The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘Damn it,’ Maggie said. ‘All my layers of security around this thing, and here was the true threat – right at the very centre.’

  ‘That was the idea,’ Marvin said contemptuously.

  ‘It was a schizophrenic stratagem,’ Black said. ‘And this was our last chance to use it – to act before, as you say, self-replication moved the build process out of human control altogether. Would it have worked? The weapon was designed by Next; I’m not equipped to say. But they needed my help, you see, in ensuring that the virus was loaded into a component assembled in one of my factories, that it was properly delivered . . .

  ‘Admiral Kauffman, I cooperated with these clever but unwise saboteurs for two reasons. First because I thought these Next contact-pessimists might have a point. Maybe we should retain an ability to stop this thing, in our own interests. And second because I wanted to retain control. To have a veto.’ He raised a kind of remote control in his bony hand. ‘An off switch of my own, in case I decided the virus should not be delivered after all. And that has been my verdict. The device really is quite harmless now. And that will be the basis of my defence when they bring the prosecutions.’

  Maggie turned on Marvin Lovelace. ‘Why? Why the hell would you do this? What gives you the right?’

  He smiled, his eyes hidden by dark glasses. ‘It’s not a question of rights. We are Next. We are trying to protect you from yourselves—’

  ‘It was not like that,’ Indra Newton blurted. She looked around, uncertain.

  Maggie said, ‘Go on, Indra.’

  ‘I heard them talk.’ Her accent was odd, Joshua thought, as if English was an entirely foreign language to her, studied from machine recordings. ‘Not Ruby and Ronald: their dilemma was genuine, deep, philosophical. Marvin and the others were different. They don’t care about humans. They don’t care much about the Next. They thought the Thinker would be smarter than them, and they didn’t want that. They want to be the smartest, for ever. And—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They’re bored. They’re surrounded by worlds full of stupid people. They’re bored ordering stupid people around, manipulating them. It’s too easy. So they want to smash things up, for fun. Why not?’

  Marvin made to lunge at the girl, but the marines kept him back.

  Maggie said, ‘I believe you, Indra. I knew a Next once, called David. A super-intelligent monster.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lobsang said gravely. ‘A bored god. And what is such a god to do? The Olympian gods warred with each other, and consumed human lives in the process . . . It is an intrinsic flaw in Next psychology, it seems. But still, how – disappointing – to witness this.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Joshua said. ‘You kind of expect more, don’t you?’

  Maggie said, ‘We’re not done, Mr Black. You’re right: there will have to be an inquiry into this. But why did you stop them, in the end?’

  ‘Because – Join us! I believe we have to trust these beings who call to us from another star. It’s that or turn our backs on the future for good. I want to see your bathyscaphe launched!’

  Bizarrely he won a round of applause, from Lee, from Dev, even from some of the marines.

  ‘But,’ Lobsang said more cynically, ‘you have other agendas in play. You always do, Douglas.’

  Black smiled, his face creasing. ‘Of course you’re right, old friend. It does me no harm at all to cement my reputation with these Next, who seem set to play such a significant role in all our futures. One must ask, you see – who is it who has the most to lose, if some form of Homo superior is to walk among us? Oh, it’s not the little fellow with his bit of property and his small dreams. He will probably be better off, in a better-run world. No, it’s the powerful and the rich, it is the politicians, the bankers, the industrialists who will find their position at the very top of our society threatened. People like me. After all, the Emperor of all the Neanderthals will have been just another hairy man-ape to the Cro-Magnons, won’t he? But I hope, you see, to leverage what control I do still have over my affairs into some kind of credit with our new lords of the universe. And hence my willingness to pull apart this petty little plot.’

  Lobsang was studying him, his artificial face inscrutable. ‘A cynic might even suspect you set up the whole thing for precisely that purpose.’

  Black raised snow-white eyebrows. ‘Lobsang! I’m shocked.’

  Joshua patted Lobsang’s shoulder. ‘To hell with him. One more Journey, Lobsang? Just like old times?’

  Lobsang looked around. ‘Very well. We’ve a lot of work to do. And I need to tell Nelson that we’re going after his grandson, at last . . .’

