The Long Mars

17

The crew of the Galileo, with a little help from Viktor Ivanov, their unexpected welcome party—unexpected to Sally and Frank Wood anyhow—spent twenty-four hours closing down the MEM lander, and unpacking its cargo, which included the prefabricated components of two aircraft. Gliders they would be, and light, spindly affairs, as Sally could tell as soon as the parts were unpacked and laid out on fine sheets over the dusty ground. It was in these fragile craft that they would be exploring the Long Mars, she learned from her father. One was to be called Woden, the other Thor.

It took Sally a few hours to get used to the Martian conditions. In the thin air her pressure suit was doing its best to inflate like a balloon, but there were joints at the elbows and knees and ankles that made moving around relatively easy. It was going to get tougher yet on the stepwise Marses, where the air would be vastly thinner than this. In the lower gravity, one-third of Earth, she could lift massive objects, but once such loads were in motion they tended to keep moving, so she needed to take care. Walking was tricky, and running more so, with a tendency to lift off the ground with every step. Experimenting, she found in fact that running in a gentle jog was easier than walking. But to run properly she needed to keep her body low down so that her feet could push back at the Martian ground, maximizing traction.

Frank gently mocked her efforts. “We’ll have you in astronaut training yet.”

Sally just ignored him, head down, experimenting, concentrating. Being able to run away was a basic survival skill; therefore she intended to master running on Mars.

While Willis and Frank got busy assembling the gliders, Sally got to know their unexpected visitor. “You liked surprise? You land on empty Mars. God bless America. Whoosh! Big fat Russian here first. Haw! Haw!”

Viktor invited Sally to come and visit his own base, meet his companions there. “Marsograd. Willis calls it Marsograd. Not its name, you not pronounce real name. Not far from here, couple hundred miles. On flank of Arsia Mons, one of the big Tharsis volcanoes. We monitor volcanoes, big job, try to understand… Come visit.”

Why the hell not? Let Willis and Frank play with their toy aeroplanes.

Viktor’s vehicle, which he’d parked in a deep young crater out of sight of the MEM, was a big, tough-looking truck on fat tyres, with a cabin that was a bubble of scarred Perspex. To Sally, it was like some glorified tractor. Inside, the cabin smelled strongly of oil and greasy Russian males, and the air cycling system rattled alarmingly. But it was roomy and warm, and the bucket seats were comfortable enough as the truck rolled away.

Heading roughly north-east they bounced over a rock-strewn landscape, following tracks that the truck had presumably laid down itself. The sky, cloudless today, her second day on Mars, was blue except at the horizon, where it faded to a more Martian dusty red-brown. And there was life here, clearly visible: those things like cacti, round and hard, what looked like trees, gnarled and folded over with small, spiky leaves—even what looked like reeds, or maybe big grass blades, each with one indented side facing the sun. She imagined the blades tracking the sun as it wheeled across the sky during the Martian day.

“Like a story book,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“It’s like the way they imagined Mars to be, oh, more than a century ago. Austere but Earth-like, with tough life forms. Like in old science fiction stories. Not the sun-blasted airless desert that we actually found, when the space probes got there.”

Viktor grunted. “Most Marses like our Mars. You see. This the exception. Special circumstance.” He seemed proud of his vehicle. He patted the heavy steering wheel. “Willis calls this Marsokhod. Not its name, you not pronounce. Runs on methane fuel from our wet-chemistry factories. You see.”

“I never even knew the Russians were exploring the Gap.”

He grinned. He was about forty; his face was leathery, crumpled, sweat-crusted after hours behind a facemask, and his black greasy hair was a tangle. “GapSpace, cowboy outfit in England. Don’t know about Russians. Not interested to look. Of course Russians are here. We have base on world on other side of Gap, on Baltic coast, high latitude. Called Star City. Like university campus and manufacturing plant and military base, all in one. Also Chinese here, though not so much. Mostly don’t know about each other. How would we know? Big empty Earths. No spy satellites. What difference, if one here or all? Gap is door to big universe. Willis know.”

“He would.” Which was presumably how he had known about the true colour of the Martian sky, for instance. “So the Russians were first here, on this Gap Mars?”

“Of course! Our flags, our anthems. But we help Willis. Why not? Humans together, few of us on big cold world. Now he will explore Long Mars. What he finds, he share.”

Maybe, she thought. “Listen, Viktor. When we first arrived, you said something about a Stepper working. What Stepper?”

He grinned again. “Daddy didn’t tell you? In back.” He nodded his head at a pile of junk behind the seats.

