The Long Mars

25

Willis Linsay appeared to be right about the stepwise geography of the Long Mars, Frank Wood observed.

Most of the stepwise Marses, at a first glance, as seen from the gliders riding in the high, thin air, were all but exactly the same. The pilots kept their dust-streaked birds hovering over their landing-site area of the Mangala Vallis, a huge arid landscape, and generally little changed from world to world, as it had been from the beginning. As Willis had predicted the only relief for Mars came from the occasional Jokers, worlds where, for some reason, there was warmth, moisture, a brief chance for any surviving life to express itself.

But all of these beneficent accidents seemed limited in time. It might take years, centuries, millennia, maybe even tens of millennia, but at last the eruptions would cease, the volcanic gases would clear, or the crater-lakes freeze over, as Mars returned to its regular state of lethal stasis. In fact, more often than they found functioning biospheres—like the world of the sand whales they’d encountered fortuitously early in their voyage—the travellers came upon traces of recently extinguished life. Aside from dust storms, not much happened on Mars; erosion was slow, and such traces could linger.

For example, about two hundred thousand steps East of the Gap, the gliders had swept over what looked like the remains of a mighty ocean that must have covered, if briefly, the plains of the northern hemisphere. Sites like Mangala showed signs of having become sea coasts, and Willis pointed out stranded beaches, what looked like a petrified forest a short distance inland, and salt plains on the dried-out ocean floor.

When they swept down for a closer look, they saw conical casts on the seabed, casts as tall as pyramids created by some immense snake—maybe a relative, in a common-origin sense, of the sand whales they’d seen before—and scattered plates like abandoned armour that might have come from something like the crustacean predators. Even bones, resembling a huge ribcage as if of a whale, sitting on a dry ocean floor.

At last, on the twelfth day, some half a million steps East of their starting point, they came upon traces of sapience. They found a city.

Set upon the high land to the south of Mangala, straight-line avenues still showed under the dust, and towers loomed, tall and bone-white. But there was no sign of extant life.

They had got in the habit of swapping over crew and rotating piloting responsibilities, to keep everybody fresh and experienced, and so that the pilots got used to the quirks of both machines. The day they found the city, Frank was riding shotgun as Sally piloted Thor, while Willis flew Woden solo. And so Frank was able to take in the scenery as Sally took the bird down close to the ground, and swept towards the city.

One peculiarity of their flight was that, such was the thinness of the air, the gliders needed high speed to keep aloft; that wasn’t so noticeable at high altitude, but close to ground level you whipped along like a swallow chasing a fly. So the city loomed out of nowhere, and suddenly Frank found himself racing over avenues of broken flags between towers of ivory, impossibly tall, cracked and shattered. Frank couldn’t resist it; he let out a rebel yell.

Sally grunted. “I’m trying to concentrate here.”

“Sorry.”

“How’s the data capture?”

Frank glanced at a tablet beside his seat, which showed megabytes of data from imaging systems, sonar, radar, an atmospheric sample suite, pouring into the glider’s compact memory. They even had radio receivers listening out for any evidence of transmitters; Mars’s ionosphere was feeble and would be a poor reflector of radio waves, but you never knew, and it seemed remiss not to listen. “All in hand,” he said. “Quite a place, isn’t it? From the air the city looked like—I don’t know—a chess set. From here, down and dirty, those towers look like cracked teeth. But taller than anything you could build on Earth.”

Willis called over, “That’s the low gravity for you.”

Sally said, “But the towers didn’t save them when the final wars came. Look down.”

Now, in the rubble-littered roadways and even inside some of the smashed buildings, Frank saw wreckage: segments of casing, articulated limbs, as if torn from some immense spider. They were made of some kind of metal, perhaps, or ceramic. These fragments were broken, crushed, blown open, and the road surfaces and walls were pitted with bomb craters. All of this was covered with a fine sheen of rust-red dust, wind-blown.

Frank asked, “Why do you say ‘final wars’?”

Sally said, “Because evidently there was nobody left to clean up when it was done. Many of these Joker islands-in-time must have ended in wars, mustn’t they? When the climate collapsed, the survivors would have fought over the last of the water—the last trees to burn—maybe they made sacrifices to appease their gods. All patterns familiar from Datum Earth’s history; that’s what we’d do. Stupidity is a universal, it seems.”

In this city like a vast cemetery, that cold remark made Frank wince.

