The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘Actually to future generations,’ said Indra Newton gravely. ‘This network of Long worlds we have discovered may be infinite. It will not be an exploration but a migration. An endless one.’

  ‘A migration into the Skein,’ Lobsang murmured, peering into the strange sky. ‘A tangle of Long worlds around the centre of the Galaxy. The Skein – is that an appropriate word?’

  ‘It’ll do,’ Maggie said.

  Jan Roderick stared up at Lobsang, who was staring at the sky. It struck Joshua that this was the first time the boy had been close up to Lobsang. ‘Mister, you look funny.’

  Lobsang looked down. ‘Well, so do you.’

  ‘Are you a robot?’

  ‘Long story.’

  Jan reached out and poked Lobsang’s leg. ‘I bet you’re not even alive.’

  ‘Am so.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  Lobsang leaned down, resting his hands on his knees. ‘Well, that’s a little tricky. You could break me down molecule by molecule and find not a single particle of life or mind. On the other hand, I could do the same to you.’

  Jan thought that over. ‘Good comeback.’ Then he ran off down the beach.

  Lobsang eyed Joshua. ‘Some kid.’

  ‘The Sisters have him in hand. I think . . .’

  Joshua saw that Sancho was wandering away now, one slow step after another, looking around at the sky, the land, the ocean. The troll stretched his mighty arms, as if glad to be free of the confinement of the pod, and then slumped his shoulders. ‘Hoo!’

  Joshua grabbed the troll-call and hobbled over. ‘So, buddy, how are you feeling?’

  Sancho bared his teeth and raised two thumbs.

  ‘Good, huh? But – I’m shy of asking a Librarian this – do you know where you are?’

  ‘Home,’ said the troll.

  Home. Joshua thought he saw what the troll meant. Home: not the place you were born into, but the place that gathered you in. That was what this ‘Skein’ of Lobsang’s was. Like the Home on Allied Drive. And that was a richly satisfying thought.

  ‘Well, they always said it – the Invitation wasn’t just for humans . . .’

  ‘Bring Sancho.’

  ‘It was a pleasure, big guy.’

  And Sancho went on his way down the beach, singing softly. Joshua was no expert, but he thought the tune was ‘Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag’.

  After a brief conversation, the ‘adults’ – Maggie, Lobsang and Joshua – decided to take a hike into a range of eroded hills, just inland. The ‘youngsters’ – Lee, Dev and Jan – evidently wanted to blow off some steam, and they kicked off their shoes and began a soccer game on the beach. Only Indra defied the rough age categorization; the serious young Next said her priority was to explore this new environment.

  Maggie lectured the soccer players. ‘OK. We’ll be back in a couple of hours. The slightest thing feels wrong and you get back in that pod and close the hatch and flush the air. And you will submit to the tox tests later, in case there’s something subtle we missed. Understood?’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘I can’t hear you—’

  ‘Captain, yes, Captain!’

  ‘Also, you do not drink the water. The ocean’s salty anyhow, but you don’t touch any fresh water either. You do not eat anything local. Life seems sparse here, but the bugs Lobsang tested do not consist of the amino acids you use, they do not use the protein suite you do—’

  ‘Captain, they’re just slime. We’re not about to eat that.’

  ‘No, and it’s not about to eat you, and if you did chomp it down chances are it would pass straight through. But we’re not going to take that chance, are we?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘We’re going to stick to the rations we brought. Aren’t we?’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘I can’t hear you—’

  ‘Captain, yes, Captain!’

  As the youngsters ran off after Sancho, Maggie joined Joshua. ‘I can’t believe they brought a soccer ball into interstellar space.’

  Joshua said, ‘I can’t believe they’re putting a troll in goal.’

  ‘But then I guess we missed a whole ten-year-old boy down in that cargo bay.’

  ‘Eleven—’

  ‘By comparison, smuggling aboard a soccer ball is small beer.’

  Lobsang joined them. The crew all carried small backpacks, but Lobsang’s was a complex affair, glistening with sensor lenses.