  Indra touched Joshua’s arm. ‘And I still want to ride in your pod, Mr Valienté.’

  ‘Bravo,’ Black called from his screen. ‘Oh, bravo, child!’

  56

  (Extract from Make Sure You Get This Down Correctly For Once In Your Life, Jocasta: The Authorized Biography of Professor Wotan Ulm, by Constance Mellanier. Valhalla: Transworld Harper, 2061. Reproduced with permission.)

  TOWARDS THE END of his life Ulm continued to speculate constructively, if controversially, on the nature of the Long Earth, and its access by humans through the process known as stepping. Of course he could be somewhat dismissive of unfounded theorizing, as is demonstrated by this verbatim transcript from a conversation with the author very late in Ulm’s life:

  ‘All this nonsense people spout about the Long Earth, as they’ve spouted since I was in short pants, and they’ve got not a jot further. Oh, we hear all about uncurled dimensions in a higher plane. Or, we’re told, there are ten to power five hundred and whatnot possible universes out there in the “multiverse”, as predicted by string theory. Or there are m-branes and p-branes bouncing off each other like puppies in a sack. What nonsense, all of it.

  ‘Stepping is human. And it is in our humanity that we will find its explanation.

  ‘It seems clear to me from a number of my studies, particularly concerning brain-damage cases, that stepping – at least, what has become known as the classic “Linsay step” process – has a strong overlap with seeing. And by seeing I don’t mean the simple physical mechanism of the eye, or even the transcription of visual signals into messages in the cortex: I mean the deep inner conscious sensation of seeing, of gathering information from a scene. And from there it is a short conceptual distance between the faculty of seeing and the faculty of imagining.

  ‘Mixed up in all that is our ability to step.

  ‘The case of Bettany Diamond (reference: Mann, 2029) makes this clear. Here was a woman who could not step, physically, and yet she was capable of seeing into the neighbouring worlds. She saw her children playing in a garden, in the stepwise footprint of her living room. Yet she could not touch them.

  ‘Stepping, then, is related to seeing, to imagining. And the greater the faculty of imagination, the greater the ability to step.

  ‘But that can’t be all there is, can it? What else, then, Jocasta? If you only had the wit, you would be asking that very question. And the answer may surprise you. The other faculty you need to be able to step, I propose, is that you must be able to convince yourself you are uncertain.

  ‘Think of the famous quantum cat in the box, threatened with poison by the disintegration, or not, of an unstable atomic nucleus. Is it alive or dead? Those are two possible quantum states, and quantum uncertainty ensures that we cannot know which is “real” until we open the box to see, and one of those potential states is actualized. Very well.

  ‘Now consider yourself, Jocasta. At any instant your location is described by many quantum states. One has you here, in this room, with me. Another has you on the moon. Another has you down the corridor, making me a better cup of tea than the last dose of tar you inflicted on me. Still another has you on Earth West 2, a step away from the here and now. And so on. Some of these places are far more probable locations for you to be in than others.

  ‘You are certain you are here, are you not? Ah, but just suppo
se – if only you had the wit – that you could imagine that you are uncertain where you are. For if you are uncertain, in a quantum-physical sense, your location becomes uncertain too – you are the prime quantum observer of yourself, after all. You become smeared, so to speak, across the adjacent possible, among the infinite number of possible locations where you may possibly be. Then if you subsequently become certain that you are actually in West 2, and not here with me in West 1, then that’s where you are – do you see? You have collapsed the quantum functions once more; you have stepped.

  ‘Imagination, and a kind of wilful uncertainty. That’s all there is to stepping, Jocasta. And the finer the mind, the greater the ability to step. We have seen this with natural talents who find “soft places”, apparent flaws in the connectivity of the Long Earth, which can carry them thousands of worlds away. Perhaps the even stranger flaw that was discovered at New Springfield was evidence of another kind of mind: a mind capable of stepping into another Long world entirely.

  ‘I say “finer minds”, by the way. I think we Homo sapiens should always remember that the minds that created the Long Earth were not our own. It was our cousins, the trolls and other humanoids, who went out a million years before us, and dreamed the Long Earth into existence as they went, step by step. Not us.

