The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter Page B
Authors: Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter
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was. I thought you’d like to see this, Joshua. I saw from the records that you and Sally went in here on the final day of the eruption itself, when the caldera collapsed. Stepping into danger, seeking to save lives at the risk of your own evanescent existence.’
‘We weren’t the only ones,’ Joshua said without emotion.
The twain dipped in the air, skimming over ground choked by an unknowable thickness of ash and pumice.
‘We are still perhaps fifty miles from the caldera,’ Lobsang said. ‘But this place like many others was caught by the final pyroclastic flow. The eruption ceased when the caldera chamber was empty of magma. The tower of smoke and ash in the air over the volcano abruptly collapsed, and superhot rock fragments came washing out across the landscape at the speed of sound, burying everything for tens of miles around.’
Joshua had been there; he remembered.
‘Now Bozeman, Idaho, is at one with Pompeii. It will take years for the ash fall even to cool, let alone for the land to be reclaimed by humans.’
‘Yet something’s growing down there,’ Joshua said. Peering down, he pointed out scraps of green.
Lobsang was silent a moment; Joshua imagined his artificial senses trained on the ground below. ‘Yes. Lichen. Moss. Even lodgepole pines. Just saplings, but still – the resilience of life.’
The twain turned its nose and headed south, towards the caldera itself.
‘So, Lobsang. Yesterday you told me you were disturbed by a plague of common sense breaking out across the planet? It would be a first, I grant you.’
‘I can give you examples . . .’
The screens in the deck flashed up with brief video snips of tales from across the US during the days and years of the Yellowstone disaster:
One little kid in a first-school classroom in Colorado, his teachers having succumbed to an ash infall, quietly organizing his hysterical classmates and walking them out of the building in a line, heads wrapped in wet towels, hands on the shoulders of the person in front.
A young teenager stuck with her grandparents in a care home in Idaho, full of old folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t step, calmly working out rotas of food sharing and mutual care.
A well-off family in Montana, the mother refusing to leave their home with her surviving children because of one little girl lost, and obviously killed, in the wreckage of an ash-crushed conservatory – her husband going crazy with fear and refusing to stay to dig out the wreck – and an au pair, a girl no more than seventeen years old, organizing the family to dig out the lost one and carry out the body, as that was the only way to persuade the mother to move and save the rest.
Joshua remembered stories he’d heard himself, one from Bozeman in fact, an account of a ‘sensible young lady’ who had come around with dazzlingly smart advice on how to survive the eruption.
‘These anecdotes all involve very young people,’ he observed. ‘If not children.’
‘Indeed. And you’ll note that their exploits are not characterized by heroism, or great feats of endurance, or whatever. Instead they are calm, and full of wise leadership – certainly wise for their age. Good judgement, whose value is evident enough even for the adults around them. And a certain cold rationality. They are able to set aside the kind of illusion that comforts but baffles the regular human mind. Consider the woman in Montana with the dead child. She couldn’t accept the death. The au pair not only accepted it; she accepted she wasn’t going to be able to persuade the mother otherwise, and came up with a strategy to save the family taking that bit of psychology into account.’
‘Hmm.’ Joshua studied the ambulant’s inexpressive face. ‘What are you suggesting, Lobsang? You’ve talked about this before. Are we seeing the emergence of some kind of smarter breed? True Homo sapiens , you’ve always called them – as opposed to regular mankind, a bunch of apes who
‘We weren’t the only ones,’ Joshua said without emotion.
The twain dipped in the air, skimming over ground choked by an unknowable thickness of ash and pumice.
‘We are still perhaps fifty miles from the caldera,’ Lobsang said. ‘But this place like many others was caught by the final pyroclastic flow. The eruption ceased when the caldera chamber was empty of magma. The tower of smoke and ash in the air over the volcano abruptly collapsed, and superhot rock fragments came washing out across the landscape at the speed of sound, burying everything for tens of miles around.’
Joshua had been there; he remembered.
‘Now Bozeman, Idaho, is at one with Pompeii. It will take years for the ash fall even to cool, let alone for the land to be reclaimed by humans.’
‘Yet something’s growing down there,’ Joshua said. Peering down, he pointed out scraps of green.
Lobsang was silent a moment; Joshua imagined his artificial senses trained on the ground below. ‘Yes. Lichen. Moss. Even lodgepole pines. Just saplings, but still – the resilience of life.’
The twain turned its nose and headed south, towards the caldera itself.
‘So, Lobsang. Yesterday you told me you were disturbed by a plague of common sense breaking out across the planet? It would be a first, I grant you.’
‘I can give you examples . . .’
The screens in the deck flashed up with brief video snips of tales from across the US during the days and years of the Yellowstone disaster:
One little kid in a first-school classroom in Colorado, his teachers having succumbed to an ash infall, quietly organizing his hysterical classmates and walking them out of the building in a line, heads wrapped in wet towels, hands on the shoulders of the person in front.
A young teenager stuck with her grandparents in a care home in Idaho, full of old folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t step, calmly working out rotas of food sharing and mutual care.
A well-off family in Montana, the mother refusing to leave their home with her surviving children because of one little girl lost, and obviously killed, in the wreckage of an ash-crushed conservatory – her husband going crazy with fear and refusing to stay to dig out the wreck – and an au pair, a girl no more than seventeen years old, organizing the family to dig out the lost one and carry out the body, as that was the only way to persuade the mother to move and save the rest.
Joshua remembered stories he’d heard himself, one from Bozeman in fact, an account of a ‘sensible young lady’ who had come around with dazzlingly smart advice on how to survive the eruption.
‘These anecdotes all involve very young people,’ he observed. ‘If not children.’
‘Indeed. And you’ll note that their exploits are not characterized by heroism, or great feats of endurance, or whatever. Instead they are calm, and full of wise leadership – certainly wise for their age. Good judgement, whose value is evident enough even for the adults around them. And a certain cold rationality. They are able to set aside the kind of illusion that comforts but baffles the regular human mind. Consider the woman in Montana with the dead child. She couldn’t accept the death. The au pair not only accepted it; she accepted she wasn’t going to be able to persuade the mother otherwise, and came up with a strategy to save the family taking that bit of psychology into account.’
‘Hmm.’ Joshua studied the ambulant’s inexpressive face. ‘What are you suggesting, Lobsang? You’ve talked about this before. Are we seeing the emergence of some kind of smarter breed? True Homo sapiens , you’ve always called them – as opposed to regular mankind, a bunch of apes who
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