The Long Mars (30 page)

‘Please, be our guests. We are
so
pleased you found us at last . . .’

David and his companions led the party of officers past the wreck, through the fields, towards the tepees. Maggie could see that the tepees were indeed built of materials scavenged from the
Armstrong
, aluminium struts, fabric from the broken envelope. As they walked, two of the women were talking quietly. Their speech was fast, fluid, as if speeded up, and Maggie couldn’t make out a word.

Gerry Hemingway slowed, his attention evidently snagged by what he saw in the fields. They didn’t look too impressive to Maggie, just scratches in the dirt, but there were potatoes and beets growing. However, what caught Gerry’s eye was a field in which some of the native life was growing, like a display of bonsais. Their colours were strange, their scent unfamiliar, exotic. And the tiny trees seemed to be wired up in a kind of net of fine cables, no doubt more salvage from the airship, that were fixed to their roots. The cables led to a bank of batteries, and glass jars of water that bubbled languidly. ‘You go on, Skip,’ he said. ‘Let me take a look at what they’re doing here.’

She nodded. ‘OK. But don’t be alone. Santorini, stay with him.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

The largest tepee was spacious enough for a dozen people to sit on blankets in the dirt. The day was warm, mild, still, and a heavy sheet that covered the door was thrown back. In a hearth in the middle of the floor a small fire burned. Maggie, Mac, Cutler, Nathan Boss, Wu Yue-Sai crowded in. Rachel had gone off with the rest of the crew, while Michael prepared some kind of hot drink on a frame over the fire.

David sat on a box, overlooking his guests, with Rosalind and Anne at his side.

Mac grunted at the layout. ‘Guy’s like a Saxon king with his thanes.’

‘Yes,’ Maggie said. ‘But he has the character for it, you have to admit.’

‘Hmm. And look how Wu is staring at him. Like she’d have his babies here and now . . .’

David said now, ‘As I said – we are so glad you came. You can see we are stranded here, just the five of us, the only survivors of the
Armstrong
. Of course we could all step away. But we aren’t even sure how far we are from home.’

Nathan Boss rattled off the number of the world for him. David thanked him, and to Maggie’s chagrin Nathan looked pleased to be favoured, just like Cutler.

David said, ‘But the number scarcely matters. Even if we could step so far we could not walk through the lethal worlds you have crossed already – worlds without oxygen, worlds whose whole biospheres are soaked in sulphuric acid. And we could not contact you. We had to wait for rescue.’ He grinned. ‘Now you can bring us home.’

And what an honour that would be for her, Maggie thought helplessly. Like she’d found Elvis. The guy really did have an air of command.

She tried to snap out of it. ‘So tell us what happened.’

Mac grunted. ‘In fact, you can start by telling us how the hell you came to be aboard the
Armstrong
in the first place.’

David appraised the two of them. ‘You are skilful, Captain. You ask the soft questions, while allowing the Doctor to wield the baton.’

‘If only we were that smart,’ Maggie said ruefully. ‘And anyhow this isn’t an interrogation, David. Please just answer the questions.’

‘We are from a community you know as Happy Landings. You would be able to determine that much from the
Armstrong
’s log.’

Mac nodded. ‘I know of it. Somewhere around a million and a half steps from Datum, right? Kind of a peculiar place, Captain. Explains the accent, I suppose.’

David said smoothly, ‘The first
Armstrong
called there, on its own journey to the far stepwise West. We five were selected as passengers, guests, for the next leg of the journey. We were thrilled. Off to the far Long Earth, aboard a military twain! But things went badly wrong. The engines – the crew lost control . . .’

Maggie left it to Mac to question them closely about the details of the incident. David and the others were vague about places and times – what precisely the engineering problem was, where exactly in the greater Long Earth they were when the crew lost control, what their stepping rate was, how the crew tried to handle the situation.

After a time, while Mac continued the question-and-answer, Nathan Boss tugged Maggie’s sleeve. ‘Captain – does Mac have to interrogate them so hard? They survived a wreck. They’ve been stranded here, cut off from the rest of mankind, for years. In the middle of an alien ecosystem too. They’re damned impressive to have survived at all, let alone to be so – composed.’

‘They are, aren’t they?’

‘Of
course
they aren’t going to know the engineering details of the crash. The crew will have kept them isolated, as safe as possible, protected from the crisis . . .’

