The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

Joshua said, ‘How about Uncle Arthur?’

  Lobsang smiled. ‘After Arthur C.?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Seems most appropriate.’

  Now Jane Sheridan ran forward with a kind of fat marker pen. ‘Allow me.’ And in a surprisingly flowing hand, she wrote ‘Uncle Arthur’ on a white patch of insulation near the ship’s snub nose.

  Maggie nodded approvingly. ‘Shall we board?’

  A tech held open a hatch.

  There was a low step, which Joshua had to negotiate awkwardly, using his cane. The tech, a bright young woman who looked about twelve years old to Joshua, offered him an arm, which he grumpily refused. Standing in the hatchway he glanced back one last time. From this slight elevation he spotted Rod and Sofia. And, over the heads of the pressing crowd, further away, beyond the engineering facilities and tents and dormitory blocks and chemical toilets of Little Cincinnati, he saw the eerie engineered landscape that enclosed all of this: the mind, artificial and alien, into whose dreams he was stepping today.

  None of this seemed real. Or maybe that was just his age. He turned away.

  It was a relief to escape from the October sun, the press of people, the glare of the camera lights, and enter the calm of the clean-smelling, brightly lit interior of the Uncle Arthur. Though he hadn’t actually seen his ship from the outside before – it had been one hell of a rush to get it built – he’d spent a lot of time in a mocked-up simulator of the interior; suddenly this was just like another training run.

  He found his seat, a hefty astronaut couch with heavy harness straps. On this middle deck Joshua was in a central seat, with Maggie settling in to his right and Lobsang to his left. Mercifully Joshua hadn’t had to climb the ladder to the upper deck, a few feet above him and separated by a mesh floor partition. Up there sat their ‘pilots’, if you could call them that: Dev Bilaniuk who ran the ship, Lee Malone, his backup, and Indra Newton, the very frail-looking Next girl whose stepping abilities, it was hoped, would carry them to – well, to whatever destination the Thinker and its makers had planned for them.

  Below, visible through another mesh floor, was Sancho. The lower deck was a storage area, and the troll was surrounded by a clutter of stuff – air tanks and recycling units, batteries, medical kit, anonymous white boxes that Joshua assumed were something to do with the mission’s science goals. The old troll was lying on his back in a heap of straw, with his big arms folded behind his head, draped in Joshua’s old survival blanket.

  Joshua rattled his cane on the floor. ‘Hey, old buddy. You hanging in down there?’

  ‘Hoo.’ Sancho raised a thumb. He looked supremely comfortable. But then, Joshua reflected, he usually did.

  There was a clang as the hatch was closed, and the last of the noise from outside was excluded. In the sudden hush, Joshua could hear the whir of fans and pumps. Through the small window before him, a disc of thick glass, he saw the technicians backing off, the well-wishers further out still waving. The armed Navy and marine grunts were still there, facing away from the ship and outwards at the crowds. Joshua knew there were more layers of security, the watchers in the towers and in the airborne twains, even small drone aircraft patrolling overhead.

  As he went through his own checks Lobsang murmured, ‘So how are you feeling, Joshua?’

  He thought about it. ‘Kind of like Step Day, I guess. I remember I built my Stepper box as well as I could, and I prepared to close the switch, and I had not the remotest idea what was going to happen . . .’

  Maggie said, ‘But you closed that damn switch anyhow.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She grinned fiercely. ‘Let’s do this thing. Mr Bilaniuk?’

  ‘I’m on it, ma’am,’ Dev called. ‘We just confirmed the hatch closed and sealed. We also sealed the inlet ports and the air vents. We’re now locked in and self-contained, and our environment sensors show that all is nominal—’

  Maggie snapped, ‘Stop speaking to history and get on with it, man.’

  Lee said dryly, ‘OK, Indra, are you ready?’

  ‘I think so . . .’

  Just like Stan Berg at New Springfield, Indra had the key responsibility, Joshua knew. She needed to be ready to step, not East or West, not across the Long Earth, but North or South, out of the plane of human imagination altogether. Ready to take the whole of this pod, and its passengers, with her.

