The Long Cosmos (2 page)

She smiled. ‘We both know the answer to that.'

He grinned back. ‘We're gonna need a bigger telescope.'

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And even further from Datum Earth:

One day Joshua Valienté would call this elderly troll Sancho. But he already had a name, of sorts, in this troll band – not a name any human could recognize or pronounce, more like a complex summary of his identity, a motif in the trolls' endless song.

And now, feeding with the others on rich bison meat, as the light of an early spring day slowly faded, Sancho was disturbed. He dropped his chunk of rib, stood up and scanned the horizon. The others grunted, briefly distracted, but they soon returned to their meal. Sancho, though, stood still, listening, watching.

It had been a good day for these trolls, here at the heart of a different North America. For some days they had been tracking a herd of animals that were like bison but not quite, with the trolls' cooperative, communal eye on one particular elderly male who, limping heavily, had been trailing behind the migration. As the trolls had moved steadily towards the setting sun, invisibly paralleling the bison's motion in worlds a few steps away, their scouts had continually flicked across to watch the prey, stepping back to report their observations in dance and gesture and hooting cries.

At last the elderly bison had stumbled.

For the bison himself it was the end of a slow-burning, lifelong story. One hind leg had never properly healed from a splintering break he had suffered as a mere calf; now that leg finally betrayed him.

And the bison, downed, panting in the heat, was immediately surrounded by hunters, big heavy humanoids, their hair black as night, stone blades and sharpened sticks in their massive hands. They closed in, cutting and slashing, aiming for tendons and hamstrings, seeking to sever veins, trying to stab to the heart. Trolls were sublimely intelligent in their way, but not as toolmakers. They did use shaped stones and sharpened sticks, but they had no way of striking at a prey from a distance; they had no bows, not even throwing spears. And so their hunting was direct and close-up and gloriously physical – big muscular bodies thrown at the prey until it was worn down through the sheer application of strength.

The bison was old and proud, and he bellowed as he tried to stand, to fight back. But he fell again under waves of assault from the hunters.

It had been Sancho who had struck the final blow, smashing the bison's skull with a single blow from a massive rock.

The trolls had gathered over the fallen beast and sung their victory song, of joy at the prospect of a meal, of respect for the bison's gift of life. Then they had fallen to the work of butchering the carcass, and the feasting began: the liver first, the kidneys, the heart. Soon the news of this kill would resonate in the trolls' long call, shared by bands across thousands of worlds – and it would lodge for ever in the deep memories of certain older trolls, like Sancho.

But now, as this happy day was ending, Sancho was distracted from the kill, the feasting. He had
heard
something. Or . . . not heard.

What was it? His mind was not like a human's, but it was roomy and full of dusty memory. He knew no human words. But if he had, he might have called what he heard, or sensed, the Invitation.

Sancho looked around at the pack, males and females and cubs feeding contentedly. He had spent years with this band, seen the little ones born, the old fail and die. He knew them as well as he knew himself. They were his whole world. Yet now he saw them for what they were: a handful of animals lost in an empty, echoing landscape. Huddling, vulnerable in the dark.

And, from beyond the horizon, something was coming.

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And in a world only a few steps from the Datum, in a new stonebuilt chapel in the footprint of an ancient English parish called St John on the Water:

Nelson Azikiwe was seventy-eight years old and officially retired. Indeed, he had come back to this place because his old parish on the Datum, although icebound on a world still suffering through a long volcano winter, was the place where, in his long and peripatetic life, he had felt most at home. Where else to retire?

But to a man like Nelson retirement was only a label. He continued to work to the limits of his strength on his various projects, as much as he ever had. It was just that now he was entitled to call it play, not work.

