given the size of the place she saw very few inhabitants, and fewer up close. But one child stood as they passed. Dressed in rags, she held out an empty bowl, her request obvious. It was a scene you might have seen in the aftermath of any human war, Maggie thought. But the child’s eyes glittered, her ears were swept back, and a pink tongue lolled from a wide mouth.

At last the truck rolled up beside a more extensive ruin, a fire-blackened crater surrounded by scraps of scorched wall. There was a dog, a big one, bigger than a Saint Bernard, lying in the shade of one fragment of wall. He raised his head to watch them approach. He wore some kind of belt around his waist, Maggie saw.

‘Welcome to the Palace of the Granddaughter,’ said Ben Morton.

And the dog spoke.

‘He-hhr name Pet-hhra. Long dead.’ The language was clearly comprehensible English, but spoken with a growl, like a coarse whisper from the back of the throat.

A canine sapient. Maggie had been briefed about this, had even seen recordings. Nothing prepared her for the reality, though. Not even the talking cat in her own sea cabin. That was obviously artificial, a smart technological toy. This, though . . .

Her culture shock got worse when the dog stood up. He got up on his hind paws, almost like a trained animal in a balancing act. But then the movement became more fluid, his anatomy seemed to adjust somehow, and he was standing, a biped as fully developed as Maggie was, his waist low but his lower legs supporting him easily. He wore a kind of short kilt, and that belt from which, she saw now, tools dangled. His face did not have the obvious projection of a dog muzzle; it was flat, proportioned something like a human’s, but the nose was broad, black nostrils flaring. His ears were sharp and lay back against his scalp, and his eyes were wide apart, unblinking, fixed on her. A predator’s gaze. Maggie had a sense of age, from the slightly awkward stance, from grey hairs around a wide mouth. Age, and injury; one forearm looked almost withered, and he held it against his chest.

He wasn’t a dog. He was humanoid, as she was, but moulded from canine clay, as she was from the ape.

She’d asked for this encounter. But not for the first time she wondered whether, in the end, she was going to have the intellectual strength, the imaginative capacity, to face the true strangeness of her long mission, if she felt so overwhelmed by this first encounter with the alien.

‘You’re a beagle,’ she said.

‘So we h-have been called, by you. My name to you – B-hrr-ian.’ He pulled his lips back, revealing very canine teeth, in what might have been an approximation of a grin. ‘I ss-it to meet you like ghh-ood dog. Yes? Now I call.’ He tipped his head back and howled, a suddenly very wolf-like sound; Maggie heard the call echo from the remains of the buildings.

Morton raised an eyebrow at the visitors. ‘Brian’s one of our main contacts here. One of the more, umm, humanized of the local beagles. He has a distinctive sense of humour. Mordant, you might say.’

‘Mo-hrr-dant? Not know that wo-hhhrd. Look up later.’

‘We’ve given him English language dictionaries, grade school stuff, and other teaching aids. We’re learning a great deal from him.’

‘And I too lea-hhrn,’ Brian said to the bemused visitors, like the other half of some bizarre trained-animal double act, Maggie thought. ‘My job always-ss to learn, when Pet-hhra was alive. G-hranddaughter. Killed in wa-hrr. For he-hrr, my learning useful. Learn of kobolds, learn of humans. Yet she despised me,’ he said, and he hung his heavy head and shook it. ‘Poo-hhr B-hrrian.’

Mac snorted in disgust. ‘Christ. It’s like he’s begging for a treat.’

‘Ignore him,’ Morton said. ‘Just showing off. He’s useful but he can be a real asshole. Can’t you, Brian?’

Brian laughed, an oddly human sound. ‘Ass-sshole? You come sniff me then, Ben-nn. You know you wan-tt to. Asshole? T-hhrue. All beagles assholes. You see how we kill each other-hrr in war. Over and ove-hrr.’

