The Long Cosmos (26 page)

Then Rod came running through the group. Wearing his orange flight suit – evidently he'd come straight from the plane – he was yelling, and he brandished a kind of fat, bright red pistol.

‘Rod! No! Get back!'

But Rod surely never heard his father over the shouting of the trolls and the roar of the singer beast, and he wouldn't have obeyed him in any case. He ran past the trolls and right up to the singer, dwarfed by its bulk. He held up that pistol – now Joshua recognized it as a flare gun – and fired it at point-blank range into the singer's jaw.

The result was spectacular. The flare burst inside the beast's huge mouth; the animal vomited smoke that was illuminated from behind by glaring orange light. The trolls scrambled back, as scared by the flare as by the singer.

But the singer, though howling with pain, wasn't finished. Smoke still pouring from between its jaws, it bent down, effortlessly scooped up Rod like a doll in its small forelimbs – and vanished.

Joshua, still calling for Rod, struggling to stand without his crutches, saw it all. It had stepped! Of course it had; it was a humanoid; Long Earth humanoids stepped. Now Joshua himself frantically stepped into the worlds to East and West, one step, two; he couldn't stand, he was sprawled on the ground, but he could
step
– Joshua Valienté had always been able to step. But there was no sign of them in the worlds next door, though a few trolls huddled there, having instinctively stepped away from trouble. No sign of the singer beast, or of Rod. And though he called until he was hoarse, and stepped over and over again, somehow Joshua knew that wherever Rod was, it was further, much further away than this.

At last he returned to the trolls' base world. As soon as he arrived back, Sally came running over, Matt's mother. Weeping, she wrapped her arms around Joshua's chest and held him close.

His mouth full of black hair, he struggled against her, struggled to speak. ‘You've got to help me. I lost Rod, I lost my son. You must help. Sancho! Get me Sancho . . .'

35

A
S THE
N
AVY
twain USS
Charles M. Duke
made its final stepwise approach to Earth West 3,141,592, Admiral Maggie Kauffman, standing in the observation lounge at the prow of the ship, was aware of the craft's deliberate reduction of its stepping rate. And she could see why the
Duke
was slowing, for though the mid-American landscapes of these last few worlds seemed uninhabited, the skies were full of traffic: big cargo-carrying twains that flickered in her view as they made their own steps towards the destination. Some of them hauled engineering components so big they had to be carried outside the holds of the craft themselves, slung in cradles beneath the gondolas. Hence the caution. You couldn't step into a place already occupied by another solid object, such as a twain, and it played hell with your steering if you tried, and you didn't want problems with that given the size and complexity of some of the loads being shipped in here. Maggie refused to be impressed by the scale of the operation, however, as ships and cargoes flickered in and out of existence above the barren ground.

‘It's as if the whole damn sky is a badly edited 3-D movie,' she groused.

Standing with her was Captain Jane Sheridan, extracted from other duties to deliver Maggie for this bizarre tour of inspection of the Messenger, Inc. installation. ‘There
is
a massive flow of materials and labour in and out of Apple Pi,' Sheridan said. ‘There's no industrial concentration like it outside the Low Earths. Even Valhalla doesn't compare, and that's the largest city in the High Meggers.'

The result, in these neighbouring worlds, was a sky full of ships and cargo.

‘And none of this existed a few months back, right? Which is no doubt why Ed Cutler was beat up to get some kind of control over the situation, and why he in turn beat up on
me
. . . You know, I'm old enough to remember that first jaunt of Joshua Valienté's, when he
discovered
the Gap. Now here we are a million worlds further on, and there's all
this
.'

Jane Sheridan was a very able young officer who had probably been born a decade or more after Valienté's Journey, and she politely declined to respond to Maggie's old-lady mumblings. ‘It's all been a fantastic rush since the Messengers, the Next, began their programme of contracting out the design, manufacture and assembly. Traffic control has been an issue. As you can see. The Navy has already designated clear loading zones in Apple Pi itself. The one we're heading to is reserved for Navy and other government traffic. The base is called Little Cincinnati, by the way; that's the footprint we'll be in. All these control procedures are initiatives of officers in situ. Of course, ma'am, you may want to review all that when you've got your feet under the table.'

