The Long War

In the weeks since they’d left behind the Low Chinas, the airships Zheng He and Liu Yang had forged steadily East, their stepping pace gradually increasing, though, Roberta learned, still far short of their design maximum. Worlds washed below the twains’ bows in great bands, cold or temperate, moist or arid, this Eastern stepwise geography roughly matching the mapping made by American explorers to the West, punctuated by Jokers of various kinds, like random flashbulbs.

They made periodic stops, and members of the crew went down to the surface, suitably protected, to observe, measure, retrieve samples of the geology, flora, fauna, even exotic atmospheric traces. They followed the Long Earth exploration strategy established by Joshua Valienté a decade earlier, with surface pioneers supervised by controllers on airships above. Roberta, watching from above, made methodical notes.

They passed the milestone of two million steps from the Datum.

And now they approached a particular world where, it was planned, Roberta herself was to descend to the surface, with Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai.

The Chinese had reached this world before, and it had been studied at least to some extent. This first descent was intended as a learning experience for Roberta, she was told, and she accepted that. She had already spent a lot of time in a kind of training chamber with Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, who showed her how to don her jumpsuit, and use her individual Stepper box, and the small monitor sets they would wear on their shoulders: how the Captain would speak to them through unobtrusive earpieces, how to use the med packs and emergency rations and silvery blankets in the event they got stranded—how to use the ceramic-and-bronze handguns they were issued. Roberta took each piece of equipment, each procedure, asked relevant questions, and practised over and over.

Yue-Sai tried to lighten up the process. She cracked jokes in her imperfect English, and tried to invent games and contests to help the practice go by. Roberta would simply wait until these moments had passed, and then would carry on with her own patient exercises.

With time she felt Yue-Sai give up on her, in a sense, and withdraw. Roberta had observed this many times before. It was not that Roberta Golding did not understand people; rather, she understood them too well. Yue-Sai’s attempts at fun had been transparent exercises in motivation, which Roberta saw through immediately. Besides, with her own sense of inner purpose she needed no external motivation. Yet that was not enough of a response for Wu Yue-Sai, and Roberta saw that too.

Aged fifteen, Roberta was a person who saw things. That is, she saw them more clearly than those around her. She certainly saw her own limitations, for instance now, as she prepared to face a remote stepwise world for the first time. She could be killed by her own ignorance, or by sheer mischance, in the blink of an eye. She saw this, and accepted it with a calm that seemed to chill others around her. But what was the purpose of self-delusion?

The career towards which she was heading was entirely a matter of stripping away delusion, she sometimes thought. What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far—physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest—had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was.

For now she had devoted herself, nominally at least, to theology and philosophy, as well as to explorations of the natural sciences, such as on this expedition. She had even received grants to help support this mission to the stepwise East from the Vatican, the Mormons, from Muslim orders, and various philosophical foundations. Dealing with such bodies, she had quickly learned when not to share her view that organized religion was a kind of mass delusion.

She had to work with what was available. She sometimes imagined she was like the scholars of the European Middle Ages who had worked their way through the ranks of the Church because there was no other organized scholarship around. Or, perhaps, as if she had been dropped even further into the past—as if she were trying to use stone blades and lumps of ochre to build a radio telescope. Still, she persevered, for there was no choice.