The Long Cosmos (29 page)

‘It's a privilege to see this emerge, isn't it?' Black said, rolling up in his chair. ‘A vision from an alien mind, I'm told, and designed and built by the superhuman Next. Remarkable.'

Maggie said, ‘I admit I'm surprised to see you here in person, to tell the truth, sir. You did seem comfortable at Karakal.' She looked at Cutler. ‘This was a Joker, in the far reaches of the Long Earth. Low gravity and high oxygen, and Mr Black had a theory that those environmental conditions would extend human life.'

Black said, ‘Well, I appear to have been correct. I'm the living proof!'

‘You hoped to attract others like yourself. The elderly rich, seeking a retirement community.'

‘It was to be a kind of brains trust for mankind,' he said ruefully. ‘An arena for medical innovation, funded by myself and the other struldbrugs. But it was not to be, alas. I was doomed by geology.'

‘Geology?'

‘Admiral, I was foolish enough to fund an investigation into
why
that particular Earth should have such low gravity – why it should be so less massive than the average. Unfortunately for me, my hired rock hounds returned with an answer. All Earths, it seems, contain radioactive materials, and on all Earths these can gather to form tremendous natural nuclear reactors – or naturally occurring fission bombs. On a huge scale.'

He spoke of the early Datum Earth, of concentrations of isotopes of thorium, uranium, plutonium, gathering in great lodes at the boundary of the outer core and the mantle. Gathering, and ultimately going critical . . .

‘Some theorists believe that such detonations split the moon from the Datum Earth, or at least expelled the mantle material that went on to form the moon. The largest nuclear explosion managed by mankind was the Tsar Bomb; that created a fireball six miles across. The Datum's moon-creating detonation would have been equivalent to ten
trillion
Tsars. And on Karakal, it seems, there were even larger explosions.'

Cutler whistled. ‘Yeah. If it stripped away so much mass that it actually reduced the planet's gravity, it must have been a hell of a bang.'

‘And some of my investors, hearing that my precious refuge was actually a relic of nuclear detonations, were deterred. By the fear of residual radioactivity, you see.'

‘That's absurd,' Maggie said. ‘The fallout, even the isotopes that created the detonation, must have decayed away aeons ago.'

‘I know! But these are precious souls who are highly motivated to preserve their own skins – and are wilful in terms of placing large investments. The slightest hint of a sniff of a problem with a place like Karakal and it was doomed. I still have a residence there, I and a few others. But my dream of a Shangri-La of the Long Earth is finished.'

Cutler said, ‘Well, I guess we're glad to have you with us despite that, sir. Aren't we, Admiral Kauffman? . . . Admiral?'

Still the twain rose; still the tremendous sprawl of the engineered landscape extended beneath Maggie. She was losing her perspective. Her eye sought patterns; maybe there was still a hint of that circular motif in there, circles upon circles, overlapping, like craters on the moon.

‘No more bullshit, Ed. How big is this thing going to get?'

‘You ain't seen nothing yet.'

‘You spoke of these circles. A hundred yards, then a thousand, then ten thousand – what's that, six miles?'

He nodded. ‘We threw up a couple of satellites. You can pick out the circular groupings, or at least the pattern-seeking software can. Six miles, yeah, then sixty, then six
hundred
. And it's still growing, even without our help. As to how they're building it so fast, three words, Admiral:
alien replicator tech
. Deployed here, on Aegis soil. You and I need to have a conversation about that. On the outer edge there are some kind of self-replicating components that are starting to spread out of their own accord—'

‘
Six hundred miles
?'

‘Just here, we're hovering over the Cincinnati footprint. You understand that this version of North America isn't quite identical to our own, on the Datum . . . East–west the Thinker already stretches from Washington DC to St Louis, north–south from Detroit to Atlanta, Georgia. It avoids the major water courses, so it's lapping around the Great Lakes, for instance. But to the east it's already spilling over the Appalachians.'

‘My God. It must cover half the continental US.'
Per gram
, those bright kids had said. This stuff was smarter than all humanity put together,
per gram.
And here was a concatenation of it half the size of the nation itself. ‘What the hell are we building here, Ed?'

