The Long Mars

8

Sister Agnes was right. Joshua was reluctant to jump when Lobsang called. He’d never really got over Lobsang’s failure to save Datum Madison from a terror attack, a nuclear weapon, back in 2030. And, deeper than that, he’d never felt comfortable at how Lobsang, beginning over fifteen years ago already, had ensnared Joshua, a natural loner, in his plans and schemes.

But on the whole, he had to admit, Lobsang had been a force for good, in the Long Earth. Maybe now he was trying to be a force for good again.

Also, according to Agnes, Lobsang was lonely.

And then there was the headache. As he’d become aware of this warning sign inside his own cranium, for sure a sign of some kind of disturbance across the Long Earth, Joshua had been expecting some kind of contact from Lobsang. He was almost relieved when it came.

What the hell. Back to the Datum he went.

Joshua agreed to meet Lobsang in the town of Twin Falls, Idaho, Datum Earth, around a hundred and fifty miles from Yellowstone.

For Joshua, just stepping into the town was problematic now. The ice and the ash on the Datum ground meant that the standing surface was far from the level of the neighbouring stepwise worlds, and unpredictable. So Joshua stepped back to the Datum a respectable distance from Twin Falls, hired an SUV, and drove in.

The roads were open, just, especially the freeways and interstates. There was little traffic save for heavy trucks and a few buses, with bundled-up people sitting behind steamed-up windows: very few private vehicles on the road, few cars like his own SUV, and you could blame the worldwide shortage of gasoline for that.

It went well at first. Then he got caught in a blizzard. He had to follow a heavy snow plough for miles.

When he finally reached Twin Falls, he found it basically frozen. The roads were flanked by ice, old, dirty, layered ice, ice that had already endured for years, ice like you might find on the north pole of Mars, he imagined. And in with the ice was volcano ash, even out here, years after it had stopped falling from the sky, heaps of it swept into corners or consolidated by the ice into hard, gritty banks by the road. Right into the centre of town properties had collapsed from falls of ash or snow, some of them burned out. None of these had been reconstructed, or cleared. This was Idaho, in January. It was like Ice Age worlds he’d visited.

He wondered why people were bothering to stay here at all—and he knew that in fact there were still a few inhabited communities even further north than this. Stubbornness, he supposed, sheer inertia. Or pride: humans, he had observed, had a way of rising to a challenge, refusing to be beaten no matter how overwhelming the odds, returning to their homes on the floodplain when the water receded, to the flanks of the volcano once the eruption was over. Twin Falls was still liveable, just, and so people still lived here, in their homes.

He left his SUV in a motel’s parking lot, having agreed upfront a payment for the innkeeper to watch over the vehicle for him until he returned. The innkeeper advised him to siphon out his gasoline before leaving the car, and then tried to dicker over the price they’d fixed. The guy got short shrift from an ill-tempered Joshua, whose weeks-long High Meggers headache had only worsened as he’d come back in to the Datum.

He was a little early for his appointment with Lobsang, so he walked into the centre of town and bought a coffee, paying an astounding price for what tasted like scrapings diluted with sawdust. But at least he got to sit in the muggy warm of the mom-and-pop coffee shop while he waited.

And, after an hour, bang on time, a twain came swimming into the murky sky.

They seemed to have remarkably little to say to each other, face to face, as Lobsang welcomed Joshua on board. Joshua focused on the twain itself.

At two hundred feet long this airship was a small one, compared with Lobsang’s own Mark Twain, and the mighty commercial ships of the Long Mississippi. Its gondola was no larger than a travel trailer. But, Joshua realized as Lobsang showed him around, the gondola was comfortable enough for two. It had a roomy lounge with expansive windows, and airline-type couches, a galley, a small table, and wall-mounted tablets with animated map displays and readings of altitude, windspeed, temperature.

As on all Lobsang’s airships there were private quarters behind closed doors—machine shops for maintaining Lobsang’s artificial infrastructure, tucked neatly out of sight, Joshua had always supposed. But through one half-open door Joshua glimpsed an upright cylinder, maybe three feet tall, intricately etched—a prayer wheel? And behind that a kind of shrine, a golden Buddha in an ornate setting of red and green and gold leaf. A whiff of incense. Another part of Lobsang, Joshua supposed, that was hidden from general view.

There was an earthometer, though Lobsang had warned Joshua that his plan was not to travel stepwise today but to journey across the Datum Earth. They would follow the interstates, the 84, 86 and 15, more or less north and east, and go take a look at the new Yellowstone caldera.

“It’s quite a sight, Joshua,” Lobsang said now. “The caldera. Even for hardened High-Meggers travellers like us. And here it is on the Datum. Horrifying if you think about it.”

He, or rather an ambulant unit, sat with Joshua, in orange robes and with shaven head, and with a rather immobile artificial face, Joshua thought. And his capacity for small talk hadn’t improved either. Still, here they were.

