The Long War (29 page)

‘There are other sorts here too,’ Yue-Sai said softly. ‘I spotted them in the deeper forest—’

The conversation was cut short by a sound of thunder.

Yue-Sai and Roberta shrank back into deeper cover. Some of the duckbills kept drinking, but the big adults looked up suspiciously. The crest-roos dipped their great heads and backed into a rough circle.

There was a crash, the splintering of wood, a groan as a young tree was felled, and the forest parted like a flimsy stage set as a tremendous animal burst into the open. Its body must have been fifteen yards long, balanced exquisitely on two striding legs. Its arms were small, comparatively, but longer and more muscular than Roberta’s own legs, and the right arm had some kind of creeper wrapped around it. Its skin was covered with feathers, brilliantly coloured, like the costume of an Aztec priest. The head was a gaping nightmare of teeth and blood, and when it opened its mouth to roar Roberta imagined she could smell raw meat.

It strode forward, huge, purposeful. It seemed more mechanical than animal, a killer robot, an automaton, and yet it breathed and pawed the earth. The herbivores were already fleeing, following the water’s edge, galloping and bellowing.

But the elves did not run, not immediately. They scattered into a loose arc, facing the creature, the adults to the fore with stone blades in their hands, the young behind them, but even the young were snarling defiance. It was like another movie scene, Roberta thought. Stone-tool-wielding man-apes against the dinosaur.

Yue-Sai was staring, as if unwilling to miss a second of the spectacle. ‘A dinosaur, all right. Or its sixty-five-million-years-later descendant. Tyrannosaur-like, or something else evolved to fit the same niche.’

‘Of course China had its own magnificent dinosaur lineages,’ Captain Chen reminded them sternly. ‘There are other comparisons to be used, Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Yue-Sai said absently. ‘It could even be a flightless bird. If it is like a tyrannosaur, the odds are this is a female. They had ranges a few miles across; the males were sparser, one every few tens of miles. But what’s that on its arm? . . .’

The predator’s roars and the humanoids’ responding snarls and gestures were reaching a climax. Abruptly the predator charged, right into the middle of the elf group.

The young with their parents scattered. The adult elves started flickering in and out of existence, faster than the predator could catch them, though she ducked her head, snapped her huge teeth, and swept empty space with her arms and tail. One elf materialized in mid-jump right beside the predator’s head, and took a swipe at her right eye with his blade before stepping away again, without ever touching the ground. The precision was remarkable, and the predator’s eye was saved only by a chance duck of the head.

Bloodied, enraged, the predator stood at the centre of the band of humanoids, unable to land a killing blow on any of them. She roared again, sweeping her huge tail, snapping her teeth.

But the humanoids had had enough. They stepped away now, mothers carrying their children, as far as Roberta could see leaving nobody behind.

‘You have to hand it to those little guys,’ Jacques said in their ears. ‘They stood up to their Grendel.’

Yue-Sai shrugged. ‘Eventually the beast will learn not to tangle with humanoids, especially steppers. And anyhow they were never her main target. Look.’

Now the predator was heading down the beach after the big crest-roos. They had a head start; the roos, alarmed, tons of flesh and bone on the move, were like a retreating tank division. But one mother hung back to shepherd her calf.

‘They’ve got too much of a start,’ Jacques said.

‘Are you sure?’ Captain Chen murmured. ‘Look at what she is doing with her arm.’

Roberta could see that the predator was using one agile hand to unwrap the vine from her arm. The vine was maybe six feet long, and was weighted at either end by something like a coconut. And now, even as she ran, her legs pounding the beach and her spine and tail almost horizontal, the predator whirled the vine and released it. It flew across the intervening space and wrapped itself around the big back legs of the lagging mother crest-roo. The vine snapped immediately, but it was enough for the mother to be brought crashing to the ground. Her calf slowed beside her, lowing mournfully, clearly afraid.

And it had a right to be, for the predator was on the mother immediately. It ran by and ducked its head to rip a huge chunk out of the crest-roo’s rear right leg, then almost casually swiped its head against one magnificent flaring ear, crushing the cartilage so the crest folded like a fallen kite. The mother bellowed in pain.

But she was able to stand, though blood dripped from the gaping wound. She even nudged her infant to move on, as they shambled up the beach after the rest of the herd, which had already cut into the forest.

