The Long Mars

2

With her final step, Sally emerged a cautious half-mile or so from the fence surrounding the GapSpace facility. Inside the fence was what looked like a heavy engineering plant, blocks, domes and towers of concrete, brick and iron, some of them wreathed with plumes of smoke, or vapour from the boil-off of cryogenic fluids.

Willis Linsay, her father, had specified a particular day for her to show up here. Well, however this latest interaction with her father turned out, here she was as requested on this January day, back in this supremely strange corner of a version of north-west England more than two million steps from the Datum. On the face of it, it was a bland British winter’s day, dull, cold.

And yet infinity was a step away.

The moon was up, but it wasn’t the moon she was used to. The asteroid the GapSpace nerds called Bellos had spattered this moon liberally with extra craters that had almost obliterated the Mare Imbrium, and Copernicus was outdone by a massive new impact that had produced rays that stretched across half the disc. Bellos had come wandering out of many stepwise skies, its trajectory a matter of cosmic chance, coming close to the local Earth, or not. Bellos had completely missed uncounted billions of Earths altogether. A few dozen, like this one, had been unlucky enough to be close enough to its path to suffer multiple impacts from stray fragments. And one Earth had been hit hard enough to be smashed completely.

Things like that must be going on all the time across the Long Earth. Who was it that said that in an infinite universe anything that could happen would have somewhere to happen in? Well, that meant that on an infinite planet… Everything that can happen must happen somewhere.

And Sally Linsay had found this huge wound, with Joshua Valienté and Lobsang, found this Gap in the chain of worlds. Their twain had fallen into space, into vacuum, into unfiltered sunlight that hit like a knife… And then they had stepped back, and survived.

The air here was cold, but Sally sucked at it until the oxygen made her drunk. She had lived through that fall into the Gap once. And now, was she really planning to go back?

Well, she had to. For one thing her father had challenged her. For another, people were working in there now. In the Gap, in space. And this was their base, one step short of the Gap itself.

The sea breeze was the same as she remembered, from her last visit with Monica Jansson five years ago—back in a different age, the age before Yellowstone. The big sky, the call of birds, were unchanged. Otherwise she barely recognized the place. Even the fence before her had developed from a flimsy barrier into a regular Berlin Wall, all concrete and watchtowers. No doubt the interior of the facility itself was riddled with intensive anti-stepper security.

The purpose of all this industry was evident. She could already see the profile of one rocket, elegant, classic and unmistakable. This really was a space launch facility. But it was not like Cape Canaveral, in the finer detail. There were no towering gantries, and that single rocket she spied was short, stubby, nothing like the great bulks of a shuttle or a Saturn V—surely inadequate for the task of climbing up out of Earth’s deep gravity. But it didn’t need to beat Earth’s gravity, that was the point; that rocket would not be launched into the sky but stepwise, into the emptiness of the universe next door.

Overall, instead of being endearingly backyard-rocketship amateurish as it had been, the facility and its approaches now looked like one big engineers’ playground. The Gap had become big business these last few years, she knew, as governments, universities and corporations back on the Datum had gradually woken up to the potential of the place. Now hoardings shouted the names of every major technical outfit Sally could think of, from Lockheed to IBM via the Long Earth Trading Company—and including the Black Corporation, of course. This had become probably one of the most crowded stepwise locations beyond Valhalla, the greatest city of the High Meggers.

Which was one reason she hadn’t come near the place for years. And why it was hard to take a single pace forward, like she had a phobia. She reflected that Joshua Valienté would do better in this situation. Good old Joshua now seemed quite at home in moderately cramped social situations like this, while she was ever more a loner and a hardened misanthrope.

But it was her father who had summoned her here, and nothing could change him, for better or worse. Willis Linsay, dear old Dad: creator of the Stepping box, a gadget probably stolen out of the box from under Pandora’s nose and released into an unsuspecting world. That was Dad all over, tinker, tinker. If you couldn’t find him, just head towards the explosions and the wail of ambulances…

And as she stood there, reluctant, conflicted, uncertain, here he came, walking boldly out of the compound to meet her. How had he known she was here? Oh, of course he would know.

