The Long War Read online

  Maggie took the opportunity to have her chief engineer, Harry Ryan, run a comprehensive overhaul of the ship’s systems; it had been a while since the last maintenance break. Among other small issues, he quickly reported problems with the Franklin’s two remaining winged aircraft, microlites capable of air launches for fast response; they had already cannibalized a third craft for spares . . .

  As she was scanning Harry’s report in her sea cabin, Maggie became aware of a steady gaze.

  It was a cat. The cat, George Abrahams’s cat, standing patiently on the carpet, gazing at her. Slim, white, healthy-looking, she was a breed indeterminate to Maggie, who was no cat person. Her eyes were eerie green sparks. Sparks like LED displays, Maggie saw, looking closer.

  And the cat spoke, a liquid string of syllables in a female human voice, quite incomprehensible.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘I apologize,’ the cat said. ‘George and Agnes Abrahams used me to practise their Swahili; it became my default setting. I am aware that you are running a systems check . . .’

  Maggie, floundering, found a memory floating to the surface of her mind. ‘Joshua Valienté. He had a talking cat, didn’t he? So the story goes.’ Then she realized that not only was the cat talking, she was engaging the cat in conversation.

  ‘I am fully equipped to support your current activity. The systems analysis, I mean. Turbine number two is developing metal fatigue. Also the flush in the aft crew bathroom is malfunctioning. Rodent infestation is negligible but not zero, by the way.’

  Maggie stared at the cat. Then she came around her desk, grabbed the cat, and set her on the desktop. The beast was heavier than she had thought, but she felt comfortably warm.

  She thought over what the cat had said. Then she slapped a comms panel. ‘Hey, Harry.’

  ‘Here, Captain,’ the engineer replied promptly.

  ‘How’s the rear crew head?’

  ‘What? . . . Umm, let me check my roster. A faulty flush, as it happens. Why do you ask, Captain?’

  ‘How about turbine number two?’

  ‘No faults reported.’

  ‘Would you check it over again? Call me back.’ She stared at the cat. ‘So – what the hell are you?’

  ‘An artificial life form. Well, evidently. Including top-of-the-line artificial intelligence. The nice thing about artificial intelligence is that at least it’s better than artificial stupidity. Don’t you think? Ha, ha.’ Her voice was fully human, but diminished, as if issuing from a small loudspeaker.

  Maggie stayed stony-faced. ‘That couple, Dr. and Mrs. Abrahams, left you behind.’

  ‘I am another gift, Captain. Forgive the subterfuge. It was thought that you would refuse me reflexively. Yet I am capable of supporting your mission in a variety of ways. A mission to which I am fully committed, by the way.’

  ‘You have a name?’

  ‘Shi-mi. Which is Tibetan for cat. I am an upgrade of previous models . . .’

  Maggie’s comms unit blipped: Harry Ryan. ‘Don’t know how you guessed it, Captain, but there is a flaw in number two turbine. Metal fatigue in the bearings. We’ll need to strip it down within seven weeks max – best to do that in dry dock. It’s a very fine imbalance; it wouldn’t have shown up for a few more days’ running, but there is a rising chance of failure. Captain, I’m embarrassed we didn’t spot it.’

  ‘Forget it, Harry. Ask Nathan to put together an itinerary to take us home.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  Shi-mi said modestly, ‘The turbine didn’t sound true. Easy to spot. It was however only one cat’s opinion.’

  ‘But you’re not just a cat, are you?’

  ‘No, Captain. I was built to the finest standard specifications of the Black Corporation’s robotics, prosthetics and artificial intelligence divisions. Whereas your turbine was built for the government on a low-bid contract. Thank you very much, and I hope I have passed the audition. Incidentally – would you be offended if I brought you an occasional mouse? It is rather traditional . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  ‘And stay out of Joe Mackenzie’s way.’

  ‘Yes, Captain. Does that mean I can stay aboard?’