She twisted and rummaged, bouncing uncomfortably as the truck rode low-gravity high over big boulders, until she found the plastic box that had been strapped to Viktor’s side when he’d first shown up. It opened easily after she popped a couple of catches. Inside was a tangle of wiring and electronic components that she recognized as the circuitry of a Stepper, the artificial aid that enabled people to step—most people anyhow, even if they didn’t have the natural ability shared by such as herself and Joshua. This was basically her father’s invention. The only difference from a thousand such boxes she’d seen before, from tangles lashed up by teenagers to sleek bulletproof models issued to cops and military, was that there was no potato in here, the earthy, almost comical ingredient that powered the box. Instead there was a grey-green puffball. “What’s this?”

“Martian cactus. Native. My colleague Alexei Krilov gives fancy Latin names. Use here instead of potato. Of course we grow potatoes too. Can’t make vodka with a cactus. You see.”

It took only a few hours to reach Marsograd.

For the last hour or so the land rose steadily; they were entering Tharsis, province of giant volcanoes, including Olympus Mons. But when Viktor pointed north-west all Sally could see of Arsia Mons, actually one of the lesser volcanoes, was rising land, a kind of bulging horizon. The Tharsis volcanoes, on this Mars as on the Mars of the Datum, were so big that you couldn’t even see them from the ground.

The Russian base was centred on a cluster of yellowing plastic domes, evidently prefabricated. But huddled around these were structures that looked oddly like tepees, struts of what appeared to be the native “wood” draped with leather of some kind. Animal skins? All these buildings were sealed up with ageing polythene sheets, and connected by piping to creaky-looking air circulation and scrubbing plants. Away from the central habitation, big solar cell arrays sprawled across the rocky ground.

Viktor rolled the tractor up to a plastic tube that turned out to be a crude kind of airlock, good enough on this peculiarly benign Mars. He led her through the tube and into a dome. Unzipping their surface suits as they walked, they came to what was evidently a galley, smelling strongly of coffee and alcohol, overlying an earthy stink of body odour and sewage. On a wall-mounted TV an ice hockey game was playing: Russia against Canada.

Viktor said mournfully, “TV show. Recorded, stepped across two million worlds and transmitted to us from Gap station. Now no more ice hockey.”

“Because there’s no more Russia after Yellowstone?”

“Exactly. We watch same games over and over. Sometimes drunk enough to forget result and bet on scores…”

Two more men came bustling in, evidently drawn by the sound of their voices. One was like Viktor, big, dark, maybe fifty; he wore a cosmonaut-type blue jumpsuit with a name tag lettered in Cyrillic and Latin: DJANIBEKOV, S. Viktor introduced him as Sergei. The other, slimmer, blond, maybe under forty—KRILOV, A.—was Alexei, and he wore a grubby white lab coat. These were three men without women, and they stared at her. But Sally met their gazes, Viktor’s too, with a certain look of her own. She had been travelling alone in the Long Earth since she had been a teenager, and was a veteran of such encounters. These three seemed harmless enough.

Once that tricky moment was over, they were fine. Indeed, they fussed over her, like kids eager to please. Sergei’s English was a lot worse than Viktor’s, Alexei’s a lot better. Of course even Sergei’s English was a hell of a lot better than Sally’s Russian, which was non-existent.

They showed her what they called their “guest room’, which was one of the tepee-like shacks. She explored the little space, curious. On the floor was a kind of rug made of thick brown-white wool. The tepee’s covering skin felt like ordinary leather, crudely treated, but the Martian wood of the structural frame was so hard and fine-grained it might have been a plastic imitation: this was some adaptation to enhance moisture retention, she imagined.

She returned to the galley. Sergei, gallant but almost wordless, offered her a big baggy sweater evidently knitted of the same wool as the rug. Although it smelled strongly of whoever wore it regularly, she pulled it on; the sweater was cosy in a base that never quite excluded the Martian chill. They fed her a late lunch, of cabbage and beets and even a couple of tiny, wizened apples, which she imagined were a treasure and a great honour to receive. They offered vodka, which she refused, and coffee, or some imitation of coffee, much-stewed, which she accepted.

Before the light faded Alexei insisted on showing her around the rest of the compound. “I am the station biologist,” he said with some pride. “Also the nearest we have to a medic, among other things. We must all play multiple roles, in a team as small as this…”

There were clear plastic tunnels connecting the domes, so you could get around the base without exposure to the Martian climate, but there were simple self-sealing airlocks that would close up in the event of a pressure breach. Because the whole base was linked up in this way she never escaped the lingering stink of body odour, but at least it was more diluted the further she got from the central quarters. Alexei insisted that Sally carry her oxygen mask loose around her neck at all times, in case of a wall breach. Sally had survived decades alone in the Long Earth; she needed no persuading about such precautions.

