The Long Mars Read Free

bardo, or the bardo of rebirth, which featured karmically impelled visions. Perhaps these were hallucinations, derived from the flaws of one’s own soul. Or perhaps they were authentic visions of a suffering Datum Earth, and its innocent companion worlds.
    Such as an image of dreamlike vessels hanging in a Kansas sky . . .
    The US Navy airship USS Benjamin Franklin met the Zheng He , a ship of the Navy of the new Chinese federal government, over the West 1 footprint of Wichita, Kansas. Chen Zhong, Captain of the Chinese ship, claimed to have concerns about the role he was expected to undertake in the ongoing relief effort in Datum America, and an exasperated Admiral Hiram Davidson, representing an overstretched chain of command – well, everybody was overstretched, as the fall of this disastrous year of 2040 turned into winter – had mandated Maggie Kauffman, Captain of the Franklin , to take time out of her own relief efforts to meet with the man and discuss his concerns.
    ‘As if I have the time to salve the ego of some old Communist apparatchik,’ Maggie grumbled in the solitude of her sea cabin.
    ‘But that’s what he is,’ said Shi-mi, curled up in her basket by Maggie’s desk. ‘You evidently checked him out. I could have done that for you—’
    ‘I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you,’ Maggie murmured to the cat, without malice.
    ‘Which is probably pretty far.’ Shi-mi stood and stretched with a small, quite convincing purr.
    She was a quite convincing cat, actually. Save for the green LED sparks of her eyes. And the prissy human-type personality she embodied. And the fact that she could talk. Shi-mi had been an ambiguous gift to Maggie, from one of the equally ambiguous figures who seemed to be watching her career with an unwelcome interest.
    Shi-mi said now, ‘Captain Chen is on his way . . .’
    Maggie checked her status board. The cat was right; Chen was in the air. Chen had insisted that the two twains needn’t land to exchange personnel; he was crossing in a two-person light copter which could easily be set down inside the Franklin , he bragged, if the US ship opened up one of its big cargo bays. These new Chinese liked nothing more than to demonstrate their technical capabilities, especially over an America still prostrate two months after the eruption. Show-offs.
    Distracted, Maggie glanced out of her cabin’s big picture window at this world, a Midwest sky big and blue and scattered with light clouds, the green carpet of a stepwise Kansas semi-infinite and flat beneath her – and all but unspoiled still, even on this Earth a single step away from the Datum. But more spoiled than it used to be. Before September, before Yellowstone, Wichita West 1 had been little more than a shadow of its Datum parent, scattered buildings of logs and blown concrete set out in a grid that roughly aped the Datum town plan. It had been typical of its type. Communities like this started out serving their Datum parents as sources of raw materials, sites for new industrial developments, and room for extra living space, sports and recreation, and so they necessarily followed their parents’ maps.
    Now, though, a couple of months after the eruption, this version of Wichita was surrounded by a refugee camp: rows of hastily erected canvas tents full of bewildered survivors, the ground littered with heaped-up drops of food and medical supplies and clothes. Twains like the Franklin , stepwise-capable airships, both military and commercial, hung in the sky like blimps over wartime London. It was a grim third-world scene, in the heart of a stepwise America.
    Of course it could have been a lot worse. Thanks to the almost universal ability that people had to step away into a parallel world from anywhere on the Datum, the immediate casualties of the Yellowstone eruption had been comparatively light. The refugees below had in fact been transferred from Datum camps they’d reached by conventional means, fleeing