Now a newcomer arrived, evidently in response to Brian’s call, another dog, even bigger. It raced in on all fours but then stood tall, graceful, lithe, even as it slowed before Maggie. This one had clear, ice-blue eyes, was heavily muscled, and stood straight, almost to attention, Maggie thought.

She glanced at Morton. ‘Is this the one?’

‘We found a volunteer, who seemed to be the type you were looking for.’ Morton’s shrug said, Sooner you than me. ‘He’s all yours.’

Plucking up her courage, Maggie stepped forward and stood before the beagle. He smelled of musk, of dust, of meat; he smelled of animal. And yet his gaze was cool, clear. She said, ‘They call you Snowy.’

‘Yes-ss,’ he said clearly. ‘My t-hrrue name—’ A guttural growl.

‘You understand why I asked for a volunteer? You understand what’s to become of you, if you come with us?’

‘Ride to scentless wo-hhrlds.’ He looked up at the sleek form of the Armstrong, and grinned.

Wu said, ‘Ah! I understand. A beagle crew member. A fine experiment.’

‘The whole journey is an experiment, Lieutenant,’ Maggie said. ‘Call this one an experiment in cross-sapience understanding.’

Mac stared at Maggie. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Mac, I didn’t tell you before because I knew you’d object—’

‘We already got Chinese military personnel on board,’ Mac said. ‘And trolls. And now this mutt!’

‘Ignore him,’ Maggie said to the beagle. ‘Welcome to the crew of the USS Neil A. Armstrong II, Acting Ensign – umm, Snowy.’

‘Than-khh you.’ And he threw back his head and howled.

As they made to depart, Brian beckoned to Maggie, a very human gesture. ‘Wait. Come ss-see my t-hrreasure.’ He hurried into the shelter and emerged with what Maggie recognized as a picture – a painting, more likely a print. It was scuffed, dirty; perhaps it had survived a war. But its subject was clearly visible.

Mac grunted. ‘“Dogs Playing Poker”. Old cigarette ads.’

‘Gift from Sally Lin-ssay. Good shh-joke, she say. Good joke, good?’ And he laughed, in a painful imitation of the human.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Maggie said.

‘You come back-chh. Have mo-hhre pic-sshtures. Play poker-hhr?’

‘So, Captain,’ Mac said as they began the ride back to the ships, ‘does Ed Cutler know about this damn beagle you’re bringing aboard?’

‘Not yet . . .’

When Snowy walked up the ramp to the airship, Shi-mi, who usually emerged to greet Maggie when she returned from a surface jaunt, took one look, arched her spine, fled back into the gondola, and wasn’t seen for days.

12

JOSHUA ACCEPTED LOBSANG’S request to seek out and contact his hypothetical new race of superior human beings – his true Homo sapiens.

Somehow he never doubted that there was something in Lobsang’s theory, his deduction of the existence of a new breed of humanity from what seemed like the slightest of scraps of evidence. Joshua had known Lobsang for fifteen years now; he knew that Lobsang saw the world as a piece, he thought on scales Joshua could barely grasp. He thought holistically, Sally Linsay had once said. If Lobsang had predicted the true Homo sap existed, then Joshua was confident they did exist, and if he looked he’d find them.

But where was he to start? Joshua was no scholar, no detective. He wasn’t that much of a loner any more – he was a family man, he had been mayor of Hell-Knows-Where, and he supposed he would always return to his deep roots in Madison, where he’d grown up. But he wasn’t entangled in the wider affairs of humanity.

In the event, Joshua’s way in to this mystery was through his friendship with one individual.

In fact, Joshua Valienté had first met Paul Spencer Wagoner many years before, in Happy Landings, back in 2031. Paul then was five years old. Joshua, on the other hand, was twenty-nine.

