The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘Well, now we have Mars, the Long Mars, another raw, arid, beautiful landscape, and an unending one. We’ll probably spend another four hundred centuries singing our way across all of that. Then we’ll figure out what to do next . . .’

  ‘Sleep well, Sally, wherever you are.’

  At last Joshua found an old movie, a favourite of Lobsang’s: The Ballad of Cable Hogue. He was falling asleep before the final reel, and dreamed of airship travel.

  He woke before light.

  This place no longer felt like Madison. It was too cold. It didn’t smell the same – it didn’t even smell like the Low Earth footprints of the town, so drastic had the climate shifts been. There was no traffic noise, but, lying there in the dark, without electric light, he heard the unmistakeable howl of wolves, and a gruff grunting closer by, the clatter of a garbage pail. A bear, maybe? Or just a raccoon? Some said that the wildlife of Canada was migrating south, fleeing advancing glaciers: lynx and moose and caribou. Some claimed you could even see polar bears not far north of Madison, in the worst of the winters.

  He rolled over and tried to get some more sleep.

  51

  A LITTLE AFTER nine the next morning Joshua, with Phyllida Green, set off towards central Madison.

  The electric cart followed Mineral Point Road, a straight-line drag that led dead east towards downtown, a route that would bring them almost to the gates of Forest Hill. The road surface was reasonably well maintained, the frost cracks and potholes roughly filled, though the edge of the asphalt was colonized by sturdy-looking saplings – pine and spruce trees. There were no markings on the road, no working lights or other traffic systems. Joshua guessed there wasn’t the volume of road traffic to justify the upkeep.

  It was a different way of life now, here on the Datum, Joshua was learning. The population densities had dropped so much, and the old globalized civilization had pretty much broken down. The days when you would use a cell phone made in Finland, to order a pizza made with ingredients from east Asia, and delivered by some guy who was an immigrant from Chile, were long gone. On the Datum, and indeed the stepwise worlds, people travelled a lot less geographically, and sourced their stuff much more locally, than they used to. Nobody used the roads any more, or the rail, or the planes.

  And the countryside through which this road threaded was transformed too. In places the ground was flooded, and culverts and banks had been hastily dug to preserve the road itself. Joshua imagined drains clogging after a few years without maintenance, and the land reverting to the marsh from which much of the city’s real estate had long ago been reclaimed. On higher ground, meanwhile, the old prairie had mostly died back, the lovely waist-high flowers that had once characterized this time of year gone, leaving sparse plains colonized by short grasses – it almost looked like Arctic tundra to Joshua. The forest clumps looked ravaged, with the green of pine trees sprouting from clusters of dead oaks and spruce. Even the state tree, the sugar maple, was supposedly extinct here, he’d learned.

  The world was silent too, the birds stilled. Joshua vaguely wondered what was going on in the lakes, which ought to be clear of ash and human pollutants by now. He guessed the birds would be back, northern-latitude species anyhow. But what about the fish?

  The trouble was that after Yellowstone it was as if the climate zones had suddenly all shifted hundreds of miles south, maybe as much as a thousand, so that the latitude of Madison was now like the southern coast of Alaska had been. And life couldn’t react that quickly. Only a handful of the native species were able to prosper in the new landscape. One day, he supposed, the north Canadian flora would transplant itself down here wholesale, the pines and the birch and the tall grass prairie. But for a long while this landscape was going to look desolate.

  They did pass a field crowded with strange, swollen shapes, each taller than an adult human being, and with a strange scent of cheese on the air. Joshua remembered how he and Lobsang had found such fungi on a world far beyond the Datum, in the course of their pioneering Journey all those years ago: a fungus that had proven easy to grow and yet highly nutritious, which Lobsang had threatened to bring home and sell to the fast-food industry. Now, in this long post-Yellowstone winter, that discovery seemed to have at last come into its own.

