The Long Cosmos (14 page)

But all this was in the background. For it was the heads of these creatures that he couldn't help but stare at: skulls swollen like balloons, with scattered patches of dark hair on what looked like painfully stretched skin, and more or less normal human faces diminished in proportion.

As this bizarre procession made its way through the hall, Dev noticed a young Next, a normally proportioned woman, staying very close to the litter, though she played no part in carrying it. Her face was closed in, expressionless.

With great care, Ronald and Ruby were set down before the big screen, facing the rest of the group. One, perhaps Ruby, the woman, took hold of the accompanying girl's hand.

Roberta whispered, sounding almost starstruck, ‘The girl with them is Indra Newton. She's a cousin of Stan Berg himself, and comes top of every scale we measure ourselves against. Thought to be the brightest of the new generation, perhaps the brightest since Stan himself, and a crucial interpreter for the lollipops.'

Dev couldn't take his eyes off them. Lollipops?

‘My God,' Lee murmured. ‘What is this?'

‘One of our experiments,' Roberta said. ‘One attempt to circumvent the legacy of our human nature and its restrictions. In this case the size of the skull, which restricts the growth and development of the brain. With this new kind, the foetuses are capable of
stepping
out of the womb, bypassing the birth canal altogether.'

Dev said, ‘I heard of this. In the wild. It's in Joshua Valienté's account of his first expedition into the High Meggers. A kind of elf developed that trick, somewhere out in the Corn Belt.'

‘That was where we got the idea,' Roberta said. ‘According to Valienté it was Sally Linsay who called them “lollipops”. We found them, extracted the relevant gene complex.
Those
creatures did nothing useful with their larger frontal lobes. Perhaps with time, we, however . . . Ronald and Ruby are already significantly more intelligent by most measures than our finest scholars. They are not yet twenty years old. They have become a kind of arbiter of disputes – as in the present instance. To that extent the experiment worked . . . And now it is Ronald and Ruby who have been central in interpreting the alien vision in design terms. I think they are ready to speak.'

‘Already?'

‘They were briefed on the issue of the Invitation before this morning. It will not have taken long for Stella to summarize the conclusion of the earlier session for them—'

‘Welcome.'

With a start, Dev realized that the two lollipops were watching himself and Lee. The one on the left had spoken. The single word had been uttered by a frail, papery voice, the voice of the very old – not of a teenager. But it had been in English. And was there a smile on that distorted face?

‘We welcome our guests,' the lollipop said. ‘Dev Bilaniuk, Lee Malone. You should hear what is decided, for it will affect you and your families. My name is Ruby. This is Ronald. As you can probably tell, this isn't our full-time job. Personally I make a living as a professional ballerina, while Ronald here is a football quarterback.'

Dev stared, disbelieving. A
joke
? Lee laughed, nervously.

‘Now, as to the issue at hand, you should know that Next science has already diverged sharply from the human—'

‘Too true,' said Ronald, his voice just as weak, yet subtly deeper. ‘Roughly speaking, we went back to Leibniz, who argued with Newton, and started again from that point. I mean, talk about schoolboy errors!'

Stella Welch coughed.

Ruby smiled. ‘I apologize. Our own science is a work in progress, and we would be well advised to be humble – as indeed Stan Berg cautioned us.

‘In our science, indeed our philosophy, we Next have learned to take our lead from Berg's Rules of the Three Thumbs. He advised us to
be humble in the face of the universe.
So we will be in this instance. We should accept this vision from the Galaxy with gratitude; while proceeding with caution, we will not be so arrogant as to assume it is necessary for such a superior race to seek our destruction. “Join us,” they said. We have no reason to believe this Invitation is a deception.

‘
Apprehend
, Berg said. We should embrace the universe in its totality – and if the perception of this Thinker, this machine from the sky, is a better window to the universe than our own senses and devices, then again we must accept the gift.

‘And Berg said,
Do good
. We will need your help with this endeavour. But we will ensure that such help is obtained with your full consent, that you will be used ethically, and your safety will be paramount. Indeed, the safety of all of us, of all the worlds. We, personally, will take necessary steps to ensure this is so.'

