The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

‘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 Sagittaria
ns – 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.’

  ‘You forgot the Chinese,’ Jane Sheridan said with a flash of humour.

  ‘Cripes, yes. Who want a piece of the alien pie for their own economic purposes. And because of that you have Long Unity desk jockeys here too . . .’

  Actually Maggie quietly approved of the Long Unity, a kind of low-key offshoot of the old UN that was extending carefully into the Long Earth, offering help, support, connectivity across an increasingly scattered mankind. The Long Unity, at least, was harmless.

  ‘To get all this built the Next’ve been using sly ways of influencing folk, recruiting them to the cause. It’s all over the Aegis. Not just the big industrial combines: cottage industry stuff. Hobbyists. Kids in home workshops, building pieces of it. We only discovered all this after the fact. Well, the President set up an advisory committee. You’ve got the National Science Foundation, NASA, the DoD, the National Security Council, the security agencies, and every goddamn futurologist and think tank we can find. But the whole operation was up and running before we were properly aware of it; we’ve been playing catch-up from the start.’

  ‘And so they called in the Navy.’

  Cutler grinned. ‘Well, hell, we were here already. Because we’re everywhere. Maggie, you know as well as I do that things have kind of dissolved in the years since Yellowstone. It’s only the Navy that has kept its shape, especially in the form of the twain fleets. Yes, they sent for the Navy, because across the Aegis there’s nobody else to send for . . .’

  The President sent for the Navy, Maggie thought sourly, and the Navy sent for me. Well, it was obvious the science was going to be a big element here. She made a mental note to send for Margarita Jha, who had served as her science officer on expeditions that had taken them to even stranger places than this . . .

  Cutler was still doing his best to alarm her. ‘We don’t know what kind of threat we’re facing here. What does this—’ he waved a hand at the industrialized landscape ‘—this almighty boondoggle mean for our economic capacity? And although it’s contained within the US Aegis – within this copy of the North American landmass – that seems to be chance, it’s where the Next happened to choose to build the thing; they don’t recognize our international boundaries, as you know, Maggie, any more than we care about chimp territories in the jungle. So how are we going to square all this with the Chinese and the rest? What’s it going to do to our relationship with the Next? That is a strategic question, believe me. And, above all – what is this thing? What’s it for? What will it be capable of doing when it’s complete?’

  Maggie glanced at Roberta. ‘Reasonable questions, I would think. Given that all this is being built in the US Aegis.’

  Roberta said smoothly, ‘Well, the location was specified in the Invitation – as we discovered once we had begun to decode it. As to what the Thinker is for—’

  That was the first time Maggie had heard the name. ‘The Thinker? What the hell is it thinking about?’

  Roberta smiled. ‘We believe it will tell us itself, when it’s ready.’

  Cutler snarled, ‘And in the meantime we have to trust it, and you. And all we get out of you Next is the same platitudinous bull crap.’

  Maggie said, ‘The President’s experts must have some ideas.’

  Cutler shrugged. ‘Only guesses. You know me, Maggie. I tend to side with more conservative opinions. The woolly space dreamer types tell me I’m paranoid. Why would anybody bother to reach out from the centre of the Galaxy to harm us? Well, I say, they’ve reached out all that way for something.’

  Roberta said, ‘We too are divided. But most of us believe implicitly in the benevolent nature of this project. This gesture from the stars.’

  Cutler glanced at Maggie meaningfully. ‘And we remember New Springfield.’

  Maggie understood Cutler’s unspoken meaning. If Roberta Golding was wrong, if this machine did turn out to be harmful after all – well, then, it would be Maggie’s duty to stop it.

  If she could figure out how.

  36

  ONCE OUT OF the relatively clear spaces of the Navy camp, they drove along narrow dirt tracks through a landscape crowded with incomprehensible machinery.

  Cutler pointed to a wooden post with a red-painted top and a number etched into its side. ‘You can see we’re trying to impose some organization on this place.’

  Roberta said, ‘To a large extent the whole facility is self-organizing. The Thinker itself has, or at least is incrementally developing, a knowledge of its own necessary layout—’

  ‘All of which wordy bullshit is no use to your average truck driver from Detroit trying to find his drop point. So we’ve sent up a couple of Navy twains to map and number the emerging zones, according to a system of our own.’

  Roberta said dryly, ‘Painting all those little signposts does keep a lot of people in uniform gainfully occupied.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cutler said entirely without irony, ‘that’s another advantage.’

  They entered what Roberta called a manufacturing zone. The cart rolled to a halt outside a kind of factory, a long, low building of aluminium walls and big glass ceiling panels. As she walked in, crossing a floor of hastily laid concrete, Maggie saw what looked like assembly lines, and some equipment she recognized: angular construc
tion robots that she’d expect to see in a twain shipyard, automated forklift trucks shifting loads to and fro, and a big overhead frame from which heavy chains dangled. More robots than people, she figured, but the people she could see were hard at work. What they were working on was the mystery.

  Cutler said, ‘I picked this site to show you because it has a cast of characters of a representative type, as you’ll see . . .’

  ‘Including my young friends from the Gap.’ Roberta abruptly took the lead, striding across the floor to a small workshop area, curtained off floor to ceiling by dust-excluding translucent sheets. At their approach a couple of workers emerged: a man and a woman, both looking no older than thirty to Maggie, and wearing blue coveralls with GapSpace logos at the breast. The woman was holding a slab of some glass-like substance.

  The man spoke. ‘Good to see you, Professor Golding.’ He indicated himself and his co-worker. ‘Dev Bilaniuk. Lee Malone. Both GapSpace employees and shareholders . . .’

  When Maggie and Cutler were introduced, the workers didn’t seem fazed by their high ranks or military uniforms. Or, indeed, particularly interested, Maggie thought.

  Lee said, ‘We were told you would want to see what we’re working on. This is a sample.’ She held up the slab of material. ‘Actually this item failed its integration tests, so it’s safe to remove it from the sterile area. We’ll break it up for components and reuse them later . . .’

  Maggie was allowed to hold the assembly. It was indeed glass-like, with a complex internal structure dimly glimpsed, like some fantastically complicated quartz crystal. And yet it was evidently artificial, for she saw subcomponents within: what looked to her like silicon chips, threads of wire or cable, and tiny light sources that glowed in constellations, green and gold. ‘It’s like a whole world in there,’ she said.

  Lee smiled. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be meaningful to say that we made this. It’s more a question of self-assembly – well, it’s that way for all the Thinker’s components, save the simplest structural pieces.’