  ‘Just get out of here.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  43

  LOBSANG PULLED STRINGS at the Black Corporation and secured Joshua and Bill the use of an airship, for the purposes of their quest in search of Sally Linsay, and the trolls. It was a relatively small, nimble craft, with a translucent solar-capture envelope a couple of hundred feet long, and a gondola the size of a truck trailer, with walls of ceramic panels and big viewing windows. Primarily used as a scout to accompany the great stepwise convoys on the Valhalla run, the ship had no name, only a corporate registration number. Bill promptly named it the Shillelagh.

  Bill, for reasons he’d yet to share with Joshua, said he wanted to fly, not out of the usual Mississippi ports, but from the Seattle area in the Pacific north-west. The quickest way to transport the airship from its base at a Low Earth Hannibal to Seattle was to break it down, ship it by rail across the Datum, and then reassemble it on an apron at SeaTac airport. That took a week. The travellers used the time to prepare, to gather supplies and kit for the journey.

  Regarding the trolls, Lobsang provided them with what he called a ‘troll translation kit’, downloaded into a neat jet-black slab, small enough to fit into a backpack.

  As for Sally, Joshua did some snooping as Bill had requested, visited the hotels she’d stayed at, even Jansson’s home, looking fruitlessly for leads as to where she’d gone.

  And he had to face the family he was leaving behind, as he disappeared on yet another jaunt into the remote Earths – once again leaving at Lobsang’s behest, once again pulled sideways by Sally, Helen’s enigmatic rival. Little Dan was jealous, pure and simple; he wanted to go exploring too. Helen, who was struggling to get permission to visit her Madison-bomber brother in prison, was ominously silent. It wasn’t a happy family that Joshua left behind, and not for the first time, and it tore his heart in two.

  But off he went anyhow.

  And on an impulse he took the sapphire ring, his one souvenir of his first Long Earth quest a decade ago: took it from where it had been hanging on Jansson’s wall, and hung it up in the gondola lounge. He wondered if Sally would expect him to do that.

  Thus, on a bright June morning at Datum SeaTac, Joshua found himself sitting in this compact gondola, laid out just like a travel trailer with a tiny galley area and lounge, foldaway bunks and tables – in fact, he learned, it had been designed by Airstream – while Bill took his place in the small wheelhouse at the gondola’s prow.

  The Shillelagh lifted easily. Soon Joshua had a fine view of the airport and the crowded development around it, and of Puget Sound.

  All of which was whipped away as they began to step, to be replaced by the increasingly sparse facilities of SeaTac West 1 and 2 and 3, with their ribbons of road and rail tracks and small settlements cut into the enduring forest, each world glimpsed in the space of a heartbeat – until soon, after only a very few worlds, there was barely a sign of mankind at all, only the forest and the Sound, and the Cascades piled up in the distance. The ship rose steadily as it stepped, and Bill directed it laterally towards the mountains, which persisted more or less unchanged as they passed through the worlds. The sky flickered, though; the weather was never unchanging from Earth to Earth, and on this June day they passed from sun to cloud to showers.

  In the first few worlds there was nothing much to see but tree tops. Joshua knew there were bears down there in those forests, and beavers, and wolves. And people too, although further out than the Low Earths there was only a long but thinning tail of colonization. More rats than people, probably, now that the twains with their roomy holds and cargoes of foodstuffs flew so thick. What else was down there was guesswork. There was a programme to map the Low Earths from orbit, with small fleets of pole-to-pole satellites that
would fly over a turning world, inspecting its continents, oceans and icecaps with cameras, ground-penetrating radar, infrared and other sensors, before stepping on to the next world, and the next . . . Even such coarse imagery, which would show few details smaller than a reasonably sized car, was only available for a hundred or so of the lowest worlds. Further out than that, save for particular worlds which had been subject to closer study, nobody knew, really.

  They were climbing the flank of Mount Rainier itself by the time they hit the first Ice Age world. For a few seconds they rode high over the crumpled white sheets that coated the ground. And then back to the endless forest green.

  Joshua sat back, watching the scenery blankly. Already he missed his family. He wondered how he was going to pass the time.

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just checking. How is everything?’

