The Long War

travel far enough we will find such a land, Roberta? Are such legends a relic of some early perception of the Long Earth itself?’
    ‘There is no sensible content in this discussion,’ Roberta murmured in reply. ‘And as to the papers you’re planning – none of this matters.’
    Yue-Sai turned to her.
    ‘How’s that?’ Jacques asked.
    Roberta gestured at the landscape around her. ‘The coming hypercane will destroy all this. I’ve been studying the climatic theory of these worlds, with their high sea levels. They are prone to tremendous hurricanes, extracting heat from the shallow oceans. Storms that can span continents, with thousand-miles-per-hour winds; water vapour is thrown up into the stratosphere, and the ozone layer is wrecked . . . I’ve also been studying the records of the weather balloons you launched from the twains. There’s such a storm forming right now. Ask your meteorologists. It’s unmistakable. It will take a few more weeks to reach full strength, but when it does this complicated little community will be right in its path. It’s been an interesting experiment, a stepwise mixing of different species. But it will soon be terminated.’
    There was silence.
    ‘“Terminated”,’ said Captain Chen at last.
    Roberta was used to this kind of reaction to her choice of words, and found it irritating. As if a child were covering its ears to avoid hearing bad news. ‘All life is terminated, ultimately. I’m only telling the truth. It’s trivially obvious.’
    Again, nobody spoke.
    Yue-Sai looked away. ‘Captain, I think it’s time we returned.’
    ‘Agreed.’

41
    T HE Z HENG H E and Liu Yang lingered for some days in the vicinity of Earth East 2,201,749. The scientists catalogued their observations and specimens, while the engineers crawled over the airships, testing their systems, carrying out routine maintenance.
    Then they moved on, into realms of the Eastern Long Earth never before explored by Chinese crews, or any other. Into the unknown.
    Shortly afterwards the ships made a longer stop, next to Earth East 2,217,643. Here they found a Gap: a break in the chain of stepwise worlds that made up the Long Earth, where the relevant Earth had been removed. Roberta quietly pointed out to Jacques that the first Western Gap discovered, by Joshua Valienté, had been at around Earth West two million. No doubt, from the similarity of those numbers, there was some conclusion to be drawn about the nature of the great tree of probabilities that was the Long Earth.
    Valienté’s airship had been wrecked by the step into vacuum that was the Gap. The Chinese ships were better prepared. Their crews had their ships hop back and forth across the Gap, dropping off hardened automatic probes, which, given the momentum of the spin of the neighbouring Earths, went sailing off into the Gap world’s empty black sky. Jacques stared without much interest at the images returned – stars that looked much like the stars as seen from any world, planets that seemed to circle in their usual orbits with smug indifference to the absence of an Earth. The crew, though, were fascinated, as they had not been by humanoids and dinosaur descendants. Jacques reminded himself that this mission had been mounted by a space agency; no wonder the crew were intrigued by glimpses of the wider universe.
    And Roberta, too, seemed to be interested. She requested that the probes be made to study the neighbouring planets, Mars and Venus, to look for any difference in their atmospheres, their surfaces.
    With this initial investigation of the new Gap complete, Captain Chen, with a rather boyish and excited grin, came to his passengers and urged them to be at the observation deck the next morning. ‘That’s when the real journey will begin . . .’
    When morning came Jacques and Roberta joined Lieutenant Wu before the big prow windows, Jacques cradling a coffee, Roberta a glass of water. The airships hung in the sky of this latest world, two sleek fish of the sky over a sprawling blanket of forest. There was a river in the middle distance, a glassy stripe, and further away the extensive shallow sea typical of these warm worlds, blue to the horizon.
    The stepping began without warning, and worlds flapped by, slowly at first, then ever faster. Soon they were travelling at a step a second, a rate they were all used to by now, and weather systems came and went to the beat of Jacques’s pulse: sun, cloud, rain, storms, even some