  After a couple of miles they crossed the West Beltline Highway. Here there was still a working lights-controlled crossing system, and they had to wait. Though some of its lanes had been closed, and the bridge by which the highway had once crossed over Mineral Point Road was evidently disused, the highway itself was still open, and it supported a trickle of traffic. Most of the vehicles Joshua saw were electric, like Phyllida’s, but there was some older pre-Yellowstone stock refitted with big fat gasifier cylinders, fuel derived from the burning of wood: it was a sight like a news clip from World War Two, to Joshua’s eyes.

  The highway junction was blazoned with bright orange warning signs, and that gave Phyllida the chance to chatter about the radiation-danger Zone system that had been established around Madison. Joshua remembered some of this, but he had never stayed in Datum Madison long enough for it to matter. The Red Zone extended a couple of miles around the Capitol building, or its ruin, where the anti-steppers’ nuke had been detonated, back in ’30. These days you were allowed in there at your own risk, but there were nightly sweeps by automated units and foot-patrol cops to stop anybody staying over. An Amber Zone stretched the best part of ten miles out from downtown, and so spanned the whole of Madison to the west to beyond the Beltline, to the south beyond Lake Monona and to Fitchburg, to the east well beyond the interstate to communities like Cottage Grove, and off to the north up beyond Dane County airport to De Forest and Sun Prairie. Phyllida said a kind of lobe of amber extended further to the east, because that was where the prevailing wind had happened to blow much of the fallout on the day of the nuke. Here you were allowed to reside, but you were subject to mandatory annual health checks, especially the children. And then there was a Yellow Zone that spread in a rough circle of radius fifty miles around downtown, just to keep you aware of the blight that lay at the heart of the area.

  They drove on in, through more built-up neighbourhoods, mostly abandoned.

  ‘Some people think the Zoning should be dropped,’ Phyllida said brightly. ‘The residual radiation’s supposed to be back to not much above the old background level by now. Except for caesium-137 of course,’ she said with an air of familiarity. ‘That is still a menace in the food chain, such as in game and freshwater fish and mushrooms, which was just what people were living off after we ran out of food after Yellowstone, wouldn’t you know it? But everybody says the ash and stuff from the volcano will probably do you a lot more harm than the radiation ever would. The authorities just want to monitor things, I suppose, and there’s no harm in that.’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘I suppose nobody knows for sure.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘People ask about it when they come to stay. We keep pamphlets. Sometimes we get medical teams and so on, come to study the ongoing effects. And sometimes people just come to see, to be tourists. Some of them brag that they’ve been to all three pre-Yellowstone civilian nuclear strike zones, in Japan and here. Like they’re collecting the experience.’

  ‘Odd.’

  ‘They pay their way, and we make a living.’ She glanced at him. ‘But most of our visitors are like you, with family here – or at least they had family here . . .’

  ‘My wife and I both grew up here in Madison. In the pre-nuke days. We never knew each other back then. After Step Day she made a trek with her family, and they built a town in the Corn Belt.’

  ‘Where’s that? I’ve never been much further than West 5, for the government offices there and the hospitals.’

  ‘Oh, about a hundred thousand steps out. This was before the twains, and they walked out there. And then when we married we lived a lot further out, more than a million steps.’

  ‘Gosh.’

  ‘But when she died, sh
e wanted to be brought back here. She was cremated.’

  ‘You brought her ashes back, then.’

  Not me, he thought. He had gone the other way, off into the High Meggers yet again, escaping from it all. And Rod, their son, had escaped too, disappearing into the Long Earth green with his elusive companions. It was Katie and Harry, Helen’s sister and her husband, who had had to bring her home to Forest Hill. They’d hardly spoken to Joshua since.

  He said only, ‘Something like that.’

  Much of the housing stock here was long abandoned, and thirty years after Yellowstone there were some pretty mature shrubs and trees colonizing front lawns and parks. They passed one big old shopping mall that had been converted into a ‘reclamation centre’, according to a big federal government sign. You could bring any of the enduring waste you could still find from the pre-Yellowstone years, near-indestructible foam coffee cups and aluminium cans and bottles of plastic and glass, decades old but some as pristine as when they were manufactured. Here, Repatriation money was being used to process such garbage of the past into useful goods to support the future.

