The Long Mars (11 page)

9

I
N THE MORNING
they ate breakfast in near silence, and flew on. Rather than make straight for the caldera Lobsang at first skirted it to the west, following the line of what remained of a south-to-north highway. As they edged closer to the caldera, the increasing thickness of ash began to overwhelm the landscape as it had existed before the eruption. They were entering a true volcanic province, Joshua thought, like a fragment of an alien world brought down to the Earth.

‘The civilization of Datum Earth will never recover,’ Lobsang murmured, as they peered down at the strange landscape.

Joshua grunted. ‘That seems a tough conclusion to come to. It’s only been a few years . . .’

‘But think about it. We’d already used up all the easily accessible ore, the oil, much of the coal. And the world was already suffering tremendous climate disruption because of all the industrial gases we spewed into the air. When Yellowstone’s effects finally fade, the best guess for the future is widespread instability, as the world seeks a new equilibrium after two massive environmental shocks, one human-induced, one volcanic.’

‘Hmm. So is this why there’s talk of rewilding?’

The idea was, when the winter finally receded from the Datum Earth, why not take the chance to heal the world? All the species that had been driven to extinction on the Datum still prospered in the neighbouring worlds (though once again, Joshua knew, on some of the Low Earths many of those creatures were already in trouble). So, in North America, you could bring back the mammoth and the wild horse and the bison and the musk ox, and the seals in the rivers and the whales in the oceans – just step specimens over, as infants perhaps, to the Datum. Similarly you could let the landscapes and seas recover to their natural state.

‘It’s a romantic idea,’ Lobsang said. ‘Of course there’s a great deal of work to do before the Datum is even
safe
.’

‘Such as, decommissioning nuclear power plants?’

‘And waiting for dams to fail, for drained wetlands to flood . . . It will take decades, centuries, for pollutants like heavy metals and radioactive waste to be reduced to safe levels. Even then, where we have driven roads or dug mines into the bedrock, the mark of mankind will linger for millions of years.’

‘Makes you proud.’

‘If you say so, Joshua. However, an effort to heal this world using the riches of its stepwise siblings seems a noble ambition, whatever the limitations in practice.’

At last, to the north of Yellowstone itself, they paused over what had once been a township. Little remained but a few scattered traces of foundations, the hint of a grid of streets protruding from the ash; much of the rest was buried completely.

Joshua checked a map display; in cheerful white, green and yellow, with finely drawn state and county lines, it displayed the vanished human landscape as it had once been. ‘This is Bozeman.’

‘Yes. Or was. I thought you’d like to see this, Joshua. I saw from the records that you and Sally went in here on the final day of the eruption itself, when the caldera collapsed. Stepping into danger, seeking to save lives at the risk of your own evanescent existence.’

‘We weren’t the only ones,’ Joshua said without emotion.

The twain dipped in the air, skimming over ground choked by an unknowable thickness of ash and pumice.

‘We are still perhaps fifty miles from the caldera,’ Lobsang said. ‘But this place like many others was caught by the final pyroclastic flow. The eruption ceased when the caldera chamber was empty of magma. The tower of smoke and ash in the air over the volcano abruptly collapsed, and superhot rock fragments came washing out across the landscape at the speed of sound, burying everything for tens of miles around.’

Joshua had been there; he remembered.

‘Now Bozeman, Idaho, is at one with Pompeii. It will take years for the ash fall even to cool, let alone for the land to be reclaimed by humans.’

‘Yet something’s growing down there,’ Joshua said. Peering down, he pointed out scraps of green.

Lobsang was silent a moment; Joshua imagined his artificial senses trained on the ground below. ‘Yes. Lichen. Moss. Even lodgepole pines. Just saplings, but still – the resilience of life.’

The twain turned its nose and headed south, towards the caldera itself.

‘So, Lobsang. Yesterday you told me you were disturbed by a plague of common sense breaking out across the planet? It would be a first, I grant you.’

‘I can give you examples . . .’