  Or something like that. In the course of his career in the Long Earth and all its mysteries, Joshua had never tried to follow the more wu-wu theories of stepping. If this worked, then fine. If not, they’d be climbing out of this pod and back on to the concrete with red faces all round.

  Lee said, ‘Indra, let’s go through the procedure one last time. It’s just like we rehearsed, remember? I’ll set up the systems, and Dev will be in control of the piloting. I need to prime the ship’s rocket engines in case we find ourselves in a Gap and I have to kill our rotation velocity. And I have to arm the abort system in case something goes wrong with the rockets, in turn. We’d be kind of unlucky if both those things happened, but you have to be prepared. You just concentrate on your stepping. I’ll give you a countdown. At five seconds I’m going to set up the abort. Then I’ll arm the engine. And then at the count of one I’ll say proceed, and you do your stuff at zero.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Indra sounded not at all nervous, Joshua thought. But then she was a Next, and one of the brightest. Maybe she’d already thought through the possible consequences of her actions today far more deeply than he ever could, and had accepted the risks. And meanwhile Lee sounded remarkably calm and competent. They were good young people, Joshua thought, obscurely pleased. All three of them.

  Lee called down, ‘Here we go, folks. Counting down, twenty, nineteen, eighteen . . . Thank you for observing all safety precautions.’

  Joshua looked sharply at Lobsang. ‘Have you been showing these kids your old movies?’

  ‘Have you?’

  Dev murmured, ‘Never mind movies. Just remember Shepard’s prayer: “Dear Lord, don’t let me screw up.”’

  Maggie snorted. ‘That’s not the version I recall.’

  Lee said now, ‘Nine, eight, seven, six, five, abort stage, engine arm, ready, proceed—’

  And they stepped.

  58

  JOSHUA FELT HEAVY, pushed back in his couch. ‘Ow! It feels like a troll just jumped on my chest.’

  ‘Hoo.’

  ‘Not you, Sancho. You OK down there, buddy?’

  ‘Ha!’

  And the light from outside the window had changed, he saw, to a kind of silvery-blue.

  ‘Everybody stay still,’ Maggie said. ‘Just lie back in your couches. I don’t want any broken bones or heart attacks just from the effort of standing up. Let’s take stock. We’re on some kind of solid surface; we’re not accelerating – we’re certainly not falling, we’re not in space. But the gravity here, wherever here is, is higher than at home. Stop me if I get any of this wrong, Lobsang.’

  ‘Precisely right so far, Admiral.’

  ‘Call me Captain. Aboard my ship, I’m Captain . . . How much heavier?’

  ‘About twenty per cent. We’re on some kind of super-Earth, maybe.’

  ‘Everybody call in. Lobsang, Joshua—’

  ‘Both fine, Captain.’

  ‘Dev?

  ‘Everything checks out,’ Dev said.

  ‘How are you, you lummox?’

  ‘Fine, Captain.’

  ‘Lee?’

  ‘Copacetic.’

  ‘Oh, good grief. Indra?’

  ‘I see stars.’

  At that, Joshua couldn’t resist it. He loosened his harness and leaned forward to his small window.

  He saw a desolate, cratered plain, littered with sharp-edged rocks. Moon-like, perhaps. But there was air here, evidently; the sky was a deep purple-blue. Perhaps there was a sun hidden behind the horizon to his right. He saw a glow spreading there, a hint of pinkness.

  But the sky was
dominated by stars – and stars impossibly big and bright, compared to the stars of Earth. He counted five, six very bright stars showing discs, maybe a dozen lesser lights, and a more distant panorama of crowded constellations.

  Dev asked, ‘Can we go out to see?’

  ‘I’d advise against it,’ Lobsang said. ‘Aside from the higher gravity, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Only a trace of oxygen. Rather like a dead Earth. Even in pressure suits the higher gravity makes it perilous. Clearly we were right to prepare the pod, to bring protection—’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much out there to see anyhow,’ Maggie said.

  Joshua wasn’t sure that was true. He thought he saw something on the horizon, more complex than the rocky waves of the crater rims. Some kind of structure? . . . His old eyes were too poor to show him more.

  Indra asked, ‘So where are we?’

  Lobsang said, ‘The obvious question. Clearly not in the solar system.’

