The Long War

53

MORNING, ON EARTH East 8,616,289:

Following Yue-Sai, her monitor pack on her shoulder, Roberta stepped gingerly over ground coated with a kind of green moss. They crossed a more or less open plain, under a cloudy sky, with the Chinese airships hanging silent above. There was no tall tree cover; the only significant vegetation was something like a fern, no more than waist height, with broad leaves spread low over the ground. The morning was bright, but the air was cold. Roberta was wrapped up in a quilted one-piece coverall and boots lined with wool, but the chill air stung her exposed skin, her cheeks, her forehead. Already Yue-Sai had nearly turned her ankle when she fell into the burrow of some subterranean animal. The animals turned out to be squirrel-like, although Roberta suspected they had features more like primitive primates than true squirrels. Well, primates or squirrels or something else entirely, they were everywhere, and you had to watch your step. It was not a very welcoming world. The navigators said that on this Earth the tectonic raft that carried South China was at a high latitude, halfway to the north pole. The geographers, straining for glimpses of the rest of the world from the sounding-rockets they sent up, said they suspected that there was a supercontinent on the equator: South and North America and Africa jammed together, the interior desiccated, the global climate distorted.

Roberta had endured the boredom of the preparation for this latest jaunt, the training, the suiting-up, and had written off the dull, relatively data-poor hours of exploration that lay ahead. She knew it was important to apprehend these worlds physically. The first space engineers, whose biographies she had studied closely when seeking role models for her own career, had spoken of the need for ‘ground truth’, a sampling of conditions down on the ground of some planet or moon, to confirm or refute hypotheses drawn up from orbital inspection, or through telescopic observations. Ground truth, yes. She saw the need for it. And this was a very remote world, an exotic world, despite the brevity of the journey here. They had crossed the six million worlds since the planet of the crest-roos in no more than a week, with the airships’ powerful drives propelling them forward in bursts of acceleration.

Even so she longed to be in her room on the ship, with her books and slates. Safe inside her head. But she was not there, not for now. She was here. She focused on the real, physical world around her.

They climbed a bluff, beyond which, they knew from a hasty aerial survey, was a dry valley, and the spectacle they had come to witness. The shallow climb, the effort of lifting her feet safely over the lumpy ground, soon made Roberta pant.

Jacques, monitoring her progress from the Zheng He, noticed. ‘I hope you haven’t been skimping your exercise routines.’

Roberta took a deep lungful of air. ‘I suspect the oxygen content is low.’ She could hear the trolls singing in the background, a murmur in her earpiece.

Jacques said, ‘The ship has atmospheric scientists who monitor the air quality before they crack the hatch. Turns out they’ve been watching the oxygen content fluctuate increasingly, the further out we’ve travelled. But here it’s well within breathable limits.’

Wu Yue-Sai said sternly, ‘But it did not occur to them to factor in the effects of physical exercise. That’s unfortunately typical: overspecialization of departments and insufficient communication.’

‘I believe the Captain is having words,’ Jacques said dryly. ‘If you’d rather come back in—’

‘No, we’re nearly there,’ Yue-Sai said. She glanced back at Roberta, who nodded.

And as she approached the summit of the rising ground, Roberta could hear a kind of orchestra of disparate sounds: a bass rumbling as of heavy traffic, even like tanks, mixed in with a chorus of mournful bellows, and a percussion section of impacts, of clanks and clunks. Excitement built in Roberta, and she grinned at Yue-Sai. They both ran up the remaining slope and threw themselves flat on the mossy ground, so they could see down into the valley.

Where the tortoises walked.

This was what they had landed to see. A two-way flow of the animals was packed into the valley, all lumbering along, those to the right heading north, those to the left heading south. The biggest of them were huge, like tanks indeed, or even bigger, with shells the size of small houses that were battered, scarred – some had birds’ nests built into folds and cracks on the shells, and Roberta wondered if those passengers had some kind of symbiotic relationship with their hosts. But she could immediately see that the tortoises came in a spectrum of all sizes scaling down from the big monsters, to ‘giants’ that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Galapagos Islands, to miniature sorts like the pets Roberta had seen people keep, even dwarf kinds she could have held in her hand. The smaller ones ran around the tree-trunk legs of the big lumbering monsters. The noise was cacophonous, from the squeaks of the smallest to great blasts from the titans, like the fog horns of supertankers.

Yue-Sai pointed out the little ones, and laughed. ‘The babies are so cute.’

Roberta shook her head. ‘They may not be infants at all. There are probably many species mixed up in there.’

‘I suppose you are right. And I suppose we will never know what is what.’ She sighed. ‘So many worlds. So few scholars to study them. If only we had laboratories to produce self-replicating scientists, to explore all the worlds. Ah, but we do! They’re called university campuses.’

Roberta smiled uncertainly.

Yue-Sai said, ‘You don’t get the joke? I suppose it was a little laborious. But is my English so bad?’

‘It’s not that. It’s just that, Jacques and other teachers tell me, I am too smart for most jokes.’

‘Really,’ Yue-Sai said, straight-faced.

‘There is an element of deception in many jokes, and then a reveal, of a truth which is surprising. I spot the deception too early. Which is why the comedy I prefer is—’

‘Slapstick. Anarchic humour. Those Buster Keaton films you watch. I understand now. Anyhow, all these worlds—’

‘And all these tortoises . . .!’

They had discovered a whole sheaf of worlds of this kind. The further they got from the Datum, the stranger the worlds they encountered, the stranger the ecologies. In a way, tortoise worlds might have been anticipated. On the Datum the tortoise-turtle body plan was an ancient, ubiquitous and very successful one. Why shouldn’t there have been worlds where tortoise lineages dominated?