  ‘Cracker.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I just need to concentrate on the piloting. Not my usual occupation, but the Black Corporation lads gave me a decent run-through. It’s simple enough . . . But not like driving a car, I’ll tell you that. Or even riding a horse. After all the ship has to be sapient, to a degree, and it’s smarter than a damn horse in fact. It’s like you have this constant dialogue with the thing. Y’know, I once rode an elephant on this farm in the African bush, a rescue sanctuary. An African elephant isn’t tamed like the Indian sort; he’s a big strong smart animal that knows where he wants to go, and if you’re lucky that might happen to be the same way you want to go. Otherwise you just have to kind of hang on. This is the same. All a bit mad, isn’t it? But we’ll get there. Wherever “there” is.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  And that was that. It was just like the journey of the Mark Twain all those years ago – but at least this time Joshua got on better with his crewmate.

  By sunset they had sailed out of the Ice Belt, as it was called, the sheaf of sporadically glaciated worlds around the Datum, and were passing over the more arid worlds of the Mine Belt. The view got even more dull. Joshua made a meal – of field rations warmed on a single gas ring, no gourmet kitchen on this ship – and took a portion to Bill, who was camping out in the wheelhouse.

  Then he turned in, looking out through the gondola’s windows as the dying rays of midsummer sunsets glowed on the gasbag.

  The dawn brought more of the same.

  By mid-morning of the second day they had crossed into the Corn Belt, a hundred thousand steps from Datum Earth, a thick band of warmer worlds lush with forests and prairie, and now studded with human farming communities – including Reboot, at Earth West 101,754, founded by Helen and her family of trekkers, and the place where she and Joshua had married.

  Then, in the late afternoon, Joshua sensed the airship slowing. The strobing of the skies slowed, and the more or less identical landscapes below flickered gently, coming to a standstill.

  And an angry buzzing filled the air. Suddenly the gondola was dark, the light excluded by a swarm of dark heavy insectile bodies that slammed continually against the clear windows, chitinous wings clattering. Joshua glanced at the gondola’s compact earthometer: this was West 110,719.

  He had to yell over the noise. ‘Hey, Bill!’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘I recognize this place.’

  ‘You should. Classic Joker. In fact you discovered it, during The Journey with Lobsang.’

  ‘Yeah, and we passed straight on through. What are we doing here, Bill? Those bugs are going to choke us if they get in the air vents.’

  ‘Patience, grasshopper.’

  The airship lifted now, Joshua could feel it, though the world remained hidden by the swarming, angry bodies of the flying insects – they were like huge locusts, perhaps, an impression he remembered from that first visit.

  Abruptly the Shillelagh rose into sunlight. Joshua saw he was still hovering over the flanks of Rainier, or this world’s copy of it. Evidently this world was warmer than the average, for forest rose up almost all the way to an eroded summit – it was oak woodland, mature trees rearing out of a luxuriant tumble of fallen trunks and thickets. He spotted a stream down there, bubbling down the steep slope of the mountain. As he watched, something blundered through the undergrowth and crashed away east, and a few roosting creatures took fright and rose up – they weren’t birds, they were like huge, fat dragonflies – and fluttered noisily away to safety.

  When Joshua looked away from the mountain summit, he saw a landscape cloaked by swarming insects, a pulsing, gleaming carpet of them that seemed to extend all the way to the ocean shore, visible in the distance. The land crawled with them, like black rivers coursing between sparse patches of green, and clouds of flyers rose up everywhere. But nothing flew as high as this summit, and not as high as some of the other mountains of the Cascades, whose flanks rose out of the swarms like green-clad islands in an insectile sea.

  ‘They’re altitude limited,’ Joshua observed. ‘The insects.’

  ‘Yeah, most of the larger species. Not all. Enough to make the summits survivable.’

  ‘Survivable by who?’

  ‘By us, Joshua. Well, specifically, by you.’

  ‘We’re stopping here?’

  ‘Yeah. Not long, maybe overnight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve an appointment to keep up here. This is why I wanted to start us off in the Cascades. I’ll drop an anchor, deploy the ladder. The grassy stretch by that stream down there looks a good place to camp. Take the tape. The cassette, you know.’

