The Long Mars

15

On the ninth day after the inception of the Chinese drive, Maggie, writing up reports in her sea cabin, barely looked up as she sensed the airship come to a stop, once again. Another science halt; she’d be informed if it was necessary for her to know the details, or if it was thought she’d be interested.

And a day later, with the ship still halted, Gerry Hemingway called. “Captain, sorry to bother you. You might want to see this one for yourself.”

She checked her earthometer: Earth West 17,297,031. What the hell, she needed some fresh air. “I’ll be there. How’s the weather?”

“We’re near a sea coast here. Kind of crisp, and it’s February. Bring cold-weather gear, and waterproof boots. And Captain—”

“Yes, Gerry?”

“Be careful where you step.”

“See you on the access deck.” She stood, and glanced down at Shi-mi. “You coming?”

Shi-mi sniffed. “Will Snowy be there?”

“Probably.”

“Bring me back a T-shirt.”

Maggie Kauffman stood on a sandy beach, by a gently lapping sea. She wondered if this was an inland American sea like in the Valhallan Belt, or if such labels as “America” made sense any more, as the continents slid around the face of the Earth like jigsaw pieces on a tipped-up tray.

She was here with Gerry, Snowy the beagle and Midshipman Santorini whom she’d assigned as an informal companion for the beagle. Even Snowy, who generally went barefoot, was wearing heavy, improvised boots, she saw. Further away more of Gerry’s science team were recording, mapping, monitoring, staring at this unremarkable beach, the ocean, the dunes. There were two armed marines assigned by Mike McKibben, their tough-talking, Scrabble-playing sergeant. Nobody from the Navy side was sure if the marines were attached to parties like this to keep an eye on the local dinosaurs or crocodiles, or on the Navy crew, or on the dog that spoke English.

And two of the party were civilians, wearing odd-looking sensor packs on their shoulders. These were employed by Douglas Black, and sent a continuous feed back to him. Black rarely showed his face outside his cabin, but he was endlessly curious about the worlds they travelled, and liked to explore, if only vicariously.

Well, there were no crocodiles or dinosaurs here, that Maggie could see. Plenty of life in the ocean; she glimpsed fish, seaweed, the remains of some kind of shellfish on the tidal wrack. And crabs, she saw: a hell of a lot of the little bastards running around.

Gerry Hemingway was watching her. “Captain, we haven’t filed a formal report yet. What’s your first reaction?”

“That I’m glad you warned me to put my boots on. These damn crabs are everywhere.”

“OK. Fair enough. We’ve found a whole belt of worlds dominated by crabs and crustaceans. This is the most spectacular so far. Look, if you’ll indulge us, we’ll show you this step by step. It’s a way of checking our conclusions.”

“Show me what?”

“Follow me down to the ocean, please, Captain.”

She glanced at Snowy, who gave a remarkably human shrug, and stepped forward, very carefully.

At the water’s edge, Hemingway splashed out a little way. “What about this, Captain? And this?” He pointed at the seabed, a big patch of pink, a patch of green.

Looking closer she saw the pink was a crowd of shellfish of some kind, like shrimp, and the green was seaweed. “I don’t see…” Then she realized that the shrimp things were corralled into a rough square, ringed by walls of stones heaped on the sea-bottom sand, and patrolled by some kind of crab no bigger than the palm of her hand. And the seaweed too was a roughly square patch, maybe six feet on a side. More crabs were working the seaweed, passing over its surface, plucking at the greenery. Working in neat parallel lines, up and down this—field?

She stepped back and looked around. The near-shore sea floor of this coastal strip, as far as she could see to left and right, was covered in rectangles and squares like this, green, pink, purplish, other colours. Now she saw it, it was obvious.

“Oh.”

Hemingway was grinning. “‘Oh’, Captain?”

“Don’t get smug, Hemingway.”

“Fa-hrrms,” said the beagle, staring as she was. “Little fa-hrrms.”

“That’s it,” Hemingway said. “We’re evidently seeing careful, conscious, purposeful cultivation by this particular kind of crab. Next step. Follow me, Captain…”

They walked along the beach to what looked at first glance like some kind of drainage ditch cut deep into the sand, straight and long and coming out of the dunes. It ran with clear water, down to the sea. Maybe ten feet wide, the surface was cluttered with debris, Maggie saw, maybe litter from the land washed away by some storm…

No. She looked again. The “debris” was flowing in two lanes, one washing down towards the sea, the other back up. And what she’d thought was drifting junk was mostly little squares and rectangles, none bigger than eighteen inches or so on a side, floating on the water. The ones heading downstream carried what looked like waste, empty pink shells and other garbage. The ones coming up from the sea were laden, with “shrimp’, with seaweed.

Snowy bent over, his black nostrils flaring as he sniffed, and briefly Maggie wondered what he saw, what he sensed…

What did she see?

