The Long War (40 page)

‘That’s OK, Nathan. The picture is clear enough.’

Wayne snorted. ‘What the heck is this? It’s a joke. It’s only a talking animal.’

That got roughly translated through the troll-call. And the speed with which Carl moved, grabbing Wayne’s leg and holding him upside down by one hand, was remarkable.

Maggie smiled. ‘Your point is refuted, I think. And your testimony. Sheriff, it’s not your people who deserve respect from the trolls but the other way around.’ She tilted her head to look at the inverted Wayne. ‘As for you, I’ll leave you in the hands of your parents, in the hope of a better future.’

The boy wriggled in the grasp of the placid troll, all but scraping his scalp on the ground. ‘Screw you. Everybody knows about you and your damn ship. It’s all over the outernet. Captain Troll Lover.’

She felt her blood rise. But she said calmly, ‘Drop him, Carl.’

And she turned away, heading back to the ship, before the boy hit the ground with a cry of pain.

T
HE
B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN
hovered over the township of Cracked Rock through the night.

Still fuming from the sideswipe from that kid Wayne – how could a slimeball like him in some dump world like this know so much about her? – Maggie called her chief engineer. ‘Harry, who’s the nerdiest geek you have down there? You know the kind—’

‘Ensign Fox,’ Ryan said without hesitation.

‘Fox. Toby, right? Listen – send him up.’

As she waited for Fox she scanned his personnel file. He really was a geek, of the barely tamed variety: a wretched sailor, but an IQ of a zillion. Just what she needed.

When he arrived, Maggie demanded, ‘Ensign Fox. How often do you guys do a serious systems scan? I mean, sweep for bugs, Trojans, all that hacker shit?’

Fox seemed distracted by the presence of Shi-mi, who was watching from a basket on the floor. But he looked hurt to be asked the question. ‘Well, Captain, we in Tech run sweeps more or less all the time. Of course we’re mostly running Black Corporation software; it’s self-policing, though we do have some independent firewalls which—’

‘Black Corporation software. I bet we uploaded even more of it back in Detroit, right? System upgrades, replacements.’

‘Well, yes, Captain. That’s routine.’

‘And I know I had Harry scan the ship from stem to stern after the refit. But still – how much control does Black software have of this ship? Give me a non-technical answer.’

Fox thought for a minute, his small face crumpled. ‘Well, Black is the principal contractor. Their software – it suffuses the
Franklin
, Captain.’

Maggie said, ‘The ghost in the machine. Seems to me we leak like a damn sieve, Ensign. Even if it is under our level of detection.’

He didn’t seem too perturbed, as if that were known and accepted. ‘Yes, Captain.’

‘Thank you, Fox. By the way, how’s the Aegis census going?’

Fox’s small face worked as he sought a concise answer. She imagined Harry Ryan beating that kind of verbal skill into the head of a boy who must once have suffered from the hyper-volubility of the typical nerd. In the end he said simply, ‘Frustratingly incomplete, Captain.’

‘Well, keep at it. Dismissed, Ensign.’

‘Captain.’

When he’d gone she came around the desk, grabbed the cat, and set her on the desk. ‘That guy George Abrahams and his damn troll-calls.’

‘Captain?’

‘This is supposed to be a military mission.
This is my command
. I bet every communication we attempt with the trolls is relayed back to him.’

‘I couldn’t say—’

‘You’re probably riddled with bugs too, aren’t you? Listen, kitty litter. I want you to set me up another meeting with Abrahams. Understand? I’ve no doubt you can do it.’

The cat only mewed softly.

The next day, she got through her business at the township as quickly as possible. That mayor from a couple of worlds over, summoned at last, seemed totally in awe of Maggie, promised to do his best to learn the lessons of the event, and offered the
Benjamin Franklin
crew the freedom of the local stepwise cities, which Maggie politely declined.

She had one more meeting with Sheriff Kafka outside his office. When he tried to apologize for his screw-up, she slapped him on the back. ‘You did your best last night. You’ve got a lot to learn – but then, who hasn’t?’

He nodded gratefully. ‘Godspeed, Captain.’

And now for George Abrahams.

