The Long Mars (13 page)

But mankind’s colonization wavefront had spread further yet, thinning out into the still stranger, still less familiar worlds beyond Valhalla. Such as this one. Now Maggie Kauffman stood with her officers in the science section of her ship’s observation galleries, as Gerry Hemingway prepared to brief them on this world, showing imagery taken from the ground and a nanosat in orbit: tentative maps, geological and atmospheric profiles, classifications and analyses.

And all the while that ruined city was spread out beneath the ship’s prow, a tangle of dirt tracks and walls and field boundaries. It looked from the air as if it had been smashed flat and then burned out, leaving great blackened scars on the ground – though it was still inhabited, as you could tell from the smoke rising from scattered hearths. Everybody on both craft was a veteran of Yellowstone, of rescue and retrieval operations, and the devastation brought back harsh memories.

There were humans down below. The
Armstrong
hovered over a small huddle of bubble tents, a scraping of tyre tracks, a couple of heavy off-road vehicles. People had come to study this place. But the city itself had been built, not by humans, but by a race of alien sapients. It seemed almost incredible to Maggie to think of that, even as she stood here looking down on a city whose name, translated into human tongues, was something like ‘The Eye of the Hunter’. A city that had been built by the race called the beagles.

The three trolls were on the deck, huddled together, peering down at the ruins. They hooted their way through what sounded to Maggie like a softly sung but highly complex version of a funereal hymn, ‘Abide With Me’.

For this briefing Maggie had assembled the shore party she was planning to send down to the city. Maggie herself would lead. Wu Yue-Sai was here, as a gesture of cross-cultural friendship with the Chinese. Maggie had never encountered the beagles in person herself, but Joe Mackenzie, her chief medical officer, had relevant expertise; during the post-Yellowstone years he had actually spent time here as part of some kind of biological-stroke-cultural mission – a jaunt he’d told her virtually nothing about.

Wu looked like she was full of nothing but honest eagerness and curiosity. Mac, on the other hand, never the cheeriest of souls, glowered down at the city, almost hostile.

‘Hey.’ Maggie touched his shoulder. ‘You OK?’

‘I don’t know why you want me in this party.’

‘Because you worked here. Even though you never told me about it.’

He avoided her eyes. ‘Saw enough of this place back then. Look, why have we stopped? We’re going
much
further than this. It’s as if Lewis and Clark spent a week hanging out in a Chicago bar before—’

‘Well, we aren’t Lewis and Clark. We’ve got different mission objectives. You’ll see.’

Hemingway was now displaying global maps, images of this particular Earth. Maggie saw a layout of continents not very much different from those of Datum Earth, but not in quite the right places, landmasses that seemed enlarged, or smeared, even joined together: Australia was connected to south-east Asia by a fat neck of land, the Bering Strait was closed. In the heart of all the continents were the yellow-red stains of deserts. The oceans looked shrunken, and even the polar caps were diminished.

Gerry Hemingway said, ‘Some of the climatologists call these worlds Venusian, or Para-Venusian . . . It’s all about water. Datum Earth and Venus seem to be at two ends of a band of possible water content levels, for planets like ours. Our Earth has a lot of surface water in its oceans, of course, and in the air, and cycling around in the mantle. Venus may have started out with a similar water lode but lost it all early on. A world like this is somewhere on the spectrum between the two – significantly drier than Earth, not as dry as Venus. There is life here, even complex life, even sapients, but it’s sparse, isolated. The early Long Earth explorers, including the first Valienté mission, missed this exception. And its inhabitants. Well, you would, unless you took the time to survey the whole planet.’

Yue-Sai shook her head. ‘We always rush, rush across the Long Earth. So we did on the
Zheng He
. So we will on this wonderful craft! One always wonders what one misses, simply through not having time enough to see. So many worlds, so many wonders.’

Hemingway said, ‘It was only five years ago that the indigenous sapient culture was discovered. Since then, despite the demands of the Yellowstone crisis, an international consortium of universities has funded stations of observers and contact specialists: linguists, cultural analysts. You see one such camp below. And we contacted the local sapients.’ He hit a tab, and the map on his tablet lit up with a scattering of dots, spread around the fringes of the continents, and along the main water courses. ‘Here are the main communities we’ve detected so far. They tend to be small in extent but densely inhabited. That’s something to do with the beagles’ biology; they like to live in close bands. But they have links of communication and trade that span the continents.’