The screens in the deck flashed up with brief video snips of tales from across the US during the days and years of the Yellowstone disaster:

One little kid in a first-school classroom in Colorado, his teachers having succumbed to an ash infall, quietly organizing his hysterical classmates and walking them out of the building in a line, heads wrapped in wet towels, hands on the shoulders of the person in front.

A young teenager stuck with her grandparents in a care home in Idaho, full of old folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t step, calmly working out rotas of food sharing and mutual care.

A well-off family in Montana, the mother refusing to leave their home with her surviving children because of one little girl lost, and obviously killed, in the wreckage of an ash-crushed conservatory – her husband going crazy with fear and refusing to stay to dig out the wreck – and an au pair, a girl no more than seventeen years old, organizing the family to dig out the lost one and carry out the body, as that was the only way to persuade the mother to move and save the rest.

Joshua remembered stories he’d heard himself, one from Bozeman in fact, an account of a ‘sensible young lady’ who had come around with dazzlingly smart advice on how to survive the eruption.

‘These anecdotes all involve very young people,’ he observed. ‘If not children.’

‘Indeed. And you’ll note that their exploits are not characterized by heroism, or great feats of endurance, or whatever. Instead they are calm, and full of wise leadership – certainly wise for their age. Good judgement, whose value is evident enough even for the adults around them. And a certain cold rationality. They are able to set aside the kind of illusion that comforts but baffles the regular human mind. Consider the woman in Montana with the dead child. She couldn’t accept the death. The au pair not only accepted it; she accepted she wasn’t going to be able to persuade the mother otherwise, and came up with a strategy to save the family taking that bit of psychology into account.’

‘Hmm.’ Joshua studied the ambulant’s inexpressive face. ‘What are you suggesting, Lobsang? You’ve talked about this before. Are we seeing the emergence of some kind of smarter breed?
True Homo sapiens
, you’ve always called them – as opposed to regular mankind, a bunch of apes who
call
ourselves wise . . .’

‘Well, it looks that way.
If
you are prepared to build a mountain of hypothesis on a raft of a few observations.’

But Lobsang, Joshua suspected, would have more behind his argument than a few scattered fragments of evidence like this. ‘So how is this happening? And why now?’

‘I suspect those two questions may be linked. There may be some –
incubator
, somewhere out in the Long Earth. Only now, you see, with the advent of widespread stepping, have the products of such an incubator been able to reach the Datum. And perhaps we are seeing the emergence of this new quality under stress. Some gene complex suddenly expressing itself, under the pressure caused by the huge dislocation after Yellowstone. That would explain why we see this
now
, you see. And then there’s you, Joshua.’

‘Me?’

‘Your headaches. This odd psi sense you seem to have for the presence of an unusual kind of mind – and a powerful one. If I screwed a lightbulb in your ear I suspect it would start flashing a red alert.’

‘Nice image. Something new in the world, or the worlds, then. And something I’m sensitive to, like I was sensitive to First Person Singular.’

‘Not only that, there may be a nascent organization behind it all.’

‘An organization? Doing what?’

‘My colleague Nelson Azikiwe has an account of an English child – his family are refugees in Italy now – another disturbingly bright child, but this one terrorized by fearful locals. There had even been mutterings of witchcraft.
His
parents, it seems, were approached by another, a teenager. They were offered a scholarship at some kind of residential college, such was the teenager’s story, aimed at exceptionally bright children. The parents’ account was vague, but they were struck by the eerie calmness of the youngster, the effortless way he seemed to dispose of their objections to his plan.’

‘Did they let their son go?’

‘With some teenager? Of course not. Although, Nelson says, he
almost
convinced them. Nelson predicts the next approach will be through a front, a more reassuringly elderly adult . . .’

‘If this is all so, what do you want to do about it, Lobsang?’

‘If this nebulous entity exists, if some
new kind of human being
is emerging in our world, I want to meet it. Talk to it. I see myself as something of a guardian of mankind, Joshua. This new entity may be reaching the end of its own long childhood. As it rises up to adulthood, I want to make sure it means us no harm.’

‘And that, I imagine, is where you want my help. Finding these new people.’

‘You and a number of others. Ah . . . It is time.’

‘For what?’

All the display screens cleared down. ‘Look out of the windows.’

