The Long War Read online

  Now the predator was heading down the beach after the big crest-roos. They had a head start; the roos, alarmed, tons of flesh and bone on the move, were like a retreating tank division. But one mother hung back to shepherd her calf.

  ‘They’ve got too much of a start,’ Jacques said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Captain Chen murmured. ‘Look at what she is doing with her arm.’

  Roberta could see that the predator was using one agile hand to unwrap the vine from her arm. The vine was maybe six feet long, and was weighted at either end by something like a coconut. And now, even as she ran, her legs pounding the beach and her spine and tail almost horizontal, the predator whirled the vine and released it. It flew across the intervening space and wrapped itself around the big back legs of the lagging mother crest-roo. The vine snapped immediately, but it was enough for the mother to be brought crashing to the ground. Her calf slowed beside her, lowing mournfully, clearly afraid.

  And it had a right to be, for the predator was on the mother immediately. It ran by and ducked its head to rip a huge chunk out of the crest-roo’s rear right leg, then almost casually swiped its head against one magnificent flaring ear, crushing the cartilage so the crest folded like a fallen kite. The mother bellowed in pain.

  But she was able to stand, though blood dripped from the gaping wound. She even nudged her infant to move on, as they shambled up the beach after the rest of the herd, which had already cut into the forest.

  The predator stood and watched them go, by the water’s edge, breathing hard. The crest-roo’s blood stained her mouth. Then she ducked to the water, took a mighty drink, shook her head, and trotted after the mother and calf. It was a pursuit that could have only one outcome.

  ‘That predator used a bolas,’ said Roberta.

  Yue-Sai said, ‘Yes . . . It looked as though it could have been a natural object. A vine-like growth with fruit. But there was nothing “natural” in the way she used it.’ Yue-Sai looked delighted, in her quiet way, to have made this staggering discovery. ‘I told you, Roberta. We’re far away from home now. Have no preconceptions.’

  ‘I’ll second that,’ Captain Chen said. ‘And I should tell you that our signal-processing experts here inform me that there was data content in the patterns that flared across the crests of those roo-like beasts. They were talking, through the visual means of their crests! Sentience! Our onboard scholars must make all this clear when they joint-author their paper: “A mammal–reptile assemblage of tool-making intelligences beyond Earth East two million”. How marvellous! What a great discovery for China!’

  They began to walk back to the pick-up point.

  Chen, evidently enthused, went on, ‘We Chinese, you know, Roberta, have a utopian legend of our own. There is a story that dates back to the fifth century after your Christ, of how a fisherman found his way through a narrow cave to the Land of Peach Blossom, where descendants of soldiers lost from the age of the Qin dynasty lived in a land sheltered by mountains, in peace with each other, in peace with nature. But when the fisherman tried to reach it a second time, he could not find the way. So it is with all utopias, whose legends proliferate around the world. Even in North America, where the natives’ dream of the Happy Hunting Ground was displaced by the European settlers’ fables of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Do you think if we travel far enough we will find such a land, Roberta? Are such legends a relic of some early perception of the Long Earth itself?’

  ‘There is no sensible content in this discussion,’ Roberta murmured in reply. ‘And as to the papers you’re planning – none of this matters.’

  Yue-Sai turned to her.

  ‘How’s that?’ Jacques asked.

  Roberta gestured at the landscape around her. ‘The coming hypercane will destroy all this. I’ve been studying the climatic theory of these worlds, with their high sea levels. They are prone to tremendous hurricanes, extracting heat from the shallow oceans. Storms that can span continents, with thousand-miles-per-hour winds; water vapour is thrown up into the stratosphere, and the ozone layer is wrecked . . . I’ve also been studying the records of the weather balloons you launched from the twains. There’s such a storm forming right now. Ask your meteorologists. It’s unmistakable. It will take a few more weeks to reach full strength, but when it does this complicated little community will be right in its path. It’s been an interesting experiment, a stepwise mixing of different species. But it will soon be terminated.’

  There was silence.

  ‘“Terminated”,’ said Captain Chen at last.

