The Long War

As she sat with Sister John, and Frank went to find coffee, Jansson tried to take in the images unfolding across the screens that plastered the walls of this office. Images taken from civilian news, police, military sources; images gathered on the ground, and from planes and twains, copters and satellites – all of them images from Datum Earth, downloaded on to memory chips and then hastily transferred by hand through the walls between the worlds, and retransmitted with only a slight delay.

After false alarms across the Low Earths, there had indeed been a significant eruption in the Yellowstone footprint – and it had been at Datum Yellowstone itself, she soon learned.

It had begun about one in the afternoon, Madison time. The evacuation of the Park had been going on since just before the eruption. About an hour later the great tower of ash and gas had started to collapse, all around the vent, a mass of superheated rock fragments and gases washing across the Yellowstone ground as fast as a jet airliner, smashing, flash-burning, crushing . . . As excited geologists talked, unwelcome records started to tumble: this was already a worse eruption than Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Tambora.

Sleep seemed to be rising in Jansson’s head, like her own pod of deep hot magma. She couldn’t take in the words any more, the images. And those damn pills didn’t seem to be helping with the pain.

She quickly lost track of time.

At one point she was faintly aware of a kind of conference going on over her head, involving Mike, the Sisters, Frank Wood, and somebody who had the air of a doctor, though she didn’t know him. She gathered that they’d decided to move her, over her feeble protests, into a room at Agnes’s Home for a couple of days.

Mike Christopher organized this briskly, a wheelchair, an ambulance. He winked at her. ‘You get an astronaut to hold your hand, Spooky.’

She pulled her tongue at him.

And still the bad news came. Even before she was taken out of the police station new images were filling the wall screens, the tablets, the glowing smartphones.

A second eruption vent had opened up.

And then a third.

By the time they got her out of there, Yellowstone, imaged by brave USAF pilots in fast aircraft, looked like Dante’s hell.

The next time she woke she was in a cosy but unfamiliar room, attended by Sister John. With brisk compassion the Sister helped her to the bathroom, and brought her breakfast in bed. She was in an adjustable bed, she discovered, like the one she’d been using in her convalescent home, there was a drip stand alongside, and her medications on a shelf by the door. Everything looked to have been moved over from the convalescent home. She felt a warm surge of gratitude for this kindness.

Then Sister John showed in yet another doctor. He tried to talk to her about the nature of her care: palliative only, and so forth. She waved that away and asked him about the news. ‘No TV before meds,’ he said sternly, as he began to treat her.

Only after he’d gone was Frank Wood allowed in, who looked like he’d been sleeping in his suit. Then, at last, they turned on the TV.

The whole caldera was opened up now. The towering cloud it produced was tall enough to be seen from as far away as Denver or Salt Lake City, as evidenced by shaky handheld camera footage from those places. But the images were strange, a yellow-brown light, a shrunken sun. Like daylight on Mars, Frank Wood suggested.

By now that cloud of ash and gas and lumps of pumice was spreading fast and far through the high air. Cars wouldn’t drive far before their filters clogged, and so there were eerie shots of freeways full of shuffling people, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, tramping through the grey snow-like fall like starving Russian peasants, all heading away from Yellowstone.

But of course most people, whoever could, were heeding the systematic calls to step away. And shots from the air, taken from Earth West and East 1, 2, 3, showed the new communities in the footprints of the threatened Datum cities being swamped by a mass of people stepping over, people unconsciously forming up in blocks and streets, in the forms of the schools and hospitals and shopping malls and churches from which they had come, a human map of the doomed communities just a step or two away.

All this was horribly familiar to Jansson. She murmured, clutching Frank’s strong hand, ‘I remember trying to persuade my chief.’

‘Who, dear?’

‘Old Jack Clichy . . .’

‘We have to get people to step, sir. Anywhere, East or West, just away from Madison Zero.’

‘You know as well as I do that not everybody can step. Aside from the phobics there are the old, kids, bedridden, hospital patients—’