  And that simple fact had somehow not congealed in Joshua’s mind. ‘Wow. Of course not. We just crossed interstellar space. In a step.’

  ‘I know where we are,’ Dev said.

  Lobsang said, ‘I’ll soon figure out if those stars up there are visible from Earth, and if so I’ll be able to tell where we are. You saw that this ship is crusted with telescopes, spectroscopes. As well as atmospheric sensors we can detect temperature, radiation; we have probes for sampling the local rock suite, grabbers to take specimens of any life forms—’

  ‘I don’t see any flowers to pick, Lobsang—’

  ‘And the onboard AI is very smart.’

  ‘You know that, do you?’

  ‘Well, yes. As I am the onboard AI—’

  Dev snapped, ‘Will you listen? Sorry. Will you listen, sirs? I know where we are. I’m an astronomy buff. I spent a lot of time in the Gap, at the Brick Moon, looking out at the stars.’

  ‘Where, then?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘The Pleiades.’

  Lobsang waited a few seconds, as his automated sensor suite delivered its results. ‘Lucky guess.’

  ‘Was not.’

  ‘We are on a planet orbiting one of the principal stars of that cluster. Some of that wispiness up there is probably above the atmosphere.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Dev said. ‘There’s a cloud of interstellar dust crossing the cluster. Easily visible in a telescope.’

  ‘Well, I’m impressed,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Well done, Mr Sulu,’ Lobsang said dryly. ‘But in that case we’ve only come around four hundred light years from home so far.’

  Joshua thought that over. Only four hundred light years . . .

  ‘When we get a little further out, it may be more of a challenge to locate our position.’

  Maggie held up her hands. ‘Enough of the antler-locking. Let’s review what happened here. So we – stepped. But instead of passing up or down the chain of the Long Earth, we stepped in another direction—’

  ‘So to speak,’ Joshua said.

  ‘And ended up here. On the planet of another star.’

  ‘This is what was expected,’ Indra said. ‘From the fragmentary clues extracted from the lollipops’ partial communication with the Thinker. The Long Earth is a chain of worlds, like a necklace drifting in some higher-dimensional space. It may fold back on itself, or it may cut across other necklaces, other Long worlds, drifting in the higher continuum.’

  ‘Like this one,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Yes. We think that the Thinker is an engine for imagining these more remote worlds, these tremendous jumps. And when that couples with my own will, my ability to decohere—’

  ‘Oops, you lost me,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Stepping is a faculty of the mind,’ Lobsang said. ‘And the Thinker we just built is the most powerful mind our small planet is ever likely to see. Hence this monumental stepping.’

  Joshua said, ‘So is this how the silver beetles stepped into their own Long world?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lobsang said. ‘But that was an accident. This time we’re in control.’

  Joshua said, ‘Or the Thinker is.’

  Maggie said, ‘So what now? You say the theory is we stepped through a linkage between one Long world – the Earth – and another. I thought Long worlds are supposed to be linked to the rise of sapient life. I don’t see any signs of sapience here. I don’t see life at all.’

  Joshua was still peering at those structures on the horizon. ‘About that—’

  ‘If it’s Long,’ Dev said, ‘then we ought to be able to step across it. East or West, I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lobsang said. ‘Just as Sally Linsay and her father stepped across the Long Mars. Allow me.’

  ‘God damn it.’ Joshua swallowed his pride and fumbled for his prescription sunglasses, so he could see those distant structures better.

  But before he got them over his nose, there was another discontinuity.

  The light changed again, and those distant structures vanished – but the heavy weight on Joshua’s chest remained.

  Maggie turned on Lobsang. ‘What the hell did you just do?’

  ‘I stepped,’ Lobsang said reasonably. ‘The conventional way – West, as it happens. Thereby carrying Uncle Arthur with me as a temporary extension of my body.’

  ‘Next time you feel like pulling a stunt like that, consult me first.’

  Again Joshua cautiously sat up, and peered out of the window. There were the Pleiades once more – a crowded cluster of stars in the sky – but now their glow was obscured by a pale-blue sky, a scatter of streaky clouds. And, looking down, he saw that the ground was quite different. There were none of those lunar-type craters; now he saw rolling hills, a lake of what looked like blue water in the middle distance.

