Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“That’s a thoughtful gesture.”

“It is my honour. I have been studying English especially. As have many of the crew, including the Captain.”

“I can tell. Thank you. We’ll make a good team.”

“I’m sure you will.” Captain Chen Zhong approached now, bustling across the carpeted floor of the deck. As he passed, his crew subtly straightened up, and their faces became more solemn. Chen shook the hands of Jacques and Roberta. He brandished some kind of control box in his left hand. “In a moment we’ll be off! Of course we are already in the air, but soon we will be swimming stepwise too…”

His accent was stronger than Wu’s, but more complex, some of his phrasing almost British. Aged around fifty he was short, a little stout for a military man, Jacques thought, but sleek, supremely confident. Jacques would have been prepared to bet he was a survivor of the fallen Communist regime.

“So glad you could come with us, that all the various formalities were overcome. A tricky process given the newness of our nation. Of course the welfare of Ms. Golding is a top priority.” Now he faced Roberta. “I hope you’ll have time to enjoy the experience. Such a pretty thing! Forgive me for saying it. Yet you are so serious.”

Roberta, taller than he was, just looked back at him.

Chen winked at Jacques. “Quiet one, is she? But observant. No doubt you’re drinking in the details of the airships even as they are launched. The unusual mode of propulsion, for instance.”

To Jacques’s relief, Roberta deigned to reply to this. “The flexible hull, you mean. Strung with some kind of artificial muscle, contracting when electrical impulses are applied?”

“Very good, very good. With the electricity provided by solar power. You can see why such a system is appropriate? When we observe the worlds we explore, why not do it with as little noise and other disturbance as possible? We hope to reach Earth East 20,000,000, our nominal target—nearly ten times further than any human has ventured into the Long Earth before!—in a mere few weeks. We estimate we will also need to maintain a velocity, that is a lateral velocity, of over a hundred miles per hour in the process. I’m sure you can see why.”

Roberta shrugged. “That’s trivial.”

Jacques exchanged a glance with Yue-Sai. That was one of Roberta’s more annoying verbal tics; the need for a sideways speed might be obvious to her, but wasn’t at all obvious to Jacques, or, it seemed, to Yue-Sai. The point went unexplained.

Chen said, “You know your engineering, then. But what of your wider education? Are you aware of the provenance of the names of our pioneering ships?”

“Liu Yang was the first Chinese woman in space. And Zheng He was the eunuch admiral who—”

“Yes, yes. I can see we have little to teach you.” He smiled. “Then let us explore together.” He held up the gadget in his left hand; it was like a television remote, Jacques thought, and on it was a familiar corporate logo: a Black Corporation marque. Chen said, “I hope you have all been following your nausea inoculation regimes? Now—are you ready?—every journey must begin with a single step.” He pressed a button.

Jacques felt a familiar jolt to the gut, but faint, a ghost sensation.

The crowded landscape of Datum Henan was whisked away. Suddenly rain clattered on the windows and bounced off the great hull overhead. The trolls, apparently unperturbed, sang on.

Chen led the party to the big downward-looking windows at the gondola’s prow, so they could see better. At first glance Jacques could see little difference in the landscape below, Henan East 1, compared with the original: more, cruder factories and coal-burning power stations belching smoke, roads like muddy tracks, a smoggy tinge to the air. Yet in the distance there were patches of green, of forest, and that wasn’t like the original.

Chen said, “Henan! Long ago the cradle of Han civilization, you know. But in more recent times something of a hellhole, exploited, over-industrialized. A hundred million people crammed into an area the size of the state of Massachusetts.” That was a Datum Earth reference that meant little to Jacques, but he got the idea. “Datum Henan was once a prime source of migrants to cities like Shanghai, who became the cleaners and the clerks and the barkeeps and the prostitutes. You can imagine that on Step Day a rather large proportion of the population of such places as this wandered over into the new worlds with alacrity. It took the authorities some time to restore order. You should not underestimate the impact that stepping had on the Chinese people as a whole in those early days—and not just the economic or other practical effects. I mean rather the psychological, as you will see. Of course you know that the disruptions after Step Day eventually led to the, ah, retirement of the last Communist regime.” He studied Roberta, evidently curious about her reaction. “So we begin our exploration, Ms. Golding. Here we are on Earth East 1, of twenty million. What do you understand the purposes of this expedition to be?”

She thought before answering. “To see what’s out there.”

He seemed pleased by the simplicity of the reply. “Yes! We will count the worlds, and we will catalogue them, number them. We will establish the longitude of the Long Earth East, so to speak. I have seen your academic record: your intellect is evidently remarkable. You don’t think a mere voyage of exploration, of fact-gathering, is trivial ? We are like butterfly collectors, are we not?”

She shrugged. “If you want to understand butterflies, you first have to collect butterflies. Or finches.”

Chen seemed to puzzle over that word. “Ah! Like Darwin on Galapagos. A neat reference. Well, I can’t promise you finches, but butterflies…” He let that tail off mysteriously.

“Why did you bring the trolls?”

He glanced at her sharply. “Good question. I should have known you would ask it. In the planning, most people dismissed our trolls as—what, as a cabaret, an animal show? Not you! The trolls, in a sense, are the Long Earth, are they not? Their long call stitches it together—and, I believe, appeals to the musical sensibilities of all Chinese people. Now we may be venturing further than even any troll has travelled before. Think of that! And we want whatever we discover in those remote footprints of China to become part of the troll song.”

Jacques said, “Of course you know that trolls are an integral part of our lives, in the community we come from.”

“Ah, yes. So I hear. Although you keep its location secret, don’t you?”

“We treasure our privacy.”

“Of course you do.” Chen pressed his button, and they stepped once again. Jacques noticed a counter on the wall: flickering digits that would count the worlds.

In East 2 the sky was bright, the sun high, and the land was carpeted with green, with forest. The contrast with the Datum, and even East 1—the sudden flood of colour, the light illuminating the observation deck—was breathtaking.

Chen said, “You can see why a sudden access to all this so startled people. Our nation is older than yours, older than Europe. China has been cultivated, built on, fought over, mined, for five thousand years. It was a shock for us to walk into this primordial green. There were immediate cultural responses. An upsurge in support for environmental protection. Songs, poems, paintings, most of them bad. Ha! Well, there was nothing much we could do about East 1, or West 1. Quickly ruined by the first flood of travellers, the first helpless and hapless migrants. Each footprint became one big shanty town. But the government organized quickly, and we kept East 2 as a kind of national park, a memorial of Step Day, of our sudden access to our country’s own past—as best we could, anyhow; even here we are harmed by pollution from the heavy industrialization of this Low Earth in such places as the United States footprint, and there are ongoing negotiations in the United Nations about that. We also store some of our treasures here—the heritage of our deep culture. Even a few buildings, temples dismantled and rebuilt. Just as humanity is preserved from extinction by the existence of the Long Earth, should any calamity befall our home world, so now is our cultural past.”