The Long Mars

19

The two gliders, Woden and Thor, sat side by side on the red dust of Mars.

The gliders were spindly constructions, supremely lightweight. Their wings were long—fifty or sixty feet, each wing longer than the entire fuselage—wings surprisingly narrow and sharply curved, which was something to do, Sally learned, with managing the flow of the very sparse Martian air. But the slender hulls of the gliders had been intelligently designed, Sally discovered as they got the ships loaded up, with a lot of room for food and water, surface exploration gear, inflatable domes for temporary shelter, spares and tools to maintain the gliders themselves—and some items that surprised her, such as emergency pressure bubbles, each big enough for one human, and little drone aircraft to act as eyes in the sky.

And, poking around the hulls, Sally discovered that each ship carried a whole stack of Stepper boxes, ready to be fitted out with Martian cacti.

Willis was proud of the design, and bragged about it at length. “You can guess the design principle. These gliders will be our equivalent of twains back on the Long Earth. We’ll ride in the sky as we step, safely above any discontinuities on the ground—ice, flood, quakes, lava flows, whatever. Airships would be no use in this thin air—they’d have to be too big to be practical, and we don’t have the lift gas anyhow. But the gliders are based on designs that have successfully flown at ninety thousand feet on the Datum, which is about the air pressure on the local Mars—higher on this Mars, of course… The gliders will only step the way twains step—a controlling sapient does the stepping, that is the pilot, metaphorically carrying each ship stepwise. We probably won’t travel too far laterally. We’ll do a lot of circling. That way, if we crash, there’s at least a chance that we could step on foot back to the MEM. Another failsafe option. Right, Frank?”

Before they launched, Sally said she had two questions. “Two ships, right?”

“Well,” Frank said, “we could carry three persons in one ship at a pinch. We’re taking two ships for backup.”

Sally thought almost fondly of Lobsang. “You can never have too much backup.”

“Right,” said Frank.

“Two gliders, then. We need two pilots, from the three of us.” She looked at them. “So, question one: who’s driving?”

Frank and Willis both put their hands up.

Sally shook her head. “I won’t waste my time arguing with two old-guy control freaks like you.”

“You’ll get your turn,” Willis said. “We’ll need to rotate.”

“Sure. I’m happy to ride shotgun. Do I get to choose who I ride with?” And before they could answer she snapped, “You got the short straw, Frank.”

“That’s all I need. A back-seat driver.”

“Don’t push your luck, Chuck Yeager… And, Dad, here’s my other question—why all the Stepper boxes?”

“Trade goods,” he said simply. He wouldn’t expand further.

She glowered at him, but said no more. This kind of secretiveness was typical—the way he’d known all about the Long Mars before they’d even come here, the way he’d been working with the Russians on Mars who he hadn’t mentioned until they landed, the secrets of Mars itself—“Ask your father about life on Mars”—and now these Steppers, carried for a contingency he clearly foresaw but wouldn’t discuss. He’d been this way since she was a teenager; it was a way of keeping control, and it had always made her coldly furious.

But she’d known all about his personality when she signed up for this jaunt. The time to challenge him would come, but not yet, not yet.

Frank was focusing on the flight. He said sternly, “We’re going to take this in stages. We’re going to suit up fully, in case of cabin leaks, and we’re going to make our very first step on the ground. Then, if all goes well, we’ll launch and step further in the air.”

Willis scowled. “OK, Frank, if you insist. Safety first.”

“That’s the way to stay alive. Let’s get on with it.”

On their last night, the Russians insisted on taking them all over to Marsograd, served them coffee and vodka and black bread with some kind of algal paste, and made them watch a movie, called White Sun in the Desert. Viktor explained, “Old cosmonaut tradition. Movie watched by Yuri Gagarin before historic first flight in space. All Russians remember Gagarin.”

Frank fell asleep during the movie. Sally just sat through it, trying to avoid conversation with her father.

In the small hours, in the dark, they were driven back to the gliders in the Russian rover. They arrived a little before dawn. The MEM was a silent hulk in the dark, sending reassuring status messages to Frank’s tablet, waiting to take them home.

They clambered out of the rover, and the Russians rolled away.

In their already familiar pressure suits the three of them crossed to their aircraft, and boarded. Soon Sally found herself sitting in a cramped bucket seat, looking at the back of the helmeted head of Frank Wood, in the pilot’s bucket seat in front of her.