  As they fixed their packs, Joshua, leaning on his cane, scuffed the alien sand with the toe of his good leg. ‘So, through the Star Gate, huh, Lobsang?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Where the hell are we? I’m guessing you have a pretty good idea.’

  Lobsang glanced up at the lurid sky, the dazzling stars blurred by the colourful clouds, that single brilliant shadow-casting pinpoint. ‘I believe we’re halfway home. Back from the Galaxy centre, that is. I’m judging that from the sky above, and from the composition of those stars we see – which, according to our spectroscopes, have a higher content of heavy elements than the stars close to the sun. At a guess I’d say we’re around fourteen thousand light years out from the core. About twelve thousand light years in from the solar system.’

  Indra pointed out, ‘That’s always assuming we’re moving along the same radius. In and out, to and from the centre.’

  ‘True enough. The Galaxy does have a circular symmetry . . .’

  ‘And yet,’ Joshua said, ‘here we are standing on a beach, with sand in our toes, the waves lapping.’

  ‘Universal formations, Joshua.’

  ‘I guess.’ He looked along the beach, at the soccer game. The shouts of the young folk and the hoots of the troll came drifting in silence broken otherwise only by the lapping of the ocean waves. ‘That pod looks remarkably out of place.’

  ‘Whereas those kids,’ Maggie said, ‘look like they belong here. And the damn troll.’

  ‘Indeed they do. Like the Traversers in their ocean. So. Shall we walk?’

  61

  IT WAS A very mundane hike, despite that bizarre psychedelic flag of a sky up above.

  They walked up from the beach and through a bank of dunes. Maggie led the way, striding boldly. Lobsang followed, the lenses and other sensors on his pack whirring and swivelling.

  Joshua was happy to play rear gunner and stay at the back of the group, pivoting on the damn cane, not wanting to hold anybody up. Indra Newton, however, walked beside him, and Joshua was aware that she was keeping an eye on him. It irritated him that anybody should think he needed watching over. But on the other hand he was kind of touched; he wouldn’t have expected that kind of thoughtfulness of a super-brain Next like Indra. Well, people always surprised you.

  The hike across the sand was hard work, though. He kept thinking of that desperate scramble across another beach, on the world of the Yggdrasil trees.

  The going got a little easier for him once they’d climbed out of the soft dry sand at the top of the beach, and the ground became firmer. Joshua saw that the sand here was bound by a kind of moss that looked vaguely green, although Joshua didn’t trust his colour sense under this peculiar sky.

  And then he nearly stumbled when his cane broke through a kind of crust and sank into the earth. Indra grabbed his arm to steady him.

  He found himself looking down into a broken-open nest, littered with clumps of moss, from which an animal and its young all stared back up at him. He was reminded of the rabbit-mole nests he’d learned to crack with Sancho – but this animal was nothing like a rabbit-mole. The beast might have been a couple of feet across, and it had six stubby, almost triangular limbs folding out from a central core; it was something like a big starfish covered in electric-blue fur. But in that central section was a mouth, and three very human-looking eyes peered up at him. Around it were three, four, five smaller copies, wriggling starfish the size of coins. He caught all this in a glance.

  Big Mama opened that small mouth and h
issed at him, the little ones squealed and clambered over her, and she lifted her limbs and gathered herself into a ball of fur, enclosing the young. Then she rolled out of the broken warren and shot out of sight over the curve of a dune, moving with remarkable speed.

  Maggie said dryly, ‘I see you’re making friends, Joshua.’

  ‘At least nobody’s killed anybody else yet.’

  Indra said, as they walked on, ‘Life, then. But there doesn’t seem to be very much life here. There’s nothing like grass on these dunes.’ She glanced inland, to bare, eroded hills. ‘I see nothing like trees, though that appears to be a universal biological form. No animal life, save Mr Valienté’s – starfish? Even the ocean seemed relatively lifeless, save for the Traversers, of course.’

  ‘You’re almost right,’ Lobsang said. ‘Actually there is more animal life. In the far distance – my enhanced vision reveals it, but it may not be apparent to you – there are more starfish, big ones, browsing on the flank of that hill . . .’