  ‘And as to why such Long worlds should exist at all – consider this. Starting with rocks flying around an infant solar system, it seems to be very hard to make one world capable of producing a mind – in the solar system it took billions of years to produce a fecund Earth. But having made one such world, if you could just run off copies, like pages off a printing press . . . But it is a cooperative process. Sapience conjured the Long Earth into existence. Maybe the Long Earth itself, having nurtured sapience, is now using that sapience to dream its way to infinity.

  ‘What kind of stepping would an arbitrarily powerful intellect be capable of? Even I can scarcely speculate. Certainly I won’t live to see it. Perhaps you will, my dear. Perhaps you will. But now I’m tired. So very tired. Turn the lights out when you leave, would you, Jocasta? . . .’

  57

  ON A BRIGHT October day, more than three million Earths from the Datum, a pod sat at the heart of the Little Cincinnati compound, that island of human enterprise in the great technological ocean that was the Thinker. The squat craft had been set up on a broad concrete square intended for landing heavy cargo twains, but today the only twains visible hovered in the autumn sky above, watchful, camera pods gleaming.

  Joshua Valienté hobbled across the asphalt, with Lobsang, Maggie Kauffman and Dev Bilaniuk. They all wore NASA-type blue jumpsuits, and carried breathing masks. They were late, and they were hurrying. A heavily armed and watchful escort of Navy personnel accompanied them, led by Jane Sheridan. There had been specific threats against the project from the more extreme contact-pessimist types, and nobody was taking any chances.

  As they neared the pod, camera lights glared in their eyes, and they had to push through a small crowd of applauding workers and other well-wishers. Joshua, pivoting on his walking cane, felt self-conscious, even ridiculous. And yet there was something glorious about it all. As if the ship was to be powered, not by any kind of technology, but by a surge of shared enthusiasm. He wasn’t about to express such thoughts out loud, however.

  ‘God damn it,’ Maggie snapped. ‘I haven’t got time for this Right Stuff crap. We’re overdue as it is.’

  Lobsang smiled easily. ‘Go with the flow, Maggie. The corporate people and the government have stumped up the funds for all this. We’d never have got our little craft built in three months otherwise. The contact-pessimist lobby in government has had to be bought off too. And the way they’re clawing back the money, the way they’re generating political credit, is by splashing us across the news as fast as the outernet will carry it. So smile for the cameras.’

  ‘I’m a Navy admiral, damn it. We’re selling our souls to this circus.’

  ‘My own life story shows it’s always possible to buy your soul back . . .’

  At last they got through the crowd, passed inside a cordon of rope, and faced their ship. The craft, a squat cone standing on three stubby legs, was swathed in black and white insulation that was broken by stubby antennas and glistening lenses and attitude-thruster nozzles that gaped like the mouths of baby birds. Any clear area, it seemed to Joshua, was plastered with flags, predominantly the holographic Stars and Stripes of the US Aegis, the Long Unity Earth-in-cradled-hands sigil, and corporate logos: the marching lumberjacks of the LETC, the chesspiece knight of Lobsang’s own transEarth Institute, the GapSpace roundel. A couple of trucks were nuzzled up against the ship, pumping fuel, water, air and other necessities into the craft, and white-coated engineers fussed over last-minute adjustments.

  This was all very small scale compared to what Joshua remembered from the old Cape Canaveral days of the space shuttle. Even so the pod looked familiar. ‘It’s like an Apollo command module on steroids,’ he said.

  Dev Bilaniuk was totally at home with this technology – which, of course, was the reason he was on the crew. ‘This is Gap chic, Joshua. Yes, it is kind of like Apollo. The design is based on our own stepper shuttle design, which carries crews across into the Gap itself. And that in turn is based, not on Apollo, but on SpaceX tech – kind of a son of Apollo from the 2010s. Bigger, roomier, modern materials . . .’ Dev caressed the side of the ship with one hand. ‘We considered a lot of options for the pod. Maybe a literal bathyscaphe, from ocean explorations; those things are pretty rugged. The chassis of a marine corps armoured vehicle was suggested too. But we went for a minimal spacecraft design, in case we found ourselves falling into some kind of Gap; the ship is vacuum-proof, and we might need to regularize our momentum and position to be able to get back, and we’ll need attitude thrusters for that.’