The predator stood and watched them go, by the water’s edge, breathing hard. The crest-roo’s blood stained her mouth. Then she ducked to the water, took a mighty drink, shook her head, and trotted after the mother and calf. It was a pursuit that could have only one outcome.

‘That predator used a bolas,’ said Roberta.

Yue-Sai said, ‘Yes . . . It looked as though it could have been a natural object. A vine-like growth with fruit. But there was nothing “natural” in the way she used it.’ Yue-Sai looked delighted, in her quiet way, to have made this staggering discovery. ‘I told you, Roberta. We’re far away from home now. Have no preconceptions.’

‘I’ll second that,’ Captain Chen said. ‘And I should tell you that our signal-processing experts here inform me that there was data content in the patterns that flared across the crests of those roo-like beasts.
They were talking
, through the visual means of their crests! Sentience! Our onboard scholars must make all this clear when they joint-author their paper: “A mammal–reptile assemblage of tool-making intelligences beyond Earth East two million”. How marvellous! What a great discovery for China!’

They began to walk back to the pick-up point.

Chen, evidently enthused, went on, ‘We Chinese, you know, Roberta, have a utopian legend of our own. There is a story that dates back to the fifth century after your Christ, of how a fisherman found his way through a narrow cave to the Land of Peach Blossom, where descendants of soldiers lost from the age of the Qin dynasty lived in a land sheltered by mountains, in peace with each other, in peace with nature. But when the fisherman tried to reach it a second time, he could not find the way. So it is with all utopias, whose legends proliferate around the world. Even in North America, where the natives’ dream of the Happy Hunting Ground was displaced by the European settlers’ fables of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Do you think if we travel far enough we will find such a land, Roberta? Are such legends a relic of some early perception of the Long Earth itself?’

‘There is no sensible content in this discussion,’ Roberta murmured in reply. ‘And as to the papers you’re planning – none of this matters.’

Yue-Sai turned to her.

‘How’s that?’ Jacques asked.

Roberta gestured at the landscape around her. ‘The coming hypercane will destroy all this. I’ve been studying the climatic theory of these worlds, with their high sea levels. They are prone to tremendous hurricanes, extracting heat from the shallow oceans. Storms that can span continents, with thousand-miles-per-hour winds; water vapour is thrown up into the stratosphere, and the ozone layer is wrecked . . . I’ve also been studying the records of the weather balloons you launched from the twains. There’s such a storm forming right now. Ask your meteorologists. It’s unmistakable. It will take a few more weeks to reach full strength, but when it does this complicated little community will be right in its path. It’s been an interesting experiment, a stepwise mixing of different species. But it will soon be terminated.’

There was silence.

‘“Terminated”,’ said Captain Chen at last.

Roberta was used to this kind of reaction to her choice of words, and found it irritating. As if a child were covering its ears to avoid hearing bad news. ‘All life is terminated, ultimately. I’m only telling the truth. It’s trivially obvious.’

Again, nobody spoke.

Yue-Sai looked away. ‘Captain, I think it’s time we returned.’

‘Agreed.’

T
HE
Z
HENG
H
E
and
Liu Yang
lingered for some days in the vicinity of Earth East 2,201,749. The scientists catalogued their observations and specimens, while the engineers crawled over the airships, testing their systems, carrying out routine maintenance.

Then they moved on, into realms of the Eastern Long Earth never before explored by Chinese crews, or any other. Into the unknown.

Shortly afterwards the ships made a longer stop, next to Earth East 2,217,643. Here they found a Gap: a break in the chain of stepwise worlds that made up the Long Earth, where the relevant Earth had been removed. Roberta quietly pointed out to Jacques that the first Western Gap discovered, by Joshua Valienté, had been at around Earth West two million. No doubt, from the similarity of those numbers, there was some conclusion to be drawn about the nature of the great tree of probabilities that was the Long Earth.

