The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘But which way?’ asked Indra Newton. ‘South? I could take us home—’

  ‘North,’ said a small voice, from somewhere under Joshua’s seat. ‘Let’s keep going.’

  The crew exchanged stares. Then Joshua turned in his seat to look down through the mesh floor; his head briefly swam in the higher gravity. ‘Sancho?’

  ‘Hoo?’

  ‘Who the hell’s down there with you?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  Maggie said sternly, ‘Come on out of there, nobody.’

  There was a rustle in the heaps of straw that surrounded the big troll, and a couple of supply boxes tumbled out of the way. Then a small human being stood, face tilted up bravely.

  It was Jan Roderick.

  Joshua laughed. ‘Well, that’s reduced the average age of the crew.’

  ‘You,’ Maggie said. ‘The kid from Madison, Wisconsin. Who made all those – bolts.’

  Dev called down, ‘Hey, little dude. Sit down. OK? Sit on a bale. Or sit on that troll. We don’t want you breaking any bones in this gravity.’

  Jan obeyed.

  Maggie snapped, ‘How did you get aboard?’

  Jan pointed at Joshua. ‘I said I was with him.’

  Maggie rubbed her face. ‘Oh, for cripe’s sake.’

  Joshua had to laugh. ‘Don’t blame me.’

  Lobsang said, ‘I suppose that once he was aboard, he was unlikely to be detected. We aren’t mass-critical, we have no significant internal sensors – not of the kind that would detect intruders. This was not anticipated.’

  ‘It damn well should have been,’ Maggie said. ‘Suppose he’d been a suicide bomber? When we get back, there’ll be heads rolling in my security team. Why the hell did you do this, kid?’

  Indra Newton said, ‘Is it not obvious? He is here for the same reason we all are. Curiosity.’

  ‘They never would have let me go,’ Jan said, gazing up. ‘No matter how many bolts I made. I was just a kid.’

  ‘So you stowed away,’ Dev said. ‘I don’t know if I would have had the guts—’

  Maggie said, ‘Can it, Bilaniuk, don’t encourage him. What if we’d had to go back because of you, stowaway? How would that make you feel, if you caused us to terminate the mission?’

  Joshua touched her arm. ‘Hey, go easy.’

  ‘OK, OK. Lobsang, I take it our life support can sustain the additional burden of a ten-year-old brat.’

  ‘I’m eleven!’

  ‘I stand corrected. An eleven-year-old brat.’

  Lobsang said, ‘As long as we don’t extend the mission unduly. There’s plenty of reserve. It’s the lack of an acceleration couch that concerns me more.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘All our couches were moulded to fit our bodies.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m not likely to forget the fitting session,’ Joshua said wryly.

  ‘We have no spare couch. Even if we did it would not fit the boy.’

  ‘I’m fine in the straw,’ said Jan.

  ‘Like hell,’ said Maggie.

  ‘Come on,’ said Joshua. ‘The straw’s good enough for old Sancho. And ten-year-old kids are made of rubber anyhow.’

  ‘Eleven!’

  ‘Sorry. Listen, kid. Just cuddle up to Sancho. Can you do that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sancho, you make sure he’s OK down there, and keep him out of trouble. You got that?’

  Sancho waved a troll-call. ‘Hoo.’

  ‘OK. Let’s go on. But when we get back, kid, and I deliver you back to the Home, you’re going to apologize to Sister Coleen, and you’ll tell Sister John what you’ve done, and they’re going to ground you for a year.’

  ‘I can live with that.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I mean, sorry, Mr Valienté.’

  Maggie glared at Joshua. ‘Are we done?’

  Joshua shrugged.

  ‘What a circus. OK, people, buckle up. Mr Bilaniuk, Ms Malone, if you please.’

  Lee said, ‘OK, Indra, same routine as before . . .’

  North, again.

  59

  THE GRAVITY IMMEDIATELY felt gentler. Maybe this time it was actually less than Earth normal. Having got used to the weight of a troll on his chest, now it felt like Joshua was suddenly falling, as if the elevator cable had snapped. Joshua felt his gorge rise, and he swallowed hard. He had no prior experience of different gravities, save for falling into the Gap.

  The light was different again, a softer greenish-blue.

