The Long War

“‘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.

“This is no consolation,” Roberta murmured, hiding her face. “Just mindless animal warmth.”

“I know,” Jacques said. “But it’s all we have. Try to sleep now.”

58

Captain Maggie Kauffman’s requested meeting with George Abrahams came to pass only a few days after her request of the cat, not particularly to her surprise. They arranged to rendezvous at a community further West, in a stepwise Texas, a town called Redemption—a location conveniently on the Franklin’s route to Valhalla, where all the Operation Prodigal Son dirigibles were now being summoned for the showdown with the Declaration-of-Independence “rebels’.