Lee Malone came back to speak to them, though at Maggie’s stern glare she sat down and strapped herself in. She held up the component she’d shown them before. ‘I’ll be installing this later.’ A slab of crystal, winking lights. ‘You can see why we call this machine the Thinker. Every gram of it is devoted to information processing – to intelligence.’
‘And we’re driving through it,’ Joshua said. ‘As if we’re driving through an immense brain. What the hell is it doing with all that brainpower?’
They came to a place where the engineered landscape seemed to have split along a tremendous fault. The bus slowed, and the passengers peered out at an uplifted cliff that rose a good fifty yards above the level of the road. The edge looked fractured, and sparks, like miniature lightning flashes, crackled across the broken face. But Joshua saw connections, scab-like extrusions, seeping down the uplifted face to the lower levels. A healing process beginning, perhaps. Something about it made Joshua shudder.
‘Earthquake,’ Maggie said. ‘A small one, but it did a lot of damage. Well, I say a lot – minor on the Thinker’s overall scale. You’ll see it seems to be repairing itself. We did send human crews out here, but they didn’t know where to start.’
Joshua, staring at the computronium cliff, thought he saw movement, short noon-time shadows shifting across the broken faces. ‘I could swear I see somebody moving.’
‘Could be.’ Maggie snapped her fingers to attract the attention of a junior officer, who began to make calls. ‘This is a machine as big as a continent, Joshua. We’ve had people trying to mine the stuff – there is gold in there, platinum. It’s hard to patrol it all, although we do try. Drive on, Dev.’
The scenery soon became numbing. The scale was literally superhuman, after all.
Joshua’s head started to nod. The troll did fall asleep, and snored enthusiastically.
After around an hour, the bus slowed. Dev Bilaniuk announced they were arriving at Hillsboro – or, rather, a station at the footprint of that Datum community. They drove into another fenced compound, much smaller than Little Cincinnati, just a few acres kept clear of obvious Thinker elements. At the heart of this facility was another wire fence enclosing a much smaller area, with its own watchtowers and marines hefting automatic weapons. Joshua wondered what secret they were guarding here.
And just beyond, not much further to the east, Joshua saw open countryside. The crystalline layers of computronium that washed around this compound came to a ragged border; this was an edge of the Thinker.
‘Everybody out,’ Maggie said as the bus rolled to a halt. ‘There’ll be coffee, food. I’d advise you to use the bathroom on the bus, however; the local facilities as used by marine jarheads and Navy grunts aren’t likely to be pristine . . .’
Joshua clambered out of the bus with some difficulty, refusing help. Standing with Lobsang, leaning on his stick, he accepted a coffee.
On the side of the empty bus, a panel was alight with the image of Douglas Black, his head cradled on what looked like fresh pillows. When he saw Lobsang, he made a gesture from Joshua’s distant childhood, forked fingers pointing to his own eyes, then outward. I’m watching you. Black grinned boyishly.
Maggie was intrigued by Lobsang. ‘You’re drinking the coffee?’
‘For the flavour, and to be sociable. I can ape most human functions.’
‘I’ve ordered food and drink for the troll,’ Maggie said. ‘A variety. I’m used to provisioning my own troll crew members. I know they’re picky.’
‘Sancho isn’t too choosy,’ Joshua said. ‘Don’t give him caffeine, however. I tried him on an espresso once. Boy, did I regret that!’
An officer came jogging up. ‘The lollipops are ready for you, ma’am.’
Joshua and Lobsang exchanged a glance. Lollipops? That word had only one meaning for Joshua, and not a pleasant one.
Maggie led them to the central wired-off compound. ‘Just to warn you, what you’re going to see is a Next project, not ours. I’m told the individuals involved, or at least their parents, had a free choice about participating. Try not to judge what you see, not to react . . .’
The two Next sat in chairs, facing each other; they had metal frames helping support their heads, and drip tubes snaked into their bare arms. Their bodies seemed almost normally proportioned, and they were dressed in light robes, like hospital gowns. But their heads were grotesquely swollen, the craniums all but hairless, the big bubble-like skulls overwhelming their small faces. They were evidently a male and female, but it was hard to guess at their ages.
