The Long Cosmos Read online

  This was around a couple of weeks into The Journey. Joshua had already made the remarkable if disquieting discovery of the lollipops, an unexpected new breed of humanoid.

  Joshua woke one morning to find the Twain’s stepping halted. They were in the Western section of what would later be called the Corn Belt: Earth West 314,159.

  It said something for Joshua’s exhaustion that he hadn’t noticed the stop. And when he glanced out of the windows he saw immediately why Lobsang had called a halt at this particular world.

  A world like a bowling ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep-blue sky.

  ‘A Joker. Like we saw before,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Indeed.’ Lobsang glanced at a tablet. ‘The last was at West 115,572. I thought this time we both ought to take a look.’

  ‘We, Lobsang?’

  ‘I’m allowed some curiosity.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Joshua, I am sure I’m safe in your hands . . .’

  They stood in nothingness.

  No. Not quite.

  Joshua let go of the ladder from the hovering airship and took a tentative step forward. He was on a plain, a flat surface, featureless, a soft eggshell blue. Above him the sky was a white abstraction, a dome. He took another step, turned around. As far as he could see, this empty plain stretched away, in every direction, to a misty horizon under that sky. It was like an artefact, not a world. An abstraction, and inverted – white above, sky-blue below.

  In the middle of it stood two grimy humans – or one and a simulation. They cast no shadows, Joshua saw now. The light was diffuse, that empty sky illuminating the land, although for all he knew it could be the other way around.

  Lobsang looked just as baffled as Joshua felt. He stepped forward, clapped his hands, shouted, ‘Hello?’ The sounds were swallowed up without echoes.

  Joshua looked around uncertainly. ‘What is this, Lobsang?’

  ‘There have been accounts of worlds like this,’ Lobsang said. ‘Including the one we found. Cueballs, travellers are calling them. A kind of Joker – an eerie place you’d hurry through.’

  ‘A flaw in the Long Earth, then?’

  ‘Maybe. Or . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is my wild theorizing, Joshua. Some kind of intersection – I mean, with another Long world. Like two necklaces, crossing over at this one place.’

  Historians would note Lobsang’s remarkable prescience in this remark, given that at this point in The Journey the pair had not yet encountered Sally Linsay, queen of the soft places. Then again, the extent of Lobsang’s knowledge was always a mystery.

  ‘Two worlds crossing . . .’

  ‘Worlds merging somehow,’ Lobsang went on. ‘Mingling. Until you’re left with this – abstraction. All that’s left is what they have in common, the most basic features.’ He jumped a couple of inches in the air. ‘Gravity. This world has mass, then. Size. We could measure the distance to that horizon, if we bothered. It’s like a mathematical model, not a world at all. A set of numbers with no detail.’

  ‘Or like an emulation in a computer game.’

  Lobsang sighed. ‘Joshua, I am like an emulation in a computer game.’

  ‘Then why the glow, the blue ground? . . .’

  Lobsang stared around. ‘It’s like the stuff everything else is made of. The light that shines behind reality, giving it substance . . . Don’t look at me like that, Joshua. You should remember my cognitive capacity is rather larger than yours, my processing speeds orders of magnitude faster. I have a lot of time to think. Even while people like you are talking.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And I think about the nature of the Long Earth. Even about Platonic realities, and . . .’

  ‘And then you smoke a bit more?’

  Lobsang said nothing.

  ‘Come on. We’ve logged it, let’s move on.’ Joshua reached out for the ladder to the airship.

  But Lobsang was standing a little way away, and staring into the air. ‘Joshua. Look at this.’

  They were like raindrops, perhaps. Mist particles. All around Lobsang, perfectly spherical droplets of water hung in the air, quite stationary.

  In retrospect, 2030, when he had gone exploring with Lobsang, had been a pretty good year for Joshua Valienté. It had even made him famous.

  That wasn’t how 2070 was turning out.

  19

  JOSHUA WAS STUCK in a nightmare.

  Dumped on the ground.

  Blood in mouth, dirt under cheek.

  Being rolled on his back, to a flood of pain from his leg. Being handled like a doll in the hands of some coarse idiot child, limbs pulled this way and that. When he struggled, feebly, more hands pressing him down.