Yue-Sai was on Maggie’s other side. She seemed to have got over her first star-struck reaction. ‘But even so they seem very vague about it all, for individuals evidently so intelligent.’

Maggie noticed that Rosalind and Anne were observing this sidebar discussion. Again they whispered to each other, and again Maggie strained to catch that peculiar high-speed talk of theirs.

Yue-Sai said, ‘Captain, if I may, I would like to go inspect more of this little colony for myself.’

‘You do that.’

As Yue-Sai stood up, David smiled and held out a hand to her. ‘Please, don’t leave us.’

It was a request, not a command. Yet it seemed to have a peculiar effect on Yue-Sai. She stood frozen, as if unwilling to disobey him. But then she shook her head, turned away, and left the tepee.

‘And you say there were no survivors,’ Mac pressed now. ‘From the crew, I mean. None but the five of you.’

David spread his hands. ‘What can I say? They kept us safe – in an inner cabin, far from the gondola walls – while they struggled to save the ship. We broke out later, after the crash. I can show you the cabin if you like.’

‘I’m sure you can.’

David described how over the following days, weeks, they had taken the bodies, bagged up, to a burial site some distance away. ‘We needed to stay here, by the wreck. We needed its raw materials for our survival, and we knew any rescue attempt would be drawn here. We buried the bodies decently.’

Mac pressed him on exactly where. David was vague, as if distressed to be pushed to recall such a difficult time.

‘All the questions you ask, Doctor Mackenzie – look, the
Armstrong
crew saved us. They gave their lives to do so. This is the noblest sacrifice imaginable. Really, is there anything else to be said?’

Even Maggie felt there wasn’t. ‘Let’s take a break.’

Quietly, however, she detailed Nathan to keep David and the others as busy as possible. ‘The rest of you, spread out. There are only five of them, they can’t tag us all.’ Then she turned to Mac, who remained expressionless. ‘I don’t know if anything’s wrong here. But—’

Mac said, ‘These kids are just too damn likeable. Right?’

‘Something like that. I’d prefer to take a look around myself . . .’

32

M
AGGIE FOUND THAT
the reactions of the crew to these Happy Landers was extreme – mixed, but extreme. ‘Like they all love them or hate them,’ Mac growled. ‘Mostly they love ’em,’ he admitted.

In those terms, Gerry Hemingway was a lover.

‘You should see what they’ve done with the native ecosystem, Captain. Those experimental fields out front? You understand we have a mix of life origins here on this world, with Datum types – our DNA type – mixed in with at least one other kind. Well, they’ve been experimenting, through domestication, even a little genetic tinkering using equipment scavenged from the
Armstrong
’s lab. They’re developing useful crops, for food, fabrics, drugs, from the DNA stock. And they’re using the partner life forms to support that – as nitrogen fixers, for instance, pest control, even using them as natural, self-repairing supports for the crops.’

‘And that affair with the wires and the batteries and the jars?’

‘Power production. Milking the photosynthesizing plants for energy to be stored in the batteries, or to crack water for hydrogen. They’ve made incredible progress, though it’s hard to judge the details – hard to judge exactly what it is they’ve done, they don’t seem to write stuff down. And when they try to explain it – Rachel spent fifteen minutes with me, she was open enough, but—’ He shook his head. ‘I was a slow starter at grade school, you know, Captain. Made up for it later. Speaking to her, to this kid from the boonies, from some place where they don’t even have proper schools – this kid who must have been self-taught in every discipline we discussed – Captain, she made my head spin. I felt like I was back at grade school again, and she got kind of impatient when I couldn’t keep up, like she wasn’t used to being asked to clarify her statements.’

Mac grinned. ‘Well, that’s how you make the rest of us feel, Gerry.’

Maggie said, ‘Shut up, Mac. So they’re – well, they’re smarter than us. More inventive, faster learning.’

‘I’d say by a significant degree,’ Hemingway said seriously.

‘I’d agree with that,’ Mac said. ‘And not just smarter academically. Smarter with people too. You can see it by the way they’re
dazzling
everybody. It’s all subtle signals, subtexts, body language. All working just under the radar of the conscious mind.’

‘But they ain’t foolin’ you, huh, Mac?’

