The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘But what kind of help can they possibly want, from . . .’

  ‘From a kid like me?’ He glared at her, defiant. ‘Maybe if I’m smart enough to figure out the code, I’m smart enough to help. Even if I am just a kid.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s just that it’s all so strange for me.’

  ‘But you can’t deny it’s real.’

  ‘I guess not . . .’ Again, that voice. She glanced to the grimy window. ‘Can you hear somebody? The lady on reception said we were the only guests here.’

  He stared at her. Then he lunged at his radio and turned up the volume.

  Suddenly the voice was crystal clear. ‘. . . Stay where you are, and keep broadcasting. We’ve located you from your signal, but it will take us a few hours to reach you. Thank you for responding to our message, and for taking the trouble to come. My name is Roberta Golding, and I look forward to meeting you. Don’t try to reply; this message is on a loop. Be assured we’re on our way. Stay where you are, and keep broadcasting . . .’

  Sister Coleen and Jan just stared at each other.

  Then Jan jumped to his feet and ran around the room, punching the air. ‘Yes! I was right!’

  Sister Coleen longed to join in. But she said, ‘Well, now, just be sensible, Jan. We don’t know what this is about, yet.’

  ‘It’s going to be fun—’

  She grabbed his shoulders to make him stand still; he was panting hard. ‘But I’m still in charge,’ she said. ‘Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’

  Of course he would have promised anything to get to meet this Golding woman. Sister Coleen sighed. ‘I suppose I’m glad I’m not going to have to trek off to the High Meggers, or wherever . . . Now, before this lady shows up, will you calm down, and take your coat off, and get washed, and have something to eat?’

  27

  IN THE EVENT it was not until the next morning that Roberta Golding arrived.

  And when she did it was in a small helicopter that descended from the empty blue sky of a Wisconsin fall day, landing before the Capitol mound. Jan, of course, was thrilled.

  ‘I’m sorry it took so long. There are only a handful of us responders on each of the target worlds; I’ve had to travel from the Manhattan footprint.’

  Sister Coleen frowned. ‘Target worlds?’

  Jan whispered, ‘She means the pi worlds.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  Jan was all for going for a joyride on the chopper, but Roberta insisted on coming up to their rooms in the motel. ‘You asked me to come see you, after all,’ she said to Jan. ‘And if we’re to work together, it’s important that I get to know you.’

  Jan was round-eyed. ‘We’re going to work together?’

  ‘If,’ said Sister Coleen firmly as they walked back to the motel. ‘She said if. And I’m still saying if too, young man. Let’s just see how this pans out.’

  Roberta stood in Jan’s room, gravely surveying his materials, glancing at his tablet, his home-assembled radio kit, his cuttings file, showing every evidence of approval. Although it was hard to tell what she was thinking, Sister Coleen admitted to herself. Roberta, in her forties perhaps, was slim, serious and bespectacled; she wore a sober, anonymous trouser suit. And she was rather inexpressive.

  Eventually she nodded to Sister Coleen. ‘He’s done well. And I do understand how difficult life can be for such a child. And for you, of course. I was once like him. Many of us were.’

  ‘“Us?” “Such a child”? Ms Golding, you haven’t said a word about what’s going on here, who you are—’

  ‘We are the Next,’ said Roberta simply.

  Sister Coleen stared.

  Jan said, ‘Cool.’

  Sister Coleen pulled herself together. ‘The Next. OK. And is Jan right? I mean, that you’ve been sending out messages of some kind?’

  ‘He is. We are engaged in a project. A big one, a construction project which – well, it’s far too large for us to handle alone.’

  ‘What kind of project?’ Jan snapped. ‘What construction? What’s it for?’

  ‘We don’t know yet. We’ll have to build most of it to find out, I suspect – if we build it at all, and that’s being debated. But, you see, we received a message too, from – somewhere else. You’ll learn all about this if you join us.’

  ‘But I know what it is. A SETI signal. Like in Contact. It was in the news, for a while.’