For some time the ground had been steadily rising, but it was a fractured ground, ash-blanketed, strewn with immense rocks. It was as if, Joshua thought, they were following debris rays towards a great lunar crater.

Quite abruptly the ground fell away, as if they had sailed over a cliff. Joshua looked down to see a landscape like some gloomy artist’s palette: swirls of reddish rock, lava pools that bubbled languidly, sulphur-yellow scum beneath wraiths of steam. His view was obscured by heat shimmer, and he heard switches being thrown in the gondola’s air conditioning unit, as suddenly, after hours of fighting off arctic chill, now it strove to exclude the sudden warmth.

And when he looked ahead, beyond the curdled plain below, he saw a kind of cliff face, very far off, blued by the mist of distance, shimmering in heat haze.

Lobsang said, ‘This is the caldera, Joshua. The crater. So big you can’t really see that it’s circular from here. The ground, below, is half a mile down – we’re above the collapsed magma chamber. And the caldera’s far wall is over forty miles away. We were unlucky actually.’

‘Unlucky?’

‘The supervolcano erupts every half million years or so. Some eruptions are worse than others – in some, more magma is released, more damage is done.
This
was the worst for two million years. The geologists were able to tell us that much, even though they didn’t see it coming. And the result lies around you.’

Joshua had no words.

‘Impressive, isn’t it? Even to God, it must be quite a sight. Even to
me
. . .’ His voice wavered oddly.

Joshua felt a flicker of concern. ‘Lobsang? Are you all right?’

Lobsang didn’t answer. But he said, more uncertainly, ‘I don’t ask this of you lightly, Joshua. To travel again, I mean. I have become more aware of the risks I ask you to take when stepping into the Long Earth. Any of us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you considered what would happen were you to die out there? I’m referring to the fate of your immortal soul. Can a discarnate soul cross stepwise between the worlds? If you were alone – in a world in which there were no other humans to host your spirit – you might not be able to reincarnate as a human at all.’

Joshua had come across this kind of idea before, mostly from the sort of earnest swivel-eyed zealot who waited to harangue you at twain terminals. It was mildly shocking to hear Lobsang saying this. For all Lobsang’s claims about his origin, that he was the soul of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated into a gel-substrate supercomputer, they had never delved too deeply into the mystical side of that proposition. But Joshua thought of the small Buddhist shrine tucked into a corner of the airship. Perhaps Lobsang was changing, reaching for his own deeper roots.

‘I take it you’ve been studying this reincarnation business?’

‘Wouldn’t you? And I’ve had a lot of encouragement from Agnes in such matters. Buddhism, you know, is essentially a way of working with the mind. By developing the basic potential of the mind you can achieve inner peace, compassion and wisdom. All of us can do this. But
I
am nothing
but
mind, Joshua. How could I fail to be drawn to such ideas, even without my cultural background? As for ideas of reincarnation, I’ve gone into them deeply. I am familiar with over four thousand texts on the subject, besides my own experience.’

‘Oh.’

‘Also I have been counselled by Padmasambhava, an old friend in my previous life, now the abbot of a monastery in Ladakh. Which is in India, just beyond the Tibetan border, and a place where the old wisdom has been preserved despite the Chinese occupation. Although Padmasambhava is himself a shareholder in a Chinese logging consortium . . . I am not losing my mind, you know,’ said Lobsang severely.

‘I didn’t say you were. But it’s odd to hear you express self-doubt, Lobsang—’

‘I think I remember my death.’

That stopped Joshua in his tracks. ‘What death? You mean—’

‘In Lhasa. My last human death. And my reincarnation.’

Joshua thought that over. ‘So was it like when Doctor Who regenerates?’

‘No, Joshua,’ Lobsang said with strained patience. ‘It was not like when Doctor Who regenerates. I remember it, Joshua. I
think
. The lamentations of the women, in the kitchen, when the chikhai bardo came, the moment of my death. The Tibetans believe that the soul lingers in the dead body. So for forty-nine days the Book of the Dead is read over the corpse, to guide the soul through the bardos, the phases of existence that bridge life and death.