‘You're in charge now, Maggie. You tell me.'

Behind her, Maggie was peripherally aware of a figure in a plain black robe approaching Black.

‘Mr Black? I'm sorry to bother you. We've never met, but your people were kind enough to invite me aboard. I couldn't help but overhear your conversation about the risks involved with this project: the Invitation, the Thinker. I represent a dissident group of Next, a conservative group, who, like you, are concerned that we should – how did you put it? – prepare for the worst. I wonder if we could talk about cooperation? We call ourselves the Humble. My name is Marvin Lovelace . . .'

39

I
N THE END
the trolls had to drag Joshua away from the river and back to his camp by the rock bluff. Sancho was at his side, grave, solid, that silver blanket as ever around his neck, and he offered Joshua a shoulder to lean on as he hobbled back to the bluff, defeated. Even as night fell, with Joshua far beyond being able to move any more, he raged at Sancho for not saving Rod, and he shouted for help into his radio, to Lobsang, to Sally Linsay – even to Sister Agnes, and he was ashamed of himself about that. But there was no one to hear.

He slept at last.

He woke up with a face crusted with tears. In the night, Sancho had carefully draped the survival blanket over him.

At least he felt calmer. Or maybe it was just another stage of his exhaustion.

And when he looked around, in the morning light, he saw that the area around his campsite was laden with gifts, of roots, butchered meat – even lengths of tree branch, perhaps a wistful attempt to provide him with better crutches.

Seeing Joshua was awake, with Sancho sitting beside him, the trolls came cautiously to see him. He was subject to playful backslaps and shoulder punches that more than once knocked him over, despite Sancho's admonitory growls. Evidently he was a hero for saving Matt. And, most embarrassing of all, Sally offered him sex. (Well, he
thought
that was what she was doing when she faced away from him, bent over, and backed up like a small truck reversing . . .) The offer, once refused, thankfully wasn't repeated. But he did get the sense that he had been accepted into the group more deeply than ever.

But Rod was not here. And nobody seemed to be trying to find him.

Two days after he had lost Rod, he was sitting with Sancho on top of the rock bluff, on their customary old-fart perch, as he thought of it. ‘I can't stay here, Sancho.'

‘Ha,' said Sancho thoughtfully, pulling at his spacesuit-silver blanket.

‘What I need to do is
find Rod
. And if I can't find him, I'll find a way home. Maybe in that plane. Get help. And then come back for him. After all, he came all this way for me.'

‘Hoo.'

‘And what about you, buddy? Sooner or later, I guess you'll find some other troll band and start all over again. Don't forget to tell them about the singing river ape. That was a new one on me.'

Sancho reached for the troll-call. ‘Danger.'

‘Yes, big, big danger. A predator that's evolved to take out trolls. Curse you, natural selection! You're always one step ahead of the game.'

Sancho seemed to be thinking hard. Coming to a decision. Then he said, ‘Find.'

‘What?'

Groaning slightly, Sancho lumbered to his feet, adjusted the blanket over his shoulder, and held a hand out to Joshua. ‘Find.'

‘What? Find who?
Rod?
Will you help me find Rod?' Suddenly excited, suddenly energized, Joshua clumsily propped himself up on one crutch. ‘Find him how? Where? Do you
know
where the singer took him?'

The troll wouldn't answer that. Instead he gestured at the camp, Joshua's scattered heaps of stuff, augmented now by Rod's gear from the plane.

‘Yes, yes. I get it. I need to figure out what to bring.'

Joshua scrambled down from the bluff. Rod's white medical pack was still there. Joshua sat in the dirt, opened up the pack and piled in whatever necessities he could see to hand – knives, matches, his handgun, a length of rope. He kept the medical stuff, but it broke his heart to dump the last couple of beers, unopened, in the dirt. One last item – he grabbed Sancho's battered pink pom-pom and stuck it in the bag. All this at top speed, before the troll could change his mind.

