The Long War (28 page)

But, much later, they had evidently suffered their own extinction event. Maybe there had been war, or plague, or another asteroid fell unluckily . . . In the aftermath, a community of survivors, or their descendants, their technology lost, their civilization smashed, had been drawn here by the strange phenomena surrounding a nuclear pile, possibly natural, a chance concentration of uranium ore under that building. It had been a god, a temple that had slowly killed them.

That was one theory, at any rate: a
chance concentration
of the ore. But from the beginning there had also been speculation that this pile was not some natural phenomenon but the ruined and still toxic remnant of a much older and higher technology. The remnant radioactivity came from an abandoned core, or maybe a waste dump. This hypothesis was the subject of much debate, but it fitted Sally’s own first impressions when she’d come upon this place.

It was kind of satisfying that the answers weren’t simple or clear. Like all worlds, this one was no neat, finite theoretical model but the product of its own long and unique evolutionary history. Sally, moreover, had been through college herself in Madison; she understood enough science to know when a house of theorizing started to totter on foundations of inadequate data, and ignored most of the guesswork.

She was pleased that Joshua had never revealed the existence of the one tangible souvenir they had brought back from this place: the exquisite ring – it could almost have been crafted by a human jeweller – that they had found on the fleshless finger of one post-dinosaur. Pleased that Joshua had kept it all these years.

Well, the research money had run out, the Long Earth was always full of other study targets of various kinds, and the archaeologists had long since sealed up their digs and gone away. And Sally, now, in hunting mode, was glad of it. Glad of the solitude. Nobody here but us shadows on the rock . . .

A hot breath on her neck.
The hunter hunted
, she thought immediately. She hadn’t been paying attention. She whirled, reaching for the knife at her belt.

A wolf: that was her first impression. Huge, fur bristling, mouth open, tongue hanging, eyes like windows into Arctic waste. It looked as heavy as she was, more. And it had got close enough to
taste
her, practically, before she’d even noticed.

She forced herself not to just step out of here, her first reaction. She wasn’t alone on this trip; she had to think of Jansson. She wondered if she had time to shout a warning to Jansson, and whether it would do any good.

But the animal didn’t attack.

It stepped back, one pace, two, raised itself up – and
stood
, on its hind legs, not balancing like a dog doing a circus trick, but standing easily, naturally, as if it were designed to stand like that. Now she saw it had a kind of belt around its waist, from which tools hung – including a very technologically advanced-looking pistol made of some kind of metal, that looked like nothing so much as a Buck Rogers sci-fi ray gun, and was totally out of place. When the wolf spread its empty paws to her, she saw that the digits were long, flexible, the paws almost like thumbless hands encased in some leathery glove. Surprise heaped on surprise.

And then it spoke.

‘Sally Linsss-ay.’ Its voice was a growl, a rasp, a kind of crudely shaped whisper, but understandable, and the human words were backed up by subtle posture changes: a raise of the head, a twitch of the snout. ‘Coming he-rrhe, we knew. Kobolds-ss say. Welcome.’ And it lifted its magnificent head and howled.

I
N THE WEEKS
since they’d left behind the Low Chinas, the airships
Zheng He
and
Liu Yang
had forged steadily East, their stepping pace gradually increasing, though, Roberta learned, still far short of their design maximum. Worlds washed below the twains’ bows in great bands, cold or temperate, moist or arid, this Eastern stepwise geography roughly matching the mapping made by American explorers to the West, punctuated by Jokers of various kinds, like random flashbulbs.

They made periodic stops, and members of the crew went down to the surface, suitably protected, to observe, measure, retrieve samples of the geology, flora, fauna, even exotic atmospheric traces. They followed the Long Earth exploration strategy established by Joshua Valienté a decade earlier, with surface pioneers supervised by controllers on airships above. Roberta, watching from above, made methodical notes.

They passed the milestone of two million steps from the Datum.

And now they approached a particular world where, it was planned, Roberta herself was to descend to the surface, with Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai.

The Chinese had reached this world before, and it had been studied at least to some extent. This first descent was intended as a learning experience for Roberta, she was told, and she accepted that. She had already spent a lot of time in a kind of training chamber with Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, who showed her how to don her jumpsuit, and use her individual Stepper box, and the small monitor sets they would wear on their shoulders: how the Captain would speak to them through unobtrusive earpieces, how to use the med packs and emergency rations and silvery blankets in the event they got stranded – how to use the ceramic-and-bronze handguns they were issued. Roberta took each piece of equipment, each procedure, asked relevant questions, and practised over and over.

Yue-Sai tried to lighten up the process. She cracked jokes in her imperfect English, and tried to invent games and contests to help the practice go by. Roberta would simply wait until these moments had passed, and then would carry on with her own patient exercises.

With time she felt Yue-Sai give up on her, in a sense, and withdraw. Roberta had observed this many times before. It was not that Roberta Golding did not understand people; rather, she understood them too well. Yue-Sai’s attempts at fun had been transparent exercises in motivation, which Roberta saw through immediately. Besides, with her own sense of inner purpose she needed no external motivation. Yet that was not enough of a response for Wu Yue-Sai, and Roberta saw that too.

Aged fifteen, Roberta was a person who
saw
things. That is, she saw them more clearly than those around her. She certainly saw her own limitations, for instance now, as she prepared to face a remote stepwise world for the first time. She could be killed by her own ignorance, or by sheer mischance, in the blink of an eye. She saw this, and accepted it with a calm that seemed to chill others around her. But what was the purpose of self-delusion?

The career towards which she was heading was entirely a matter of stripping away delusion, she sometimes thought. What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals.
Those
questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately,
their
answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was.