He was taller than she was—she had always had more of her mother’s colouring and body shape—and thinner than ever, like a man built of nothing but sinews and bone. After her mother had died he’d seemed to live on nothing but brandy, potatoes and sugar, for years.

He slowed as he approached her. They stood there, wary, eyeing each other.

“So you came.”

“What do you want, Dad?”

He grinned, a slightly deranged expression she remembered too well. “Same old Sally. Down to business, eh?”

“Is there any point me asking what you’ve been doing—hell, since you turned the world upside down on Step Day?”

“Pursuing projects,” he murmured. “You know me. You either wouldn’t understand or you wouldn’t want to know. Suffice to say it’s all for the common good.”

“In your opinion.”

“In my opinion.”

“And is there some new project that you brought me here for?”

“Here?” He glanced around at the GapSpace installation. “Here is only a waystation, en route to our ultimate destination.”

“And where’s that?”

He said simply: “The Long Mars.”

Sally Linsay was used to wonder. She had grown up stepping, as a child she had walked into uncounted alien worlds. But even so, as her father spoke those words, she felt the universe pivot around her.

They were met at the compound gate by a guy her father introduced as Al Raup. While his scalp was shaven, a thick black beard sprouted from his chin, giving Sally the odd impression that his head had been rotated around the axis of his stub nose and re attached upside down. He wore canvas shorts, grubby sneakers with no socks, and a black T-shirt too small for his belly with a faded slogan:

SMOKE ME A KIPPER

He might have been any age between about thirty and fifty.

He stuck out his hand. “Call me Mr Ttt.” Tuh-tuh-tuh.

She ignored the hand. “Hello, Al Raup.”

Willis raised an eyebrow. “Now, Sal, play nice.”

“Come, let me show you around my domain…”

Raup swiped them through the security barriers, and they walked into the compound. Sally heard the growl of heavy vehicles, smelled brick dust and wet concrete, and saw giant cranes loom over holes in the ground. Workers wandered around in yellow hardhats. In some cases she saw “danger: radioactivity” signs, and that was new since she’d last visited. Nuclear rockets under develop ment maybe?

She did notice a party of trolls labouring at a concrete mixer, apparently happy enough. Sally cared little for technology, or people, compared with animals.

“So,” Raup said. “Welcome to Cape Nerdaveral, Marsonauts!”

“You’re exactly the type I remember from my last visit here,” Sally snapped at him.

“Ah, yes. When you snatched those trolls.”

“When I liberated them. Glad to see your kind hasn’t gone extinct with the corporatization of this place.”

Raup waved fat fingers. “Ah, well, we geeks were here first. We figured out the basic parameters of how to use the Gap, we started the construction of the Brick Moon and sent over a few test shots, all before anybody even noticed we were here.” His accent might have been middle American, but he had a strangulated, showy way of speaking, with looping vowels and over-precise consonants. She had an odd sense that he had already rehearsed in his head almost everything he said, in case he ever had an audience to use it on. “We’re no innocents. We filed a few patents. But in the end the corporate guys had no interest in screwing us over. Easier to buy us out; we were relatively cheap, in their terms, and we had expertise they needed.” He grinned. “We Founders are all dollar millionaires. How cool is that?”

Sally couldn’t have cared less, and dismissed his bragging.

In among the gargantuan industrial facilities she saw sprawling residential blocks, bars, a hotel, a cinema-cum-theatre, a lot of casinos and gaming houses, and shadier-looking establishments she guessed might be strip joints or brothels. And there was one modest chapel, she saw, built of what looked like native oak, with a small graveyard set out within a low stone wall: a reminder that space travel was a dangerous occupation even here.

“I can see you have plenty of chances to spend all those dollars.”

“Well, that’s true. It’s something like an Old West mining town,” Raup said. “Or maybe an oil rig. Or even early Hollywood, if you want a more glamorous example. Actually you have to watch your step these days.”