It had been Joshua’s third visit to the place Sally Linsay had dubbed Happy Landings. He’d come here the year before in the course of his exploration, with Lobsang and Sally, aboard the prototype stepper-airship Mark Twain, of the far Westward reaches of the Long Earth – a jaunt that had subsequently become known, in some fan circles at least, as ‘The Journey’. Under Sally’s guidance they had called into Happy Landings, more than a million and a half steps from the Datum, in the course of their outward-bound trek – and on the way back had called in again, with the Twain now a semi-derelict in the sky, and having lost Lobsang, after their shattering encounter with the entity they called First Person Singular. Now, a year after The Journey, Joshua had been passing through this particular world, on his way home from a brief, head-clearing sabbatical – and home for Joshua, just now anyhow, meant a Corn Belt town called Reboot, where he was going to marry Helen Green, daughter of a pioneering family.

He couldn’t resist calling in again on Happy Landings.

He wasn’t far from the Pacific coast in this version of Washington State. In fact this was the footprint of a Datum township called Humptulips, in Grays Harbor County. Joshua would always remember his surprise on seeing this place for the first time, a township where no township had a right to be, far beyond where the consensus at that time had it that the colonizing wavefront might yet have reached, just fifteen years after Step Day. Yet here it was.

The town hugged the bank of its river, surrounded by tracks that cut off into thick forest. There were no fields, no sign of agriculture. Like the great city of Valhalla a few years later, this was a place where people lived off the natural fruits of the land – and especially in an area as rich as this, as long as you controlled your numbers and spread out a little, that was an easy way to live. And, by the river, in the town itself, visible even from the air during that first visit, Joshua had spotted trolls, everywhere he looked. It was a unique population, a blend of human and troll – which was maybe what made it so strange in other ways.

Now Joshua strolled alone around the town, roughly centring on the big square by City Hall. The dusk was gathering, but as ever the square was full of smiling townsfolk, and bands of trolls singing scraps of song – people and trolls mixing casually. People nodded politely to Joshua, more or less a stranger making his third brief visit. As always it was all remarkably gentle, civilized, comfortable.

But, paradoxically, that had made Joshua uncomfortable. The community seemed too calm. Not entirely human . . . ‘It all feels a bit Stepford Wives to me,’ was how he’d tried once to express it to Sally.

And she’d said later, ‘Sometimes I wonder . . . I wonder if there’s something so big going on here that even Lobsang would have to recalibrate his thinking. Just a hunch, for now. I’m just suspicious. But then a stepper who isn’t suspicious is soon a dead stepper . . .’

‘Hey, mister.’

The kid had stood directly before Joshua, staring up. He was five years old, dark-haired, smut-nosed, wearing clothes that were clean but just a tad too big for him and extensively patched. Typical colony wear, heavily reused. Just a kid, but something in his sharp gaze cut right through Joshua’s weary, vaguely muddled thinking.

‘Hello,’ Joshua said.

‘You’re Joshua Valienté.’

‘I won’t deny it. How do you know? I don’t remember seeing you before.’

‘I never saw you before. I deduced who you were.’ He stumbled over that word, deduced.

‘You did?’

‘Everybody heard about the airship you flew in before. My parents talked about the people on board. There was a young man, and now he’s back, everybody’s talking about it. You’re a stranger. You’re a young man.’

‘Good work, Sherlock.’

The kid looked puzzled at that reference.

‘So who are you?’

‘Paul Spencer Wagoner. Wagoner is my father’s name, Spencer’s my mother’s name, and Paul is my name.’

‘Good for you. Spencer, like the mayor?’

‘He’s my mother’s second cousin. That’s why we came here.’

‘So you weren’t born here? I thought you had a different accent from most.’

‘My mom came from here but my dad’s from Minnesota. I was born in Minnesota. The mayor invited us to come because we’re family. Well, my mother is. Most people come here by accident.’

‘I know.’ Although Joshua didn’t understand how. That was another mysterious thing about Happy Landings. People somehow came unstuck in the Long Earth, and just drifted here, from all over . . .

Once he’d tried to discuss this with Lobsang. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the network of soft places. People drift and gather, like snowflakes collecting in a hollow, maybe.’