  Roberta smiled. ‘It started that way, certainly. But it soon vanished from your news bulletins, didn’t it? Strange news from the High Meggers – not as immediate as the latest sabre-rattling between the US and China, say. Jan, evidently you have a longer attention span than most of your kind.’

  ‘“Your kind.”’ Sister Coleen frowned. ‘I don’t like that. What is it you call us? Dim-bulbs? So you need help from us dim-bulbs for this great project, do you?’

  Roberta said mildly, ‘We are still few, and with limited resources. You are many, and have the resources of worlds.’

  ‘So why aren’t you approaching the big engineering companies? Even the government?’

  ‘Oh, we are. You may hear of this. We call ourselves the Messengers – well, we have incorporated under the name.’ She smiled. ‘The Messengers, Inc. Yes, we have taken out contracts with many of the world’s largest engineering concerns – that is on the Datum Earth and the Low Earths, even at Valhalla. But the project is bigger even than that, it seems.’

  Jan asked, ‘How big?’

  She smiled. ‘Not as big as a planet.’

  Jan goggled.

  Sister Coleen couldn’t take that in. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So you sent out these stories—’

  ‘We needed a way to ask for help from everybody, from all the worlds, from ordinary people, the public. But it is only human contact that unites the Long Earth. And what better medium to send a message than coded into stories, passed by word of mouth from one human being to another? Of course it needed to be a message heard only by those capable and willing to help.’

  ‘Such as a ten-year-old boy?’

  Jan said quickly, ‘But I did understand, Sister. It’s not just the numbers. It’s what the stories are about. That tells you something about the project. The story of Bettany Diamond is saying that it’s something to do with how we see the worlds of the Long Earth. The Cueball story says it’s about how the different Earths are connected up. And Johnny Shakespeare – well, he rebuilt a whole world, by accident. Just like your big project, maybe.’

  Roberta eyed Sister Coleen. ‘You see, Sister, it does depend on which ten-year-old boy you ask.’

  Jan said, ‘But what can I actually do?’

  Roberta touched his radio. ‘You built this from a kit, did you?’

  ‘With some upgrades,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Jan, if you can make something like this, you can make stuff for us. We’ll give you the specs of a replicator – like a matter printer. And with that, you can make parts.’

  ‘Parts? To do what?’

  ‘Well, we don’t necessarily know. Not yet. None of us knows for certain. I guess when it’s all put together, then we’ll know. This is crowd-sourcing, as they used to call it, working across the whole Long Earth. The final assembly will be on Earth West three million—’

  ‘Let me guess.’ Sister Coleen flicked through Jan’s notes to the pi digits. ‘Earth West 3,141,592. Right?’

  ‘You’re getting the idea, Sister. We chose that world especially. Although the idea for the pi numbering came from events on West 3,141.’ Her smile was thin. ‘Even the Next had no influence over that.’

  Sister Coleen wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘And, 3,141,592. That’s a long way away. Is it past the Gap?’

  ‘Indeed. We don’t know what this machine is going to do. To build it a long way away seems a good idea. If we build it at all.’

  Coleen said, ‘I remember when it was in the news, a lot of people didn’t like this thing. Maybe it’s some kind of trap, like a big bomb
they’re getting us to build to blow ourselves up.’

  Roberta laughed. ‘It might comfort you to know that we too are exploring such dangers, at greater depth.’

  Coleen scowled. ‘If I wasn’t used to being patronized by the senior Sisters I might take offence at your tone.’

  Jan said, ‘Will I be able to come see it?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. But you’ll have to talk about that with Sister.’ Roberta stood up. ‘I think we’re done for today. We’ll be in touch.’

  Sister Coleen said, ‘We live at—’

  ‘The Home in Madison West 5. I know.’

  On impulse, Jan tugged Roberta’s hand. ‘Pi is in Contact. That’s what gave me the idea about the code numbers in the first place.’

  Roberta smiled, and winked at Sister Coleen.

  Who was already trying to figure out how she was going to explain all this to Sister John.

  28

  NELSON’S FIRST IMPULSE, when he had seen his grandson vanish in the belly of the disappeared Traverser on that warm world seven hundred thousand steps West, had been to call on Lobsang’s help.