‘Maybe I’m better at recognizing this stuff than most. I did some psychology options before they let me out into the wild, you know. Once did a term paper on Hitler. How he got so many people to do what he wanted. You can analyse it quite specifically.’

Hemingway scoffed. ‘You’re not seriously comparing David, say, to Hitler.’

‘These guys are
worse
, potentially. Hitler had the charisma but he wasn’t all that smart – probably wouldn’t have lost his war otherwise. These characters are smarter than us – Maggie, I’d like to try IQ tests and such on them, I predict they’d break the scale. Definitively smarter. And smart people can fascinate, baffle, like a magician bamboozling a five-year-old kid.’

If Hemingway was a fan and Mac an immediate sceptic, Wu Yue-Sai, despite seeming briefly dazzled herself, was definitely growing suspicious. She showed Maggie around the rest of the settlement. Most of the fields were scratches, the structures half-finished. And, in a roughly dug pit, there were heaps of ration packs from the downed
Armstrong
, all scraped clean, even MREs, military-class meals ready to eat, usually a last resort when it came to cuisine choices.

‘Captain, one must have sympathy for their plight. Whatever happened to bring them here, we have five Crusoes, pitched into an alien wilderness with a challenge to survive. Yet they are five young people, strong, healthy and
very
smart, who have spent
years
here. And, aside from their remarkable experimental set-up which Lieutenant Hemingway has shown you, they have made remarkably little progress. It’s as if what they have achieved, save for the basic provision for shelter and so on, has been – well, for show. Half-finished, abandoned.’

Mac grunted. ‘Eating off ship’s rations while meddling with the plants’ genetic make-up. Five Doctor Frankensteins.’

‘But no Igor,’ Maggie said with a grin.

Wu Yue-Sai said slyly, ‘Actually I understand that reference. It is odd you should say that, Captain. I think they
do
have an Igor.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look here.’

She showed them one of the secondary structures, a rough tepee that contained nothing but a heap of fire-damaged clothing, presumably hauled from the crash. Yue-Sai had examined the structure closely, even pulling the supporting struts out of the ground. And she had found, roughly scratched into one strut – far enough down that it would have been buried, out of sight – a pair of initials.

‘SA,’ Mac read. ‘There’s no “S” among the group we met.’

Yue-Sai said, ‘Indeed not. Then who is SA? Was it SA, in fact, who built this structure?’

At that moment Snowy came running. When he really wanted to move fast he went down on all fours, big, strong, wolf-like, and very animal, despite the adapted uniform he wore, the gloves on his paw-hands. He was a bizarre and terrifying sight.

When he reached Maggie he stopped, straightened up, as if morphing back to human form, and saluted her. ‘Captain. I have ff-found . . . You ss-see.’

Making his own investigation, he’d followed scents. That was very wolf-like, Maggie thought. Covering a lot of ground quickly, he’d followed one trail to a clump of forest, of comparatively tall trees in this bonsai world. In the heart of the wood he’d found a cage, swathed in silver survival blankets under a covering of leaves – those blankets would have rendered the set-up invisible to infrared sensors, Maggie realized.

And in the cage, Snowy had found a man, bound and gagged, in the remains of a marine uniform.

Maggie immediately snapped out orders. ‘Nathan, go round up those superstars and tie ’em down. Use lethal force if you need to.’

Nathan Boss hesitated for one second – that was the glamour fighting against Navy discipline in his head, Maggie thought. Then he said, ‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Mac, Yue-Sai, Snowy, come with me. Let’s go rescue that marine.’

It wasn’t hard to bust open the cage.

When they’d got through, Maggie went in herself to release the man. She pulled the gag away from his mouth tenderly. He was filthy, rough-shaven. He whispered hoarsely, ‘Thank you.’ Yue-Sai had a water flask. She passed it over and he drank greedily, his gaze flickering nervously from one face to the next. ‘Hey, Wolverine,’ he said at length. ‘Don’t eat me.’

‘He’s a member of my crew,’ Maggie said reassuringly. ‘His name’s Snowy. Acting Ensign Snowy.’ She turned to Mac. ‘Now do you see why I brought him along?’

‘Thank you, Snowy,’ the marine said seriously. ‘Without you finding me – well, I reckon those damn Happy Landers would have left me for dead, after you took them off this place. Probably only kept me alive after you showed up as an insurance policy. Or hostage, maybe. They think things through, all ways up.’