The Long Mars

40

There was nothing to say. So, at first, they said nothing.

They were stepping West now—West, back the way they had come, back to the Mars of the Gap, and, ultimately, home.

Sally made her way to the rear of the pressurized compartment, where a small bathroom was partitioned off. Here she opened her suit, for the first time since leaving the campsite to explore the pit—it seemed days ago, it was only hours, it was still early afternoon on Mars. She breathed in cabin air that felt suspiciously thin, with a faint tang of burning. No doubt there were leaks in the pressurized inner hull after the battering the glider had taken, on top of the hole ripped into the fuselage by the rocket-worm. They could be dealt with later. For now she just took some time to herself, to loosen her suit, wash herself down with wipes, empty her suit’s piss collection tank.

Time away from her father.

When she joined him again, he was still at the controls. The glider was facing geographic west, appropriately enough, and the shrunken Martian sun was starting to descend across stepwise landscapes all but identical save for the usual flickering changes of detail, the scattered rocks and craters, the patterns of shadows. His faceplate open, Willis glanced over at her, and held up a small glass vial with some kind of whisker within. “Some day we’ll come back out here and give Frank Wood a proper burial. Later yet, they’ll build a statue to him. A three-hundred-foot tall statue of Mars rock. And it was all for this.”

“Beanstalk cable.”

“Yep. We got what we came for, whatever it cost us. And with this we’re going to change the world. All the human worlds.”

“Again.”

“You better believe it. Listen, Sally. I’ve checked over the systems. With just the two of us the supplies we managed to salvage ought to be sufficient to get us home. But we have other problems. Thor’s not going to make it back, not all the way. We took too much damage. Lost too many fluids for one thing, coolants, hydraulics. Even our methane-fuel factory is failing.”

She sat down in her couch, behind him, and shrugged. “She did well to keep flying at all, after a rocket attack.”

“Yeah. Well, we’re going to need to ditch.” He paused. “And I’ll need you to tell me where.”

She understood what he meant. She closed her eyes and felt the stepping, the slow rhythm of it, again, again, again, one a second, like a deep pulse inside her head. And, under that, she had a vague, misty sense of the wider topology of this Long Mars, just as she always had of the Long Earth. A sense of connections.

Her father wanted her to bring him to a soft place, a short cut in the Long Mars. There they would ditch…

“And I’ll take you home,” she said, completing the thought aloud. “Through the soft places, as Granddad Patrick used to call them. Holding you by the hand, like when I was a little kid taking you to your tool shed in Wyoming, West 1.”

“That’s the best plan I got. It was only ever a fallback concept, Sally. I mean, it was a logical anticipation, but I didn’t know for sure if there would be soft places here, if you would be able to detect them, use them…”

“Use them to save you. You and your precious cable whisker.”

“Well, it is precious, Sally. More precious than anything.”

“More than the life of a man like Frank Wood?”

“The rights of an individual, the life of one man, are as nothing compared with the value of a technology like this. We’re talking about the destiny of the species.”

She felt cold, sluggish, passive. As if she had to work through this one step at a time.

“When you were up in the glider, and Frank and I were on the ground—we were waiting for you to choose which one of us to save. You hesitated.”

He said nothing.

“I mean, most fathers would save their daughters instinctively. Right? I think Frank would have understood. But you—you hesitated. You were calculating, weren’t you?”

“I—”

“Here’s what I think. You weighed us up, Frank and me. Frank’s the better pilot. Given an operational glider, Frank would have been more useful to you than me. And also Frank was obviously better equipped to handle the Galileo and take us home. But you assessed the damage, and you figured, no, the glider wasn’t going to make it, you were going to need the short cuts. As for the Galileo, well, you watched me train on the emergency procedures, and I guess we’ll have support from the Russians at Marsograd when we need to fly home. We’ll cope with Galileo. But the soft places were the key item.

“All of which meant you needed me more than you needed Frank. It wasn’t about family, or loyalty. Your only consideration was which of us had the greater—utility—to you at this point in the mission, given the probabilities going forward. And it happened to be me, because of the soft places. Which is why you saved me, not Frank.”

“What do you want me to say—”

She cut across him. “And—of course—this was why you contacted me in the first place. Summoned me to the Gap, to Mars. Your first contact with me in years, out of the blue, out of nowhere, the father who turned the whole world upside down and went missing when I was still in my teens. It wasn’t me you needed alongside you. It was my ability you wanted. I was a backup option, in case the gliders failed. A human dowsing rod. Nothing more than that.”

He seemed to think that over. “So, what’s your point? You seem to think I’ve acted unreasonably. Is that it? But, Sally, I’m not a reasonable man. Reasonable men are like Frank Wood. He just accepted it when his career choices shut down. He drove a damn tour bus at the Cape, until he heard about the Gap, somehow. Then he just drifted again, until you happened to show up with that policewoman… In the end he accepted his death, down there in the dirt. I’m not like Frank Wood, just accepting what the universe throws at me. I’m unreasonable. I change the universe.”

She wasn’t angry, to her own surprise. Maybe she’d seen too much crap out in the reaches of the Long Earth to be angry at the failings of mere human beings any more. Even her father. What did she feel, then? Disappointment? Perhaps. But this was the way Willis had always behaved. Pity, then? But who for? Willis, or herself ?

“Yes,” she said. “You are a man who changes the universe. But you’re also my father—”

“Grow up,” he snarled.

And so Sally took her father back through chill tunnels, the soft places of the Long Mars.

At the Gap Mars, Viktor and Sergei and Alexei made them welcome once more, though they were saddened by the loss of Frank.

Then Sally and Willis crossed space, back to the Brick Moon and GapSpace. Aside from dealing with necessary business, they had no significant conversation, in the weeks it took them to reach home.

Immediately on her return, Sally sought out Frank Wood’s family. She hated such obligations. But she knew there was nobody else who would tell how he died.

And she visited the grave of Monica Jansson, in Madison West 5, to tell her too.

That was when she got a message from Joshua Valienté.