  Roberta was used to this kind of reaction to her choice of words, and found it irritating. As if a child were covering its ears to avoid hearing bad news. ‘All life is terminated, ultimately. I’m only telling the truth. It’s trivially obvious.’

  Again, nobody spoke.

  Yue-Sai looked away. ‘Captain, I think it’s time we returned.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  41

  THE ZHENG HE and Liu Yang lingered for some days in the vicinity of Earth East 2,201,749. The scientists catalogued their observations and specimens, while the engineers crawled over the airships, testing their systems, carrying out routine maintenance.

  Then they moved on, into realms of the Eastern Long Earth never before explored by Chinese crews, or any other. Into the unknown.

  Shortly afterwards the ships made a longer stop, next to Earth East 2,217,643. Here they found a Gap: a break in the chain of stepwise worlds that made up the Long Earth, where the relevant Earth had been removed. Roberta quietly pointed out to Jacques that the first Western Gap discovered, by Joshua Valienté, had been at around Earth West two million. No doubt, from the similarity of those numbers, there was some conclusion to be drawn about the nature of the great tree of probabilities that was the Long Earth.

  Valienté’s airship had been wrecked by the step into vacuum that was the Gap. The Chinese ships were better prepared. Their crews had their ships hop back and forth across the Gap, dropping off hardened automatic probes, which, given the momentum of the spin of the neighbouring Earths, went sailing off into the Gap world’s empty black sky. Jacques stared without much interest at the images returned – stars that looked much like the stars as seen from any world, planets that seemed to circle in their usual orbits with smug indifference to the absence of an Earth. The crew, though, were fascinated, as they had not been by humanoids and dinosaur descendants. Jacques reminded himself that this mission had been mounted by a space agency; no wonder the crew were intrigued by glimpses of the wider universe.

  And Roberta, too, seemed to be interested. She requested that the probes be made to study the neighbouring planets, Mars and Venus, to look for any difference in their atmospheres, their surfaces.

  With this initial investigation of the new Gap complete, Captain Chen, with a rather boyish and excited grin, came to his passengers and urged them to be at the observation deck the next morning. ‘That’s when the real journey will begin . . .’

  When morning came Jacques and Roberta joined Lieutenant Wu before the big prow windows, Jacques cradling a coffee, Roberta a glass of water. The airships hung in the sky of this latest world, two sleek fish of the sky over a sprawling blanket of forest. There was a river in the middle distance, a glassy stripe, and further away the extensive shallow sea typical of these warm worlds, blue to the horizon.

  The stepping began without warning, and worlds flapped by, slowly at first, then ever faster. Soon they were travelling at a step a second, a rate they were all used to by now, and weather systems came and went to the beat of Jacques’s pulse: sun, cloud, rain, storms, even some snow. The detail of the forest flickered – once a tremendous, evidently recent crater appeared right under the prow of the Zheng He, before being whipped away like a stage prop – and occasionally a world flared, or darkened, and Jacques knew that the ships’ systems would be recording yet another Joker.

  Chen joined them, and grasped the polished wooden rail that ran before the window. ‘You might
want to hold on.’

  Behind them, the trolls began to sing ‘Eight Miles High’.

  The stepping rate increased. To Jacques the passage of the worlds was suddenly visually uncomfortable, as if a strobe light were flashing in his face at increasing frequency. He tried to focus on the position of the morning sun, which remained constant in the multiple skies, but masks of cloud flashed across its face, and the sky flickered white, grey, blue. They all grabbed the rail now, even Roberta. Jacques thought he heard a thrumming of engines, and he sensed the airships driving forward even as they stepped. He could see the silvery hulk of the Liu Yang flex, a mighty plastic fish swimming through the flickering light of world after world.

  Behind them, a crew member threw up.

  ‘It will pass,’ Yue-Sai said. ‘We have all been tested for a tendency to epilepsy, and the nausea medication has been carefully applied. The discomfort will pass in a moment . . .’

  Faster and faster the stepping came, faster and faster the weather systems flickered past their view. Jacques forced himself to keep watching, and focused on the rail in his hands, the vibrations of the ship’s engines transmitted through the floor under his feet.

