The Long Mars

23

Not far past the hundred-million-step milestone, the purple-scum band gave way to yet another sort of world: another band in which multicellular life had emerged. It was a welcome island of scenery after long stretches of purple scum worlds—or sometimes, for the sake of variety, green scum. Yet the creatures they encountered in these worlds were not like anything anybody had seen before.

Earth West 102,453,654: on this world the land had been colonized by things that looked like trees, but were actually, said the biologists, a kind of much-evolved seaweed. Things like sea anemones crawled over the ground, browsing. And the canopies of these kelp-like forests, and much of the world below, were dominated by a kind of jellyfish.

Jellyfish, living in trees.

These were tremendous leathery creatures, typically as massive as a troll. Their permanent habitat seemed to be the shallow sea, and while some crawled out on to the land, others flew, rocketing out of the ocean on water pumped from their mantles, and then gliding using fins protruding from their carapaces as “wings” to reach the tree tops.

The canopy was laced with natural cables, like lianas but probably not. The jellyfish would descend on these cables for smash-and-grab raids on their cousins on the ground, and on other life forms like the anemones. Once the watching scientists even observed a kind of war, as one band of jellyfish from one forest clump hurled cables and nets over at another clump, and attacked in force.

All this was recorded from the air, by the human visitors. Off-duty crew spent all their spare time at windows or in the observation galleries, gazing down. Captain Kauffman vetoed any shore leave, however; the oxygen level was so low the party would have had to wear facemasks and carry tanks, and thus encumbered would have been terribly vulnerable to the predatory flying cnidarians of the branches above.

Bill Feng surprised Maggie by showing a peculiar fascination with the spectacle below—a peculiar interest in living things for a man she’d taken as a standard-issue engineer, anyhow. The Chinese said in his oddly accented English, “I have a military background myself, but I have never been one to cherish war for its own sake. Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own—and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?”

Maggie had no satisfactory answer.

Having logged, recorded and sampled these worlds, the ships pressed on.

Now that there was something to see out of the windows Maggie reduced the cruise rate to the nominal two million steps a day, but when this sheaf of worlds, which the biologists called the Cnidarian Belt, gave way after only a few more days’ travel to the purple scum, Maggie quietly ordered an increase in the stepping rate once again.

At Earth West 130,000,000, approximately, reached seven days after they had left the Cnidarian Belt—seven more days of purple scum—the expedition reached a new kind of world. Here a typical Earth’s air seemed depleted of oxygen altogether—there was merely a trace in an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen, carbon dioxide and volcanic gases, and that trace, Gerry Hemingway told Maggie, was probably put there by geological processes, not by anything alive. These were worlds, then, where oxygenating life had never formed in the first place, where there had been no discovery of the complex trick of photosynthesis, the use by green plants of the energy of sunlight to crack carbon dioxide to acquire its carbon for life-building, and incidentally to release excess oxygen into the air.

The airships had been designed in anticipation of such conditions. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen the great jet turbines which pushed the craft around the sky had to be fed oxygen from an internal store. Faced with a new engineering challenge to test his craft, Harry Ryan was in his element, and Maggie was fascinated; in this mode the technology was like a scramjet. But inside the gondola the air, now fully recycled by necessity, soon smelled stale.

Beneath the prow, meanwhile, the landscapes were more dismal than ever. Only a biologist could love the strange purple-crimson slicks and mounds of anaerobic bacteria that were the emperors of these worlds. Maggie quietly ordered that the accelerated stepping rate, three million steps a day, be maintained for now, but she warned Harry Ryan to be sure to watch the crafts’ onboard reserves. She didn’t want to have to try to walk back home through this.

It was the issue of oxygen, in fact, that caused her to have her first long conversation with Douglas Black since her most distinguished passenger had come on board the Armstrong.

Maggie made her way to Black’s suite of rooms. She had Mac at her side; she was here to back up the doctor’s complaints.

She’d asked for this meeting, but even on her own ship Douglas Black wasn’t a man who would come calling. And it didn’t surprise her that Black kept them waiting on his doorstep. His man Philip told them he had just woken up from a nap.

Mac muttered, “Damn arrogance.”

“Let’s just play it low key for now, Mac, and see what he has to say for himself…” And then the door opened.

Black had a team of aides, but only one servant on hand today, Philip the overbearing bodyguard, who gave the two officers a quick guided tour of Black’s suite, glaring at them throughout.

The suite, a grand name for a set of cabins which Black had fitted out at his own expense, was less luxuriously appointed than Maggie had expected. There was a small galley, for Black insisted on having his food prepared for him exclusively, from fresh ingredients where possible—evidently Philip was also the chef. The lounge area was equipped with deep, adjustable chairs and couches, and a bank of information-processing gear, screens, tablets, storage units.

At first glance Black’s bedroom looked to Maggie like a compact intensive care unit, with one big gadget-laden bed draped in a transparent curtain—it was effectively an oxygen tent, Mac murmured—and surrounded by monitors and drip-feeds, even what looked like a telesurgery robot arm. One small cot in the corner, behind a light partition, must be where Philip slept, on guard twenty-four seven.

