The Long War

Confucians won in the second century BC . But now we have room to spread out, to explore other ways.’
    ‘ Dao zai shiniao ,’ Roberta said.
    Chen laughed out loud. ‘The way is in the piss and the shit! Very good, very good.’
    Roberta seemed neither pleased nor offended by his praise.
    The airship moved on. Around East 20, a belt of more industrialized worlds began. Jacques looked down on factories, power stations, mine heads, industrial parks cut into the green. Lines of workers moved between workshops and shabby-looking dormitory, refectory and shower blocks. Cargo airships hovered, or were tethered to masts. On many of these worlds, smoke and soot and smog hung thick in the air.
    Chen was observing their reactions. ‘Few westerners have seen this. Save for those who have put money into these Third Front developments. Douglas Black for one.’
    Jacques asked, ‘Why “Third Front”?’
    ‘Ah, that’s a reference to Mao,’ Chen said, and winked again. ‘In response to aggression from the Soviets in the 1960s Mao scattered industrial production facilities across China – into the remote west, for example. So that it became more difficult to cripple us with nuclear bombs, you see. He encouraged workers to go out there. “The Further from Father and Mother, the Nearer to Chairman Mao’s Heart” – that was the slogan. As then, so now. One can despise Mao’s crimes while admiring his ambition.’
    Jacques wondered if you could have one without the other. He said, ‘You can’t seriously be suggesting there’s a risk of some kind of shooting war with the west.’
    ‘There are other threats. Stepping itself has destabilized nations – including China of course. And climate collapse on the Datum, with all that would follow, could yet be a serious issue.’
    They came to a world – East 38, according to the wall counter – where a thunderstorm was raging. The two airships drifted in a sky populated by huge, lumpy, rushing grey clouds, and rain lashed down on the forest below. Jacques observed what looked like the scars of lightning strikes, blackened craters in the forest cover.
    Chen watched them expectantly.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ Jacques said. ‘What is it we are meant to see here?’
    ‘You could only perceive it properly from orbit, perhaps,’ Chen said. ‘Here, soldier-engineers are using atomic weapons to blast paths and tunnels through the Himalayas, thus removing an accident of geology that disrupted the flow of air and moisture across Eurasia. In this world, the interior of Asia will be green.’
    Jacques was astonished. ‘You’re reshaping a whole mountain range?’
    ‘Why not? And in another neighbouring world, we are diverting all the rivers arising in the Himalayas, save for the Yangtze, again to bring moisture to the heart of the continent.’
    Roberta said, ‘More dreams of the Maoists.’
    ‘Yes! You know your history. Schemes that were too expensive, or too risky, to be tried out when the Datum was all we had. Now we can experiment with no harm done. What dreams we have, what ambition! Aren’t we Chinese great?’
    Maybe. But Jacques wondered what the experience of these new worlds, these diverse environments, was doing to the souls of the colonists here. In the West worlds, different Americas were evolving, sharing their parent’s values maybe but subtly diverging. Here too that must be true, with new kinds of China developing, still rooted in the same deep history – surely the Chinese would always stay Chinese – but each acquiring a whole new character. And he wondered how soon it would be before those new Chinas became restless in search of freedom from their gigantic parent, like the Valhallan Belt Americas.
    As the lightning cracked in the sky, the trolls were growing anxious, their song fragmented.
    Chen lifted his remote control, apparently with regret. ‘I would love to show you our new mountains. But we cannot linger; it is unsafe here.’
    Jacques asked, ‘Why, the lightning?’
    ‘No, no. The fallout from the atomic mining. On we go . . . Now we will speed up. You understand these ships are an experimental sort, developed by our own engineering companies in conjunction with the Black Corporation. One purpose of this exploration is to test the new technologies.’
    The passing of the worlds accelerated until, as Jacques could tell from his own pulse, the realities were washing past at the rate of roughly one a second, blink, blink, blink, then