  And then the flickering seemed to fade away, the worlds merging into a kind of continuous blur. The sun, paler than usual, hung in its patient station, in an apparently cloudless sky that took on a deep blue colour, like early twilight. The landscape below was misty and vague, the shapes of the hills grey and dim, littered with patches of forest that seemed to grow, shiver, pass away. The river that had been writhing jerkily across the landscape now spread out, as if flooding a wide band of ground with a silvery grey, and the ocean coast too became a broad blur, the boundary between land and sea uncertain.

  ‘We have passed the flicker fusion threshold,’ Roberta murmured.

  ‘Yes!’ Chen cried. ‘We are now travelling at our peak rate, an astounding fifty worlds per second – worlds passing faster than the refresh frames in a digital screen, faster than your eye can follow. At such a rate we could traverse the great treks of the first pioneers of the Long Earth in little more than half an hour. At such a rate, if we kept it up, we could traverse more than four million worlds per day.’

  Jacques asked, ‘But we’re moving laterally too, right? Why’s that?’

  ‘Continental drift,’ Roberta said immediately.

  Chen nodded approvingly. ‘Correct. On Datum Earth the continents drift with time. The rate is something like an inch per year. Thanks to those cumulative effects there is also some drift as you move stepwise. So we move laterally, the great engines working to keep us over the heart of the tectonic plate on which South China rides. Sooner that than get lost altogether.’ He winked at Jacques. ‘Our Chinese airship technology has, incidentally, also set airspeed records.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now if you will excuse me I have engineers who need praising, or calming down, or both. Duty calls . . .’

  Jacques noticed that the lower digits on the Earth counter mounted on the wall of the deck had become a blur, like the worlds they were tracking, while higher, grander, slower-changing digits marked the tremendous strides they were making, off into the unknown.

  The trolls, meanwhile, sang on.

  42

  VIGNETTES FROM THE continuing mission of Captain Maggie Kauffman, as the summer wore on across the Long Earth:

  The voyage of the USS Benjamin Franklin progressed in a rather disorderly, zigzagging way. The colonists of the Long Earth didn’t organize themselves consciously, either geographically or stepwise, and yet a kind of organization was emerging nevertheless, Maggie noticed, with clusters of homesteads growing up in neighbouring worlds. Gerry Hemingway of Science was developing a mathematical model of this, of a percolation of mankind into the Long Earth which resulted in a distribution that he described as ‘on the edge of chaos’. Maggie, wearily, thought that summed it up pretty well.

  Once, on the Atlantic coast in a temperate Corn Belt sky, they encountered a British dirigible called the Sir George Cayley, returning from a mission to Iceland. At such locations as Iceland, incoming steppers rummaged through the parallel worlds looking for beneficent weather. If you got the choice, you would go to a world with the local climatic optima – change your world, change your weather. In Iceland’s case, you sought out analogues of the relatively benign first-millennium country first discovered and colonized by the Dark Age Vikings. (Dressing up to play the part was apparently optional.)

  Parties from each ship visited the other. British ships always had the best booze, in Maggie’s experience, including gin-and-tonics raised in toasts to His Majesty – and the Brit crews, charmingly, always stayed seated for the loyal toast, a tradition going back to Nelson’s day, when there had been no room on those crowded wooden ships to stand.

  However, such pleasing adventures, for the Franklin crew, were not the norm.

  More typical was a call to a world some seven hundred thousand steps from the Datum where a hopeful silver miner, who seemed to have got his ideas about excavation techniques solely from the movies, had turned his wannabe mine shaft into a death trap. Getting him out was a technical challenge, but luckily one of the crew, Midshipman Jason Santorini, had misspent some of his early years caving; he just loved worming his way into the rubble heaps.

  When the dispiriting rescue was over, Maggie gave the crew a couple of days’ shore leave before moving on.

  On the second day, as Maggie sat eating lunch with her senior officers, on the ground in the shadow of the Franklin – with Midshipman Santorini being rewarded for his efforts with lunch at the Captain’s table – another twain, a small commercial vessel, drifted in from the horizon. It lowered a stairway a little way away in the scrub, and two people alighted stiffly: an elderly woman, a middle-aged man.