Even before this first limited trial Frank insisted on running a few more “integrity checks” before going any further.

Then he called back, “OK, let’s do this. The ground test first. Thor, this is Woden. You hear me over there, Willis?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Sally, I have my Stepper box; I’ll do the stepping. For now I’ll carry you and the ship. OK?”

“Copacetic, Captain Lightyear,” Sally said.

“Yeah, yeah. Just take this seriously; it might keep you alive a little longer. Willis, on my zero. Three—”

Before he’d got to “two” Willis’s ship had winked out of existence.

Frank sighed. “I knew he’d do that. Here we go—”

Stepping on Mars, Sally discovered, felt just like stepping on Earth. But the landscape beyond the hull of the glider changed dramatically, a more significant difference than most single steps on the Long Earth, unless you fell into a Joker.

Around the two gliders, still sitting side by side on the ground, the basic shape of the landscape endured, the eroded remains of the Mangala valley, the rise to the north-east that was the beginning of the great bulge of Arsia Mons. But aside from that there was only a plain of dust littered with wind-sculpted chunks of rock, under a sky the colour of butterscotch. No life here.

The MEM, of course, and the tyre tracks left by the Marsokhod, had disappeared.

Frank theatrically tapped one of the display screens before him. “Air’s all gone. Pressure down to one per cent of Earth’s, and—yep, it’s mostly carbon dioxide. Just like our Mars.”

They clambered out cautiously. In the thin air Sally found her pressure suit inflated, subtly, making it stiffer to move around in. Frank and Sally checked each other’s suit, checked the glider cab. They took care over this, at Frank’s insistence; a failure of their gear over in the Gap Mars would have been survivable—here, probably not. The average Mars was lethal. Unprotected, Sally would be killed by the lack of air, the cold, the ultraviolet. Even the cosmic rays sleeting through the thin atmosphere inflicted a radiation dose equivalent to standing five miles from a nuclear blast, every six months.

Frank looked east, to the rising sun, holding up his hand to shield his faceplate from the glare, until he found a morning star. Earth, Sally realized, a feature missing from the sky of the Mars of the Gap. Frank opened a hull hatch and pulled out a small optical telescope and a fold-out radio antenna.

Willis came walking over from his own glider. “At last, this is an authentic Mars. Just like our own. The way Mars is supposed to be.”

Sally said, “I thought the Gap Mars was barren. I didn’t realize how much life there was, visible even in a casual glance. Not until now, when it’s all been taken away.”

“You’d better get used to it.”

Frank was peering through his telescope, listening in to his radio gear. “You were right, Willis.”

“I usually am. What about specifically?”

Frank pointed at the sky. “That’s Earth. We came East, right? The GapSpace facility is one step East of the Gap. But there’s no radio signals coming from that Earth up there. No lights on the dark side. If that was the GapSpace Earth we’d see evidence of it, hear it.”

Sally tried to get her head around that. “So we took a step into Long Mars. But it doesn’t—umm, run parallel to the Long Earth.”

“It seems not,” Willis said, peering up into the sky. “The Long Earth chain of stepwise alternates, and the Long Mars chain, are independent of each other. Intersecting only at the Gap. That’s no surprise. They’re both loops in some higher-dimensional continuum.”

Sally felt neither wonder nor fear. She’d grown up with the strangeness of the Long Earth; a little more exotica now hardly made any difference.

Frank, as ever, stuck to the practical. “What that does mean is that our only way home is back this way—I mean, back to the Gap universe, and the MEM, and Galileo, and a ride across space.”

“Noted,” said Willis. “OK. Anybody need the bathroom again? Then let’s get these birds in the air.”

To launch, each glider was fitted with small methane-burning rockets. The craft would scoot along the ground and fling itself into the air, gliding when the rockets were shut down. The gliders carried plenty of methane and oxygen propellant, and were equipped with versions of the Russians’ Zubrin factories, small processing plants, to manufacture more if they needed it.

They took their time to pace out a launch runway across the dusty plain, kicking aside any rocks big enough to cause a problem. Then they lined up the ships. From the air they would look like Lilliputians, Sally thought, toiling to move these fragile toy aeroplanes.

At last they were ready.