She couldn’t keep her intention to meet him again a secret from her senior officers. So she wasn’t very surprised when Joe Mackenzie showed up in her sea cabin with a couple of coffees, and sat, watching her like an X-ray machine. ‘Patient confidentiality guaranteed.’

Maggie said, ‘You know what the issue is, Mac. Do
you
trust the Black Corporation? . . .’

‘What’s to trust?’

‘I think someone is up to something.’

Mac grinned. ‘Well,
everybody
is up to
something
. And the military have been in bed with Black for years. Which is why he was on the podium with Cowley when our mission was launched.’

‘Yeah, but does that give Black the right to monitor us routinely? This is a military expedition, Mac. I get the impression that everybody from the Pentagon on down is turning a blind eye.’

Mac shrugged. ‘So Black has a lot of power. So have military contractors had all the way back to World War Two. That’s the reality of life, I guess. I mean, there’s no evidence of malice on the part of Black, is there? Or a lack of patriotism.’

‘No, but . . . Now it’s personal, Mac. This is my ship, my mission.
Me
. It’s just a feeling – but it’s like I have a searchlight on me. Do you think I’m losing my way?’

‘No. I think you’re following your instinct, and it’s never failed you in the past.’

‘What, even about keeping the cat?’

‘Except for that,’ said Mac.

T
HE AIRSHIPS
Z
HENG
He
and
Liu Yang
steadily forged towards their target of twenty million worlds East of the Datum.

They passed more unprecedented milestones: ten million, twelve, fifteen million steps. Now they were crossing an extraordinary span of the Long Earth, of this great probability tree whose twigs and leaves were whole clusters of worlds; now they were reaching branches of that tree with a very deep divergence from those that led to an Earth anything like the Datum. It became impossible for the crews of the airships
Zheng He
and
Liu Yang
even to rely on breathable atmospheres in the worlds they visited. The oxygen levels fluctuated significantly, from, rarely, concentrations so high that spontaneous combustion, even of wet vegetation, must have been a hazard to unwary visitors, to, more often, worlds where the oxygen level was no more than a trace, and the land on the backs of the dancing continents was much less green. A more subtle danger, Roberta learned, was too high a concentration of carbon dioxide, ultimately lethal for humans.

And life had less of a grip on many of these Earths. They found whole bands of worlds where the land was bare altogether, where its colonization by plants from the sea had apparently never happened, let alone its later ‘conquest’ by wheezing lungfish. All but featureless, all but identical, these drab worlds passed, day after day, unchanging even at the airships’ tremendous stepwise speed.

Drab or not, Roberta for one was fascinated by the evolving panoramas of land, sea and sky she glimpsed through the windows of the observation deck, and intrigued by the closer-up glimpses of the worlds they stopped at to sample in more detail – not that she was allowed down to the surface on these hazardous worlds. Yet something in her, something weak and to be despised, recoiled from the bombardment of strangeness. After all, from here, even the whole of the Ice Belt, the band of periodically glaciated worlds of which the Datum seemed to be a reasonably typical member, seemed very small, very narrow, and very far away, spanning much less than one per cent of the monumental distance they had already travelled.

She spent more time alone in her cabin, trying to integrate the sheer flood of data hitting her. Or she would sit with the trolls on the observation deck, listening to their crooning, even though this kept the rest of the crew away from her – even Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, though not the loyal Jacques Montecute.

For his part, Jacques watched Roberta uncomfortably. He even felt a stab of guilt; this expedition might be too much for her after all. The horror of the Long Earth, in the end: Roberta was just fifteen years old, and the very scale of it might overwhelm one so young, no matter how smart.

On July 6, 2040, the Chinese ships reached their nominal target of Earth East 20,000,000 – a world which turned out to be unprepossessing, barren, ordinary. They planted a stone cairn with a plaque, took a few photographs, and prepared to turn back.

Captain Chen assembled his senior crew and guests on the observation deck of the
Zheng He
, for a party to celebrate the moment. The trolls sang a new song, playfully taught them by Jacques – ‘China Girl’. Chen even broke out the alcohol, for once. But Jacques advised Roberta not to make this the day she first tried champagne. Without regret, she stuck to her orange juice.

Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, in full dress uniform, neat and pretty, linked arms with Roberta. ‘I am so happy to have achieved so much, with you, my partner in discovery.’

Captain Chen strutted over. ‘Indeed. And no doubt we will learn even more during our long return journey to the Datum. So many worlds to revisit and sample. Twenty million of them!’

Roberta considered that carefully. ‘I feel my time would be better spent integrating the data I have already accumulated.’

‘“Integrating the accumulated data”! Is that all you wish to do?’ Captain Chen walked up to Roberta, looked up into her face.

He was an impulsive, somewhat childish man, Jacques judged, and evidently he was angered by Roberta’s humourlessness, her failure to laugh at his jokes, perceiving that his moment of triumph had been spoiled.

‘Clever child, clever child. But what a pompous creature you are. Clever, yes. But do you believe you are better than us mere mortals?
Homo superior
– is that what you understand yourself to be? Must we make way for you?’

She did not reply.

Chen reached up and wiped a thumb over her cheek; it came away moist. ‘And if it is so, why are you crying?’

Roberta fled.

She didn’t come down to the observation deck the whole of the next day.

A little before midnight, as he was preparing for sleep himself, Jacques went to her cabin door and knocked. ‘Roberta?’

No reply. He listened for a while, and heard the sound of sobbing. Captain Chen had discreetly given Jacques a pass key in case of emergency. Now he swiped the card and opened the door.

The room itself was as orderly as ever, the single lamp burning over her workstation, her little heap of tablets and a few precious printed books, her notes. Charts on the wall, showing their progress across the Long Earth. No photographs, paintings, toys, no souvenirs save for science samples – none of that for Roberta Golding.

Barefoot, wearing T-shirt and sports slacks, Roberta was curled up on her bed, face away from the door.

‘Roberta?’ Jacques went over. She was surrounded by scrunched-up tissues; she had been weeping for a while, evidently. And she had bruises on her temple. He’d seen this in her before; she would hit herself, as if trying to drive out the part of her that wept at night. He’d thought she’d grown out of it, however. ‘What’s wrong? Is it what Captain Chen said to you?’

‘That fool? No.’

‘Then what? What are you thinking about?’

‘The crest-roos.’

‘The what?’

‘The reptilian-mammalian assemblage we found on East two million, two hundred thousand—’

‘I remember.’

‘All doomed to be eradicated by a hypercane. An accident of weather. Probably gone already. Scrubbed away like a stain.’

He imagined that dreadful perception building up in her head, all these long days. He sat on the bed and touched her shoulder. At least she didn’t flinch away. ‘Remember Bob Johansen’s English class?’

She sniffled, but at least she stopped crying. ‘I know what quote you mean.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘
Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
—’

He continued, ‘
And count myself a king of infinite space
—’

‘
Were it not that I have bad dreams
,’ she whispered.

He knew how she felt. It was the way he felt himself, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion. A time when you
knew
you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall. Luckily the sun always came up, people stirred, and you got on with stuff that distracted you from the reality.

The problem for Roberta Golding was that she was too smart to be distracted. For her, it was three a.m. all the time.

‘Do you want to watch your Buster Keaton movies?’

‘No.’

‘How about the trolls? Nobody can be unhappy around a troll. Shall we go see them?’

There was no reply.

‘Come on,’ he said. He got her up, draped a blanket over her shoulders, and led her to the observation deck.

There was a single crewman on watch here, reading a book; she nodded to Jacques and looked away. The trolls were slumbering in a big heap near the prow. The infants were asleep, and most of the adults. Three or four were murmuring their way through a song about not wearing red tonight, because red was the colour that my baby wore . . . Silly, but with easy, pretty multi-part harmonies. The Chinese crew tended to keep their distance from the beasts. Or, perhaps, the trolls kept them away, subtly. But they welcomed Jacques and Roberta.

So Jacques sat on the carpeted floor with Roberta, and they snuggled up to the warmth of the big creatures’ furry bellies. Immersed in the trolls’ strong musk, they might have been at home in Happy Landings, if not for the strange skyscapes that swept past the windows.