Then he zipped up, pulled out rucksack straps, and, still sitting awkwardly, hauled the case on to his back. ‘OK, buddy, I'm packed.' And he tucked the troll-call into a jacket pocket, to forestall further conversation.

Sancho grinned, a wide toothy orang-utan's grin. Then with one huge hand he grabbed the scruff of Joshua's neck, lifted him to a standing position, and
shook
him, as if straightening out the legs of a string puppet. Joshua gagged, half-choked by his own shirt; his dangling leg ached, and he fought to keep hold of his crutches. Even the straps of his pack dug into his back.

‘Hoo!'

And he fell into a hole between the worlds.

40

I
T WASN
'
T LIKE
stepping.

With a step you transitioned from one world into the next, a world more or less identical save for such details as civilizations and extinction events, like stepping between successive frames of a movie. And then you stepped again, into another frame, and then another . . .

This
wasn't like that. This was a plummet.

It was more like travelling through soft places, through which Joshua Valienté had passed too many times with Sally Linsay. It had been a Long Earth theorist called Mellanier, an academic rival of Sally's father Willis Linsay, who had first posited the idea of soft places purely on theoretical grounds. Linsay pictured the Long Earth as a necklace strung with the blue pearls that were whole alternate worlds. Simple stepping allowed you to move along the chain, from one pearl to the next. But Claude Mellanier hypothesized that the necklace might get tangled up, in some higher-dimensional jewellery box, with strands overlaying strands. And he argued that it might be possible to break through into an adjoining strand, and thereby travel, in one jump,
much
further through the Long Earth than any simple step would take you. You could even move geographically across the Long Earths using soft places, unlike regular stepping. It was said that the most gifted steppers among the Next could
manufacture
their own soft-place routes . . .

Joshua Valienté thought of soft places as being the Long Earth's equivalent of wormholes, like in
Contact
, and they were about as pleasant to fall through. This was something like a soft place – but a soft place with greased walls.

It made a kind of sense. Trolls were stronger physically than humans, and they'd spent a couple of million years out here busily adapting to the strange conditions of the Long Earth. Of course their stepping, their soft-place tunnelling, was going to be a tougher ordeal than anything a mere human would choose to face.

But it was galling for Joshua, who had been the poster boy of stepping since he was thirteen years old. Now, maybe, he knew how it felt to be a phobic, like his brother-in-law, poor Rod Green, who had been made physically ill by stepping even if he was sedated and carried over on a stretcher. Always something new to learn about the Long Earth, it seemed – even about the trolls.

And, in a blur, with the troll's strong hand at his neck the only firm reality, he thought he could see Sally Linsay's face, hear her mocking voice.
Not so tough now, are you, Valienté?
This
is the reality of stepping. Like what it
really
feels to be a fish out of water . . .

‘Leave me alone, Sally.'

‘Hoo?'

Suddenly he became aware that he was no longer being held up by Sancho. He was standing, supported by his crutches.

But he was surrounded by milky, glaring emptiness.

It might have been one of the white-out blizzards he'd been caught in during the Datum's long volcanic winter, or even another Cueball Joker. But the temperature was neutral, and he felt soft moisture gathering on his face. Under his feet too was the most featureless of surfaces, like a pale-white sand. But then he saw what looked like a worm cast, just to one side of the dangling boot of his damaged leg. Not a Cueball, then.

He looked up at the troll, who loomed black against the white mist. ‘Where the hell are we, Sancho?'

‘Hoo?'

‘Damn it . . .' He fished the troll-call out of his jacket pocket and tried again. ‘Are we there yet?'

‘Beach,' the troll said simply. ‘Huh?'

Almost comically Sancho cupped his hand to one hairy ear.

And now, straining, Joshua could just make out the rush of a breaking wave. He turned to look that way.

He was in a mist, a sea fog maybe, close, moist. But the mist was lifting now, and he could see a littoral strewn with what looked convincingly like seaweed, and a greyish ocean on which languid waves rolled, breaking almost elegantly at the shore with a rush of broken shells. The horizon was still entirely hidden.