Attendants stood by this tableau, whether Next or human Joshua couldn’t have said. But the guards around the wire fence were US marines.
Lollipops. The memory surfaced slowly. It was forty years ago now. Joshua and Lobsang, during The Journey, had paused at a world more than a hundred and thirty thousand steps from the Datum. Here they had found evidence of a slaughter of human colonists . . . And, later, a very strange creature. Trying to help the big-brained elf as she gave birth, in his ignorance Joshua could have killed her.
The creatures in the pen were like Joshua’s lollipops, crossed with humans.
Roberta Golding joined them, walking over from the bus. ‘They are in no pain.’
Joshua frowned. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘It’s the first question people usually ask.’
‘And why the guards?’
Maggie said grimly, ‘They’re here because people have tried to terminate these two. Even some of our own personnel.’
Roberta said, ‘The marines protect Ronald and Ruby from such misguided acts of kindness.’
Joshua stared. ‘Ronald and Ruby?’
‘They have been genetically engineered, based on a humanoid type you yourself discovered, Joshua Valienté—’
‘What the hell are they doing here?’
Roberta sighed. ‘We are trying to communicate with the Thinker. It was Ronald and Ruby themselves who led our effort to translate the Invitation’s rather abstract and utterly alien vision into practical engineering. So they will always have an intimate connection with it, you see. And this particular location is dense with complex electromagnetic fields. Now, the human brain, or the processing that goes on in there, is also a matter of complex electromagnetic fields. And surely those fields could be manipulated by a sufficiently advanced technology: your thoughts could be shaped, your perceptions, your very memories altered, non-invasively but profoundly intimately. So we have brought Ronald and Ruby here in the hope of contact. It is hard to imagine a more complete communication, if it works . . .’
Joshua saw that Sancho had gone to the fence. The marines looked alarmed, but Maggie waved at them to let the troll pass. Sancho pressed his face to the wire and stared at the lollipops.
Joshua too found himself staring in utter dismay. He murmured, ‘Lobsang, tell me. How can people so smart commit something so self-evidently wrong as this?’
‘I know what you mean,’ Lobsang said grimly. ‘Maybe it’s because the minds of the Next themselves are so new. A hasty rewiring of a system that is after all millions of years old. Things go wrong when you grow too fast. We believe there are asylums at the Grange and elsewhere for the mentally ill – and of course we know of a few crazies who’ve made it to the human worlds, such as the Napoleons who escaped from Happy Landings by hijacking a Navy twain.’
‘And look at those two,’ Joshua said. ‘They hardly look healthy, do they?’
Lobsang said darkly, ‘But maybe they have their uses. Let’s find out.’
They walked back to the group.
Lobsang asked Roberta now, ‘So what success have you had with your communication experiment?’
‘None,’ said Maggie without hesitation.
‘Some,’ Roberta contradicted her.
Maggie put her hands on her hips and glared at her. ‘That’s news to me.’
Roberta, slim, quiet, looked at them all through her heavy glasses. ‘You must see the diffi
culty. The Thinker’s intellect is almost beyond our ability to comprehend. The totality of all human thought could pass through the mind of the Thinker in a few days. All of it, since we left the trees. How can we communicate with such a mind? Ruby has said that the Thinker manipulates whole systems of thought – whole sciences, complete philosophies – as we manipulate words in a sentence.’
Lobsang considered this. ‘And yet these two have spoken with the machine, to some extent. Can they say what it wants?’
Roberta looked at the lollipops. ‘Join us. That’s still the basic message it’s giving us.’
Maggie shook her head. ‘Join us? How? Are we supposed to build some kind of wormhole, like in Contact?’
‘Nothing like that. The lollipops say they dream of opening doors.’
‘Opening doors.’ Suddenly Joshua saw it. He had, after all, lived through Step Day. ‘Stepping. This is all about stepping.’
Lobsang stood back and smiled. ‘That’s it. We should have seen it from the beginning. And it’s just like New Springfield. I was there.’