Those little mats, pale brown in colour, were craft, woven of some kind of reed. Purposefully constructed. They reminded her of big table mats. The seaward ones seemed to be flowing with the current, but those heading upstream were attached by fine thread to more crabs on the bank of the little canal: bigger beasts than those she’d seen on the seaweed farms, hefty, clumsy, labouring to pull their threads. She looked closer, and made out more of the smaller crabs. Each of the big haulage animals had at least one little crab beside him, with a pincer holding—what, a whip? Something like that. And on each of the rafts themselves rode another little crab, or two, and they held handles in their pincers which controlled a kind of rudder—

She stepped back. “No way.”

“Way, Captain,” said Hemingway, grinning. “There are many possibilities for life—and, it seems, many possibilities for toolmaking, civilization-building. Here, it was the crabs who took the chance. Why not? On the Datum, crabs are as old as the Jurassic, there are thousands of species, and they can be pretty smart, communicating with clacks of their pincers, fighting over females, digging burrows. They don’t have hands but you could do some fine work with those pincers.”

“They don’t seem to be reacting to us, do they? Half a dozen vast presences looming over them.”

“Too big,” Snowy growled. “Not ss-see.”

“That may be true,” Hemingway said. “Maybe they physically can’t look upwards. Why would they need to? Or maybe they just can’t process us, visually; we’re just too strange, like clouds come down to the ground…”

“You mentioned ‘civilization’. I see a lot of rafts and fishers. What civilization?”

He straightened up. “Just over the dunes, Captain.”

The city of the crabs centred on what Gerry Hemingway believed was a temple complex. Or maybe it was a palace.

A big blocky building with open porticoes faced a long, wide rectangular pool, brimming with murky green water. What appeared to be a sculpture of a crab—like the raft pilots, but big, half the size of an adult human—loomed over the “temple’. Smaller sculptures, of crabs with upraised pincers, stood in a line around the pool, but Maggie thought that these life-size copies looked more like corpses, or maybe cast-off shells.

This complex, of pool and palace, was lined on all sides by more buildings, all more or less rectangular in form, but with softened edges, and all constructed of some hard, brownish substance. The palace, in fact, was the centrepiece of a straight-line grid-pattern of streets, which delineated blocks cluttered with buildings. The canal from the sea led straight into one big area that looked like warehousing, where, Maggie supposed, the incoming food was processed through in one direction, and the sewage bundled up and flushed away in the other. It was a regular city, and laid out in a surprisingly human-like fashion—unlike the irregular beagle city. But all the streets swarmed with crabs, scuttling this way and that. There were no vehicles on the land, but Maggie did see some of the smaller crabs riding on the backs of their bigger cousins.

And Maggie could step over the tallest buildings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. Where she planted her feet—with great care—in streets and open areas, the crabs still didn’t seem to perceive her properly; they just scuttled sideways around her big boots.

When she looked up she saw the comforting bulks of the twains, like a reminder of reality.

“My God,” she said to Hemingway. “It’s like a model layout. I keep expecting some toy steam train to come rattling around the bend.”

Hemingway seemed to be bursting to explain it all to her. “Here’s as much as we have figured out, Captain. We’ve been watching for twenty-four hours now. We think these ones—” He bent down and pointed to a sample.

“The raft pilots?”

“Yeah. They are the smart ones. They’re males, who seem to dominate here. These others, the bigger ones, are the females for this species—many crab species have sexual dimorphism. Umm, they also seem to be using other species as draught animals, food stock maybe, construction workers. They don’t seem to have discovered the wheel—see, they ride the dumber ones?

“The buildings are made of a kind of paste, of chewed-up shell and spit; they have a particular kind of animal that specializes in producing that. You can see there’s a big food processing area over there. We can’t even guess at the function of the rest of the buildings, the districts, though some are probably residential. On the Datum, crabs like to live in hollows, in caves, even in pits they dig out of the seabed…”

Maggie bent to look closer at the stationary crab likenesses around the pool. “Crabs moult, don’t they?”

“They do, Captain. They cast off their outer shells regularly. And maybe that’s what this is. Not sculptures, like the big guy over the palace, but moulted shells discarded by—who? The emperor, his ancestors, a line of priests? And it is a him, you can see by the size of the shell. And kept for ceremonial purposes here.”

“Lots of guesswork going on here, Gerry.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Mo-hrre coming,” said Snowy, and he stepped out of the way of the big thoroughfare that led up to the pool.

Here came a regular procession, a whole line of crabs heading for the central complex, most of them raft-pilot size but a few others in there too. Some seemed to have their shells decorated, red, black, purple, maybe with some relative of squid ink, Maggie thought. Others walking alongside clacked their pincers loudly in the air. Conversely there were others, in the middle of the crush, who looked kind of bedraggled, their shells scuffed and scarred. Some even had their pincers missing, nipped off at the joint, perhaps.

The only sounds were the clatter of pincers and the scraping of thousands of shells, a noise like sand on a window.

“Soldier-hhrs with fallen en-hhemies,” Snowy said, sounding almost sad. “Thei-hrr weapons-ss cut away.”

“Perhaps. The kind of sight we’ve seen enough of on the Datum, in the past.”

Hemingway said, “Maybe those guys playing castanet aren’t making noises at random. Some crab species communicate with noises like that. On the Datum the message is usually just ‘That food is mine’, but here it must be more complex.”