Maggie grunted. ‘Unless I can persuade Ed Cutler to pass this dream job to some other sap. Just tell me this –
Apple Pi
?'

Sheridan shrugged. ‘I'm not sure where the name came from, ma'am. But you know that the Next who initiated this project selected the target world partly because of its stepwise designation—'

‘The digits of pi, OK. And some bozo thought that was funny?'

‘Well, we are the Navy, ma'am. And it is a footprint of North America that's being rebuilt here.'

Maggie stared at her.' “North America, being rebuilt”? That seems an odd way to put it.'

‘Best if you see for yourself, ma'am,' Sheridan said diplomatically. She pointed down. ‘There's our own ground spotter.'

A guy in a yellow high-vis jacket waved paddles, and Maggie heard a crackle of radio communication. For the last few worlds the visual spotters stepped ahead of incoming twains at walking pace, one world at a time, to ensure there were no collisions.

‘Almost there, Admiral . . .'

Even given the crowded skies of the neighbouring worlds, it was a shock to make the last step into Apple Pi.

After the usual vegetation-green landscape in the world next door, suddenly the twain hovered over a carpet of technology. There were heaps of components everywhere, some evidently metallic and painted with a dull-red corrosion-proof paint, some of more enigmatic materials – ceramics, perhaps. Many of the components, especially the big ones, had an oddly organic look, not like regular engineering at all, with sweeps and curves and blisters, like spray-painted seaweed, Maggie thought, on a huge scale.

From the air it looked to Maggie like she was flying over some vast engineering storage yard, a yard that filled the landscape from the middle distance all the way to the horizon, into which twains descended industriously, like bees dropping into a field of flowers.

The Navy drop area below, kept clear of Messenger engineering as Sheridan had said, was a broad slab of concrete marked with roughly painted landing zones. Ground vehicles skimmed between a scatter of temporary buildings, prefabricated units or just canvas. Maggie saw there were a number of ships already down, tethered to mooring pylons. For all the scale of it there was a sense of haste, of improvisation. A Stars and Stripes, holographically enhanced, hung limply on a flagpole.

And all of this under a mundane American springtime sky, blue with scattered clouds, a faint threat of rain in the afternoon . . .

She grunted. ‘I wish I knew what in hell this is all about.'

Sheridan said carefully, ‘I rather think the senior commanders hope—'

‘That I'm going to figure it all out for them? In their dreams.'

As soon as the twain was anchored, Sheridan led Maggie, escorted by a couple of junior officers, down a staircase to the ground. The air, after the processed atmosphere of the twain, was oppressive and smelled of engine oil, hot metal and wet concrete, and, stepping down the stairs in her heavy uniform, Maggie felt every one of her sixty-nine years.

There was a reception committee waiting for her at the bottom of the stair, beside a small electric ground vehicle.

‘Oh, Christ,' she said. ‘There's Ed Cutler himself. I'm being thrown in the deep end.'

‘I'll be right beside you, ma'am.'

Cutler came forward to greet her. Aside from a couple of junior officers – both armed, Maggie noticed – his only companion was a middle-aged woman in a sober business suit, who hung back, formal, reserved. Maggie thought she looked familiar.

‘Admiral Kauffman,' Cutler said, saluting. ‘Welcome to the nut house.'

She saluted back. ‘Glad to be here, Admiral Cutler.'

‘Call me Ed. When we're in private, anyhow. I think we've known each other far too long for formalities, you and I . . .'

Maggie inspected him sceptically. Ed Cutler was just as she'd known him all the years, in fact the decades, they'd worked together. Thin, intense, fragile, devoted to order and control, he was a man a lot better suited to a desk job than to the complex realities of the field. More than once Maggie and her officers had had to save the day for him, for instance the time he'd lost his head while the Navy and other agencies were trying to contain a more or less peaceful rebellion in Valhalla. Yet he was a survivor. And he was a man who followed orders no matter how inimical they might be to him personally. That was why his superiors valued him, why promotion had followed promotion.