  And a cat, that followed them down the ramp.

  Maggie and her officers stood to greet the couple. Joe Mackenzie eyed the cat suspiciously.

  The man said, ‘Captain Maggie Kauffman? I’m pleased to meet you in the flesh, having heard so much about you! It took us some time to arrange a rendezvous, as you can imagine . . .’

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘My name is George Abrahams. This is my wife, Agnes. My title is Doctor, though that need not concern us.’ His accent sounded vaguely Bostonian, the name naggingly familiar to Maggie. He was tall, slim, a little stooped, and wore a heavy black overcoat, and a homburg over silver hair. His face was oddly neutral, expressionless – unmemorable, Maggie thought.

  The cat, slim, white, looked around, sniffed, and set off in the general direction of the Franklin.

  Mac nudged Santorini. ‘Keep an eye on that damn flea bucket.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Maggie invited them to sit, courteously enough, and Mac, evidently acting out of a kind of reflexive politeness, even poured them coffee.

  Then Maggie said more sternly, ‘Tell me how you found us, Dr. Abrahams. This is after all a military vessel. And what do you want of me?’

  How he had been following her seemed innocent enough: through outernet accounts posted by civilians, of the Franklin’s various interventions. All of this was public. As to the what, that concerned the troll-call.

  Maggie snapped her fingers. ‘Of course. Yours is the name on the instruction sheet.’

  ‘I am its designer,’ he said, not particularly modestly, and his wife rolled her eyes. ‘From all accounts you got the measure of it very quickly – amazingly so, if you don’t mind my saying it. Well, I come bearing gifts. I have fifteen more translators for you and your crew. Of course, they are still only prototypes, though refined versions. As we develop them further both parties are learning to use the gadgets – trolls and humans, I mean. As I’m sure you’ve found out, trolls are patient and they learn just as fast as humans, oh my goodness how they learn, and of course they remember; they remember everything.’

  ‘Well – thank you,’ Maggie said, nonplussed. ‘We’ll happily take possession of the troll-calls, after
security checks . . . You know Sally Linsay, I take it. And – I have to ask – are you associated with the Black Corporation?’

  ‘Oh my dear lady, two interrogations in one sentence! Of course I know Sally – a remarkable judge of people. And as harsh as a hanging judge when she’s in the mood! As for the Black Corporation—’ He sighed. ‘Yes, of course they are involved. Captain, I am independent, I have my own workshop – yes, I am in partnership with the Black Corporation, but they don’t own me. They did fund my work, and arranged delivery of the prototype to you.’

  ‘Once again Douglas Black is giving away technological treasures for free?’

  ‘My impression is that Douglas Black believes that to release such a technology should in the long term have a beneficial effect on humanity’s career in the Long Earth. And in the short term it may heal our fractured relationship with the trolls. I of course have worked closely with the trolls in the course of my studies. What wonderful beasts they are! Don’t you think? And so soulful! Anybody who has ever owned pets knows that animals have something which equates to a soul . . .’

  The wife nudged him. ‘You’re preaching, George. And what’s more, to the converted. We’ve done what we came to do. Now it’s time to wave goodbye and let these good people get about their duties.’

  That seemed to be that. Slightly bewildered, Maggie and her officers arranged to collect the troll-calls, and rose to wish the couple goodbye. The wife, who seemed oddly elderly compared with the husband, fussed as they retreated to their ship: ‘Do get on, dear. Remember your prostate!’

  ‘Don’t ham it up too much, Agnes . . .’

  It was only after they had gone that Mac looked around and said, ‘What happened to that damn cat?’

  Their next assignment was in a stepwise Nebraska, on the way back to the Corn Belt, where the hunter-gatherer-type wandering inhabitants of nearby parallel Americas periodically got together for what they described as a ‘hootenanny’. A mixture of marriage market, farmers’ auction, rock concert and Hell’s Angels gathering, these events were magnets for trouble. But for the Franklin the assignment was routine, the ship’s very presence a deterrent to disorder.