  Somewhat reluctantly Joshua began to pull his kit together: a sleeping bag, food packets, fire-making gear. Bug repellent spray! ‘I’m going down alone, am I?’

  Bill sounded embarrassed. ‘Look, Joshua, I don’t want to sound like a fan-boy here. Your Journey’s famous – and of course I know the inside story. The idea of you going down into all them unknown worlds all alone, while Lobsang stayed tucked up in the airship. Comedy gold.’

  ‘Well, that’s a consolation for all the scars.’

  ‘But the strategy actually makes sense. You go down, do the exploring thing, make contact.’

  And Joshua wondered, contact with what?

  ‘Meanwhile I’ll stay aloft, ready to help out when it all goes tits-up.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘If, mate. If. Slip of the tongue.’

  Not for the first time in the course of his adventures in the Long Earth, and against his own better judgement, Joshua went with the flow.

  Bill insisted that he carry a two-way radio, and a small shoulder unit with TV and sensor links. Joshua agreed, despite unpleasant memories of Lobsang’s shoulder-riding parrots, and for his part packed a handgun.

  The climb down into the undergrowth was easy. Immediately he was on the ground the ship rose, taking the ladder with it.

  Alone, Joshua turned around slowly. In this open space that the stream had carved between the trees, it was pleasant enough. The air smelled of damp wood and the leaf mould of millennia, and he heard the remote buzz of the lapping ocean of insect swarms below this summit. Over his head squadrons of some insectile equivalent of bats hurtled after things like flies.

  He had nothing much to do but wait. He began to make his camp, spreading out his blanket roll and sleeping bag. He thought about a fire, but the air was warm and moist enough without it. With his travel rations he didn’t need to cook. He began to relax. It was almost like he was on sabbatical. He toyed with the idea of doing some fishing, just for fun, if the streams on this summit supported any fish . . .

  The radio clicked into life. ‘Josh, can you hear me, mate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ha ha. How you doing down there?’

  ‘Making a restaurant reservation.’

  ‘Funny you should say that. If it does all go tits up and you need supplies quickly there’s a cache, only a mile or so downstream.’

  ‘A cache? Of what?’

  ‘Survival stuff. A little shelter, a bi
t of food, knives, tools. Spare laces for your boots. Left by combers, for combers.’

  Joshua sat on his sleeping bag. ‘Bill, what is this place? Why did we stop here? I mean, in a Joker? Who the hell stops in Jokers?’

  ‘Combers do. That’s the point, really. You want to know the story of this world? How Earth West 110,719 got its locusts? Our best guess is that pterosaurs never evolved on this world.’

  ‘Pterosaurs?’

  ‘And other flying dinosaurs. Back on the Datum, before the pterosaurs, big insects ruled the skies. Got as big as they could, in fact, exploiting the high oxygenation of the air. Then when the pterosaurs came along the big insects got hunted down, and only the little ones survived, and they never got so big again. After that the skies belonged to the pterosaurs, and later the birds. Here – no pterosaurs, for whatever reason. And later, the birds didn’t have a chance to grow large either. So here it’s not swallows chasing flies; here huge rapacious dragonflies hunt down birds the size of big moths . . .’

  ‘Not a world for humans, then.’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘But the combers come here.’

  ‘Of course. And to survivable refuges in other Jokers. Joshua, a Joker is a whole world, and it isn’t going to be the same all over; there are always going to be safe places, refuges like this. You get to know them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Through other combers. There’s a whole subculture that people like you, and even Lobsang, know nothing about. And we like it that way.

  ‘You think the story of the Long Earth is about colonies like Hell-Knows-Where, or Helen’s Reboot, or cities like Valhalla, and wars of independence and whatnot. All the mad old stuff from Datum history projected into the new worlds. Well, that isn’t the story, Joshua. It’s about a new way of living – or maybe a very old one. The combers haven’t colonized the Long Earth, Joshua. Nor have they adapted it to suit themselves. They just live in it, as it is.’