Joshua cradled a coffee infinitely stronger and more flavourful than the one he’d been served in Twin Falls, and looked down at the cleared highway below, a band of black cutting across a grey-white landscape. A few trucks moved between the surviving townships, but he also saw horse-drawn buggies, like something out of an open-air museum. Bicycles, too, at least close to the towns. Even what looked like a dog sleigh, cutting across the snow banks. “Quite a sight,” he said. “Ten years ago you would never have believed you’d see all this.”

“Indeed. It is as if the climate bands have suddenly shifted a thousand miles closer to the equator, from north and south. So that Los Angeles, say, now has a climate similar to Seattle’s before the eruption.”

“I know. I’ve been there. The Angelinos just hate all that rain and fog.”

“While Seattle itself is more like Alaska. Much of the planet north or south of forty degrees, in fact, has been largely abandoned to the ice. Canada, north Europe, Russia, Siberia—empty, the nations collapsed, the people gone stepwise, ancient cities deserted save for hardy hold-outs. Nelson Azikiwe tells me that little moves in Britain now save for salvage parties from the Low Earths trying to rescue cultural treasures.”

“Nelson Azikiwe?”

“Another of my friends, Joshua. Actually you met him in my reserve in Low Earth Madison on the day of the eruption. I’d like you to link up with him, in fact.”

Joshua didn’t respond to that. For “friends” read “assets”. Sometimes he felt as much a “friend” to Lobsang as a chessboard pawn would to a grandmaster. Even so, ultimately he’d probably find himself doing what Lobsang asked.

“The politics of the Datum Earth has been dramatically reconfigured,” Lobsang said now. “The new powerhouse nations are Southern Europe, North Africa, India, south-east Asia, southern China—even Mexico, and Brazil which is exploiting the final dieback of the rainforest to open up Amazonia to agriculture and mining. There is much jockeying for position in the new order, as you can imagine. China is somewhat disconnected from its stepwise footprints, compared to America and its Aegis, but on the Datum the Chinese are very strong.”

“Good luck to them.”

“But Datum America is prostrate. Not that this concerns you overmuch, I imagine, out in your homestead at Hell-Knows-Where.”

Joshua scowled. “You know damn well that I don’t live there any more, Lobsang. I haven’t even been back there in months. You had to send out Bill Chambers to fetch me back from my latest sabbatical, didn’t you?”

“I had hoped that you might have been able to come to some reconciliation with Helen.”

“Then you don’t know Helen. I guess all the time I spent back here at the Datum after Yellowstone was the final straw—even though she knew it was the right thing to do. I could never get the balance right, not for her, between home, and—”

“And the call of the Long Earth. The two sides of your nature.”

“Something like that.”

“And Dan?”

“Oh, I see him as much as I can. Fine kid—thirteen years old, and already taller than me.”

“And yet your sabbaticals still draw you away… How’s your hand, by the way?”

Joshua lifted his prosthetic left hand to his throat, pretended to choke himself, and pretended to fight it off. “It has good days and bad days.”

“I could get you something far better, you know.”

“With you inside? No offence, Lobsang—but no.” He held out his mug. “Have we run out of coffee already?”

The airship travelled at a leisurely pace. It took until evening before they were over Idaho Falls, maybe eighty miles from the caldera. Here Lobsang said they would stop for the night.

At Joshua’s request Lobsang lowered the ship so they could climb down to the ground, briefly escaping from the heated air of the gondola, although Lobsang insisted they should return to the airship before dark: “A lot of bandits out here nowadays, Joshua.”

With Lobsang at his side, Joshua walked around experimentally on a road surface choked with ice and ash drifts, and peppered with boulders of pumice so massive it was hard to believe that any force could propel them eighty yards through the air, let alone eighty miles. The air was bitterly cold, attacking his cheeks and nose and forehead, any part of him that was left exposed by the layers of his cold-weather gear.

He came to a stream, flowing sluggishly. The water was grey with ash, and the tree trunks by the banks were grey-brown. The scene was eerie, the light coppery as the sun went down. And the world was silent. There had been no traffic on the interstate for many miles, but nature was subdued here too; Joshua heard not so much as a bird call, as he inspected the spindly trunks of dead pine trees.

“Kind of quiet,” he said to Lobsang.

The ambulant unit was kitted out in Arctic gear as he was. Its breath, evidently heated and kept moist by some internal mechanism, steamed quite convincingly, a touch of verisimilitude. “The world is quieter still for me. So many communications nodes and networks have failed or been abandoned. To me, Joshua, it is as if the world is becoming Thulcandra.”

Joshua knew the reference. “The silent planet. Why did you bring me here, Lobsang?”

“How’s your headache?”

“Of course you’d know about that. If you want to know, it’s worse than ever. I mean, I usually feel uncomfortable when I’m at the Datum, or close to it, but this is worse…” He tailed off, glancing around. He thought he had heard something, breaking the deadened silence. A furtive scuffling. A wolf, starving in this frozen wilderness? A bear? A human, some kind of bandit, as Lobsang had warned him?

Lobsang seemed unaware. “But this is different, yes? Your headache. You must have a sense that something about the Datum has changed.”