Of course it helped greatly that the growing technological infrastructure of this Low Earth provided the communications he needed to keep in touch with the wider world, and indeed worlds, without his needing to leave the comfort of his lounge. Thus he spent time each day communicating with the Quizmasters, an online group of ageing, grumpy paranoid obsessives – none of whom, as far as he knew, he had ever met in person – who were now scattered over the Low Earths and beyond, and yet across the decades had managed to remain in regular touch with each other, if necessary through the stepwise swapping of memory chips. It was an odd fact of the Long Earth that, more than half a century after Step Day, still nobody had figured out how to send a message across the stepwise worlds save by carrying it by hand.

Just now the phenomenon that was becoming known as the Invitation was snagging the Quizmasters' attention. The news of the receipt of an apparent SETI signal by a radio telescope at the Gap had been a nine-day wonder in the news media of the Low Earths, insular and inward-looking and obsessed with local politics and celebrities as they were. There had been a flurry of reports, a firestorm of speculation over mankind's galactic future or its imminent cosmic doom, before it was all forgotten. But not by the Quizmasters.

Some believed it must be what it most obviously looked like, some kind of SETI message from the sky: the fulfilment of the dreams of the decades-long Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a message whispering into radio telescopes on any stepwise world where they had been established. Others believed it couldn't be that precisely
because
that was the most obvious explanation. Maybe this was a covert military experiment, or some kind of corporate viral infiltration, or the first moves in the long-anticipated Chinese invasion of a prostrate post-Yellowstone America.

And it was as Nelson was sifting through another day's communications on this burning topic that he received an invitation of his own.

The screens of all his tablets and other devices suddenly blanked. Nelson sat back in his chair, startled, suspecting a power outage – not uncommon in a world that relied on the careful burning of wood for its electricity supplies. But then one screen after another lit up with a familiar face: a man's face, calm, head shaven.

Nelson felt a tingle of anticipation. ‘Hello, Lobsang. I thought you'd gone away again.'

The face smiled back, and the multiple devices in Nelson's room resounded to a voice like the beating of a gong in a Buddhist temple. ‘Good afternoon, Nelson. Yes, I have – gone away. Think of this presence merely as a kind of messaging service . . .'

Nelson wondered
how much
of Lobsang he was talking to. Since Lobsang, when fully functioning, had seemed to run much of Datum Earth, for him vocal speech must have been about as efficient a method of communication as yodelling in Morse. Probably this avatar wasn't much more than a sophisticated speech generator. And yet, Nelson reflected, he had taken the trouble to have this ‘messaging service' smile at his old friend.

Lobsang said now, ‘I have some news for you.' The tablet before Nelson cleared again, and Lobsang's face was replaced by that of a child, a sun-kissed boy aged maybe ten or eleven. ‘This is somebody I only just discovered myself. A remote probe called in, rather belatedly . . .'

‘Who is he?'

‘Nelson, he's your grandson.'

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And much further from the Datum, indeed more than two hundred
million
steps out:

The USS
Charles M. Duke
wasn't Admiral Maggie Kauffman's boat. At sixty-eight she was much too old for operational command, and was in fact formally retired, not that that kept her from troubling her former superiors and nominal successors in the echelons of what remained of the US Navy. Yet this latest mission into the deep Long Earth was her idea, her inspiration – hell, the result of a twenty-five-year-long campaign on her part to resolve an item of unfinished business.

And, she realized, when Captain Jane Sheridan told her about the note that had been received from Datum Hawaii, it was a bit of business that was going to have to be left unfinished a while longer yet.

Maggie did put up a fight, though. ‘But we've come so close. Two hundred million worlds plus change!'

‘With another fifty thousand to go yet, Admiral, and the most hazardous stretch—'

‘Bah. I could pilot this tub through that “hazardous stretch” in my sleep.'

‘I'm afraid the recall is quite unambiguous, ma'am. We have to turn back. They don't send out fast-pursuit boats to deliver such a command every day. And after all, the note is for
you
. Admiral Cutler is calling for your return specifically.'

‘Why, Ed Cutler couldn't command a leaky bathtub.'

‘I couldn't comment on that, ma'am.'

‘I'm retired!'

‘Of course you are, Admiral.'