Willis went up first, in Thor this time. That was yet another precaution by Frank; he kept two warm bodies on the ground ready to help in case the first flight attempt ended in a crash. Willis put his glider through banks and turns and rolls, testing out responses in a way that would have been impossible in the thicker air of Gap Mars.

When they’d got through that programme and Willis reported he was happy, Frank and Sally climbed aboard Woden and took off in their turn. The methane rockets were noisy and gave a firm shove in the back.

But soon they were gliding, high over Mars.

They flew in silence broken only for Sally by her own breathing, and the whirr of the miniature pumps in the pressure suit pack she’d stowed behind her couch. There wasn’t a whisper from the Martian air that must be flowing over the glider’s long narrow wings. The cabin was a glass blister that gave a good all-round view, and Sally found herself sandwiched between a cloudless yellow-brown sky and a landscape below of much the same hue. Lacking any contrasting colour to the universal buttery brown, from above the landscape looked like a model, a topographic representation of itself chiselled out of soft clay.

From up here she could make out the distinctive form of Mangala Vallis, as she’d studied it in maps en route to Mars, a complex network of valleys and gullies flowing out of the higher, more heavily cratered ground to the south. It very obviously looked as if a great river had once run here, leaving behind bars and levees and islands, carved out and streamlined by the flow. But the water was just as obviously long gone, and the landscape was clearly very old. The valley features cut across the most ancient craters, huge worn ramparts that would have graced the moon—but the islands and levees were themselves stippled with younger craters, small and round and perfect. Unlike Earth, Mars was geologically static, all but unchanging, and had no mechanisms to rid itself of such scars.

The horizon of Mars, blurred a little by the dust suspended in the air, seemed close and curved sharply. And to the north-east she saw the land rising up, and imagined she saw the mighty flank of Arsia Mons looming into her view. Mars was a small world but with outsized features: volcanoes that stuck up out of the air, a valley system that sprawled around half the equator.

Nowhere in this landscape did she see a glimpse of life, not a speck of green, and not a drop of water.

“When do we start stepping?”

“We already have,” Frank said. “Look down.”

Although the gross features of the landscape below the banking gliders endured—the horizon, the mighty carcass of Arsia, the outflow channels—now she saw that details were changing with every heartbeat: a different pattern of newer craters on the older landscape to the south, subtleties in the finer twists and turns of Mangala’s complex of channels to the north. Then there was a blink, she was in a crimson-tinged darkness, and the glider was buffeted as if it had driven into turbulent air. Just as suddenly the darkness cleared, and the gliders flew on.

“Dust storm,” called Willis.

“Yeah. Not very comfortable,” Frank replied. “But we’ve got no vents to clog, no engines to choke. These storms can last months.”

“But we don’t need to stick around to see it,” Willis said.

They snapped into the buttery sunlight of the next world, and the next. The Marses slid past below, one every second.

As they flew on, things became relaxed enough that Sally was able to loosen her faceplate and open her suit. The stepping was no faster than the old Mark Twain, the prototype stepper airship she rode across the Long Earth with Lobsang and Joshua Valienté fifteen years ago, no faster than a modern commercial cargocarrier, and a lot slower than the fastest experimental craft, or even the best military ships. But it was fast enough, she thought, for this journey into the utterly unknown.

Except that it seemed like a journey into the utterly identical. There were simple step counters in the cabin, and she watched the digits pile up as time passed: sixty worlds a minute, over three thousand an hour. At that rate, on the Long Earth, they would have crossed over sheaves of Ice Age worlds, fully glaciated planets, within the first hour or more; after ten hours or so they would be crossing into the so-called Mine Belt, a band of worlds with quite different climates, arid, austere… Even on smaller scales the Long Earth was full of detail, of divergence. Here there was nothing, nothing but Mars and more Mars, with only the most minor tinkering with detail at the margins. And not a sign of life anywhere: dead world after dead world.

She did, however, notice an odd sensation at times, a sense of twisting, of being drawn away… She knew that feeling from her jaunts on the Long Earth: it was a sense that a soft place was near by, a short cut across the great span of this chain of worlds. She supposed that to someone like Frank that would seem unimaginably exotic. To Sally, these subtle detections gave a glow of familiarity.

The gliders flew on, banking like great birds in the empty skies. They had set off not long after dawn. As the Martian afternoon wore on, Sally decided to try to sleep, asking Frank to wake her when they got to Barsoom.