Some of the domes were industrial, where compact, crude-looking machinery cracked the Martian atmosphere and water to produce breathable air and fuels such as methane and hydrogen, or processed the rusty dirt to produce iron. Alexei said they were also working on “Zubrin kits’, which he said were adapted to generate methane and oxygen in the sparser conditions of more typical versions of Mars, like the Mars of Datum Earth. “You must import hydrogen, to such impoverished Marses. But a ton of hydrogen processed with Martian air will give you sixteen tons of methane and oxygen—a good return, you see.”

They walked through the farm domes, which sheltered laboriously tilled fields of potatoes and yams and green beans. The work these Russians had put in was heartbreakingly clear from the quality of the soil they’d managed to create from Martian dirt. “Such a challenge, the native dirt is just rusty grit coated with sulphates and perchlorates…” They’d even imported earthworms. But a spindly, yellowed crop was their only reward so far.

Beyond the domes, open to the Martian elements, was a small botanical garden Alexei had established, and he proudly showed Sally his collection of native stock. The cacti were shrivelled and tough-looking, and the trees he’d planted, from seeds collected from adult specimens on the slopes of Arsia Mons, were hardly grown.

He took particular pride in showing her a clump of plants a few feet tall, a kind of ice-cream swirl of yellowish leaves on a base of green leaves. “What do you make of this?”

She shrugged. “Ugly. But that green looks more Earthlike than Martian.”

“So it is. It’s a Rheum nobile, a noble rhubarb—or rather a genetically tweaked version. Grows in the Himalayas. Those yellow leaves wrap around a seed-bearing stem within. It’s adapted for altitude, you see, for thin air. The yellow column is a kind of natural greenhouse.”

“Wow. And here it is growing on Mars.”

He shrugged. “One of a suite of plants from Earth that could almost make it on Mars, on this Mars anyhow. And you can eat the stems, yum yum.”

His final surprise, kept in a dome to themselves, was a small herd of alpacas: awkward-looking beasts, imported as embryos from the mountains of South America, scraping at the scrubby grass that grew at their feet. They peered out at the humans, their woolly faces curious and oddly endearing.

“Ah,” Sally said. “So that’s where you get the wool. And the leather for the tepees.”

“Indeed. We hope that the descendants of these creatures may some day become adapted to survival in raw Martian conditions, on this Mars at least. Of course we may have to genetically engineer Earth-based grasses for them to feed on.

“And if alpacas, why not human beings? Today, this particular Mars is like Earth at an altitude of six miles or so. The highest town on Datum Earth is in Peru, at about three miles. Humans cannot live much higher than that, permanently—or rather we cannot. Our children may be different. This Mars is almost within reach, for us, for the alpacas—”

“For the rhubarb.”

“Exactly. This was our mission, from the Moscow government. We Russians have always looked to the stars, and the discovery of this near-habitable version of Mars excited our scientists and philosophers greatly. We three were the vanguard; we were sent here to establish how humans might live on this world, as well as to study the life forms already extant here.”

“The vanguard. More should have followed?”

“Marsograd should have been a city by now—such was the plan. But your American supervolcano put a stop to that, as to all Russian ambitions. Still, we are here, and we learn much…”

Working pretty much single-handed, Alexei Krilov had been able to establish a great deal about the strange life forms of this relatively clement Mars.

“I have gathered samples from diverse environments, from the deep wet valleys to the flanks of the great volcanoes where life probes at the fringes of space. The cacti have tough, leathery skin which almost perfectly seals in their water stores. The trees have trunks as hard as concrete, and leaves like needles to keep in the moisture. Do not imagine these forms of life are primitive, by the way. They survive in extremely austere environments; they are highly evolved, highly specialized, superbly efficient in their use of mass and energy.

“Both cacti and trees photosynthesize busily—that is, they use the energy of sunlight to grow. And the photosynthesis, by the way, is a form known from Earth; as seems obvious, life on this Mars has been seeded from Earth.”

Sally frowned. “I don’t understand. This is the Gap. There is no Earth here.”

“Ah, but there are Earths close by…”

When it was young, he said, Mars—every version of Mars—was most likely warm and wet, with a thick blanket of air, and deep oceans. It had been like Earth in many ways—indeed, more generous in those days, and the biologists believed that even complex life, plants, something like animals, might well have got kick-started here on this generous young world within the first billion years or so. It had taken billions more years on Earth.

But Mars was smaller than the Earth and further from the sun, and those facts doomed it. As the geology seized up and the volcanoes died back, and the sunlight got to work breaking up the upper atmosphere, Mars lost a lot of its air. Its water froze out at the poles, or receded to buried permafrost or deep underground aquifers.