And now, beyond his own retirement age, he had the rank of admiral, and was commander of USLONGCOM, the vast military command zone that comprised all of the Long Earths – and in practice, out here in the High Meggers, only President Damasio herself wielded more power. But nothing Ed Cutler ever attained or did was going to impress Maggie.

‘Well, here I am, Ed. Shall we get on with it?'

Ed grinned at Sheridan. ‘There you are, you see, Captain. That's what I value most in the Admiral here. Decisiveness. Urgency. Yes indeed, Maggie, we've a lot to see. I've done my best to sort this mess out, but you're better suited to a job like this, and I need to get back to my other responsibilities. Look, I know you've had no proper briefing notes. That's the damn Long Earth for you – every communication has to be carried by the Pony Express. I've arranged an introductory tour for you, to get you started right away.'

‘Thanks.'

He turned and gestured to his companion, the woman. ‘First I need to introduce you—'

‘We've met before.' The woman, hair tied tightly back, bespectacled, smiled thinly and extended her hand.

‘Roberta Golding,' Maggie said, remembering, and she took the woman's hand. The shake was firm, determined. ‘Yes, we have met. After the Happy Landings incident . . .' Where Ed Cutler had had an extraordinary part to play, Maggie reflected, when he had smuggled aboard her ship a nuclear weapon intended to eliminate the Next altogether. That was a quarter of a century back. And now here he was standing beside this representative of the Next as if she was a business partner. ‘Strange times, Doctor Golding.'

‘Strange indeed, Admiral. Though it's “Professor” now. Not that such titles matter in the face of all this.' She gestured around.

‘Your project, you mean.'

‘Well, it isn't
ours
. We Next, and our human allies, are just – facilitators, I suppose. The project belongs to the Sagittarians – which is one name we have for the agency at the heart of the Galaxy who sent the Invitation in the first place.'

Maggie sighed. ‘Straight off the twain, and I'm already discussing galactic alien intelligences with an authenticated superhuman megabrain.'

Sheridan caught her eye. ‘That's why they called in the Navy, Admiral.'

Roberta said, ‘I for one am glad to see you, Admiral. I do remember your decisiveness over the Happy Landings affair – and your good judgement. I hope that your presence here will progress the project.'

Maggie frowned. ‘What I'm here to progress is national security.'

‘Of course. But the two objectives need not be in conflict.'

‘We'll be the judge of that,' Ed Cutler said briskly. ‘Very little of this project is under the control of the federal government, let alone USLONGCOM – even though it is all entirely within the US Aegis. And it's all been so darn
fast.
Come and hop aboard this electric runabout.' He turned and led the way; the party filed aboard the little vehicle, selected seats, fixed seat belts. ‘I want to show you some of the work being done here, Maggie. Stuff on the ground. Who we've got working here. And our, umm, guests.'

‘Guests?'

‘You'll see,' he growled. The vehicle pulled away, driven by one of Cutler's armed junior officers. ‘As I recall, you were the first to appoint non-humans to your twain crew. First trolls, then those damn dogs.'

‘Beagles. They're called beagles.'

‘That's one reason I pushed for your selection for this job. You're probably going to feel right at home in this zoo. Look, Maggie, we've had direct pressure from the administration to deal with this. I spoke to President Damasio herself. Hell of a thing to have dumped in your lap in the middle of your first term. And from the administration's point of view this came out of nowhere. All we were aware of initially was a huge diversion of manufacturing capability from the Low Earths, even from the Datum. And the creation of more capacity, in fact.' He glanced at Roberta. ‘None of us knew the Next were so damn wealthy, in human terms.'

‘We do command significant resources,' Roberta said. ‘Amassed through selling appropriate ideas and innovations to human entrepreneurs, and investing the proceeds. This is carefully done, to avoid destabilization.'

‘Carefully done, my ass,' Cutler growled. ‘Maggie, the first we heard was squawks from some of the post-Yellowstone reclamation and conservation agencies about the industrial resource that was suddenly being diverted away from their projects. And then we had a flood of patents from get-rich-quick types who got their mitts on bits of ET tech. Then came campaigns from the paranoid types who think it's all some kind of alien trap, a Trojan Horse.'