Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

‘And if so it really will be a Shangri-La. Without the monks.’

Mac grunted sceptically. ‘Or a community of struldbrugs, like Gulliver’s Travels – undying but ageing, and growing more and more bitter. A gang for whom even death will no longer bring an end to their clinging to wealth and power. Think of all the monsters of history who you wouldn’t want to see still around today, from Alexander through Genghis Khan to Napoleon . . .’

‘It might not be like that. Maybe they will give us a longer perspective.’

‘Hell of a gamble if you ask me. So are you going to allow this, Captain?’

‘I don’t see I’m in a position to stop him. He’s not crew, Mac.’

‘I guess. Well, I’m glad I won’t live long enough to see what grows from the seed you planted today.’

‘You old cynic. Come on, let’s get back to the ship and go home.’

THE GALILEO CREW had left behind the world of the sand-whalers and the monoliths with, as far as Frank Wood was concerned, a sigh of relief.

And it was only when they were safely in the air, passing over yet more clones of dead Mars, one every second, that Frank began to relax, that the military man inside him began, grudgingly, to release his hold on events. How they had got away from ferocious fire-spitting land-dragons and harpoon-hurling sand-whalers – not to mention some kind of monstrous unseen Martian tyrannosaur – without harm to themselves or their equipment, he had no idea. And he kept remembering that crustacean prince, as Frank had labelled him (or her) in his head, humiliated by his leader with one of Willis’s Stepper boxes. What kind of consequence was that going to have? But, he supposed, that was a problem for the future, not for right here, right now.

In the days that followed, while Willis paged through the screeds of images the whalers had retrieved for him from the monoliths, and Sally sank back into her own default mode of wary silence, Frank spent a lot of time asleep, nerves slowly recovering. He wasn’t as young as he used to be.

And he was only peripherally aware of the new Jokers the expedition came upon, and paused to study.

A flooded Mars, where, it looked like, the whole of the northern hemisphere was drowned by an ocean. Here beasts not unlike the sand whales roamed the land, while what looked like cities floated on tremendous rafts on the sea. ‘Fishermen’, crustacean types, came ashore in land-yachts to hunt the whales, just as on Earth land-dwellers harvested the fruit of the sea . . .

A drier Mars, whose copy of Mangala Vallis was nevertheless covered by forests, of tough, low, needle-leaved trees. Willis was tempted to linger here because he thought he saw two forest clumps in slow-motion conflict with each other: a war waged at the speed a flower grew. ‘Birnam Wood besieging Dunsinane!’ he said. But they could not afford a long enough stay to study this slow encounter properly . . .

A plain covered in rocky coils, like heaps of rope. Willis’s first guess was that these were some kind of volcanic extrusion. But when he took Thor down for a closer look the coils unwound into pillars of basalt, gaping mouths opened, and gouts of flame shot out at the hastily retreating glider: another variation on the theme of sand whale . . .

Once, Sally swore, on a moist but chill Mars, a glacial Mars, she saw a herd of reindeer , off in the northern mist, coats shaggy, antlers held high, animals much larger than their terrestrial equivalent. But the others could not see it, and the cameras could not penetrate the mist for a clear image. None of them understood what this vision, like a race memory of the Ice Age, might mean . . .

And, every so often, Frank thought he saw flickering forms in the valleys of Mangala, far below. Translucent sacs, like survival bubbles; gaunt forms like landed sand-yachts. As if they were being followed. Probably the product of paranoid dreams, he thought.

Finally, eleven weeks since the landing and nearly three million steps from the Gap, Willis Linsay said he thought he had found what he was looking for.

TO SALLY, PILOTING Frank in Woden , it was just another dead Mars. As seen from a high altitude the basic shape of the landscape, the tangle of Mangala Vallis below, the great rise of the Tharsis uplands to the north-east, looked much as she remembered it from spacecraft images of the Datum-Earth Mars, taken decades ago in a reality all of three million steps away.

Behind her, Frank, sleepy, grumpy since they had run out of caffeinated coffee a week back, was also unimpressed. ‘What the hell can he have found, if even a new set of Commandments from God on those damn monoliths wasn’t good enough?’

‘It’s not visible to the naked eye,’ said Willis from Thor , his voice crackling over the comms. ‘I’ve had optical and other scanners searching for it, from both gliders.’

Sally said, ‘Tell us where to look, Dad.’

‘More or less east. You won’t see it, not from here. Use your screens . . .’

Sally fooled with her screen, looking in the direction he’d told her, exploring the bulging Tharsis province landscape under the usual featureless toffee-coloured sky. She saw a lot of horizontals, the uneven horizon itself, craters reduced to shallow ellipses by perspectives, gullies on the uplifted flanks of the volcanoes, all painted a monotonous brown by the ever-present dust. No odd shapes, no unusual colours. Then she allowed the software to scan the image for anomalies.

‘Oh, my,’ said Frank. Evidently he had done the same thing, about the same time. ‘I was looking at the ground, the landscape. The horizontals.’

‘Yeah. When all the time . . .’

There was a vertical line, a scratch of very un-Martian powder blue, so fine and straight and true it looked like an artefact of the imaging system, a glitch. It rose up out of the landscape from some hidden root. Sally let the image pan, following the line upwards. What was this, some kind of mast, an antenna? But it rose on up into the sky – up until the imaging system reached the limit of its resolution, and the line broke up into a scatter of pixels, still dead straight, fading out like an unfinished Morse code message.

Frank said reverently, ‘Arthur C. Clarke, you should be seeing this. And, Willis Linsay – respect to you, sir. You found what you were looking for, all this time. I get it now.’

Willis said, only a little impatiently, ‘OK, let’s get the fan-boy stuff out of the way. I take it you understand what you’re looking at.’

‘A beanstalk,’ Frank said immediately. ‘Jacob’s ladder. The world tree. A stairway to heaven—’

‘What about you, Sally?’

Sally closed her eyes, trying to remember. ‘A space elevator. Straight out of those wonders-of-the-future books you used to give me as a kid.’

‘Yeah. Future wonders of my own childhood, actually. Well, here it is. A cheap way of getting to orbit, basically. You put a satellite in orbit to be the upper terminus of your elevator string. You need it to hover permanently over the lower terminus, which is on the ground. So you put it over the equator, or close to, at an orbit high enough that its period matches the rotation of the planet.’

‘Where they station the communications satellites.’

‘Right. Mars has about the same day as Earth, so a twenty-four-hour orbit does the trick here too. Then you just drop a cable down through the atmosphere—’

‘The engineering details of that ,’ Frank said dryly, ‘are left as an exercise for the reader.’

‘Then you fix it to the ground station, and you’re in business,’ Willis said. ‘Once it’s in place, no more expensive, messy rockets to get off the planet. You get a cable-car ride to the sky, fast, cheap, clean. In principle this technology will work on any world. Any Mars. This Mars is better than our own, in fact, because it doesn’t have any pesky low-orbit moons to get in the way.’