“That is how it was on the Mars of Datum Earth, and on most other versions of the planet. But here, you see, this Mars has evidently had a regular injection of living things from the neighbouring stepwise Earths.

“Think about it. In our home reality, it was believed that life could be transferred between Earth and Mars, or vice versa, by the great splashes of meteorite impacts. This was called panspermia: the natural propagation of life from one world to the next. But in the Gap, well, there’s no originating Earth, but for the last few million years at least there have been stepping sapients. And every time a hapless humanoid falls from a stepwise Earth into the Gap, it may be destroyed by the vacuum, but some of the freight of microorganisms it carries will survive, delivered into space with so much less effort than a lethal rock splash. And some of those microbial travellers will survive to seed Mars—not just once, but again and again.”

“I see. I think. Ticks from unlucky trolls, colonizing Mars!”

“More likely stomach bacteria, but yes. If life gets the chance it will proliferate where the water is, in the surface ice, the permafrost, the aquifers. In time great feedback loops would be established—just as on Earth, in fact—living things mediating cycles of mass and energy, and in particular water. This Mars has very similar, if not identical, geology and physics to the Mars of the Datum. It is life that has made it as clement as it is, by mobilizing the water and other volatiles. Earth life helped restore the climate—and made it possible for Mars life, the older natives, to flourish. But all this is unusual, you see. Only happened because of the Gap. In the language of the Long Earth, this Mars is a Joker, an exception among Marses.”

“But wonderful nonetheless,” Sally said.

“Oh, yes. But not our discovery, unfortunately. The Chinese discovered a second Gap in the East, five years ago, and observed the same kind of life-spreading mechanism in that solar system. The Chinese! Typical. But even without panspermia, on all the Marses, we think, traces of that original native suite of complex life might survive, as spores, seeds, cysts… Who knows? Waiting to be woken up, like Sleeping Beauty, with a kiss of warmth and water.”

“Is that possible?”

He winked. “Ask your father about life on Mars.”

As the Martian night closed in, the crew of Marsograd, with Sally, withdrew to the galley, the cosiest location. Here they ate another meal, the centrepiece of which was thick steaks of prized alpaca meat, with boiled greenhouse-rhubarb for a sweet, and they drank more coffee, and more vodka, most of which Sally resisted.

Sally felt curiously drawn to these three odd fellows in their shabby hovels. They seemed to have a clear sense of mission. Maybe it was just that she had become so disillusioned with mankind, from the examples she encountered too often. The Long Earth was, in a way, too easy a place to get to; it was only after some bunch of idiots had already built their spanking new town slap in the middle of the flood plain of a stepwise Mississippi, and the waters had started to rise, or whatever, that they generally came to Sally’s attention. Whereas these Russians had come to a place that was supremely hard to survive in, even to get to, and were now showing supreme intelligence, in their slob-like way, in learning about their environment and how to live in it.

But their tragedy was of course that the country that had given them this mission had all but collapsed.

Alexei Krilov’s main beef about that seemed to be that the academies to which he would have reported his science results were moribund, if not defunct. “Nobody to read my papers. No universities to give me tenured posts and science prizes. Poor Alexei.”

Viktor, already drunk, snorted dismissal. “Academies? On Datum, whole of Russia abandoned now. Gone. Moscow under ice. Polar bears in Red Square. And parties of Chinese working their way in from Vladivostok.”

Sergei had spoken little. “Chinese bastards,” he growled now.

“Ha! We are last Russian citizens, like cosmonaut in Mir station when Union collapsed, last Soviet citizen.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Sally said. “Sure, Datum Russia is pretty much uninhabitable now. But most of the population escaped to the Low Earth footprints. The Long Russia survives.”

Viktor grunted. “Sure. Where struggle to build country begins all over again. Just like after Mongols smashed Kiev. And Napoleon smashed Moscow. And Hitler smashed Stalingrad.” He wagged his half-empty glass at Sally. “We Russians have saying: ‘First five hundred years are worst.’ Cheers.” He drained his glass, refilled it from the flask.

“Chinese bastards!” Sergei shouted now.

Viktor patted Sergei’s arm. “There, there, big fellow. Pah! Let Chinese have frozen ruins of Datum. To us, Long Earth, Long Mars—and the stars!”

They drank a toast to that. Then to the Nobel Prize that Alexei was never going to win. Then to the soul of the alpaca whose life had been sacrificed to provide the steaks they had enjoyed.

And then they tried to teach Sally the words of the Russian national anthem, in English and Russian. She crept out to go to bed at the point they’d got on to the third verse: “Our strength is derived through our loyalty to the Fatherland. Thus it was, thus it is and thus it always will be!…”