The Long War

69

JANSSON INSISTED ON being taken back to Madison West 5, no matter what pills she had to force down her throat to withstand the nausea. And once back at 5, she demanded to be taken, not to the convalescent home where she’d been staying, but to the new city’s central police station.

The current chief, Mike Christopher, had been a junior officer in Jansson’s time; he recognized her, let her in, and told her to sit tight in a corner of one of the offices. ‘We’re on alert, Spooky. There are already trickles of refugees showing up here, I mean in the Datum city.’

Jansson gripped Frank’s hand. ‘Refugees, Mike? In Madison? How far is Madison from Yellowstone?’

Mike shrugged. ‘Over a thousand miles, I guess.’

‘We’re talking about an eruption. It must be an eruption, right? Will the effects of this really reach that far?’

He had no reply.

As she sat with Sister John, and Frank went to find coffee, Jansson tried to take in the images unfolding across the screens that plastered the walls of this office. Images taken from civilian news, police, military sources; images gathered on the ground, and from planes and twains, copters and satellites – all of them images from Datum Earth, downloaded on to memory chips and then hastily transferred by hand through the walls between the worlds, and retransmitted with only a slight delay.

After false alarms across the Low Earths, there had indeed been a significant eruption in the Yellowstone footprint – and it had been at Datum Yellowstone itself, she soon learned.

It had begun about one in the afternoon, Madison time. The evacuation of the Park had been going on since just before the eruption. About an hour later the great tower of ash and gas had started to collapse, all around the vent, a mass of superheated rock fragments and gases washing across the Yellowstone ground as fast as a jet airliner, smashing, flash-burning, crushing . . . As excited geologists talked, unwelcome records started to tumble: this was already a worse eruption than Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Tambora.

Sleep seemed to be rising in Jansson’s head, like her own pod of deep hot magma. She couldn’t take in the words any more, the images. And those damn pills didn’t seem to be helping with the pain.

She quickly lost track of time.

At one point she was faintly aware of a kind of conference going on over her head, involving Mike, the Sisters, Frank Wood, and somebody who had the air of a doctor, though she didn’t know him. She gathered that they’d decided to move her, over her feeble protests, into a room at Agnes’s Home for a couple of days.

Mike Christopher organized this briskly, a wheelchair, an ambulance. He winked at her. ‘You get an astronaut to hold your hand, Spooky.’

She pulled her tongue at him.

And still the bad news came. Even before she was taken out of the police station new images were filling the wall screens, the tablets, the glowing smartphones.

A second eruption vent had opened up.

And then a third.

By the time they got her out of there, Yellowstone, imaged by brave USAF pilots in fast aircraft, looked like Dante’s hell.

The next time she woke she was in a cosy but unfamiliar room, attended by Sister John. With brisk compassion the Sister helped her to the bathroom, and brought her breakfast in bed. She was in an adjustable bed, she discovered, like the one she’d been using in her convalescent home, there was a drip stand alongside, and her medications on a shelf by the door. Everything looked to have been moved over from the convalescent home. She felt a warm surge of gratitude for this kindness.

Then Sister John showed in yet another doctor. He tried to talk to her about the nature of her care: palliative only, and so forth. She waved that away and asked him about the news. ‘No TV before meds,’ he said sternly, as he began to treat her.

Only after he’d gone was Frank Wood allowed in, who looked like he’d been sleeping in his suit. Then, at last, they turned on the TV.

The whole caldera was opened up now. The towering cloud it produced was tall enough to be seen from as far away as Denver or Salt Lake City, as evidenced by shaky handheld camera footage from those places. But the images were strange, a yellow-brown light, a shrunken sun. Like daylight on Mars, Frank Wood suggested.

By now that cloud of ash and gas and lumps of pumice was spreading fast and far through the high air. Cars wouldn’t drive far before their filters clogged, and so there were eerie shots of freeways full of shuffling people, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, tramping through the grey snow-like fall like starving Russian peasants, all heading away from Yellowstone.