“He means, there’s organized crime,” Willis murmured. “Always drawn to places like this. There have already been a few murders, over gambling debts and the like. One way to do it is to just drop you into the Gap without a pressure suit, and no Stepper box. Sleeping with the stars, they call it. That’s why there’s such a security presence now: policing the criminal element, and watching out for saboteurs.”

Raup said, “But it’s still a cool place to be.”

Sally just dismissed that remark.

At the heart of the complex they walked down a kind of central mall lined with office blocks, brand new, concrete gleaming white and unstained. Raup led them to a low, flashy building marked with a bronze plaque: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN AUDITORIUM. There was a crowd at the doors and Raup had to produce passes to enable them to jump the line. He said apologetically, “We built this for Walter Cronkite-type news conferences. Our corporate masters insisted. Normally it’s deserted. But you’re in luck, Ms Linsay; the scuttlebutt is that the Martian rainstorms have cleared enough for the Envoy mission controllers to attempt a landing this very day. So it’s a good chance to show off to you what we’re doing here.”

Sally glanced at her father. “Rainstorms? On Mars?”

“It isn’t our Mars,” he said. “You’ll see.”

Raup led them into a central auditorium, with rows of benches before a lectern, the walls coated with big display screens. The place was full of chattering technicians and scientist types. For now the wall screens were blank, but smaller screens and tablets around the room showed grainy colour images being put through various enhancement processes. Sally glimpsed fragments of landscapes, grey-blue sky, rust-red ground.

“Wow,” Raup said, seeing the screen images, for once not sounding like he was simulating the emotions he expressed. “Looks like they did it, they landed the Envoy. The first time we made it, to this copy of Mars.”

“Envoy?”

“A series of unmanned space probes.” Raup drew her attention to hard-copy images on the wall: trophy pictures of chunks of a planet, taken from space. “The first couple of Envoys to Mars were flybys, and these are the pictures we got. Today’s was the first actual landing, a necessary precursor to the manned missions that will follow. The very latest pictures, live from the Mars of the Gap!”

Willis snorted. “Yeah, but they’re getting the mix wrong. The sky is nowhere near that colour.”

Sally stared at her father. If these were the first landings on this Mars, how could he know that? But she’d long ago learned not to try to interrogate him.

Raup said, “You understand that the probe itself is really only a test article. For now we’re just proving the propulsion technology. With the Gap, you can do a lot. We’re hauling over nuclear rocket stages—inertial confinement fusion, if you’re familiar with the technology—and with those babies we’re getting to Mars in weeks, where it used to take you seven, eight, nine months depending on the opposition. . .”

Sally knew or cared nothing about nuclear rocketry, but the pictures caught her attention. One showed a disc, presumably the full globe of Mars imaged from space—but it wasn’t the Mars she remembered from decades of NASA pictures back on the Datum. This Mars was washed-out pink, with streaks of lacy cloud, and patches of steel grey that glinted in the sun: lakes, oceans, rivers. Liquid water, on Mars, visible from space. And there was green, the green of life.

“I told you,” Willis said. “This Mars is different.”

“You understand you’re seeing the Mars of the Gap universe, the universe one step over from here,” Raup said, back to his over-rehearsed way. “The images are radioed back to the Brick Moon, our station in the Gap. We have a clever system of packet-feeding the data stepwise to our facilities here… Our Mars is a frozen desert. This Mars, the Gap Mars, is something like Arizona, though at a higher altitude. The Envoys confirmed the higher atmospheric pressure. On this Mars you could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a facemask and sun cream.

“In this particular launch window, it was unlucky for us that our twin Envoy landers arrived in the middle of the worst storm season we’ve seen since we started watching Gap Mars, oh, a decade or more back. Not dust storms—here you get rain, snow, hail, lightning. The controllers didn’t want to risk that maelstrom, and for weeks the orbiters’ cameras have sent back nothing but images of lightning flashes. But now the storms have settled out, and evidently the mission planners agreed to go for a descent attempt. We’re just waiting for the images to stabilize…”

Now, in a stir of excitement, the technicians and scientists gathered closer around the TV monitors and tablets. The live images were clearing up, as if a snowstorm were fizzling out. Sally saw the flank of a stubby aircraft sitting on a surface of what looked like wet ruddy sand, like a beach revealed by a recently receding tide. The camera must be mounted on the aircraft itself; she could clearly see the Stars and Stripes boldly painted on its hull.