Maggie frowned, as ever wary of rapid developments, of disruption to her carefully controlled order. ‘Lobsang, speak to me.’
‘Admiral, this Invitation is a Long Earth phenomenon. We know that. What’s the most fundamental thing about the Long Earth? Stepping – the act of mind and body that enables you to travel from one world to the next. But stepping can be more than that. You remember Sally Linsay and her soft places – her leaps across the Long Earth? Then in New Springfield we found the silver beetles—’
‘Who were able to step between different planets,’ Joshua said. ‘Tangled-up Long worlds.’
Dev said excitedly, ‘And perhaps that’s why we received the Invitation just now. Because they could tell, somehow, that somebody had made that step North, into another world.’
Lobsang and Joshua exchanged a glance. ‘The Prime Directive,’ said Joshua. ‘He’s right. That’s why we received the Invitation just now.’
Lobsang nodded. ‘We always wondered where everybody was. They were out there, but they were waiting until we were ready – we could only join the party when we discovered how to step in advanced ways. And at New Springfield we achieved the step equivalent of warp drive. Stan Berg was our Zefram Cochrane. And, right on cue, here come the Vulcans.’
Maggie sighed. ‘You do realize that nobody here knows what the hell you two are talking about?’
But Roberta said carefully, ‘Admiral, based on what I know of our communication with the Thinker – this feels right. A partial perception, but a good intuition.’ She smiled brilliantly. ‘I was always one of those who argued for including humans at the very heart of the project. And this shows I was right!’
‘I’m happy for you,’ Maggie said flatly. ‘So what next, Lobsang?’
‘Admiral, we must accept the Invitation. The finer the mind, the more advanced the ability to step. I think this Thinker, this tremendous mind, is going to enable us to step out of this world altogether. And we’ll go – somewhere else. Just like the beetles.’
Maggie was still frowning. ‘I suppose that’s why I allowed you two to come here, to make these connections. But I don’t like it when things move too quickly. Where, then?’
Lobsang peered up at the sky. ‘Who knows? The Thinker may be able to tell us . . .’
‘I’d go,’ Lee said immediately. They all stared at her. ‘I’m just saying.’
Lobsang glanced at Indra Newton, standing some distance away. ‘And we may need another crew member. A specialist. In the end, the silver-beetle interface needed Stan Berg, remember, a super-stepper . . . Ah. All of which you Next foresaw, of course. And which is why you brought Indra here.’
Roberta smiled, only a little smugly now, Joshua thought. ‘We have tried to anticipate. Yes, we guessed this would involve a new kind of stepping; yes, we did learn from the experience at New Springfield. The stepwise connection with the beetles’ world seems to have been made accidentally – serendipitously. But we saw that Stan Berg was able consciously to change the connectivity of the Long Earth, even if it drained him to do it. All these suggest capabilities of still higher intelligences, who may manipulate their own Long worlds . . . In any event, if Ronald and Ruby are in communication with the Thinker, then we hope that they in turn can coach Indra in any necessary skills.’
Indra said quietly, ‘I’m Stan’s cousin. The family are intensely proud of his self-sacrifice. If I prove capable of this mission, I would be prepared to join the crew.’
Maggie snapped, ‘Who the hell said anything about a crew? You’re speaking of a journey, and, I’m guessing, into the utterly unknown. To hell with self-sacrifice. Will it be safe? Will we be able to breathe? Will we step out into the middle of – I don’t know – the heart of a sun?’
Lobsang smiled. ‘You’re a reader of Mellanier, I can tell.’
‘Who?’
‘A pod,’ said Joshua. ‘That’s what we need. Like 2001, Bowman through the Star Gate. We build a pod, and step over in that. Something like a bathyscaphe.’
‘Yes,’ Lobsang said. ‘Good. Something that will last long enough at least for the crew to survive, and step back to report on what’s on the other side.’
‘I’ll go too,’ Dev said promptly. ‘You’ll need a pilot.’
Maggie held up her hands. ‘Hold your horses. This boat that doesn’t yet exist, if it gets built at all, is going to be a Navy boat, and the Navy will get to choose the crew. If any. Which means me.’