‘And war,’ Mac said sourly. ‘Their wars span continents too.’

‘War, yeah. We understand something of the political landscape. The beagles are grouped into Packs, which roughly correspond to our nations – or maybe what we think of as our races. The North American Pack is ruled by a Mother, as they call her, who’s on the west coast, not far from San Francisco Bay. There are local, umm, fiefdoms, each ruled by a Daughter or Granddaughter of the Mother. It’s a matriarchy, as you can tell from the language. Males are warriors, workers – breeding partners. Subordinate. Though there’s no difference we can detect in levels of intelligence between the sexes.

‘And they do have devastating wars. They come in cycles, as far as we can tell from some preliminary archaeology, and their own accounts of their history. A war, and the resulting plagues and famine, causes a population crash, but when the numbers recover, war comes again. Mostly the infighting arises within individual Packs. The basic motivation is Granddaughters trying to displace Daughters, and Daughters trying to displace a Mother. Inter-Pack war seems less common. But in the worst cases you get flare-ups covering a continent – hell, maybe the whole planet for all we know. Afterwards they just build everything up all over again, using the same sites, building slap on top of the smoking ruins. This latest war, however, the first since humans were here on hand to witness it, seems to have been tougher than most.’

Maggie expected Mac to comment on that. Instead he just kept staring out of the window.

‘You must have seen something of this,’ she murmured. ‘Everybody on this boat seems to have secrets to keep from me. You too, Mac?’

Still he would not react. She turned away, obscurely hurt.

‘Thank you, Gerry,’ she said now. ‘OK, folks, we have a mission to fulfil here, as you’ll see. Let’s get down there and get it done.’

They landed close to the in-situ researchers’ huddle of tents.

The senior academic, an Australian called Ben Morton, known to Mac – he couldn’t hide
that
from Maggie – was waiting to meet them. A haunted-looking older man, Morton barely acknowledged Mac, before he offered to drive them in the researchers’ only vehicle into the beagle town, the Eye of the Hunter.

They bumped along an uneven track, past clumps of forest of low, gnarled trees, like ferns perhaps, and fields roughly delineated with straggling dry stone walls. What looked like grass was cropped by animals: not sheep or cattle or goats, but things like fat deer, and a kind of beefy flightless bird. Some of the fields were tended by workers who went upright, on two legs, swathed in rags and bearing walking staves. Maggie didn’t get too close a look. At first glance they looked human – and after all, humans came in a variety of body shapes. But look again at these workers and, elusively, subtly, they didn’t appear quite right, the head too large, the waist too low, the eyes set too wide apart.

Her companions took in all this, Hemingway in nervous silence, Mac with a kind of resentful glare. Maggie was growing sure that there was something specific he was keeping from her about his experience here.

Wu Yue-Sai was making notes on a small tablet.

Many of the farms had been looted, burned out, destroyed, Maggie saw from the beginning of the ride. And the evidence of war became more obvious as they approached the heart of the city, and certainly once they’d passed within its low, largely broken-down walls. She suspected the buildings here, of wood and daub, would always have looked irregular, even unfinished to a human eye, and they were oddly set out, clustered along straggling dirt streets – no grid pattern here. But now they were smashed, burned, only a few roughly repaired.

Given the size of the place she saw very few inhabitants, and fewer up close. But one child stood as they passed. Dressed in rags, she held out an empty bowl, her request obvious. It was a scene you might have seen in the aftermath of any human war, Maggie thought. But the child’s eyes glittered, her ears were swept back, and a pink tongue lolled from a wide mouth.

At last the truck rolled up beside a more extensive ruin, a fire-blackened crater surrounded by scraps of scorched wall. There was a dog, a big one, bigger than a Saint Bernard, lying in the shade of one fragment of wall. He raised his head to watch them approach. He wore some kind of belt around his waist, Maggie saw.

‘Welcome to the Palace of the Granddaughter,’ said Ben Morton.

And the dog spoke.

‘He-hhr name Pet-hhra. Long dead.’ The language was clearly comprehensible English, but spoken with a growl, like a coarse whisper from the back of the throat.