  Joshua peered where he pointed, but could see only massive shadows moving in the purplish light. ‘Starfish world, then,’ he murmured.

  Lobsang said, ‘I think this planet may have been through a mass extinction, relatively recently. A nearby supernova, probably. Hence the sparseness of life, the apparent dominance by one animal group. The starfish may have been chance survivors, perhaps saved by their evident habit of burrowing underground. Something similar happened on Datum Earth after a massive die-back a quarter of a billion years ago. In the strata laid down in the period after, nothing but the bones of animals the biologists called lystrosaurus – like ugly pigs.’

  Maggie scoffed. ‘As every science officer I ever flew with would have remarked, that’s a hell of a lot of supposition on very little fact, mister.’

  ‘True enough. But, lacking any better evidence, one must assume that the place one visits is typical of the world as a whole.’

  ‘But if you’re right,’ Indra said, ‘then we haven’t arrived at a typical epoch in time. Not if we’ve arrived just after a mass extinction. Not unless—’

  Lobsang smiled. ‘Go ahead. Make the deduction.’

  ‘Not unless mass extinctions are commonplace here. So that this is a typical time.’

  ‘Good. I believe that’s true. Come, let’s walk on.’ He led the way now, plodding further inland towards the more distant hills. ‘We may be near the inner edge of the Sagittarius Arm. Which is one of the Galaxy’s major star-making factories, a very active place, quite unlike the placid Local Arm through which our sun drifts – well, as you can see for yourself in the sky.’

  ‘Ah,’ Indra said. ‘And so lots of nearby supernovas. This is almost as deadly a place as the Galaxy centre. Periodically this world must get a drenching of radiation and high-energy particles.’

  Joshua grunted. ‘Then we needn’t expect to find relics of intelligent life here . . .’

  ‘Not so,’ Indra said. ‘The world must be Long, or we wouldn’t have been led here. And a world cannot be Long without local sapients.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Lobsang said. ‘Joshua, in the course of the Galaxy’s history there has been a great wave of starmaking, washing out from the centre. So the closer you get to the centre, the older the worlds and the suns are. I’d estimate this world is a billion years older than Earth. And on such an ancient world complex life, and mind, may have risen up over and over, despite the drumbeats of mass extinctions. Civilizations here are like children growing up in a minefield – and yet, evidently, some of them do grow, and flourish, and achieve great things. Otherwise we would not be here at all; the Skein could not exist.’

  Joshua frowned. ‘What “great things” have they achieved, Lobsang? I don’t see any sign of intelligence here at all.’

  ‘It may be hard to recognize. Maybe even the starfish creatures were engineered to acquire their subterranean habits, so that if the worst comes to the worst, they at least will survive.’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘More irresponsible theorizing. Fun, though. But my stomach’s starting to theorize irresponsibly about lunch. How much further do you want to go, Lobsang?’

  Lobsang looked inland, and raised a fancy pair of binoculars to his artificial eyes. In that direction the sky was brightening, the lurid backdrop of stars and interstellar clouds becoming washed out. Sunrise approaching, maybe, Joshua thought.

  Lobsang said, ‘Just a little further. I think I see something at the summit of the next ridge . . .’

  ‘That far, then,’ Maggie said. She led the way.

  Once again Joshua gritted his teeth and followed. Indra walked at his side.

  And they crested a low bluff, and stopped dead.

  Standing on the next ridge over, they saw a series of dark bands, slender, vertical, black against the lurid sky of this world.

  Monoliths.

  62

  THE TRAVELLERS HITCHED their packs and hiked hurriedly through the final valley. Joshua struggled to keep up, but he was as eager as the rest.

  They didn’t speak again until they stood, panting, at the feet of the great structures.

  Monoliths. Five of them.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Wow,’ Joshua said. ‘Also there’s a guy over there in a monkey suit throwing a bone in the air—’

  ‘Shut up, Valienté.’

  ‘Sorry, Captain.’

  Indra said, ‘They bear some kind of inscription . . . I recognize the formation.’

  ‘I suspect we all do,’ Lobsang said wryly.