For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when
not
to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion.

She had to work with what was available. She sometimes imagined she was like the scholars of the European Middle Ages who had worked their way through the ranks of the Church because there was no other organized scholarship around. Or, perhaps, as if she had been dropped even further into the past – as if she were trying to use stone blades and lumps of ochre to build a radio telescope. Still, she persevered, for there was no choice.

Despite her unsatisfactory education, Roberta Golding saw the world clearly. And she saw people clearly, more clearly than they could see themselves. Humanity, she once said in an answer in a philosophy exam taken when she was eleven years old, was nothing but the thin residue left when you subtracted the baffled chimp. Responses like that made her a promising scholar, and in Happy Landings, where there were many bright children like her, she had never had any trouble getting picked for the netball team. But here her lack of response, her habit of speaking in brief lectures, her corrections of simple errors, didn’t make the crew warm to her. Not even the forgiving Yue-Sai.

The airships settled over a suitable location, and in a methodical fashion sent up sounding-rockets and weather balloons to gain a broader picture of this world. Then Yue-Sai took Roberta down to the elevator deck, they checked over their equipment one last time, and descended to the surface of Earth East 2,201,749.

They were standing at the fringe of a forest, close to a sprawling river estuary. From the cover of the trees Roberta was able to look out over the open plain of the estuary and the wetlands that fringed it, to a sharp ocean horizon. She was distracted by huge flying creatures that swept low over the ocean water, a flock of them, each with filmy wings outspread – the largest flyers Roberta had ever seen. Something like pterosaurs? Something like bats? Something evolved from a different root altogether? Silhouetted in the sparkling light off the sea they swooped lower, graceful necks dipping, and huge fish, or fish-like creatures, were plucked from the water and gulped down into long beaks.

This was a warm, watery world, a world of high sea levels, of shallow oceans that washed far into the hearts of the continents. A world that could support such fantastic visions. And a world, Roberta understood from her studies, with dangers of its own, unknown on drier Earths like the Datum: not least exotic climatic catastrophes, such as the hypercane already brewing out on the local copy of the Pacific Ocean . . .

Shadows shifted across the forest.

Yue-Sai waved her hand. Roberta made sure the speaker feed from the monitor on her shoulder was off, and stood stock still and silent in the cover of the trees.

Immense forms moved through the forest, heading for the estuary and the fresh water. Roberta glimpsed compact, muscular bodies, on all fours but with massively powerful hind legs – they were something like kangaroos, she thought, but beefed-up – and with their ears flaring into tremendous coloured crests, stiffened with cartilage. There were several of these animals, the adults taller at the shoulder than Roberta, calves running alongside, and one infant being carried in a pouch at its mother’s belly.

Silent as a cat, Yue-Sai slid through the forest, tracking the herd.

Roberta followed as best she could. She wasn’t as quiet as Yue-Sai, but the whirring lenses of the shoulder monitor pack were noisier than her footsteps, and she took some pride in that.

They came to the edge of the forest, by a braid of fresh water. Across the estuary’s damp plain huge flocks of birds, or bird-like creatures, strutted, squabbled and fed. With marsh flowers in abundance it was a mass of colour, under a deep blue sky. Roberta thought she saw the characteristic ridged backs of crocodilians sliding through the deeper water.

And, by the water’s edge, the creatures of the forest came to drink.

The most obvious, the most spectacular, were those big bulky roos with their colourful sail-like ear-crests. The creatures were so huge and heavy, they moved so slowly and patiently, they looked as if they were carved from living rock. And they were so massive that those great hind legs must surely be evolved for kicking, not for jumping like a Datum kangaroo. But their ear-crests were oddly fragile-looking, almost translucent in the light of the sun, evidently just skin and tissue stretched over frames of cartilage. The crests were alight with brightly coloured patterns that shifted and dissolved as Roberta watched.

Yue-Sai murmured, ‘Are you getting this, Captain Chen, Mr. Montecute?’

‘Yes, Lieutenant,’ replied the Captain in their ears. ‘Try to keep these crests in view. Why so complex a display? I’ll have our scholars try passing them through pattern analyser suites . . .’

Yue-Sai touched Roberta’s shoulder and pointed again, further along the river bank.

More beasts drinking. These were like big flightless featherless birds, Roberta thought, walking almost daintily, balanced on two big back limbs but with two small grasping arms in front. Their heads were long, almost snake-like, but with wide duck-like beaks. When they dipped to the water, sucking noisily, long muscular tails waved behind them.

Roberta asked, ‘Birds, or dinosaurs?’

Yue-Sai shrugged. ‘They’re all the same big family. Don’t expect anything, Roberta. Don’t be surprised by anything . . .’

Roberta understood the principle. The histories of the parallel worlds of the Long Earth had been shaped by similar processes, but differed in the detail. You had to imagine you were travelling across a kind of probability tree, where you found worlds on which some long-past event had turned out differently, thus reshaping life’s subsequent history and providing novel raw material for natural selection to mold . . .

‘For example,’ Yue-Sai said, ‘those duckbills look bird-like, or dinosaurid. But those big crested beasts are mammals. Some kind of marsupial, it seems. And
there
’
s
something you’d never have seen back in the Cretaceous.’ She pointed.

Elves.

Stepping humanoids. There was a pack of them, maybe twenty, including children and nursing infants. They had found a spot away from the big herbivores, and far enough back from the deep water to be safe from the crocodiles and any other threats. They were scooping up water with their hands, and digging into the mud for roots and worms and molluscs. A few of the younger males were bickering; with irritable pant-hoots they flickered between the worlds, so that to watch them was like trying to follow a badly edited movie.