  Joshua said, ‘I thought there was talk of adding a layer of computronium.’ He grinned. ‘I kind of liked the idea of riding a spaceship made of diamond.’

  ‘And I vetoed it,’ Maggie said sternly. ‘We don’t want to be venturing into the unknown, inside a hull of unknown materials. Let’s minimize the variables here.’

  Lobsang said, ‘I’m reassured to find you riding along with us, Admiral Kauffman.’

  ‘Well, the Navy is sure as hell going to stay in command of this thing.’

  ‘But we don’t need an admiral. I’m sure there are many less senior officers who could have fulfilled this mission.’ Lobsang sounded as if he was teasing her, Joshua thought. ‘Someone younger, with better reflexes, vision, hearing, coordination—’

  ‘All right, Lobsang, thank you. It was my decision. There was room for only one Navy officer after you filled the thing with your damn circus of a crew. And I do have some experience leading expeditions into remote stepwise locations, as you may recall.’ She grinned, wolfish. ‘And besides, how could I resist a jaunt like this? Also I am still one of the few commanders who’ll accept a troll on her ship.’

  ‘Sancho’s coming,’ Joshua said firmly. ‘This is as much his mission as mine—’

  ‘Dad! Hey, Dad!’

  Joshua spun around so fast he nearly lost his balance on his stick.

  There was Rod, inside the roped-off area, but being held back by a white-coated technician. Behind him, beyond the rope, was a young woman, tanned, brunette, dressed in what Joshua thought of as Sally Linsay chic: practical traveller’s gear of faded jeans, multi-pocketed jacket, sun-faded hat. And, Joshua could see immediately, she was heavily pregnant – close to term if Joshua was any judge, which he wasn’t.

  He ignored the techs, the wary soldiers, Maggie Kauffman’s exasperated glare, and hobbled over. He and Rod just stood there for a moment, face to face, hands at their sides.

  Then the young woman called, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rod, we came all this way . . .’

  Rod shrugged. Joshua shrugged back. Then they hugged.

  ‘Careful with the astronaut suit,’ Joshua said, trying to cover for
the choked-up feeling that was threatening to overwhelm him. ‘And don’t give me a cold, damn it.’ He glanced over Rod’s shoulder. ‘Is that—?’

  Rod beckoned. ‘Come on over here, Sofia. Oh, ignore those Navy goons. Dad – Joshua Valienté – meet Sofia Piper.’

  Joshua shook her hand formally; she had a strong grip. ‘Rod mentioned you. And, umm . . .’

  She blushed, grinning. ‘And the next generation. I know.’ She patted her stomach.

  Rod said, ‘Look, Dad, here you are going off on another jaunt. But I wanted to see you off this time. Even I think this is a pretty cool thing to be doing, as far as I understand it.’

  ‘Praise indeed.’

  ‘And I wanted . . . well . . . ah, shit.’

  Sofia just snorted. ‘You’re as emotionally constipated as each other. Look, Mr Valienté, Rod wanted to make sure this little one met you, so to speak, before you left. Whatever happens we can tell him or her that we were here today.’

  ‘You mean, in case I don’t come back?’ Joshua grinned. ‘You can bet your house I’m coming back.’

  ‘Dad, we don’t have a house.’

  Maggie Kauffman was at his shoulder. ‘You won’t be leaving at all, Valienté, unless you get your butt over to that ship right now. There are volatiles boiling off as we speak, and that’s just what’s coming out of my ears.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Hastily Joshua hugged Rod again, and gave Sofia a peck on the cheek – and that was that.

  Then he hobbled after Maggie, back to the shuttle.

  Dev was standing before the little ship with an expression of pride. ‘We need a name. All exploratory spacecraft have names. Eagle, Intrepid, Aquarius . . .’