The Long Cosmos (39 page)

Roberta smiled, only a little smugly now, Joshua thought. ‘We have tried to anticipate. Yes, we guessed this would involve a new kind of stepping; yes, we did learn from the experience at New Springfield. The stepwise connection with the beetles' world seems to have been made accidentally – serendipitously. But we saw that Stan Berg was able
consciously
to change the connectivity of the Long Earth, even if it drained him to do it. All these suggest capabilities of still higher intelligences, who may
manipulate
their own Long worlds . . . In any event, if Ronald and Ruby are in communication with the Thinker, then we hope that they in turn can coach Indra in any necessary skills.'

Indra said quietly, ‘I'm Stan's cousin. The family are intensely proud of his self-sacrifice. If I prove capable of this mission, I would be prepared to join the crew.'

Maggie snapped, ‘Who the hell said anything about a crew? You're speaking of a journey, and, I'm guessing, into the utterly unknown. To hell with self-sacrifice. Will it be safe? Will we be able to breathe? Will we step out into the middle of – I don't know – the heart of a sun?'

Lobsang smiled. ‘You're a reader of Mellanier, I can tell.'

‘Who?'

‘A pod,' said Joshua. ‘That's what we need. Like
2001
, Bowman through the Star Gate. We build a pod, and step over in that. Something like a bathyscaphe.'

‘Yes,' Lobsang said. ‘Good. Something that will last long enough at least for the crew to survive, and
step back
to report on what's on the other side.'

‘I'll go too,' Dev said promptly. ‘You'll need a pilot.'

Maggie held up her hands. ‘Hold your horses. This boat that doesn't yet exist, if it gets built at all, is going to be a Navy boat, and the Navy will get to choose the crew. If any. Which means me.'

Joshua had to grin. ‘Of course it does.'

Roberta Golding said, ‘This has been a surprisingly constructive encounter. Suddenly we have a plan, a product of us all working together, ourselves and—'

‘And us dim-bulbs?' Joshua asked.

The Next woman smiled around at them all, brightly, without, Joshua thought, a grain of irony. And yet he couldn't be sour. A new kind of journey faced him, a new direction. He felt the way he had on the day
after
Step Day, when he couldn't wait to get hold of his Stepper box and stride out into the unknown.

‘OK,' Maggie said, glancing at her watch. ‘Let's finish the tour – and we are working to a schedule. Ms Malone, I believe you have a job to complete here.'

‘Of course.' Lee dived into the bus, and returned with her slab of computronium. ‘We wanted to show you the detail of how we work around here. This component is to be installed at the periphery of the Thinker, not far away. Please, follow me . . .'

Lee led the way to the boundary of the computronium surface.

Joshua, glancing over his shoulder, saw that Douglas Black, as displayed on his screen on the bus, was watching intently. And so too were the Next, Lovelace and Indra Newton; they'd stood back from the lollipop compound, but now, after a significant glance between Lovelace and Black, they followed closely too. Joshua felt a tingle of suspicion. The atmosphere had changed; something was going on here. He recalled Lobsang's suspicions of Black.

Only Sancho did not come. The troll stayed with his face pressed to the wire, his big fingers poking through the gaps, staring mournfully at Ruby and Ronald.

They gathered at the lip of the computronium sheet. Here the smart flooring was only a couple of feet thick, Joshua saw, and not yet anchored in the ground. Beyond, green grass grew, Earth grass innocent of the alien machinery that was about to overwhelm it.

Lee crouched down and held out the component she'd brought. ‘See how it will mate into this slot in the edge? Just as the design mandated. The tolerances are at the nano scale, and once it's installed it will be integrated seamlessly . . . Of course tens of thousands of such pieces are installed automatically, every day. But this is actually one of the last wave of components to be assembled and delivered in this way.'

‘Self-replication,' Maggie muttered. ‘That's what it's beginning to do. Eating its own way deeper into the earth, growing at the periphery . . . Making its own components from rock and air. After that point we won't be able to stop it—'

‘Ms Malone,
do not install that component.'

55

T
HE VOICE, COMING
from a loudspeaker, startled them all.

Lee looked baffled. She stared down at the component in her hands, as if it had turned into a rattlesnake.

Joshua turned. The marines at the heart of the compound were looking puzzled too, and were fingering their weapons.

And Douglas Black, his image bright and colourful in the screen on the side of the bus, grinned. ‘Sorry to play the
deus ex machina,
so to speak.'

‘You're not sorry about that at all,' muttered Lobsang. ‘Joshua, I told you he was up to something.'

Black snapped out orders. ‘Marvin Lovelace, you should stand aside. Maggie, you may consider confining him for now.'

Maggie, obviously with no idea what was going on, nevertheless nodded to a couple of marines, who hurried to Lovelace's side. ‘Mr Black, if you know something I don't—'

‘Oh, many things fall into that category, my dear Admiral. But what's relevant here is that I know what is hidden inside that component of Ms Malone's. You needn't worry, child, it's quite harmless –
now
. But you may wish to take it back to your plant and check it over. Ms Malone is quite innocent in all this, by the way.

‘You see, Admiral Kauffman, some time ago I was approached by Marvin Lovelace and others of his associates from the Humble, and was asked to help them perpetrate an undercover scheme . . .'

There had been a kind of weapon built into Lee's component, Joshua learned. A computer virus, or a heavily engineered descendant of those antique threats – a virus manufactured by Next technicians, a weapon designed by super-smart post-humans – in fact, they were told, its design had been
sketched out by Ronald and Ruby themselves
, even as they had designed their impossibly advanced alien machine. Evidently their own conflict about the wisdom of building this thing had run deep. They had wanted to be sure it had an off switch.

‘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.)

T
OWARDS 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
.