A canine sapient. Maggie had been briefed about this, had even seen recordings. Nothing prepared her for the reality, though. Not even the talking cat in her own sea cabin.
That
was obviously artificial, a smart technological toy. This, though . . .

Her culture shock got worse when the dog stood up. He got up on his hind paws, almost like a trained animal in a balancing act. But then the movement became more fluid, his anatomy seemed to adjust somehow, and he was standing, a biped as fully developed as Maggie was, his waist low but his lower legs supporting him easily. He wore a kind of short kilt, and that belt from which, she saw now, tools dangled. His face did not have the obvious projection of a dog muzzle; it was flat, proportioned something like a human’s, but the nose was broad, black nostrils flaring. His ears were sharp and lay back against his scalp, and his eyes were wide apart, unblinking, fixed on her. A predator’s gaze. Maggie had a sense of age, from the slightly awkward stance, from grey hairs around a wide mouth. Age, and injury; one forearm looked almost withered, and he held it against his chest.

He wasn’t a dog. He was humanoid, as she was, but moulded from canine clay, as she was from the ape.

She’d asked for this encounter. But not for the first time she wondered whether, in the end, she was going to have the intellectual strength, the imaginative capacity, to face the true strangeness of her long mission, if she felt so overwhelmed by this first encounter with the alien.

‘You’re a beagle,’ she said.

‘So we h-have been called, by you. My name to you – B-hrr-ian.’ He pulled his lips back, revealing very canine teeth, in what might have been an approximation of a grin. ‘I ss-it to meet you like ghh-ood dog. Yes? Now I call.’ He tipped his head back and howled, a suddenly very wolf-like sound; Maggie heard the call echo from the remains of the buildings.

Morton raised an eyebrow at the visitors. ‘Brian’s one of our main contacts here. One of the more, umm, humanized of the local beagles. He has a distinctive sense of humour. Mordant, you might say.’

‘Mo-hrr-dant? Not know that wo-hhhrd. Look up later.’

‘We’ve given him English language dictionaries, grade school stuff, and other teaching aids. We’re learning a great deal from him.’

‘And I too lea-hhrn,’ Brian said to the bemused visitors, like the other half of some bizarre trained-animal double act, Maggie thought. ‘My job always-ss to learn, when Pet-hhra was alive. G-hranddaughter. Killed in wa-hrr. For he-hrr, my learning useful. Learn of kobolds, learn of humans. Yet she despised me,’ he said, and he hung his heavy head and shook it. ‘Poo-hhr B-hrrian.’

Mac snorted in disgust. ‘Christ. It’s like he’s begging for a treat.’

‘Ignore him,’ Morton said. ‘Just showing off. He’s useful but he can be a real asshole. Can’t you, Brian?’

Brian laughed, an oddly human sound. ‘Ass-sshole? You come sniff me then, Ben-nn. You know you wan-tt to. Asshole? T-hhrue. All beagles assholes. You see how we kill each other-hrr in war. Over and ove-hrr.’

Now a newcomer arrived, evidently in response to Brian’s call, another dog, even bigger. It raced in on all fours but then stood tall, graceful, lithe, even as it slowed before Maggie. This one had clear, ice-blue eyes, was heavily muscled, and stood straight, almost to attention, Maggie thought.

She glanced at Morton. ‘Is this the one?’

‘We found a volunteer, who seemed to be the type you were looking for.’ Morton’s shrug said,
Sooner you than me
. ‘He’s all yours.’

Plucking up her courage, Maggie stepped forward and stood before the beagle. He smelled of musk, of dust, of
meat
; he smelled of animal. And yet his gaze was cool, clear. She said, ‘They call you Snowy.’

‘Yes-ss,’ he said clearly. ‘My t-hrrue name—’ A guttural growl.

‘You understand why I asked for a volunteer? You understand what’s to become of you, if you come with us?’

‘Ride to scentless wo-hhrlds.’ He looked up at the sleek form of the
Armstrong
, and grinned.

Wu said, ‘Ah! I understand. A beagle crew member. A fine experiment.’

‘The whole journey is an experiment, Lieutenant,’ Maggie said. ‘Call this one an experiment in cross-sapience understanding.’

Mac stared at Maggie. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘Mac, I didn’t tell you before because I knew you’d object—’

‘We already got Chinese military personnel on board,’ Mac said. ‘And trolls. And now this mutt!’