Joshua grunted. “And so do you, right? You’ve got evidence, haven’t you? Evidence of something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me back.”

“Indeed. Evidence of something—well put. Something elusive and difficult to define, yet nevertheless apparent to me, who, despite my post-volcano handicap, still spans the world like a disembodied bardo spirit—”

“Like a what?”

“Never mind. Something real, Joshua. Look—you know me. If nothing else I am a keen student of the folly of mankind, which at times has seemed almost terminal.”

“As we’ve discussed many times,” Joshua said dryly.

“Well, now something has changed. The aftermath of Yellowstone seems to have triggered it. People have responded well or badly. But amid the heroism and cowardice, the generosity and the venality, if you take a global view—and I am scarcely capable of less—it seems to me that humanity’s response to Yellowstone has been characterized by a startling outbreak of what Sister Agnes once described as common sense.”

And, just as he uttered those words, a figure in an orange jumpsuit, barefoot, with shaven head, materialized out of thin air, already in the middle of a flying leap. “HAAARRRGGH!”

“Not now, Cho-je!—”

But Lobsang’s words were cut off as the newcomer wrapped his legs tight around Lobsang’s neck. Lobsang was forced to the frozen ground—but as he fell he stepped away, disappearing, leaving the newcomer rolling alone in the dirty ice, ash staining his orange jumpsuit.

Joshua carried a gun, bronze, steppable. He always carried a gun. Before the guy could stir Joshua had the weapon out in front of him, held two-handed, legs wide. “I knew I heard something tracking us. Don’t move, grasshopper.”

But Lobsang appeared at his side, breathing hard, his robe ripped at the neck. “It’s all right, Joshua. I’m under no real threat. This is just—”

“HYY-AAGH!” The guy on the ground did a kind of back flip, and once more launched himself through the air at Lobsang. But Lobsang dipped into his own forward roll, and the newcomer was sent flying. This time it was the assailant who stepped away, before he hit the ground.

Lobsang straightened up, breathing hard. “It’s one of Agnes’s ideas. You see—”

“NYA-HAAH!” Now the assailant, Cho-je, came back into the world above Lobsang’s head, with his fists clamped together and ready to slam down on Lobsang’s crown. But Lobsang ducked, whirled, and caught him with a kick in the stomach—and again Cho-je disappeared.

Joshua gave up. He holstered his weapon, stood back, and watched the fight. It was a blur of kicks, punches, even head-butts that rained in with hard, meat-slapping impacts, and of stepping, as the two figures popped in and out of existence, each trying to get the down on the other. During his travels with Lobsang Joshua had watched plenty of Jackie Chan movies. And out in the Long Earth he had been involved in his own battles with elves, stepping humanoids honed by the hunt, who could cross between the worlds with such precision that they could materialize alongside you with their hands already in position to close around your throat. This was something like all of that, he thought, hastily mashed together, a high-speed blur of action that was all but impossible to follow.

“HEE-ARR-AARGH!”

“Cho-je, you fool!—”

It ended when Lobsang grabbed Cho-je’s left hand, as if to shake it, and, holding on hard, executed a standing somersault. When it was done he was still holding the hand, which had been ripped off at the wrist. Cho-je, bemused, breathing hard, looked at the stump of his arm; Joshua saw LEDs spark amid a whitish fluid that dripped to the ground.

Cho-je bowed to Lobsang. “Nice work! Good to see Sister Agnes’s care has not softened you up!”

“On the contrary,” Lobsang said. “Until we meet again.”

“Until then. If I may have my detached extremity…” Lobsang gave him back the severed hand, and Cho-je snapped out of existence.

“So, Lobsang—Cho-je?”

Lobsang was sweating, quite convincingly. “As I said, Agnes’s idea. She has the notion that I’m too powerful. I need challenges, she says. So I endure an endless routine of toughening up and training. Actually, Joshua, Agnes got the idea for Cho-je from my account of our sparring matches during our voyage on the Mark Twain. I do derive enormous benefit in terms of ambulant body control from such exercises, and Cho-je is an increasingly ingenious opponent. By the way, in addition to this training partner, she also recruited another, one of the past inmates from the Home, a rather reclusive young man who has devoted his life to launching ingenious computer-virus attacks on me.”

“Viruses, huh?”

They began to walk back to the twain. “Viruses are a worse threat to me than any physical violence, no matter how many backups I create. Any synching between my iterations at all leaves me open to a potentially lethal attack. I’m thinking of installing at least one entirely non-electronic backup.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, a few hundred monks in a scriptorium somewhere, endlessly copying my thoughts from one bound paper volume to another. A scriptorium on the moon maybe.”

“One thing has definitely changed about you, Lobsang. Your jokes are no better. But at least now I can tell they are jokes.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“And to think that just as this incident with Cho-je occurred you were about to lecture me on ‘common sense’.”

“We can continue that discussion in the morning. The twain is relatively spartan but quite comfortable, I think you’ll find.”

“Any good movies?”

“Of course. Your choice. But nothing with singing nuns in, if you don’t mind…”