‘I don't have to take any damn orders from that old desk jockey.'

‘But I do, ma'am,' said Sheridan softly.

Maggie sighed, and looked out through the sturdy windows of this observation deck, at the churning volcanic landscape of the latest stepwise Earth, and at the pursuit boat, a sleek craft that hung in the sky alongside the
Duke
. ‘But we came so far,' she said plaintively. ‘And it's been so long.' Twenty-five years since she'd left a science party on West 247,830,855, a
very
strange Earth, an Earth that was a mere moon of a greater planet. More than twenty years since a relief mission found they'd vanished. ‘They're my people, Jane.'

‘I know, ma'am.' Sheridan was in her late twenties but, highly capable, had the air of someone significantly older. ‘But the way I see it is this. After twenty-five years they're either dead, or they found a way to survive. Either way they'll keep a little longer.'

‘Damn it. Not only are you ridiculously young, you're also ridiculously right. And damn Cutler. What's all this about – some kind of invitation?'

‘I don't know any more than you right now, Admiral . . .'

Even as they argued, the
Duke
began its long trip home, and the subtle swing-like sense of regular stepping resumed. Beyond the windows whole worlds flapped by, one a second, then two, then four: sun and rain, heat and cold, landscapes and suites of life and climate systems, there and gone in the blink of an eye. But nobody was watching this routine miracle.

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And elsewhere:

On this chill March day the shaven-headed novice, sitting cross-legged behind a low desk and labouring over texts that had originated in the eighth century after Christ, was distracted by a distant noise. A faint call.

Not the talk and laughter of the villagers in the clean Himalayan air, the old men with their smoky pipes, the women with their laundry, the little children playing with their home-made wooden toys. Not the clank of cow bells from the passes. It had been like a voice, the boy thought, echoing from the cold, white, ice-draped face of the mountain that loomed over this valley, deep in old Tibet.

A voice that chimed inside his own head.

Words, softly spoken:

. . . Humanity must progress. This is the logic of our finite cosmos; ultimately we must rise up to meet its challenges if we are not to expire with it . . . Consider. We call ourselves the wise ones, but what would a true
Homo sapiens
be like? What would it do? Surely it would first of all treasure its world, or worlds. It would look to the skies for other sapient life forms. And it would look to the universe as a whole . . .

The boy called, ‘Joshua?'

The master slammed the palm of his hand flat on the desk, making the boy jump. ‘Pay attention, Lobsang!'

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The words rained down from the sky across the Long Earth, wherever there were ears to hear and eyes to see and minds to understand.

Standing by his wife's grave marker, Joshua Valienté didn't want any invitation. ‘Leave me alone, damn it!' He stepped away angrily.

The air he displaced created a soft breeze that touched the petals of the flowers on the grave.

Yet the voice from the sky did not cease.

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2

W
HEN
B
ILL
C
HAMBERS
arrived at the office, the final April morning before Joshua left for his latest sabbatical, he had trouble opening the door – and it was the door of his own office, Bill being the current mayor of Hell-Knows-Where, Joshua realized with chagrin.

Joshua was in the small private bathroom. When he heard muffled cusses he came out bare to the waist, towel around his neck, half his face covered with shaving foam. Though the morning was well advanced, the blinds were still down, and the room was gloomy. Bill was trying to get across the office without stepping on some crucial piece of travelling gear, and it was a challenge. Not only did Joshua have Bill's fold-out cot still piled with bedding, but the rest of his kit was strewn out in rows and heaps across the floor, even on the desk.

‘Mother of mercy, Josh, what is it ye're packing here?' Bill's faux Irish got stronger every time they met. ‘Hell-Knows-Where is a sophisticated place now, you know. I've got to sort out the quarterly cross-taxes by the end of the week.'

‘Bill, I thought you had a computer to handle that sort of stuff.'

Bill looked pained. That is to say, more pained than previously. ‘Ye can't leave it to the computer, man! True accountancy is the last refuge of the creative mind.'