Maggie said, “I wonder what fate awaits these prisoners when they reach that pool…”

“Something’s happening at the palace,” Hemingway said now. “Some kind of party coming out.” He snapped at his team, “Make sure you record every damn moment of this.”

“Yes, sir.”

Maggie bent down to see who was emerging from the spit-and-shell palace. One big crab in the centre of the party was surely the centrepiece of it all. His shell wasn’t marked, but he looked heavy, older, even indefinably arrogant to Maggie. He was surrounded by a circle of odd-looking acolytes, pink, vulnerable-looking… “My God,” she said. “They have no shells.”

Hemingway said, “Maybe they’ve just moulted. When it moults the whole crab has to climb out of its old shell… Of course these companions look the right size to be females. In some crab species the females are mated just after moulting, when they’re softer. Hmm. I wonder if this emperor has some way to keep his harem from forming new shells. Thus keeping them sexually available for whenever he feels the urge.”

“Ouch,” Maggie said.

“Yes, Captain. The procession is reaching the water.”

In the end the fate of the captives was brutal and decisive. One by one they were hurled into the pool, by the adorned soldier types. When the first captive hit the water the pool turned into a frenzy of activity, and was soon a mess of fragments of flesh and shell, and thrashing, struggling victims.

All the captives were thrown in, one by one, with horrible regularity, while the “emperor” and his consorts looked on.

Hemingway said, “I wonder what they keep in that pool. Some kind of piranha?”

Snowy said, “Babies-ss.”

“What?”

“Babies. C-hhrab babies are let out by mother-hrr into water. Swim-mm. Find food. Not like pups, not-tt suckle.”

“Ah,” said Hemingway. “And in that pool—”

“Babies of rule-hrr of this place. Eat enemy. Make babies-ss st-hrrong. Make them-mm fight each othe-hrr. Happens like this with us-ss. Pups tear-hhr apart fallen enemies-ss of mother-hrr.”

Hemingway and Maggie shared a glance. “You know,” said Hemingway, “I bet you’re right. I never would have thought of it that way. It makes sense—a cultural logic deriving from the imperative of their biology.”

Snowy had to get that translated into simpler terms. But then he faced Maggie. “Your thought, my thought-tt, always at mer-hhrcy of blood, of body. Need other blood, other bodies, to p-hhrove thought. My blood not you-hhrs. My thought not you-hhrs.”

Maggie grinned. “You’re right, dammit. That’s precisely why I wanted you aboard, Snowy. Different ways of thinking, from a different biological perspective. A way to shed preconceptions we never knew we had. What is the point of the Long Earth if we can’t pool our minds?” She studied the beagle. “I do hope you’re forming a more constructive impression of us, crewman, than I hear your people have on your home world.”

Snowy seemed to frown; his expression was always hard to read. “Con-shh… Cons-thrr…”

“I mean, better. I know you look down on the way we treat our dogs. But we do cherish them, you know.”

Hemingway seemed interested in the conversation. “Not only that, Captain, some people think that our relationship with our dogs contributed to our own evolution. And maybe, if we follow up this experiment with Snowy, if we continue to work together in future—”

Snowy regarded him gravely. “Maybe humans-ss be b-hhred better-hrr than before.”

Maggie let her smile broaden. “Crewman, I’ll make a note in my log that you just made your first joke. Now, as for these crab critters—” She crouched down, staring at the bloody scene playing out before them. “You know, we’ve got more in common with these little guys than you’d think. We meaning humans and beagles, at the least. Like us they’re toolmakers. Like us they build cities. Do we know if they count, Gerry? Do they write?”

“Ah, Captain—”

“You know, if I could find a way to recruit one of these guys on to the crew of the Armstrong—”

“Captain.” More urgently.

She turned. “What?”

He gestured, embarrassed. “The corner of the temple. Your, umm, butt…”

She turned and looked. “I demolished the west wing. Oops.”

“They ss-see us now,” Snowy said, looking down.

Maggie saw that the emperor character was waving his big pincers at her in a kind of comical, miniature rage, laying about him, scattering his soft-fleshed concubines. Everywhere pincers were being clattered, a rising tide of soft but persistent noise. She had offended the king of Lilliput, by brushing his palace with her ass. She tried not to laugh.

But then she felt the ground lurch.

Hemingway turned to look. “Umm, Captain.”

“What now, Gerry?”

“The big crab form on top of this building. The really big one.”

“What about it?”

“We thought it was a sculpture.”

“Yes?”

“Well, it isn’t.”

“Then what?”

“A moult, Captain. It’s another moult.”

“A moult of what? Ah. Of what’s emerging from the ground over there. I see. What do you advise, Lieutenant?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Run, Captain!”

They ran, from a crab that burst from its burrow in the sandy ground, a crab the size of a small bear and with the speed of a cheetah, moving sideways or not.

The airships stayed three days, observing, measuring, sampling. They left behind a three-person team of volunteers from Hemingway’s department with instructions to study the crab civilization, to make contact if they could—and to survive, at a minimum.

Then they flew on.