The Long War

41

THE ZHENG HE and Liu Yang lingered for some days in the vicinity of Earth East 2,201,749. The scientists catalogued their observations and specimens, while the engineers crawled over the airships, testing their systems, carrying out routine maintenance.

Then they moved on, into realms of the Eastern Long Earth never before explored by Chinese crews, or any other. Into the unknown.

Shortly afterwards the ships made a longer stop, next to Earth East 2,217,643. Here they found a Gap: a break in the chain of stepwise worlds that made up the Long Earth, where the relevant Earth had been removed. Roberta quietly pointed out to Jacques that the first Western Gap discovered, by Joshua Valienté, had been at around Earth West two million. No doubt, from the similarity of those numbers, there was some conclusion to be drawn about the nature of the great tree of probabilities that was the Long Earth.

Valienté’s airship had been wrecked by the step into vacuum that was the Gap. The Chinese ships were better prepared. Their crews had their ships hop back and forth across the Gap, dropping off hardened automatic probes, which, given the momentum of the spin of the neighbouring Earths, went sailing off into the Gap world’s empty black sky. Jacques stared without much interest at the images returned – stars that looked much like the stars as seen from any world, planets that seemed to circle in their usual orbits with smug indifference to the absence of an Earth. The crew, though, were fascinated, as they had not been by humanoids and dinosaur descendants. Jacques reminded himself that this mission had been mounted by a space agency; no wonder the crew were intrigued by glimpses of the wider universe.

And Roberta, too, seemed to be interested. She requested that the probes be made to study the neighbouring planets, Mars and Venus, to look for any difference in their atmospheres, their surfaces.

With this initial investigation of the new Gap complete, Captain Chen, with a rather boyish and excited grin, came to his passengers and urged them to be at the observation deck the next morning. ‘That’s when the real journey will begin . . .’

When morning came Jacques and Roberta joined Lieutenant Wu before the big prow windows, Jacques cradling a coffee, Roberta a glass of water. The airships hung in the sky of this latest world, two sleek fish of the sky over a sprawling blanket of forest. There was a river in the middle distance, a glassy stripe, and further away the extensive shallow sea typical of these warm worlds, blue to the horizon.

The stepping began without warning, and worlds flapped by, slowly at first, then ever faster. Soon they were travelling at a step a second, a rate they were all used to by now, and weather systems came and went to the beat of Jacques’s pulse: sun, cloud, rain, storms, even some snow. The detail of the forest flickered – once a tremendous, evidently recent crater appeared right under the prow of the Zheng He, before being whipped away like a stage prop – and occasionally a world flared, or darkened, and Jacques knew that the ships’ systems would be recording yet another Joker.

Chen joined them, and grasped the polished wooden rail that ran before the window. ‘You might want to hold on.’

Behind them, the trolls began to sing ‘Eight Miles High’.

The stepping rate increased. To Jacques the passage of the worlds was suddenly visually uncomfortable, as if a strobe light were flashing in his face at increasing frequency. He tried to focus on the position of the morning sun, which remained constant in the multiple skies, but masks of cloud flashed across its face, and the sky flickered white, grey, blue. They all grabbed the rail now, even Roberta. Jacques thought he heard a thrumming of engines, and he sensed the airships driving forward even as they stepped. He could see the silvery hulk of the Liu Yang flex, a mighty plastic fish swimming through the flickering light of world after world.

Behind them, a crew member threw up.

‘It will pass,’ Yue-Sai said. ‘We have all been tested for a tendency to epilepsy, and the nausea medication has been carefully applied. The discomfort will pass in a moment . . .’

Faster and faster the stepping came, faster and faster the weather systems flickered past their view. Jacques forced himself to keep watching, and focused on the rail in his hands, the vibrations of the ship’s engines transmitted through the floor under his feet.

And then the flickering seemed to fade away, the worlds merging into a kind of continuous blur. The sun, paler than usual, hung in its patient station, in an apparently cloudless sky that took on a deep blue colour, like early twilight. The landscape below was misty and vague, the shapes of the hills grey and dim, littered with patches of forest that seemed to grow, shiver, pass away. The river that had been writhing jerkily across the landscape now spread out, as if flooding a wide band of ground with a silvery grey, and the ocean coast too became a broad blur, the boundary between land and sea uncertain.

‘We have passed the flicker fusion threshold,’ Roberta murmured.

‘Yes!’ Chen cried. ‘We are now travelling at our peak rate, an astounding fifty worlds per second – worlds passing faster than the refresh frames in a digital screen, faster than your eye can follow. At such a rate we could traverse the great treks of the first pioneers of the Long Earth in little more than half an hour. At such a rate, if we kept it up, we could traverse more than four million worlds per day.’

Jacques asked, ‘But we’re moving laterally too, right? Why’s that?’

‘Continental drift,’ Roberta said immediately.

Chen nodded approvingly. ‘Correct. On Datum Earth the continents drift with time. The rate is something like an inch per year. Thanks to those cumulative effects there is also some drift as you move stepwise. So we move laterally, the great engines working to keep us over the heart of the tectonic plate on which South China rides. Sooner that than get lost altogether.’ He winked at Jacques. ‘Our Chinese airship technology has, incidentally, also set airspeed records.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now if you will excuse me I have engineers who need praising, or calming down, or both. Duty calls . . .’

Jacques noticed that the lower digits on the Earth counter mounted on the wall of the deck had become a blur, like the worlds they were tracking, while higher, grander, slower-changing digits marked the tremendous strides they were making, off into the unknown.

The trolls, meanwhile, sang on.