The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

. . .’
    Now, in a stir of excitement, the technicians and scientists gathered closer around the TV monitors and tablets. The live images were clearing up, as if a snowstorm were fizzling out. Sally saw the flank of a stubby aircraft sitting on a surface of what looked like wet ruddy sand, like a beach revealed by a recently receding tide. The camera must be mounted on the aircraft itself; she could clearly see the Stars and Stripes boldly painted on its hull.
    And then the camera panned away from the aircraft to reveal a glimpse of a shallow valley, with a river running, and tough-looking grey-green vegetation clumped on the banks. A living Mars.
    The Poindexter types whooped and cheered.
    They retired to a small coffee bar.
    Sally faced her father. ‘All right, Dad, enough of the space trophies and the enigmatic remarks. In no particular order—’ She counted the points on her fingers. ‘Tell me why you want to go to Mars. And how you’re going to get there. And why under all the heavens I would want to go with you.’
    He eyed her shrewdly. He was seventy years old now, and the wrinkled skin of his face looked tough as leather. ‘It’ll take a while to explain. Here’s the headline. I want to go to this Mars, the Mars of the Gap, because it’s not just Mars. It’s not even just a Mars with a significantly different climate. It’s a Long Mars.’
    She took that in. ‘You said that before. Long Mars. You mean you can step there?’
    He nodded curtly.
    ‘How do you know ? . . . No, don’t answer that.’
    ‘There’s something specific I’m looking for, and expecting to find. You’ll see. But for now – the most important thing is, if a world is Long, then it must harbour sapience. Intelligent life.’ He looked at her. ‘You understand that much, don’t you? The theory of the Long Earth, the interfacing of consciousness and topology—’
    Her jaw had dropped. ‘Hold on. Back up. You just dropped another conceptual bomb on me. Intelligent life? You discovered intelligent life on Mars?’
    He was impatient. ‘Not on Mars. On a Mars. And, not discovered . Deduced the necessary existence of. You always were a sloppy thinker, Sally.’
    Needled, her instinct was to fight back, as it had been since she’d been old enough to need to establish her own identity. She said provocatively, ‘Mellanier wouldn’t agree with you. About sapience and the Long Earth, that a Long world is somehow a product of consciousness.’
    He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Ah, that fraud. As to why you might go with me to explore – well, why the hell wouldn’t you?’ He glanced around at the geeks in the coffee bar, noisily celebrating their triumph. ‘Look at these back-slapping Brainiacs. I do know you, Sally. You liked it best before Step Day, when the Long Earth was just ours , right? Long Wyoming was, anyhow. Before I came up with the Stepper box I couldn’t step myself, I needed you to take me over, but—’
    ‘You’d read to me. Stories of other worlds, of Tolkien and Niven and E. Nesbit, and I’d pretend that was where we were going . . .’ She shut up. Nostalgia always felt like a weakness.
    ‘And now it’s all cluttered up by yahoos like these. No offence, Al.’
    ‘None taken.’
    ‘Sally, I know you still spend a lot of time alone. Wouldn’t you like to get away to a new world, a raw world, empty except for us – well, us, and a few Martians? Leave humanity behind for a while . . .’
    And Lobsang, she thought.
    Raup leaned forward, sweaty, intrusive. ‘As to how we’d get there, maybe you can already tell that the space programme we’re running out of this place is developing a hell of a lot faster than the plod back on Earth. Of course we’re able to build on all they learned and reapply it—’
    ‘Get to the point, propeller-head.’
    ‘The point is we’re ready to go . The first manned spacecraft to Mars. It’s waiting at the Brick Moon, just one step away, in the Gap. We wanted to