Terry Pratchett - The Long War

The noise, the clamour, became too much for Jansson, all at once. The words being spoken around her seemed to dissolve into a jabber. She dropped her head and put her hands to her ears.

Frank Wood put an arm around her shoulders. “Here, let’s get you out of this.”

Agnes was immediately at her side too. She smiled into Jansson’s face, took her arm, nodded to Sisters Georgina and John, and walked her and Frank away from the clamour. “Come on,” Agnes said. “Let’s get some air. Then I’ll call you a buggy—we have golf carts here—and get you back to your summer house for a break. How’s that?”

“You’re very kind.”

“I remember how it was to be ill, frankly. Lobsang didn’t clean that out of my head, at least.”

They were heading towards the greater band of trolls down by the river. As they went about their business, eating, grooming, splashing in the water, flickering between the worlds, the trolls sang another gentle melody. A few humans stood by, clapping along, trying to join in.

Despite all the people present, Jansson felt a kind of peace emanating from the contented troll band. “That’s another lovely song.”

Agnes squeezed her arm. “‘All My Trials’. Outside of the Steinman canon, one of my own favourites since childhood.”

“Oh, yes. And how appropriate for me. Soon be over …”

Agnes squeezed her arm. “That’s enough of that.”

They had come to a bluff of higher ground, a shallow rise which Jansson climbed painfully, and here they paused. They looked out over the unspoiled lakes of this world, the sun hanging calmly in the blue sky, the young, still-small city rising on the isthmus—a ghost of Datum Madison.

Agnes said, “I used to come up here when I was ill. Look at all this. The wider world that frames us all. The heavens, governed by their own eternal laws, the same on every world. Like Frank’s alignment of planets, right? And the simple things, the play of sunlight on water, a universal across the Long Earth. That’s where I found solace, Monica.”

“But when you’ve been out there , it all seems so fragile,” Jansson said. “Contingent. It might not have been this way. It might not be this way tomorrow.”

“Yes,” Agnes said thoughtfully. “And being close to Lobsang—well, I feel I see the world through his eyes, to some extent. The way he regards people—even his closest associates and friends, Joshua, Sally, that nice cleric Nelson Azikiwe, no doubt others—even me… He calls us ‘valuable long-term investments’. I sometimes think he, or maybe his paymaster Douglas Black, is positioning us all like pieces on a chessboard, ready for the game to begin.”

“But what is the game?”

“No doubt we’ll find out. Now, where’s that buggy?”

There was a commotion behind them, raised voices. Reluctantly, Jansson, Agnes and Frank turned to look.

An airship had materialized, right above Lobsang’s position. Lobsang himself seemed to freeze—no, Jansson thought, he had gone from his ambulant unit, gone in an instant, she could tell from his posture.

All around the grassy sward people’s phones started to chime, and were pulled from pockets and purses. Soon the stepping started, people being simply deleted from the scene.

And Jansson heard two words on all their lips. The first, Yellowstone . The second, Datum .

Frank said grimly, “Maybe Joshua was right about the planet alignment.”

Jansson insisted on being taken back to Madison West 5, no matter what pills she had to force down her throat to withstand the nausea. And once back at 5, she demanded to be taken, not to the convalescent home where she’d been staying, but to the new city’s central police station.

The current chief, Mike Christopher, had been a junior officer in Jansson’s time; he recognized her, let her in, and told her to sit tight in a corner of one of the offices. “We’re on alert, Spooky. There are already trickles of refugees showing up here , I mean in the Datum city.”

Jansson gripped Frank’s hand. “Refugees, Mike? In Madison ? How far is Madison from Yellowstone?”

Mike shrugged. “Over a thousand miles, I guess.”

“We’re talking about an eruption. It must be an eruption, right? Will the effects of this really reach that far?”

He had no reply.

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.