And Dev wondered what those ‘necessary steps' might be.

Ronald stirred, and raised a stick-thin hand. ‘I understand the decision is not yours alone; nobody speaks for all mankind. Nevertheless we would appreciate your feedback. Do you concur with our conclusions?'

Lee and Dev exchanged a look. Dev was aware of Indra Newton staring at them, blank-eyed, almost as if puzzled by their presence.

Lee pulled a face. ‘This is all just words. In the end, they can do whatever the hell they like.'

Dev forced a grin. ‘Maybe. But I always was a contact optimist. That's why I went to work at the Gap in the first place, I guess. Let's build this thing. When do we start?'

‘Just tell me this,' Lee said to Roberta and Stella as the meeting started to break up. ‘You said that humanity was being pre-prepared. What “viral narratives”?'

Roberta said, ‘Stories. Passed on by word of mouth. How else is one supposed to transmit a message to humanity, now that it is scattered across the Long Earth?
Stories
: bits of narrative, like viruses attaching themselves to your childlike imaginations.'

Lee pressed, ‘Stories such as?'

Roberta smiled. ‘Such as a story of Earth West 314,159 . . .'

18

A
S IT HAPPENED
, like the encounter with the lollipops, this was another incident from The Journey: Joshua Valienté's first exploration of the deep Long Earth, in the company of Lobsang, all of four decades before. An incident never fully reported, a tall tale now resurrected, spun, and whispered into ears across the Long Earth, all to further the Next's purpose . . .

This was around a couple of weeks into The Journey. Joshua had already made the remarkable if disquieting discovery of the lollipops, an unexpected new breed of humanoid.

Joshua woke one morning to find the
Twain
's stepping halted. They were in the Western section of what would later be called the Corn Belt: Earth West 314,159.

It said something for Joshua's exhaustion that he hadn't noticed the stop. And when he glanced out of the windows he saw immediately why Lobsang had called a halt at this particular world.

A world like a bowling ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep-blue sky.

‘A Joker. Like we saw before,' Joshua said.

‘Indeed.' Lobsang glanced at a tablet. ‘The last was at West 115,572. I thought this time we both ought to take a look.'

‘We, Lobsang?'

‘I'm allowed some curiosity.' He smiled. ‘Don't worry, Joshua, I am sure I'm safe in your hands . . .'

They stood in nothingness.

No. Not quite.

Joshua let go of the ladder from the hovering airship and took a tentative step forward. He was on a plain, a flat surface, featureless, a soft eggshell blue. Above him the sky was a white abstraction, a dome. He took another step, turned around. As far as he could see, this empty plain stretched away, in every direction, to a misty horizon under that sky. It was like an artefact, not a world. An abstraction, and inverted – white above, sky-blue below.

In the middle of it stood two grimy humans – or one and a simulation. They cast no shadows, Joshua saw now. The light was diffuse, that empty sky illuminating the land, although for all he knew it could be the other way around.

Lobsang looked just as baffled as Joshua felt. He stepped forward, clapped his hands, shouted, ‘Hello?' The sounds were swallowed up without echoes.

Joshua looked around uncertainly. ‘What is this, Lobsang?'

‘There have been accounts of worlds like this,' Lobsang said. ‘Including the one we found. Cueballs, travellers are calling them. A kind of Joker – an eerie place you'd hurry through.'

‘A flaw in the Long Earth, then?'

‘Maybe. Or . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘This is my wild theorizing, Joshua. Some kind of intersection – I mean, with another Long world. Like two necklaces, crossing over at this one place.'

Historians would note Lobsang's remarkable prescience in this remark, given that at this point in The Journey the pair had not yet encountered Sally Linsay, queen of the soft places. Then again, the extent of Lobsang's knowledge was always a mystery.

‘Two worlds crossing . . .'

‘Worlds merging somehow,' Lobsang went on. ‘Mingling. Until you're left with this – abstraction. All that's left is what they have in common, the most basic features.' He jumped a couple of inches in the air. ‘Gravity. This world has mass, then. Size. We could measure the distance to that horizon, if we bothered. It's like a mathematical model, not a world at all. A set of numbers with no detail.'