It was the oxygen tent, Maggie knew, that Mac had an issue with.

Black, at ease in his lounge, sitting in a massively engineered wheelchair, wore a loose, comfortable-looking kimono jacket, silk trousers, slippers. Even in the enclosed submarine-hull artificiality of the gondola he wore his sunglasses. He smiled, his wizened face creasing, as he himself poured them rather good coffee. “So—welcome to my lair, Captain Kauffman. That’s the sort of thing people expect me to say, isn’t it? Shall we get down to business? I’m aware that your doctor here has been taking an interest in my welfare, but I have brought my own medical establishment, as you can see.”

“But,” Mac growled, “on this ship, where I’m chief surgeon, you do fall under my purview nonetheless.”

“Of course. I bow to your authority; it can be no other way.”

Maggie said, “I’m afraid that’s where the friction is coming from, sir. Specifically your use of oxygen.”

“Captain, I have assured Doctor Mackenzie that I have brought my own supply, my own replenishment and recycling equipment—it’s like a regular little spaceship in here.”

“You nevertheless are plugged into the ship’s supply,” Mac said. “It’s inevitable, an engineering constraint. And you, sir, are using up a hell of a lot. Captain, I wouldn’t have raised it, but since right now there’s no spare oh-two outside the hull, we need to discuss this.”

“I don’t understand, Mr Black,” Maggie said. “Why are you using all this oxygen?”

Mac broke in, “To fill his hyperbaric chamber all day and all night. You saw the tent over his bed, Captain. He lives in the damn thing, breathing air with an oxygen content whole percentage points above the Datum Earth level.”

“OK.” This sounded nothing but kooky to Maggie. She’d had a long day before this meeting, but she wished now she’d got herself better briefed. “I’m no medic. Why would you want that, Mr Black?”

“For the most profound of reasons. To regain the one thing that all my money can’t buy me—not yet, anyhow. You joked about my searching for the fountain of youth, Captain. Well, in a sense—so I am.”

For the next few minutes he ran her through a discourse, complete with a picture show on one of his big tablets, of the treatments he was taking, not just to slow down the ageing of his body but actually to reverse it. Hormones that declined with age were replenished, including growth hormones, testosterone, insulin, melatonin, others, to let them repair and restore body functions, as they would in a youthful body. There had been attempts at genetic repair using retroviruses to make and break DNA strings, removing damaged or undesired sequences. Back in the Low Earths Black was promoting experimental methods involving stem cells to regenerate tissues, even whole organs.

He spread liver-spotted hands. “Look at me, Captain. I have always exercised, eaten well, avoided most vices. I have been fortunate in being spared many common illnesses. And of course my decades-long precautions against the ambitions of assassins have borne fruit, so far.” He tapped his skull. “Mentally I seem as sharp as ever, my memory is good… But I am eighty years old; my time is running out. There is so much more to see, so much to do. Consider the mission we are undertaking right now! Can you see that I would do all I can not to leave just yet? Can you blame me?”

“All right. But what’s that got to do with oxygen?”

“It’s one of the therapies,” Mac said. “And one of the flakier ones.”

Black inclined his head. “I won’t argue with a medical man. But you won’t condemn me for exploring all the options, will you? Yes, the use of excess oxygen is controversial. But—look where we are. Look out the window! There is no oxygen here, and these worlds are all but dead. It is oxygen that promotes the life force. Why, you yourself use it in extremis for a patient, do you not, Doctor? The word is ‘oxyology’, Captain. The use of a high oxygen partial pressure to promote healing, the rejuvenation of the body. It is cheap, it is easy, and some claim to have proof that it works, on ants and mice and so forth. Why not try it?”

Mac would have argued some more, but Maggie raised a hand. “I think I get the picture. But I don’t yet see what kind of ‘fountain of youth’ you’re seeking aboard this Navy ship, Mr Black.”

He would only smile. “All I can say is that I will know it when I find it—if it exists.”

Maggie stood. “I think we’re done here. Look, Mac, we’re watching our oxygen usage closely, but we’ve a complement of ninety, and Mr Black’s consumption, given his private supply and even with his tent, is going to be only a fraction of that. We can cope, for now. But,” she said to Black, “I’ll put my chief engineer on alert. And if we need to impose any kind of emergency measures I’ll have to restrict you to a regular crew allocation, sir.”

“Of course.” He looked faintly offended. “I would never let my own interests put at risk a single one of your young charges.” He looked from one to the other. “Is our business done? Am I allowed down from the naughty step?”

Maggie laughed gracefully, and nudged Mac until he forced a smile.

“Then, if you’ve time, let’s have fun. Please, do sit again. Perhaps you’d like to look over the latest package of science updates prepared for me by your kind Lieutenant Hemingway. I’m sure you know it all already, but the images can be startling.” He nodded to Philip, who got up to make preparations; soon the room’s screens filled up with curtains of purple and crimson. “Who would ever have imagined that life even without the power of oxygen was capable of such beauty, such inventiveness of design? Can I offer you more coffee? Or perhaps something stronger…”