  This time they all quickly unbuckled, and leaned forward. The new sky was a distinct tinge of green. A sun was setting, or rising, greyish-red and smeared by refraction, hovering just above a horizon that looked close by.

  On the land there was a blanket, greenish like the sky, lapping against a wall of mountains and spilling into a placid-looking lake. Life, obviously, a tangle, but so unfamiliar that Joshua had trouble making out the detail. Maybe those upright structures, bushy at the top, were trees, or maybe some kind of fungus, like a big mushroom – but no, one of them started to move, eerily, with a liquid glide across the ground. And conversely what had looked like a stretch of meadow near that lake started to ripple and pulse, and flowed closer to the water: an expanse maybe an acre in size, moving as one organism.

  The Uncle Arthur clanged and shuddered.

  ‘Sounding rocket away,’ called Lobsang.

  ‘Will you stop doing that?’

  ‘Sorry, Captain. Well, I see life out there, Joshua, but not as we know it.’

  ‘To coin a phrase.’

  Maggie growled, ‘Will you two quit it?’

  ‘He’s right, though.’

  Jan called up, ‘And I can see out the window, a big moon rising. With a shell.’

  Maggie snapped, ‘Hush up, kid. And sit down until I tell you it’s safe to move.’

  Lobsang said, ‘Again the air’s an oxygen-nitrogen-water mix, not quite breathable, and somewhat acidic. We seem to be being brought to worlds that are somewhat like our own, with a similar chemistry, but not identical. But the boundaries we use to describe families of life back home – bacterial, animal, plant, fungus and so on – may not apply here. It all looks rather odd. I wouldn’t recommend an EVA unless it’s strictly required, since we couldn’t be sure what we’d be stepping on.’

  ‘An EVA? You can cut the John Glenn jargon too. You got a fix on where we are yet? Still in the Pleiades?’

  ‘I think we’ve come a little further than that, Captain. If you look up, you might have a clue.’

  Joshua leaned forward stiffly, and peered up at the zenith, where, even as that big sun set, the stars were being revealed. But it was not a starscape he recognized from any world of the Long Earth, and nothing like the Pleiades either. He saw a scatter of star-like objects densely crowding the sky, but some resolved on closer inspection into clusters of stars: it was a sky full of a thousand copies of the Pleiades.

  And there was a larger structure too. Joshua saw a vast, yellow-orange circle of light, like glowing gas, roughly centred on the zenith, lumpy, ragged, broken. A finer concentric band was contained within the outer one, almost circular too. Offset from the centre of the two bands was a brilliant pinpoint, like a star but somehow more intense, bright enough to sting Joshua’s eyes. As his vision adjusted, and he tried not to look directly at that central point, he made out more detail: wide washes of purplish cloud, smaller patches of lurid green, and what appeared to be a mass of stars swarming like fireflies around that achingly bright pinpoint centre. It looked oddly wrong to Joshua. As if damaged: a broken sky.

  ‘My God,’ Maggie said. ‘How many stars are visible to the naked eye in our night sky, Lobsang? A few thousand?’ She framed a patch of sky with her fingers. ‘There must be tens of thousands up there, hundreds.’

  ‘We’re at the centre of the Galaxy,’ Indra said simply.

  Joshua gasped, and he saw shock on Maggie’s face.

  ‘Not quite the centre,’ Lobsang said calmly. He pointe
d up. ‘If that is the central black hole, then, judging by its brightness, we are something like five thousand light years out.’

  Indra said, ‘Then we’ve come around twenty thousand light years from home. At least.’

  Lee laughed. ‘Nobody at GapSpace is ever going to believe this.’

  Maggie asked softly, ‘How safe are we, Lobsang?’

  ‘Good question. The place is a bath of high-energy radiation, X-rays, gamma rays. Nearby supernovas are frequent. The Uncle’s hull will shield us to some extent, and maybe the planet’s air, but we should not stay long. I’ve an aerial view of the world from the sounding rocket. You all have tablets in the walls before you. Well, except you, Jan Roderick.’

  ‘Hoo.’

  ‘Sorry. And except you, Sancho . . .’

  In his tablet, Joshua saw a cratered landscape, as if from overhead. But this was not grey and dead, not like the moon, not even like the Pleiades world. This image was full of colour and detail. Some of the craters were flooded with round lakes that gleamed like coins in the starlight, and the grey-green of the local life swept over circular ranges of rim mountains. ‘It’s like they terraformed the moon,’ he said.