‘Or like an emulation in a computer game.'

Lobsang sighed. ‘Joshua,
I
am like an emulation in a computer game.'

‘Then why the glow, the blue ground? . . .'

Lobsang stared around. ‘It's like the stuff everything else is made of. The light that shines behind reality, giving it substance . . . Don't look at me like that, Joshua. You should remember my cognitive capacity is rather larger than yours, my processing speeds orders of magnitude faster. I have a lot of time to
think
. Even while people like you are talking.'

‘Fair enough.'

‘And I think about the nature of the Long Earth. Even about Platonic realities, and . . .'

‘And then you smoke a bit more?'

Lobsang said nothing.

‘Come on. We've logged it, let's move on.' Joshua reached out for the ladder to the airship.

But Lobsang was standing a little way away, and staring into the air. ‘Joshua. Look at this.'

They were like raindrops, perhaps. Mist particles. All around Lobsang, perfectly spherical droplets of water hung in the air, quite stationary.

In retrospect, 2030, when he had gone exploring with Lobsang, had been a pretty good year for Joshua Valienté. It had even made him famous.

That wasn't how 2070 was turning out.

19

J
OSHUA WAS STUCK
in a nightmare.

Dumped on the ground.

Blood in mouth, dirt under cheek.

Being rolled on his back, to a flood of pain from his leg. Being handled like a doll in the hands of some coarse idiot child, limbs pulled this way and that. When he struggled, feebly, more hands pressing him down.

Huge figures all around him, black-haired bodies glimpsed through a film of blood. All of it suffused with agony.

Pass out. Wake up. Pass out again.

He lived this over and over. The nightmare lasted for days.

He came back to himself slowly, bit by bit.

He lay there and let it happen. After all, what choice did he have?

He thought of the jigsaw puzzles he used to dig out of the back of cupboards at the Home. Battered old relics in torn boxes, depicting scenes of worlds that had vanished before he had been born: range riders in the Old West, Mercury astronauts in silver spacesuits. Lost dreams. Working alone, sometimes for hours on end, he'd painstakingly sort the pieces into their categories: corners, edges, bits with sky or sea or silver-spacesuit fabric,
edges
with sky or sea or spacesuit silver . . . You just had to be patient, one piece at a time, and slowly, slowly, the picture would emerge. And the more of the picture you got, the more you were going to get.

Spacesuit silver. He wondered why he was thinking of that.

It was dark, then it was light. Days passing.

It would soon be fall, he thought, on this world as on all the worlds of the Long Earth. Soon the days would be getting shorter, colder. Nothing he could do about that now. He just had to endure.

A dull ache in the leg was his constant companion, and he fretted about the state of the break.

Also his trousers, ripped to pieces. He always had been lousy at sewing. That made him want to laugh, but his chest hurt.

The sky above him was the first part of the puzzle to come clear. A blue sky, with scattered cloud. And the air was cooler than he remembered. Was it that much later in the year? How long had he been lying here?

He smelled dirt, and the dense animal musk of trolls, and heard running water. No sign of humanity, not even the smell of a campfire. He was still out in the High Meggers. Nobody had come, nobody had found him, then. He had no idea whether he was even still in the world where he'd made his stockade—

The troll face, looming over him, seemed to come out of nowhere. He flinched back.

The troll, startled, ducked back too, only to return more circumspectly, curiously. This was a young animal, he saw now, very young, a cub, its rounded face a mask of thick black fur, its features still babyish – almost human-looking, if you ignored the beard. This certainly wasn't the older troll that had saved him after . . .

After he'd been run down by the baby elephant with a mask like a
Star Wars
stormtrooper. He remembered now. And the mother who'd carelessly stomped on him.

‘Hoo!'

The troll moved abruptly, approaching him again. Lying in the dirt, helpless, Joshua cringed back from the fast, determined motions of this powerful young animal – and he
was
an animal, after all. Joshua had to force himself not to step out. He had to believe he was better off here than anywhere else. And besides, the trolls would probably just step after him.