  By the time they reached Forest Hill they were just a few miles from downtown. There were posts on the sidewalk giving distances to the perimeter of the inner Red Zone. Joshua began to see damage he thought must be associated with the nuke: roofless wooden-framed buildings just rotting away, concrete structures that were windowless shells. But life sprouted wherever it could, the green of weeds breaking through abandoned driveways, flowers swaying on dirt-covered windowsills in the June light.

  After she’d parked up, Phyllida offered to walk him to the grave marker, but he refused. She did check he had a working cell phone, and made him promise to call her if he needed a ride home. He chafed a little at this fussing, but a good heart had always been a characteristic of the Greens. And besides, his pride wasn’t what it had been. Not since he’d needed a troll to wipe his backside.

  Once he was inside the cemetery, however, and began his hobbling exploration, he regretted turning down her offer of help. He’d logged on ahead and had downloaded a plot number and a rough map, but it hadn’t occurred to him that since Yellowstone the cemeteries in Madison, indeed all over the Datum no doubt, had been forced to become a lot bigger than they’d once been. Forest Hill had colonized what had once been a golf course, and also, he figured out, a residential area between its old southern boundary and Monroe Street, an area probably burned out after the nuke. But even in these extensions the plots were squeezed in tight.

  It was a gruesome odyssey.

  The sun was high in a cloud-speckled sky by the time he found Helen’s plot; he was sweating, wheezing a little – maybe there was still some ash in this foul Datum air – and he leaned heavily on his stick as he peered down at the little marker. It was a modest marble slab set in a square of gravel, with the inscription in a neat, apparently machine-worked font. He read the words aloud. ‘To the memory of Helen Green Valienté Doak, wife of Joshua Valienté, wife of Benjamin Doak, mother of Daniel Rodney, 2013–2067. And to the memory of Rodney Green, 2012–2051 . . .’

  I kept my promise, he told Helen silently.

  There was a hand on his shoulder. ‘You found her.’

  Joshua turned. ‘Nelson. Didn’t hear you coming. I’m losing my survival skills.’

  ‘You are if a clumsy ox like me managed to sneak up on you.’ Nelson Azikiwe, wearing a sober black overcoat, bent a little stiffly to see the stone.

  ‘She wanted to come back home in the end.’

  ‘I can understand that. Personally, I have a plot marked out in my old parish of St John on the Water. Well, as a former incumbent my name is already on a plaque in the church, in gold leaf.’

  ‘Very tasteful. Helen’s family is all over the place. Her father’s buried at Valhalla. Katie, her sister, and her family will be staying at Reboot.’

  ‘What about you, Joshua? Where will your final resting place be?’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘Wherever I fall over, I guess. I’d rather not provide a snack for some ugly High Meggers predator, however. And especially not a croc.’

  Nelson squinted at the marker. ‘So brother Rodney is here with her.’

  ‘That was one reason she wanted to come home, I think. For Rod’s sake. He didn’t see any of the family before he died, in prison. She had his ashes brought here. I think she always felt guilty about Rod.’

  ‘I remember the story.’

  ‘Here in Madison the perps of the nuke attack remain notorious, as you can imagine. So we tried to keep the existence of this plot a secret. I said we shouldn’t even have Rod’s name on the stone, but Helen always insisted on that. If the stone was ever desecrated—’

  ‘She will lie safe,’ came a new voice. ‘You can rely on me for that, Joshua.’

  Startled, they both turned.

  The newcomer appeared to be another elderly man, dressed in jeans and a loose jacket, almost as sober as Nelson in his overcoat. He was entirely bald, clean-shaven, his features rather nondescript. The lines around his eyes and mouth and on his forehead gave an impression of age, certainly, but that was indeterminate too.

  ‘You’ve got a new face,’ Joshua said by way of greeting.

  Nelson looked the newcomer up and down. ‘A whole new ambulant unit, in fact. Impressive-looking. But rather heavy-set?’

  Joshua said, ‘And you got your arm back.’

  ‘The damaged copy you brought back from the world of the Traversers, Joshua, had served its purpose. It is now in a transEarth vault, where the various improvisations that were forced on me to survive years of isolation are being studied for potential future value.’

  Nelson smiled. ‘No sandals and robe?’

