The Long War

Cars wouldn’t drive far before their filters clogged, and so there were eerie shots of freeways full of shuffling people, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, tramping through the grey snow-like fall like starving Russian peasants, all heading away from Yellowstone.
    But of course most people, whoever could, were heeding the systematic calls to step away. And shots from the air, taken from Earth West and East 1, 2, 3, showed the new communities in the footprints of the threatened Datum cities being swamped by a mass of people stepping over, people unconsciously forming up in blocks and streets, in the forms of the schools and hospitals and shopping malls and churches from which they had come, a human map of the doomed communities just a step or two away.
    All this was horribly familiar to Jansson. She murmured, clutching Frank’s strong hand, ‘I remember trying to persuade my chief.’
    ‘Who, dear?’
    ‘Old Jack Clichy . . .’
    ‘We have to get people to step, sir. Anywhere, East or West, just away from Madison Zero .’
    ‘You know as well as I do that not everybody can step. Aside from the phobics there are the old, kids, bedridden, hospital patients—’
    ‘So people help each other. If you can step, do it. But take someone with you, someone who can’t step . . .’
    Frank just held her hand.
    She heard the Sisters talking of Joshua Valienté, Sally Linsay, others, rushing to the Datum to help with the relief effort. The names snagged her attention, before she sank back into deeper sleep.
    When she woke again, Sister John was quietly weeping.
    ‘They’re saying it’s our fault. Humanity’s. The scientists. All the local versions of Yellowstone have been unstable recently, but it’s only on the Datum that this has happened. Humans disturbing the Earth, like we did the climate. Others are saying it’s a punishment from God. Well, it’s not that,’ she said fiercely. ‘Not my God. But, how will we cope with this? . . .’
    By now Jansson was too feeble to get up. Damn morphine, she thought. Sister John had to help her with the bedpans. She was peripherally aware of a nurse in the background, from the convalescent home; Jansson didn’t know his name. But he let Sister John take the lead. That struck her as polite.
    And when she woke with a little more clarity, here was Frank Wood, still sitting at her side.
    ‘Hey,’ she said.
    ‘Hey.’
    ‘What time is it?’
    ‘The time?’ He checked his watch, a big astronaut-type Rolex, then did a double-take. ‘Three days since the first eruption started. It’s morning, Monica.’
    ‘You need a clean shirt.’
    He grinned and rubbed his chin. ‘This is an all-female establishment, as far as adults are concerned. Don’t ask me what I used to shave today.’
    Of course there was a TV on, the sound soft, in a corner of the room. The projections were fast changing. As the tremendous cloud of ash and dust spread, across the continental US, even into Canada and Mexico, people were stepping away in their millions, an emigration greater than any in human history, before or after Step Day. Meanwhile the effects of the cloud were already global. Shots of towering sunsets, over London and Tokyo.
    It was very strange to watch this, Monica thought, from a world five steps removed, in West 5, where the sun was shining – or not, she realized vaguely: once again it was night. As if she was watching a snow globe, roughly shaken. Or an ash globe.
    She felt too weak to move. Only her head. She had an oxygen tube in her nose now. An automated meds dispenser by her bed, like a prop from ER . She drifted helplessly back towards sleep.
    ‘Carry them in your arms, on your back ,’ she’d told Clichy. ‘ Then go back and step again. And again and again . . .’
    ‘You’ve thought about this, haven’t you, Spooky?’
    She murmured, ‘It’s why you gave me the job all those years ago, Jack . . .’
    Frank leaned close. ‘What was that, honey?’
    But Monica seemed to be sleeping again.
    On the seventh day, at last, the eruption finished. No more fresh ash, to global relief.
    But it ended with a clash of cymbals, as Frank Wood, sleepless, grimy, watched on the room’s wall TV. The caldera, fifty miles wide, emptied of magma, just collapsed. It was as if a chunk of real estate the size of a small state had just been dropped a thousand feet.
    Some of the younger Sisters, excited, went stepping over into ash-coated Datum Madison to witness the