  And life: something like grass, something like trees, with trunks, a crown of branches with leaves.

  ‘It could almost be Earth,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t for the predominant colour scheme of – purple.’

  The pod rang like a gong.

  Maggie yelled, ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘My bad,’ called Lobsang. ‘I just launched a sounding rocket.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had any sounding rockets.’

  Joshua laughed, though his own heart was thumping. ‘Oh, Lobsang loves his sounding rockets.’

  ‘I thought we needed a wider view . . . The results of my sensors are coming in. There’s now an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere out there. Not quite breathable, the oxygen’s too high, and so’s the carbon dioxide. But it’s close. And unstable: I mean, chemically. I deduce the presence of life on this world.’

  Joshua said dryly, ‘So you just deduced the existence of all the trees and grass and flowers we can see out there.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Lobsang said without a trace of irony. ‘My aerial survey is coming in . . . I can see a good few hundred miles around our position. No sign of sapient life, at least nothing technological.’

  ‘How can you tell so quickly?’ Dev called down.

  ‘No regular structures. I have pattern-seeking algorithms to tell me that. Also no sign of forest clearances, no fires, no industrial-gas imbalances in the air. I’d detect Neanderthals skulking around their hearths in those forest clumps, believe me. Of course we’d have to do a global survey to be sure. In fact I’ve yet to see any evidence of large animal life—’

  Slam. Again the pod rocked. This time Joshua’s port went dark, and he flinched back.

  Maggie growled, ‘Now what? Lobsang, another rocket?’

  ‘He’s innocent this time,’ Joshua said, and he pointed to his window. Maggie leaned over to see.

  Together they peered into a kind of moist, clammy tunnel, with purple-black walls feebly illuminated by the cabin lights.

  ‘That’s somebody’s throat,’ Maggie said, wondering.

  Joshua said, ‘I think we found evidence of animal life, Lobsang.’

  Dev stood up cautiously and peered down through his own window, from above. ‘O
h, wow. I can see it from up here. Think of, think of a turtle. A huge one. With an armoured shell. I mean, those are serious blades. And legs like a tyrannosaur. And jaws like a crocodile. I don’t think he can crush the hull—’

  ‘Step us back out of here, Lobsang,’ Maggie called.

  ‘Wait,’ Joshua said. ‘We don’t want to kill that thing. We will if we carry him with us.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Lobsang said. He pushed a button.

  This time there was a sharp knock, as if somebody had punched the outer hull. Joshua heard a kind of bellow, and the beast dropped away.

  He turned to Lobsang. ‘What was that? A weapon?’

  Lobsang said, ‘I used one of our impact probes. Non-lethal, but it will have stung. A small shell designed to bury itself in rock to return a mineralogical analysis—’

  Maggie said, ‘Enough. I don’t care. Lobsang, step us back.’

  A subtle shift once more, and they were back on the moon-like plain, under the brilliant star cluster.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Dev said. ‘There should be sapience here. That’s why this world is Long in the first place, right? Yet we saw nothing.’

  ‘No,’ Joshua said. ‘There is something, on this copy of the world at least. Take a look at the horizon, at around ten o’clock. There’s a building out there – I think. I saw it before . . .’

  Maggie produced a set of big Navy binoculars. ‘Some kind of structure. Looks like a bunker. Roofless, abandoned.’ She lowered the glasses. ‘There was sapience here, then.’

  ‘But not any more,’ Joshua said.

  ‘And those craters, they weren’t in the stepwise world.’

  ‘So they weren’t created by impacts, like on Earth’s moon. I guess the folks who lived here, whoever they were, whatever they were – they blew themselves up.’

  ‘A race even more stupid than humanity, then,’ Lobsang said. ‘I’ll write that in the log. A notable discovery.’

  ‘There may be survivors elsewhere,’ Indra Newton said. ‘We know that if a Long world has a purpose it must be to serve as a refuge for sapient life, even against its own follies.’

  Maggie said, ‘It could take a lifetime to find them. That’s for a future expedition. Not for us. Let’s go on.’