But of course most people, whoever could, were heeding the systematic calls to step away. And shots from the air, taken from Earth West and East 1, 2, 3, showed the new communities in the footprints of the threatened Datum cities being swamped by a mass of people stepping over, people unconsciously forming up in blocks and streets, in the forms of the schools and hospitals and shopping malls and churches from which they had come, a human map of the doomed communities just a step or two away.

All this was horribly familiar to Jansson. She murmured, clutching Frank’s strong hand, ‘I remember trying to persuade my chief.’

‘Who, dear?’

‘Old Jack Clichy . . .’

‘We have to get people to step, sir. Anywhere, East or West, just away from Madison Zero.’

‘You know as well as I do that not everybody can step. Aside from the phobics there are the old, kids, bedridden, hospital patients—’

‘So people help each other. If you can step, do it. But take someone with you, someone who can’t step . . .’

Frank just held her hand.

She heard the Sisters talking of Joshua Valienté, Sally Linsay, others, rushing to the Datum to help with the relief effort. The names snagged her attention, before she sank back into deeper sleep.

When she woke again, Sister John was quietly weeping.

‘They’re saying it’s our fault. Humanity’s. The scientists. All the local versions of Yellowstone have been unstable recently, but it’s only on the Datum that this has happened. Humans disturbing the Earth, like we did the climate. Others are saying it’s a punishment from God. Well, it’s not that,’ she said fiercely. ‘Not my God. But, how will we cope with this? . . .’

By now Jansson was too feeble to get up. Damn morphine, she thought. Sister John had to help her with the bedpans. She was peripherally aware of a nurse in the background, from the convalescent home; Jansson didn’t know his name. But he let Sister John take the lead. That struck her as polite.

And when she woke with a little more clarity, here was Frank Wood, still sitting at her side.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey.’

‘What time is it?’

‘The time?’ He checked his watch, a big astronaut-type Rolex, then did a double-take. ‘Three days since the first eruption started. It’s morning, Monica.’

‘You need a clean shirt.’

He grinned and rubbed his chin. ‘This is an all-female establishment, as far as adults are concerned. Don’t ask me what I used to shave today.’

Of course there was a TV on, the sound soft, in a corner of the room. The projections were fast changing. As the tremendous cloud of ash and dust spread, across the continental US, even into Canada and Mexico, people were stepping away in their millions, an emigration greater than any in human history, before or after Step Day. Meanwhile the effects of the cloud were already global. Shots of towering sunsets, over London and Tokyo.

It was very strange to watch this, Monica thought, from a world five steps removed, in West 5, where the sun was shining – or not, she realized vaguely: once again it was night. As if she was watching a snow globe, roughly shaken. Or an ash globe.

She felt too weak to move. Only her head. She had an oxygen tube in her nose now. An automated meds dispenser by her bed, like a prop from ER. She drifted helplessly back towards sleep.

‘Carry them in your arms, on your back,’ she’d told Clichy. ‘Then go back and step again. And again and again . . .’

‘You’ve thought about this, haven’t you, Spooky?’

She murmured, ‘It’s why you gave me the job all those years ago, Jack . . .’

Frank leaned close. ‘What was that, honey?’

But Monica seemed to be sleeping again.

On the seventh day, at last, the eruption finished. No more fresh ash, to global relief.

But it ended with a clash of cymbals, as Frank Wood, sleepless, grimy, watched on the room’s wall TV. The caldera, fifty miles wide, emptied of magma, just collapsed. It was as if a chunk of real estate the size of a small state had just been dropped a thousand feet.

Some of the younger Sisters, excited, went stepping over into ash-coated Datum Madison to witness the consequences first hand. After just five minutes the quakes came, a ground-shaking pulse of energy travelling around the planet – though in the ruins of Madison there was only rubble to disturb. Then, after an hour or more, the sound, like a tremendous artillery barrage just over the horizon, or like the launch of a space shuttle, Frank Wood thought, digging back into his boyhood memories.

‘My God,’ Frank said, and he felt for Jansson’s hand. ‘What is to become of us, Monica? . . . Monica?’

Her hand was very cold.