Joshua had to grin. ‘Of course it does.’
Roberta Golding said, ‘This has been a surprisingly constructive encounter. Suddenly we have a plan, a product of us all working together, ourselves and—’
‘And us dim-bulbs?’ Joshua asked.
The Next woman smiled around at them all, brightly, without, Joshua thought, a grain of irony. And yet he couldn’t be sour. A new kind of journey faced him, a new direction. He felt the way he had on the day after Step Day, when he couldn’t wait to get hold of his Stepper box and stride out into the unknown.
‘OK,’ Maggie said, glancing at her watch. ‘Let’s finish the tour – and we are working to a schedule. Ms Malone, I believe you have a job to complete here.’
‘Of course.’ Lee dived into the bus, and returned with her slab of computronium. ‘We wanted to show you the detail of how we work around here. This component is to be installed at the periphery of the Thinker, not far away. Please, follow me . . .’
Lee led the way to the boundary of the computronium surface.
Joshua, glancing over his shoulder, saw that Douglas Black, as displayed on his screen on the bus, was watching intently. And so too were the Next, Lovelace and Indra Newton; they’d stood back from the lollipop compound, but now, after a significant glance between Lovelace and Black, they followed closely too. Joshua felt a tingle of suspicion. The atmosphere had changed; something was going on here. He recalled Lobsang’s suspicions of Black.
Only Sancho did not come. The troll stayed with his face pressed to the wire, his big fingers poking through the gaps, staring mournfully at Ruby and Ronald.
They gathered at the lip of the computronium sheet. Here the smart flooring was only a couple of feet thick, Joshua saw, and not yet anchored in the ground. Beyond, green grass grew, Earth grass innocent of the alien machinery that was about to overwhelm it.
Lee crouched down and held out the component she’d brought. ‘See how it will mate into this slot in the edge? Just as the design mandated. The tolerances are at the nano scale, and once it’s installed it will be integrated seamlessly . . . Of course tens of thousands of such pieces are installed automatically, every day. But this is actually one of the last wave of components to be assembled and delivered in this way.’
‘Self-replication,’ Maggie muttered. ‘That’s what it’s beginning to do. Eating its own way deeper into the earth, growing at the periphery . . . Making its own components from rock and air. After that point we won’t b
e able to stop it—’
‘Ms Malone, do not install that component.’
55
THE VOICE, COMING from a loudspeaker, startled them all.
Lee looked baffled. She stared down at the component in her hands, as if it had turned into a rattlesnake.
Joshua turned. The marines at the heart of the compound were looking puzzled too, and were fingering their weapons.
And Douglas Black, his image bright and colourful in the screen on the side of the bus, grinned. ‘Sorry to play the deus ex machina, so to speak.’
‘You’re not sorry about that at all,’ muttered Lobsang. ‘Joshua, I told you he was up to something.’
Black snapped out orders. ‘Marvin Lovelace, you should stand aside. Maggie, you may consider confining him for now.’
Maggie, obviously with no idea what was going on, nevertheless nodded to a couple of marines, who hurried to Lovelace’s side. ‘Mr Black, if you know something I don’t—’
‘Oh, many things fall into that category, my dear Admiral. But what’s relevant here is that I know what is hidden inside that component of Ms Malone’s. You needn’t worry, child, it’s quite harmless – now. But you may wish to take it back to your plant and check it over. Ms Malone is quite innocent in all this, by the way.
‘You see, Admiral Kauffman, some time ago I was approached by Marvin Lovelace and others of his associates from the Humble, and was asked to help them perpetrate an undercover scheme . . .’
There had been a kind of weapon built into Lee’s component, Joshua learned. A computer virus, or a heavily engineered descendant of those antique threats – a virus manufactured by Next technicians, a weapon designed by super-smart post-humans – in fact, they were told, its design had been sketched out by Ronald and Ruby themselves, even as they had designed their impossibly advanced alien machine. Evidently their own conflict about the wisdom of building this thing had run deep. They had wanted to be sure it had an off switch.
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