  ‘Speaking of moons,’ Jan said, but everybody ignored him.

  Lobsang said, ‘With the stars crowded so close there are going to be a lot of disturbed comets, a lot of impacts. Frequent mass extinctions. But extinctions can be a spur to evolution—’

  ‘If you survive at all, I guess,’ Maggie said.

  Jan shouted, ‘Will you all please look out of the window! Sorry.’

  At last they looked. He’d been staring out at a part of the horizon the others had missed.

  A moon was rising, Joshua saw. A big fat moon, vaguely elliptical in shape, with coloured bands smeared across its surface. And there was a shell around it: cracked, crumbling at the edges, revealing the gassy world within. But, definitively, a shell.

  A shell around a world.

  Maggie murmured, ‘Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.’

  ‘It’s a moon, all right!’ Jan called up. ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Actually,’ Lobsang said, ‘I think you’ll find that this world is a moon of that gas giant.’

  Joshua scoffed. ‘Don’t get pompous, Lobsang. You missed it completely.’

  Maggie said briskly, ‘Enough of the banter. What I want to know is – what is that shell?’

  ‘It’s clearly artificial,’ Lobsang said, inspecting telescopic images on his tablet. ‘There are signs of a kind of ribbing on the underside, where it’s exposed. I have a name for it, if you like: a supramundane habitat.’

  Maggie chewed that over. ‘Supramundane. Meaning, above the world?’

  ‘These things have been studied, hypothetically. A shell like that around Saturn, for instance, would have a hundred times the surface area of Earth, and about Earth-normal gravity.’

  ‘You say “studied”,’ Maggie said. ‘I don’t suppose that includes details on how to build such a thing.’

  ‘But you can see why you would,’ Dev said. ‘It’s a shelter.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lobsang said now. ‘Of course – I hadn’t thought of that. A shelter, from this lethal sky. You’d live on the inside. You could plate the outer surface to pick up energy from the local sun. You’d be sheltered from the supernova radiation and the rest. Even a dinosaur-killer asteroid would just pass through, leaving a bullet-hole you’d have time to fix before the air leaked out.’

  ‘But it’s all busted up,’ Jan said. ‘Where did they go? Did they die out?’

  Lobsang said, ‘Maybe they – moved on. Became something higher, something to which even a shell around a gas giant is just a toy.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Jan.

  Maggie spluttered laughter. ‘Kids today. That’s all you’ve got to say? “Cool”?’

  Dev called, ‘So what now? I guess we could explore this world stepwise.’

  Lobsang shook his head. ‘Any stepwise copy will surely still be close to the galactic centre, and unsuitable for us. Let’s move on.’

  Indra asked, ‘North again?’

  ‘North. We have the supplies, air, power, for at least one more jump.’

  ‘OK, people, buckle up,’ Maggie said. As they settled down, she said to Lobsang, ‘I don’t understand why we’re jumping around the way we are. I mean, aren’t the Pleiades further out from the centre of the Galaxy than the sun? I checked it on my tablet here. And then we came all the way in to the very heart.’

  Indra replied from above, ‘We are moving across a tangle of Long worlds. There is no reason why distances across this tangle, in terms of steps jumped, should correspond to spatial distances, to galactic geography. It is the relations between the elements of the tangle that determine distance. In fact there are some relational theories of physics that describe all our perceptual reality, even such qualities as distance and time, as emergent properties of relations between more fundamental objects—’

  ‘I get it,’ Maggie said quickly. ‘It’s complicated. Let’s go see what else is out there. Dev, Indra, Lee, you ready to do your stuff?’

  ‘After the next stop,’ Joshua murmured, ‘I need to take a bathroom break.’

  ‘You and me too, kiddo,’ said Maggie. ‘Billion-year-old aliens or not—’

  Bright light flooded the cabin,

  There was a sickening sensation of falling,

  And a tremendous splash.

  There was darkness outside the windows, and the Uncle dipped and spun. Joshua clung to his couch, wishing he’d taken that bathroom break earlier.

  Maggie yelled, ‘Report, Lobsang!’

  ‘We’re underwater!’ Lobsang called back. ‘Or to be more precise, immersed in liquid of some kind—’

  ‘It is water,’ Dev called down. ‘I’m copying the readings here. Salty, not too acidic. Like ocean water on Earth.’