Willis said, “I doubt if there’s anything more for us here. I’ll go down to take a few samples. Follow me if you like.”

Frank saw Woden dip towards a broad flat area outside the city. He asked Sally, “How about it? Need to stretch your legs?”

“I’ll be fine. You?”

“Skip it. I’m doing my couch yoga as we speak.” To conserve the methane fuel they needed to launch from the ground, they were trying to minimize landings.

Sally tugged on her joystick. Thor’s nose lifted, and the glider spiralled into the high air. Once again the city was reduced to a toy-like diorama, with no visible trace of bomb blasts or insectile war machines.

Frank switched to the internal intercom, so Willis couldn’t listen in. “So, Sally.”

“What?”

“‘Stupidity is a universal.’ I’ve heard you say that kind of thing before. Are you serious?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m only asking.”

“Look—I didn’t grow up despising mankind. I had to learn it. You know my background…”

He knew the basics. Most of it he’d learned from Monica Jansson, who, late in her life, Sally had grown close to—close at least in Sally’s terms—when they had pulled that stunt of liberating a couple of trolls from GapSpace. And then Jansson had become close to Frank, all too briefly, before he’d lost her.

Sally Linsay had grown up a natural stepper, but from a mixed background; her father, Willis, was not a natural. Before Step Day, her mother’s family—like, it seemed, many dynasties of naturals—had, understandably, kept their peculiar superpower to themselves, but they’d used it when it suited them.

“I was stepping when I was a little kid,” Sally said now. “My uncles would go hunting in the Low Earths with crossbows and such, and they knew to watch for grizzlies. Dad was always more a tinkerer than a hunter, and he built a stepwise workshop for himself, and dug a garden. I’d take him over there and I’d help him out, and he’d make up stories and such, and play games. The Long Earth was my Narnia. You know Narnia?”

“That’s the one with the hobbits, right?”

She blew a raspberry. “To me, stepping was a joy. And it was a useful experience, because I was surrounded by smart people who understood what they were doing, and used the gift wisely, and took precautions.

“Then came Step Day, and suddenly every idiot with a Stepper box could go out, and guess what? Next thing you know they’re all drowning or freezing to death or starving, or getting chomped by some mountain lion because the little kitteny cubs were so cute. And worst of all is that all those idiots took not just their idiocies with them into the Long Earth, but their petty flaws too. Their cruelty. Especially their cruelty.”

“And especially cruelty to trolls, right? I know that much about you, from when you showed up at the Gap.”

She was sitting ahead of Frank in the glider’s pilot seat; he saw her back stiffen. Predictably she had become hostile. “If you know all about me already, why are you asking?”

“I don’t know it all. Just what I heard, from Monica for instance. You became a kind of rogue. An angel of mercy, helping save these ‘idiots’ from themselves. But also—” He sought for a non-antagonistic term. “You became the conscience of the Long Earth. That’s how you see yourself.”

She laughed. “I’ve been called many things, but not that before. Look, most of the colonized Long Earth is far from any semblance of civilization. If I see a wrong being committed—”

“A wrong in your opinion.”

“I make sure the wrongdoers know about it.”

“You act as a self-appointed judge, jury—and executioner?”

“I try not to kill,” she said, somewhat enigmatically. “Oh, I punish. Sometimes I deliver the perps to justice, if it’s available. Dead folk don’t learn lessons. But it depends on the situation.”

“OK. But not everybody would agree with the value judgements you make. Or the way you assume the right to act on those judgements. There are some who’d call you a vigilante.”

“What’s in a word?”

“You see, Sally, what I’m struggling with is this. It was your father who did this, who caused Step Day. And now all these ‘idiots’ are polluting your Long Earth, as you grew up seeing it. Killing the lions in your Narnia. Right? Is that the real problem? The fact that it was your own father opened it all up—”

“What are you now, some kind of analyst?” She was practically snarling.

“No. But after my military service I saw a number of analysts myself, and I know the questions they ask. Look, I’ll shut up. Your business is your business. But, Sally—do good, OK? But watch that anger of yours. Think about where it comes from. We’re all a long way from home, and we rely on each other, and we need to be in control. That’s all I’m saying.”

She wouldn’t reply. She just kept flying the glider in wide, over-precise loops, until Willis had done his work and came flying up to join them.

Then, after a quick synchronization of their data stores, they stepped away, the chessboard city vanishing from beneath their prows.