  ‘These days I prefer to remain anonymous.’

  ‘Except when you choose not to be,’ Joshua said wryly. ‘You say you’re protecting Helen’s grave . . .’

  ‘You know me, Joshua. I see the world turn – all the worlds – I see thistledown fall on a gravestone.’ He sighed. ‘But I can make other eyes turn away – electronic eyes, at least. The stone isn’t even marked on most plots of the cemetery. I made sure you downloaded a version which had the correct entry.’

  Joshua frowned. ‘So you saw me coming.’

  Nelson touched his arm. ‘He watches over us with the best of intentions.’

  ‘So he always says, Nelson.’ He faced the ambulant unit. ‘So what do we call you this time? George Abrahams?’

  The ambulant unit smiled at last, and its rather stiff face was transformed. ‘“Lobsang” will do.’

  ‘It’s good to see you again,’ Joshua said grudgingly.

  The unit considered this. ‘In spite of everything?’

  ‘Consider that a standard caveat.’

  ‘Indeed. I have missed you too. Well, here we are reunited. Look at the three of us, relics of an age gone by. Do you recall the movie Space Cowboys? In which Clint Eastwood and other veterans—’

  Joshua held his hands up. ‘Know it by heart.’

  ‘Well, rather like the Cowboys, we have one last mission, gentlemen.’

  Joshua said, ‘So I hear. We’re going to find Nelson’s grandson, and bring him home. One last hurrah. Though I’ve no idea how to go about it. Whereas you, Lobsang—’

  ‘I have a plan, of course.’

  Nelson seemed eager, energized. ‘You do?’

  ‘And I know precisely where we will begin. We will follow a trail of breadcrumbs laid by a much abler agency than even I ever was.’

  ‘You mean the Next,’ Joshua guessed.

  ‘And we’ll begin just where it all started for you, Joshua. With a boy, in a children’s home that once stood on Allied Drive, since relocated to Madison West 5. Back to the beginning, you see.

  ‘Well, that’s the plan. We can go back to West 5 whenever we are ready. But I wondered if you might wish to see central Madison first.’

  Joshua grunted. ‘I haven’t been back there since Yellowstone.’

  �
�It’s only a few miles from here, and an easy walk. But I have a cart.’ He glanced at the two of them, Nelson corset-stiff and Joshua leaning heavily on his cane. ‘I thought that might be wise.’

  ‘Perceptive as ever, Lobsang,’ Joshua said. He took a breath, stood straight, and turned away from Helen’s marker.

  52

  TO JOSHUA’S UNTUTORED eye, the open-top electric cart looked identical to Phyllida Green’s – a wheeled box of some smooth white plastic. He did wonder how it kept its energy topped up. From supply points in the street?

  For the first few minutes Lobsang drove respectfully slowly, and the cart moved almost silently along the roughly restored asphalt of Monroe Street. By now they were well within Phyllida’s Red Zone, as Joshua could tell from a plethora of signposts with glaring scarlet warning discs, radiation-hazard symbols, and free-call emergency telephones. Yellowstone ash was heaped up by the side of the road, and filled up the interiors of the roofless houses, as if it had been poured in.

  The cart jolted over a bump in the road, making the two old men in the back groan. Looking over his shoulder, Joshua saw that the asphalt had been melted here, and had then solidified in a frozen wave.

  They were reaching downtown now, the central zone of the nuclear devastation, and Lobsang slowed further. Here, many buildings had been flattened to their foundations, though others, some of the more solidly built office blocks and public buildings, had withstood the blast to varying extents. Of course nothing had been rebuilt; only gaudily coloured monitoring stations and emergency medical centres had been erected amid the ruins. But the green was sprouting everywhere it could, pushing through layers of cracked concrete and asphalt, despite the radiation, despite the climate collapse. Life going on.

  The mound on which the Capitol building had once stood had been blown apart. They slowed to a halt in the rubble. Flowers swayed between concrete blocks.

  ‘I suppose I owe you both an apology,’ Nelson said. ‘It’s my fault you are both here. Drawn away from places you’d much sooner be, I’m sure.’