‘In many worlds,’ Yue-Sai said, ‘even on the Datum, you’ll find tortoises behaving like this. Forming lines to get to waterholes, like the lake higher up this valley. Drinking their fill, enough to last months.’

‘But not a line a hundred miles long.’

‘No,’ said Yue-Sai. ‘And not a line running on what looks like a road, with a metalled surface.’ Not that they’d been able to get close enough to check that out. ‘And not a line with traffic police . . .’

These were individuals about the size of Galapagos giants. They stood on raised islands in the middle of the two-way flow, or in bays cut into the valley walls. Some of them had belts wrapped around their shells, with pockets, pouches. They even had tools, like whips that cracked occasionally, and things that looked like simple horns to Roberta, to amplify their calls. The function of these individuals was clear: to keep the tremendous flow moving peaceably. They would dive in, horns blaring, if there was a clash, or the two-way lanes got mixed up, or a little one fell under the feet of the giants. Somehow, amid a chaotic clatter of shells, everything got sorted out.

‘We might have expected intelligence,’ said Yue-Sai. ‘I have been studying. On the Datum, people learned that tortoises could solve mazes. At least, that was when people gave tortoises a chance to solve mazes, as opposed to eating them, or stifling them in “hibernation boxes”. Perhaps there are great cities elsewhere on this world. Tortoise armies. Tortoise colleges . . . That thought makes me want to laugh, but I’m not sure why.’

‘I don’t believe we’ll find anything too advanced,’ Roberta said. ‘Not locally.’

‘Why not?’

‘Look at the wardens’ tools. They have similar functions, obviously, but differ in detail. See? The stone here is shaped differently from there. The braiding on the whip handle—’

‘So what?’

‘Tortoise culture must be different from ours,’ Roberta said. ‘Their reproduction patterns are different. If you are a tortoise you emerged from one of hundreds of eggs; you don’t know your parents; you received no parental care. Their young may not be guided through family backgrounds and formal education as we are. Perhaps they compete for a right to live, and part of that competition is learning how to make tools. But that means every generation must more or less reinvent the culture from scratch.’

‘Hmm. Thus limiting their overall progress, generation to generation. Maybe. That is a lot of supposition based on just a little data.’

Roberta had learned not to say things like It’s too beautiful a theory not to be true. Once Jacques Montecute, overstressed, had told her that she should have the slogan ‘Nobody Likes a Smart Alec’ tattooed to her forehead in reverse, so she could be reminded of it every morning in the bathroom mirror. She contented herself with saying, ‘It does fit with the likely physiology, and the evidence of the non-uniformity of the tools. But, yes, the theory needs more testing. It would be interesting to know what’s going on nearer the equator in this world.’

Yue-Sai did a double take. ‘Why so?’

‘Because those tortoises that solved the mazes back on the Datum were allowed to do so in warm conditions. Tortoises are cold-blooded; they shut down in the cold, to some extent.’

‘Oh. So maybe the behaviour we’re witnessing here, in the cold, is—’

‘Limited by temperature. They may be achieving much more in warmer latitudes. Do you think Captain Chen would sanction a journey south, towards the equator?’

‘And risk getting shot down by some super-tortoise? I do not think so.’ Yue-Sai packed away her equipment. ‘Time to get back to the ship.’

Before they left, Roberta glanced across the valley, to the far wall where erosion had exposed the strata of the local sedimentary rocks. She could clearly see a marine deposit, a chalky layer embedded with flints, below a bed of gravel, and then above that a few yards of peat, under the mossy ground surface. She could read the geology. This region, now elevated, had once been under the sea. Later, ice had come and gone, leaving behind the gravel, and then the peat had been laid down over millennia of temperate climates . . . This world, like all other worlds, had a story of its own, a story billions of years deep and probably not quite like any other in the Long Earth ensemble. A story that probably nobody would ever get around to unravelling, and all she would take away from this place was a few snapshots of tortoises.

She could only turn away.

Back at the airship Captain Chen was excited, and not about tortoises. ‘Finally – finally! – we have the results back from the probes we sent into the Eastern Gap. You remember, more than six million worlds back.’

‘Of course I remember.’

‘You asked us to inspect the planets, Venus and Mars. And the scientists found—’

‘Life.’

He seemed crestfallen. ‘You knew? Of course you would know . . .’

On the Mars of the missing Earth East 2,217,643, there was oxygen and methane in the air, chemically unstable gases that must have been injected by the processes of life. There seemed to be some kind of vegetative covering on the lower ground of the northern hemisphere. And in the clouds of that copy of Venus, high, cool, full of water, chlorophyll had been observed. Earth-like plants, drifting in the Venusian sky.

No, Roberta wasn’t surprised. Any Gap that could be reached by a stepping animal, even the most foolish of humanoids, was going to be a place where bacteria and other living organisms were regularly injected into space, if only accidentally, through the hole where Earth should be. Most such reluctant pioneers would die quickly, including the hapless humanoids if they couldn’t step straight back – but some hardy bacterial spores, having hitched a ride on the stepping humanoids, might survive the radiation, the vacuum. And of those spores, some might ultimately drift into the skies of other worlds, and seed them. This was panspermia, the transfer by natural processes of life between the worlds. It was thought to be possible even in the Datum universe. How much easier panspermia must be in a Gap cosmos, with a way for life to reach space so much more easily than being blasted off by an asteroid impact.

No, Roberta wasn’t surprised. She filed the confirmation away in the back of her mind, where a kind of model of the Long Earth, and all its facets, was slowly being assembled, fact by fact, deduction by deduction.