‘Yes, perhaps it’s something like that,’ Lobsang had said. ‘We know that stability is somehow a key to the Long Earth. Maybe Happy Landings is something like a potential well. And it’s clearly been operating long before Step Day, deep into the past . . .’

‘How did it fly?’

Again Joshua, exhausted from his journey, had allowed himself to get lost in his own thoughts. ‘What?’

‘The airship you came in on.’

Joshua smiled. ‘You know, it’s amazing how few people ask that. How do you think it flies?’

‘It might be full of smoke.’

‘Smoke?’

‘Smoke rises up from a fire.’

‘Hmm. That’s not a bad try. I think the smoke is actually lifted up by hot air from the fire. And the hot air rises up because it’s less dense than cold air. Some airships, balloons anyhow, are lifted by hot air. You have to have burners under the envelope. But the Mark Twain’s envelope was full of a gas called helium. It’s less dense than ordinary air.’

‘What does “dense” mean?’

Joshua had to think. ‘It’s how much amount of stuff there is in a given space. How many molecules, I guess. Iron is more dense than wood, say. A brick-sized block of iron is heavier than a brick-sized block of wood. And wood is more dense than air.’

Paul screwed up his nose. ‘I know what molecules are. Helium is a gas.’

‘Yes.’

‘Air is a gas. Lots of gases, mixed up, I know that.’

Joshua started to feel nervous, like he was being led down a trail into a thickening forest. ‘Yes . . .’

‘I can imagine how iron is denser than wood. Do you say “denser”? I don’t know that word.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You could jam in the molecules tighter. But how does that work with gases? If the atoms are all flying around.’

‘Well, it’s something to do with the molecules moving faster when stuff is hotter . . .’ Joshua had never been one to bluff a kid. ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘Ask your teacher.’

Paul blew a raspberry. ‘My teacher is a kind lady and all but she doesn’t know squat.’

Joshua had to laugh. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘If you ask one question and then another she gets unhappy, and the other kids laugh at you, and she says, “Another time, Paul.” Sometimes I can’t even ask the questions – you know – I can kind of see it but I don’t have the words.’

‘That will come in time, when you grow up a bit more.’

‘I can’t wait around for that.’

‘I hope he’s not bothering you.’ The woman’s voice was soft, a little strained.

Joshua turned to see a family approaching, a man and woman about his own age, a toddler in a buggy. The kid seemed distracted; she was singing softly, looking around.

The man stuck out his hand. ‘Tom Wagoner. Pleased to meet you, Mr Valienté.’

Joshua shook. ‘Everybody knows my name, it seems.’

‘Well, you did make quite an entrance last year,’ Tom said. ‘I do hope Paul hasn’t been pestering you.’

‘No,’ Joshua said thoughtfully. ‘Just asking questions I soon realized I had no answer to.’

Tom glanced at his wife. ‘Well, that’s Paul for you. Come on, kiddo, time for supper and bed, and no more questions for the day.’

Paul submitted gracefully enough. ‘Yes, Dad.’ He took his mother’s hand.

After a couple of minutes of pleasantries, the family said goodbye. Joshua watched them go. He became aware that the little girl, introduced as Judy, had kept up her odd singing all the way through the short encounter, and now they’d stopped speaking he could hear her more clearly. It wasn’t so much a song as a string of syllables – jumbled, meaningless maybe, but he kept thinking he heard patterns in there. Complexity. Almost like the trolls’ long call, which Lobsang was determined to decode. But how the hell could a toddler be singing out a message that sounded like greetings from a space alien? Unless she was even smarter than her precocious brother.

Smart kids. That was another odd thing he was always going to remember about Happy Landings.

Enough. He had looked around for a bar, and a place to stay the night. He’d left the next day.

But he hadn’t forgotten Paul Spencer Wagoner.

And he hadn’t forgotten Happy Landings either. And, in the year 2045, he thought of it again, considering Lobsang’s suggestion that out there in the Long Earth there could be incubators of a new kind of people. What would such an incubator be like? What would it feel like?

Like Happy Landings, maybe?