  His son Sam and the other fishermen had immediately struck out for the nearest land – a verdant but uninhabited island. Here there was food and water and fuel for fires; here, Sam said, after conferring with his fellows, they would wait for the return of the Traverser with their families. What else could they do?

  But Nelson knew there was little hope of the situation simply resolving itself. Whatever new phenomenon the Long Earth was now displaying was far greater in scale than the human. And to deal with it he needed the help of an entity greater than the human.

  So he had recalled his twain, and headed straight back to the Low Earths.

  Once back home, Nelson had learned that his own experience in that remote footprint of the Tasman Sea was part of a wider phenomenon. With the help of online resources, and buddies including his old friends the Quizmasters, he’d discovered that his own Traverser, seven hundred thousand steps out, had not been unique in its disappearance. Traversers had always been able to step, of course, from one world to the next. But now they were disappearing altogether, along with whatever freight of life they carried, as authenticated by various bewildered observers on several far-separated worlds.

  Where were they going? How did they travel? And why now? Nobody had any answers.

  But of course it wasn’t the issue of the Traversers itself that Nelson cared about. It was Troy, lost in the belly of the vanished beast. Troy, his grandson, found and lost in a matter of weeks . . . And Sam, Nelson’s son, abandoned too, left adrift on that island close to the footprint of New Zealand with the rest of the tiny fishing fleet.

  Only Lobsang could help. But Lobsang had disappeared.

  Eventually he learned that Lobsang was in a virtual reality, a refuge, itself locked inside a kind of corporate firewall. As Nelson battered feebly against this barrier, a butterfly against a window, he got to know Selena Jones at transEarth, Lobsang’s gatekeeper, rather too well.

  In the end, it was not until Decenber of 2070 that he got the break he needed, when he attended the funeral of Sister Agnes, at the Home at Madison West 5. This was a strange, eerie affair. Nelson gave a eulogy, and helped carry a coffin that felt peculiarly heavy. The hymn being sung had been ‘Morning Has Broken’, with a discarded ambulant unit of Lobsang’s playing the Rick Wakeman piano accompaniment, and pretty soulfully too.

  And it was at the funeral that he met Ben Abrahams, né Ogilvy: Ben, the adopted son of Agnes, and of Lobsang. Ben had helped Lobsang hide away, and now agreed to help Nelson find him.

  But, he warned Nelson, it would mean undertaking a journey even stranger yet . . .

  29

  AS THE TRAVELLERS came down from the final mountain pass, they descended at last below the snow line. Nelson found himself walking on solid rock, the footing cold but firm under his thick boots in this Himalayan spring. He paused for a moment, beside Ben Abrahams. Side by side, the two of them must look as fat as trolls, Nelson suspected, swathed as they were in layers of clothing, in their thick trousers and padded jackets and mittens and Tibetan-style woollen hats, and with their breath steaming from their mouths.

  Nelson raised his face to the mountain before him. It seemed to rise almost vertically to the crystal-blue sky – a wall of granite laced with brilliant-white ice.

  Ben Abrahams pointed. ‘The village is in the valley just down below.’

  Glancing down, Nelson saw threads of smoke rising, and in the huge silence he thought he heard the clank of cow bells, all of it dwarfed by the tremendous presence of the mountain. ‘Imagine living under that all your life. Humanity is irrelevant here.’

  ‘Yes. Hell of a view, isn’t it? Oh, sorry, Nelson—’

  ‘For using the H word? Don’t worry about it. My dog collar is long ago and far away. It’s a relief to be able to stand on firm ground, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘That it is, Nelson.’

  ‘Although,’ Nelson said, thinking about it, ‘I’m not as winded as I ought to be, given what we just came through. And given how high up we are.’

  ‘More than two miles above sea level.’

  ‘And given my age.’ He looked at his mittened hand, turned it over. ‘But then this isn’t me, is it? Not my body.’ Which wizened husk was lying in a kind of sensory deprivation tank in a Low Earth transEarth facility right now, surrounded by scanners, and with internal monitors that had wriggled up his nose and into his ears, while his consciousness was projected into this unreal place.