  ‘Mars?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Indra. ‘This seems to be precisely the same configuration that Willis Linsay and his party encountered on the Long Mars.’

  Maggie was tentatively touching a monolith with her bare hand. The face was covered with symbols, like runes, perhaps, each element of which was the size of a human head. The inscribing was clean, sharp, as if made by a laser, and seemed not to have been eroded by time. ‘These stones are big,’ Maggie said. ‘And there are a lot of symbols. A lot of information, right?’

  ‘Just as on the Martian versions,’ Lobsang said, distracted. ‘I’m comparing this with the images Linsay brought back. The symbols look similar – the same alphabet – but the message appears different . . .’

  ‘Nobody knows what the Martian monoliths have to say,’ Maggie said. ‘In spite of a quarter-century of study. Right?’

  Lobsang murmured, ‘Willis Linsay believed he made some progress.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ Maggie said, faintly mocking.

  ‘Perhaps what we are seeing are elements of a key. If we put this together with the Martian inscription, and after much further study—’

  ‘But a key to what, Lobsang?’

  Lobsang just smiled. ‘We’ll know when we have it, I suppose.’

  Joshua was trying to get his head around the paradox of the monoliths. ‘Willis and Sally travelled stepwise into the Long Mars. And that was a Mars not accessed from Datum Earth but from the Gap, far from the Datum across the Long Earth. Meanwhile, here we are having stepped our way into the centre of the Galaxy, and we find a copy of what they found . . .’

  ‘My head’s exploding too,’ Maggie said. ‘And if anybody tells me it’s because I’m trying to imagine a five-dimensional space with my three-dimensional brain they’re on a charge.’

  ‘But I think that about sums it up, Maggie,’ Lobsang said, smiling. ‘This is life in the Skein. All these Long worlds tangled up together. We’re going to have to get used to a universe which isn’t simply connected.’

  ‘He means that in a precise mathematical sense,’ Indra said quietly.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Maggie wryly. ‘Well, at least this monument to nothing will give us some shade for lunch.’ She opened her pack, sat on the ground at the foot of a monolith, and pulled out plastic boxes. ‘We got Navy-issue field rations. Sandwiches. Chicken paste, tuna paste, or . . . paste.’

  Lobsang began to open his own pac
k. ‘Maybe we can save such delicacies for later. I also brought along a treat. Joshua, maybe you could lend a hand? We won’t need to build a fire; I have a small camping stove.’

  Joshua saw that Lobsang had brought frozen oysters, and bacon, and even Worcester sauce. ‘Oysters Kilpatrick,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘It seemed appropriate,’ Lobsang said. ‘In honour of an absent friend.’

  ‘All we need is a bunch of sunbathing dinosaurs and it could be forty years ago . . .’

  There was a radio crackle. ‘Captain Kauffman, Bilaniuk. Come in, Captain, do you copy?’

  Maggie puffed out her cheeks. ‘Hold that thought, Mr Valienté.’ She tapped a button on her pack. ‘We’re here, Dev. Go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks, Admiral,’ Dev said. ‘You’d better get back here, ma’am. We don’t know how come they showed up like this. Maybe one Traverser calls to another, in this big ocean of theirs. Maybe we were recognized somehow, or at least you were, or Joshua . . . I don’t know. Anyhow, it’s here. They’re here . . .’

  And Lobsang and Joshua looked at each other.

  ‘I guess the oysters are going to have to wait,’ Maggie said with regret.

  63

  LONG BEFORE THEY’D got back to the beach, where the Uncle Arthur still stood on a slant, Joshua could see it all.

  Out at sea there was not just one Traverser any more, not just the living island that had collected the Uncle from the abyss. Now there were many – perhaps a dozen, even more? It was hard to distinguish the low backs of the beasts in the further ocean.

  ‘An archipelago,’ Maggie said. ‘An archipelago of Traversers. That’s not a bad word, is it? And look how they’re bumping up against each other.’

  ‘Frolicking,’ said Joshua. ‘Beasts the size of islands, presumably brought here from many worlds, frolicking together. On any other day that might seem strange.’