  Maggie ordered, ‘Keep us upright, Mr Bilaniuk.’

  ‘In hand, Captain. We have air bags in the nose to stabilize us, and a flotation collar around the base. Also the pressure’s not too high. We’re built to withstand far worse than this . . . Actually the pressure’s already dropping.’

  ‘We’re rising,’ Lobsang said.

  ‘I know,’ Joshua called. ‘I can feel it in my bladder.’

  Suddenly they broke through into the air. Joshua glimpsed bright-blue sky through the water that streamed off his window.

  ‘On the surface!’ Dev called.

  Lee said, ‘But in that case, why are we still rising?’

  Maggie leaned forward and stared out of the window. ‘Because we’re on some kind of island. And that’s rising.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Jan Roderick.

  ‘Hoo!’ said the troll.

  Joshua and Lobsang stared at each other wildly.

  Lobsang said, ‘A rising island?’

  And Joshua said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  60

  THE UNCLE ARTHUR, on its four legs, stood at a slight angle on the sloping beach where it had been deposited by the tide. The sea, receding, lapped gently at the shore. The light outside was eerie, a purplish twilight. The sun of this world wasn’t yet up, according to Lobsang. This sky was like a bad special effect, cluttered with brilliant stars and lurid clouds through which even more stars shone, gauzy, as if seen through a veil, Joshua thought. Joshua had no idea where he was. This was not the sky of the centre of the Galaxy. But on the other hand it wasn’t the mundane sky of home, either. Aside from the light show up there, however, this world was remarkably Earth-like. Even the gravity felt about right . . .

  And far out to sea, the back of the Traverser that had raised the pod up from the depths was like a low island, silhouetted, its stately movement only visible to Joshua if he watched it carefully for a few minutes, peering through his small window.

  Joshua said, ‘So this is where the Traversers went. But why?’

  ‘Because they were invited, I suspect,’ Lobsang said.
‘Even if we were probably no more aware of their form of the Invitation than they were of ours.’ He sounded unpleasantly triumphant, to Joshua. ‘I always did suspect there had been some kind of intervention in the evolution of these creatures, Joshua. They were turned, by some agency, into collectors. Samplers. Curators, if you like. Waiting for a call from the sky. And when it came, here they travelled, by some super-stepping ability of their own. With their cargo of life, gathered from the Long worlds they came from.’

  ‘Worlds, Lobsang?’

  ‘Sure. Why shouldn’t the same strategy have been used on other worlds? Maybe this ocean is shared by Traversers from other temperate, watery planets like ours. And maybe there are stranger oceans out there, where you’ll find curators from the ammonia-laced oceans of worlds like Europa, or even the acid clouds of worlds like Venus . . .

  ‘This is the fullest expression of stepping, I think, Joshua. We find ourselves in a cross-connected tangle of Long worlds of different kinds, with many different kinds of sapient inhabitants.’

  As with much of what Lobsang said, even from the beginning of their relationship, this went mostly over Joshua’s head. He tried to picture it. ‘Like a subway map? All those lines, cross-connecting . . .’

  ‘Something like that,’ Lobsang said, not unkindly. ‘But this world is a step beyond, in a sense. A place where many world lines cross, a multiple junction – which is how the Traversers have been able to congregate, coming from so many worlds. This is a Grand Central Station of the Galaxy, Joshua. The air is breathable, by the way.’

  They threw open the hatch of the Uncle Arthur and clambered out.

  Almost without prior discussion they piled gear out of the pod: a couple of tents, sleeping bags and blankets, bottles of water and packets of food, lanterns, mosquito nets. They needed to stay a few hours anyhow to allow the air supply to replenish itself, and beyond that, by common consent, it seemed to Joshua, they were going to spend some time here, have a meal, maybe stay the night. It wouldn’t have felt right to have gone scurrying home without exploring a bit.

  ‘But then we are going straight back,’ Maggie Kauffman said sternly. ‘We made three of those super-steps, and we survived them all. We bought enough risk. We’ve done our job, we’ve proved this new way of travelling is feasible, and our responsibility now is to get back to Earth, tell everybody what we found, have our picture taken with President Damasio. We can leave the rest to future expeditions.’