  He shuddered.

  Ben asked, ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No. Call it existential angst.’

  Ben grinned. ‘Just forget about it. The outside. Accept what you see, what you feel. We crossed by the pass above—’

  ‘Yes. I can remember. Kind of. I remember what went before.’ The weeks of effort it had taken to get permission to access this simulation. ‘And I remember the hike – but the way I remember reading an entry in somebody else’s diary. I don’t recall making any particular individual step. Even the last step I took, before standing right here . . .’

  ‘Don’t push it, Nelson,’ Ben said. ‘Your memories of the trek are mostly mock-ups. No deeper than they need to be.’

  Nineteen years old, Ben was calm, strong, assured. His accent was a kind of backwoods twang, incongruous for a young man so obviously well educated, Nelson thought. But then, with his adopted parents, Lobsang and Agnes, he had spent his early years in a backwoods community.

  ‘So this place is—’

  ‘Not far from Ladakh. West Tibet. Now within the boundaries of India, and preserved from the worst of the Chinese occupation of the country as a result. And then, when Step Day came, this was the focus of the main migrations out of the Datum, as Buddhist communities gathered here and spread out into empty footprints of the Himalayas – empty of the Chinese, that is. What you see is a recreation of the Datum community as it was pre-Yellowstone, pre-Step Day. Lobsang asked for that specifically.’

  ‘Yes. Lobsang. Who we came to see.’

  Ben, his face round-cheeked inside his fleecy hood, glanced at him with faint concern. ‘It was your idea, Nelson. You wanted to come here—’

  ‘I remember now. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Nelson, this kind of memory muddle isn’t particularly uncommon. It’s just that there have to be horizons within a sim like this. Cut-offs to the memory, as well as physical boundaries. A sim can’t be infinite, or infinitely detailed; you have to start a sim somewhere, from some base in space and time. And at least if we come walking down from the hills like this, we will be fully consistent with the sim itself. We shouldn’t give Lobsang himself any cognitive problems.’

  ‘Then let’s get on with it.’

  But Ben hesitated. ‘You’re sure it’s necessary to do this? Lobsang has been living a normal life, growing up in here for years.’

  Nelson smiled. ‘“Normal” for a Tibetan-Buddhis
t novice monk?’

  Ben sighed. ‘I don’t exactly monitor him daily. My studies at Valhalla keep me far away. I have kept a closer eye on him recently, since my mother’s health began to fail . . . He’s going to have to come to terms with her death; that’s one issue. Also, with Lobsang, there have recently been signs of some cognitive disturbance. As if he is distracted by something. Maybe that comes from within himself, or maybe from outside this artificial environment.’ He glanced at Nelson. ‘Maybe he knew you were coming.’

  ‘Or maybe whatever caused – the reason I’m here – has disturbed Lobsang too.’

  ‘Come, it’s not far now. I’m sure the villagers will make us welcome, and we can warm up. They’re always kind to strangers – well, you have to be, in a place like this . . .’

  They wandered down into the village, side by side. The only vehicles on the track they followed were bicycles and a couple of hand-drawn carts.

  The place seemed small and cramped to Nelson, a huddle of single-storey houses. There were some modern buildings, constructed of breeze blocks and corrugated-iron panels, but most of the houses and communal places were built of old, worn stone. Nelson imagined the labour as each block had been cut and hauled down from the mountain; once brought here the stone would be used and reused, over and over. He saw cattle penned behind a wall on the outskirts of the village, big beasts with thick black hair and curling horns and bells around their necks. And as they entered the village itself there were more animals, dogs, goats with thick coats of hair, seeming to wander at will.

  The people peered at them curiously, their expressions not unfriendly.

  They were shorter than Nelson, though he was tall anyhow. Men and women alike, they looked rounded in their heavy coats. But many of them wore modern western gear – quilted jackets and lace-up boots and Day Glo mittens. There were few children around, but then this was a working day, a school day; the adults would be at work in the fields or the nearby towns, the children in their classes. The younger women and men struck him as very handsome, and the older people seemed to have faces as hard and leathery as old saddlebags.