And then the camera panned away from the aircraft to reveal a glimpse of a shallow valley, with a river running, and tough-looking grey-green vegetation clumped on the banks. A living Mars.

The Poindexter types whooped and cheered.

They retired to a small coffee bar.

Sally faced her father. “All right, Dad, enough of the space trophies and the enigmatic remarks. In no particular order—” She counted the points on her fingers. “Tell me why you want to go to Mars. And how you’re going to get there. And why under all the heavens I would want to go with you.”

He eyed her shrewdly. He was seventy years old now, and the wrinkled skin of his face looked tough as leather. “It’ll take a while to explain. Here’s the headline. I want to go to this Mars, the Mars of the Gap, because it’s not just Mars. It’s not even just a Mars with a significantly different climate. It’s a Long Mars.”

She took that in. “You said that before. Long Mars. You mean you can step there?”

He nodded curtly.

“How do you know?… No, don’t answer that.”

“There’s something specific I’m looking for, and expecting to find. You’ll see. But for now—the most important thing is, if a world is Long, then it must harbour sapience. Intelligent life.” He looked at her. “You understand that much, don’t you? The theory of the Long Earth, the interfacing of consciousness and topology—”

Her jaw had dropped. “Hold on. Back up. You just dropped another conceptual bomb on me. Intelligent life? You discovered intelligent life on Mars?”

He was impatient. “Not on Mars. On a Mars. And, not discovered. Deduced the necessary existence of. You always were a sloppy thinker, Sally.”

Needled, her instinct was to fight back, as it had been since she’d been old enough to need to establish her own identity. She said provocatively, “Mellanier wouldn’t agree with you. About sapience and the Long Earth, that a Long world is somehow a product of consciousness.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Ah, that fraud. As to why you might go with me to explore—well, why the hell wouldn’t you?” He glanced around at the geeks in the coffee bar, noisily celebrating their triumph. “Look at these back-slapping Brainiacs. I do know you, Sally. You liked it best before Step Day, when the Long Earth was just ours, right? Long Wyoming was, anyhow. Before I came up with the Stepper box I couldn’t step myself, I needed you to take me over, but—”

“You’d read to me. Stories of other worlds, of Tolkien and Niven and E. Nesbit, and I’d pretend that was where we were going…” She shut up. Nostalgia always felt like a weakness.

“And now it’s all cluttered up by yahoos like these. No offence, Al.”

“None taken.”

“Sally, I know you still spend a lot of time alone. Wouldn’t you like to get away to a new world, a raw world, empty except for us—well, us, and a few Martians? Leave humanity behind for a while…”

And Lobsang, she thought.

Raup leaned forward, sweaty, intrusive. “As to how we’d get there, maybe you can already tell that the space programme we’re running out of this place is developing a hell of a lot faster than the plod back on Earth. Of course we’re able to build on all they learned and reapply it—”

“Get to the point, propeller-head.”

“The point is we’re ready to go. The first manned spacecraft to Mars. It’s waiting at the Brick Moon, just one step away, in the Gap. We wanted to wait until we got confirmation of the planet’s atmospheric conditions and so on from these automated landers. But now that we’ve got that—”

“We? Who exactly is going on this mission?”

Raup puffed out his chest and lifted his hefty belly. “Our crew will be three, just like the Apollo missions. Yourself, your father, and me.”

“You.”

Willis put in, “I know what you’re thinking. But you and I aren’t astronauts, Sally—”

“Nor is this puff-ball. Dad, there’s no way I’m spending months in a tin can with this guy.”

Willis seemed unperturbed. “You have an alternative?”

“Does a guy called Frank Wood still hang around here?”