The Long War

urgent message. According to patchy outernet reports leaking down from the High Meggers and beyond, the Neil Armstrong was lost.

53
    M ORNING, ON EARTH East 8,616,289:
    Following Yue-Sai, her monitor pack on her shoulder, Roberta stepped gingerly over ground coated with a kind of green moss. They crossed a more or less open plain, under a cloudy sky, with the Chinese airships hanging silent above. There was no tall tree cover; the only significant vegetation was something like a fern, no more than waist height, with broad leaves spread low over the ground. The morning was bright, but the air was cold. Roberta was wrapped up in a quilted one-piece coverall and boots lined with wool, but the chill air stung her exposed skin, her cheeks, her forehead. Already Yue-Sai had nearly turned her ankle when she fell into the burrow of some subterranean animal. The animals turned out to be squirrel-like, although Roberta suspected they had features more like primitive primates than true squirrels. Well, primates or squirrels or something else entirely, they were everywhere, and you had to watch your step. It was not a very welcoming world. The navigators said that on this Earth the tectonic raft that carried South China was at a high latitude, halfway to the north pole. The geographers, straining for glimpses of the rest of the world from the sounding-rockets they sent up, said they suspected that there was a supercontinent on the equator: South and North America and Africa jammed together, the interior desiccated, the global climate distorted.
    Roberta had endured the boredom of the preparation for this latest jaunt, the training, the suiting-up, and had written off the dull, relatively data-poor hours of exploration that lay ahead. She knew it was important to apprehend these worlds physically. The first space engineers, whose biographies she had studied closely when seeking role models for her own career, had spoken of the need for ‘ground truth’, a sampling of conditions down on the ground of some planet or moon, to confirm or refute hypotheses drawn up from orbital inspection, or through telescopic observations. Ground truth, yes. She saw the need for it. And this was a very remote world, an exotic world, despite the brevity of the journey here. They had crossed the six million worlds since the planet of the crest-roos in no more than a week, with the airships’ powerful drives propelling them forward in bursts of acceleration.
    Even so she longed to be in her room on the ship, with her books and slates. Safe inside her head. But she was not there, not for now. She was here. She focused on the real, physical world around her.
    They climbed a bluff, beyond which, they knew from a hasty aerial survey, was a dry valley, and the spectacle they had come to witness. The shallow climb, the effort of lifting her feet safely over the lumpy ground, soon made Roberta pant.
    Jacques, monitoring her progress from the Zheng He , noticed. ‘I hope you haven’t been skimping your exercise routines.’
    Roberta took a deep lungful of air. ‘I suspect the oxygen content is low.’ She could hear the trolls singing in the background, a murmur in her earpiece.
    Jacques said, ‘The ship has atmospheric scientists who monitor the air quality before they crack the hatch. Turns out they’ve been watching the oxygen content fluctuate increasingly, the further out we’ve travelled. But here it’s well within breathable limits.’
    Wu Yue-Sai said sternly, ‘But it did not occur to them to factor in the effects of physical exercise. That’s unfortunately typical: overspecialization of departments and insufficient communication.’
    ‘I believe the Captain is having words,’ Jacques said dryly. ‘If you’d rather come back in—’
    ‘No, we’re nearly there,’ Yue-Sai said. She glanced back at Roberta, who nodded.
    And as she approached the summit of the rising ground, Roberta could hear a kind of orchestra of disparate sounds: a bass rumbling as of heavy traffic, even like tanks, mixed in with a chorus of mournful bellows, and a percussion section of impacts, of clanks and clunks. Excitement built in Roberta, and she grinned at Yue-Sai. They both ran up the remaining slope and threw themselves flat on the mossy ground, so they could see down into the valley.
    Where the tortoises walked.
    This was what they had landed to see. A two-way flow of the animals was packed into the valley, all lumbering along, those to the right