The Long Cosmos (44 page)

Big Mama opened that small mouth and hissed 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

T
HE 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 pack. ‘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

L
ONG 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.'

Now, Joshua saw, one of the Traversers had come closer to the shore than the rest. Big glistening flaps on its back opened up, and what looked like standard-issue humans emerged, just walking out. Some of them clambered into crude-looking boats they hauled out of the Traverser's interior, and paddled to the shore.

The
Uncle Arthur
crew just watched, open-mouthed.

The woman who walked up the beach was perhaps thirty years old, the boy at her side perhaps ten. All but naked, their feet bare, their legs coated with seawater and sand, they bravely faced the travellers in their high-tech suits. The little boy was clinging to his mother's hand, staring.

Lobsang said, ‘You know who this is, don't you?'

Joshua murmured, ‘I think you're scaring him, Lobsang. Let me handle this.' Joshua hobbled forward, deliberately smiling. ‘Lucille? Troy?'

The woman nodded curtly.

‘My name is Joshua Valienté. This is Lobsang. Troy, your grandfather, Nelson Azikiwe, asked us to find you. Well, I'm not quite sure how we did it, but here we are.'

‘Huh,' said the woman, unimpressed. ‘You took your time.'

64

T
HE
U
NCLE
A
RTHUR
returned through more star-spanning leaps to Earth West 3,141,592.

For much of the journey Joshua's time was spent trying to explain to his new guests, Lucille and Troy, what the hell was happening to them – and, yes, how he'd find a way to bring them back home one day, back to their own ocean seven hundred thousand steps from the Datum, back to Sam and the stranded fisher folk.

And when the
Uncle
arrived back at Little Cincinnati, for once the centre of attention wasn't a continent-sized computer. The sky over the Navy base was dominated by a twain – and not just any twain, Joshua saw, not some Low Earth tub, not some battered old scow from the Long Mississippi run, not even a state-of-the-art US Navy military vessel – this was an island in the sky, huge, with artificial light gleaming from ports in a hardened underbelly. And its envelope hull was made, not of some fabric, but of
wood
, Joshua saw, tremendous panels of it. It was like one vast piece of furniture.

As he stumbled out of the
Uncle
, Jan Roderick's eyes were wide, his mouth a perfect circle. ‘Oh. My. Gosh.'

Joshua grinned. ‘Not an inappropriate response.'

Lee and Dev, techno-buffs both, gazed up at the ship too. ‘Wow,' Dev said simply. ‘That thing must be a mile long.'

‘Actually a little longer,' Maggie said. ‘That, my young explorers, is the USS
Samuel L. Clemens
. More than five times the length of the
Duke.
Douglas Black, the builder of this prototype, owes me a few favours . . .'

‘Black,' Lobsang said. ‘I knew it.'

And Joshua snapped his fingers. ‘Reaching-wood,' he said. ‘That's how that damn thing stays up. I knew
that
would leak out.'

Maggie pursed her lips. ‘I once glimpsed those forests too, Mr Valienté, aboard the
Armstrong II
. When you came back with your account – well, the opportunity to check it out again seemed too good to miss. Mr Black assures me that all logging will be carried out sustainably. And you've never heard
that
promise before, have you? Anyhow, so I'm informed, it's come to take you all home. Once again I thought we may as well travel in style.'

Jan walked up, looking worried. ‘I won't be in trouble, will I?'

Maggie looked at him sternly. ‘For stowing away? If you were, was it worth it?'