Valienté’s airship had been wrecked by the step into vacuum that was the Gap. The Chinese ships were better prepared. Their crews had their ships hop back and forth across the Gap, dropping off hardened automatic probes, which, given the momentum of the spin of the neighbouring Earths, went sailing off into the Gap world’s empty black sky. Jacques stared without much interest at the images returned – stars that looked much like the stars as seen from any world, planets that seemed to circle in their usual orbits with smug indifference to the absence of an Earth. The crew, though, were fascinated, as they had not been by humanoids and dinosaur descendants. Jacques reminded himself that this mission had been mounted by a space agency; no wonder the crew were intrigued by glimpses of the wider universe.

And Roberta, too, seemed to be interested. She requested that the probes be made to study the neighbouring planets, Mars and Venus, to look for any difference in their atmospheres, their surfaces.

With this initial investigation of the new Gap complete, Captain Chen, with a rather boyish and excited grin, came to his passengers and urged them to be at the observation deck the next morning. ‘That’s when the real journey will begin . . .’

When morning came Jacques and Roberta joined Lieutenant Wu before the big prow windows, Jacques cradling a coffee, Roberta a glass of water. The airships hung in the sky of this latest world, two sleek fish of the sky over a sprawling blanket of forest. There was a river in the middle distance, a glassy stripe, and further away the extensive shallow sea typical of these warm worlds, blue to the horizon.

The stepping began without warning, and worlds flapped by, slowly at first, then ever faster. Soon they were travelling at a step a second, a rate they were all used to by now, and weather systems came and went to the beat of Jacques’s pulse: sun, cloud, rain, storms, even some snow. The detail of the forest flickered – once a tremendous, evidently recent crater appeared right under the prow of the
Zheng He
, before being whipped away like a stage prop – and occasionally a world flared, or darkened, and Jacques knew that the ships’ systems would be recording yet another Joker.

Chen joined them, and grasped the polished wooden rail that ran before the window. ‘You might want to hold on.’

Behind them, the trolls began to sing ‘Eight Miles High’.

The stepping rate increased. To Jacques the passage of the worlds was suddenly visually uncomfortable, as if a strobe light were flashing in his face at increasing frequency. He tried to focus on the position of the morning sun, which remained constant in the multiple skies, but masks of cloud flashed across its face, and the sky flickered white, grey, blue. They all grabbed the rail now, even Roberta. Jacques thought he heard a thrumming of engines, and he sensed the airships driving forward even as they stepped. He could see the silvery hulk of the
Liu Yang
flex, a mighty plastic fish swimming through the flickering light of world after world.

Behind them, a crew member threw up.

‘It will pass,’ Yue-Sai said. ‘We have all been tested for a tendency to epilepsy, and the nausea medication has been carefully applied. The discomfort will pass in a moment . . .’

Faster and faster the stepping came, faster and faster the weather systems flickered past their view. Jacques forced himself to keep watching, and focused on the rail in his hands, the vibrations of the ship’s engines transmitted through the floor under his feet.

And then the flickering seemed to fade away, the worlds merging into a kind of continuous blur. The sun, paler than usual, hung in its patient station, in an apparently cloudless sky that took on a deep blue colour, like early twilight. The landscape below was misty and vague, the shapes of the hills grey and dim, littered with patches of forest that seemed to grow, shiver, pass away. The river that had been writhing jerkily across the landscape now spread out, as if flooding a wide band of ground with a silvery grey, and the ocean coast too became a broad blur, the boundary between land and sea uncertain.

‘We have passed the flicker fusion threshold,’ Roberta murmured.

‘Yes!’ Chen cried. ‘We are now travelling at our peak rate, an astounding
fifty worlds per second
– worlds passing faster than the refresh frames in a digital screen, faster than your eye can follow. At such a rate we could traverse the great treks of the first pioneers of the Long Earth in little more than half an hour. At such a rate, if we kept it up, we could traverse more than four million worlds per
day
.’

Jacques asked, ‘But we’re moving laterally too, right? Why’s that?’

‘Continental drift,’ Roberta said immediately.

Chen nodded approvingly. ‘Correct. On Datum Earth the continents drift with time. The rate is something like an inch per year. Thanks to those cumulative effects there is also some drift as you move stepwise. So we move laterally, the great engines working to keep us over the heart of the tectonic plate on which South China rides. Sooner that than get lost altogether.’ He winked at Jacques. ‘Our Chinese airship technology has, incidentally, also set airspeed records.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now if you will excuse me I have engineers who need praising, or calming down, or both. Duty calls . . .’