  Huge figures all around him, black-haired bodies glimpsed through a film of blood. All of it suffused with agony.

  Pass out. Wake up. Pass out again.

  He lived this over and over. The nightmare lasted for days.

  He came back to himself slowly, bit by bit.

  He lay there and let it happen. After all, what choice did he have?

  He thought of the jigsaw puzzles he used to dig out of the back of cupboards at the Home. Battered old relics in torn boxes, depicting scenes of worlds that had vanished before he had been born: range riders in the Old West, Mercury astronauts in silver spacesuits. Lost dreams. Working alone, sometimes for hours on end, he’d painstakingly sort the pieces into their categories: corners, edges, bits with sky or sea or silver-spacesuit fabric, edges with sky or sea or spacesuit silver . . . You just had to be patient, one piece at a time, and slowly, slowly, the picture would emerge. And the more of the picture you got, the more you were going to get.

  Spacesuit silver. He wondered why he was thinking of that.

  It was dark, then it was light. Days passing.

  It would soon be fall, he thought, on this world as on all the worlds of the Long Earth. Soon the days would be getting shorter, colder. Nothing he could do about that now. He just had to endure.

  A dull ache in the leg was his constant companion, and he fretted about the state of the break.

  Also his trousers, ripped to pieces. He always had been lousy at sewing. That made him want to laugh, but his chest hurt.

  The sky above him was the first part of the puzzle to come clear. A blue sky, with scattered cloud. And the air was cooler than he remembered. Was it that much later in the year? How long had he been lying here?

  He smelled dirt, and the dense animal musk of trolls, and heard running water. No sign of humanity, not even the smell of a campfire. He was still out in the High Meggers. Nobody had come, nobody had found him, then. He had no idea whether he was even still in the world where he’d made his stockade—

  The troll face, looming over him, seemed to come out of nowhere. He flinched back.

  The troll, startled, ducked back too, only to return more circumspectly, curiously. This was a young animal, he saw now, very young, a cub, its rounded face a mask of thick black fur, its features still babyish – almost human-looking, if you ignored the beard. This certainly wasn’t the older troll that had saved him after . . .

  After he’d been run down by the baby elephant with a mask like a Star Wars stormtrooper. He remembered now. And the mother who’d carelessly stomped on him.

  ‘Hoo!’

  The troll moved abruptly, approaching him again. Lying in the dirt, helpless, Joshua cringed back from the fast, determined motions of this powerful young animal – and he was an animal, after all. Joshua had to force himself not to step out. He had to believe he was better off here than anywhere else. And besides, the trolls would probably just step after him.

  Suddenly there was a hand behind his head, a strong hairy paw, lifting him. Another hand before his face – cupped, with a splash of water in the palm. Joshua reflexively opened his mouth, and the water spilled in, more than he’d expected, gritty and cold. He gagged, but, determined, he swallowed.

  Then he was dropped with a thump that sent a fr
esh wave of pain shooting up from a battered body. ‘Hoo!’ An adult troll lumbered across his field of view, and away.

  As Joshua lay there, gasping, he started to sense more trolls, moving around him. Of course there would be more trolls. A youngster like that wouldn’t be alone. Now he heard their massive movements, their leathery feet scuffing in the dirt – a few snatches of song, like samples of an opera in Klingon.

  ‘Well,’ he said. His own voice sounded odd, very scratchy; his mouth felt Para-Venusian dry. ‘I sure could do with another sip of that water.’

  As if in response another troll loomed over him. This was an adult, a big male, not old; it wasn’t Sancho. The male peered curiously into Joshua’s eyes, and poked his cheek hard enough to hurt.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Hoo!’

  He raised Joshua up, a little more gently this time, to a half-sitting position. Joshua glimpsed the young troll behind the male, and a female, standing there, looking on with what seemed like curiosity, if not concern. Beside her was another cub, what looked like a female to Joshua, though with all that black fur it was hard to tell the sex even with the adults. She clung to the leg of the adult female, as if she was shy. This could be a family. He knew that trolls in the wild could be monogamous, with little family groups sticking together within the larger bands of dozens or more. As far as he knew, nobody was sure if the adult males in each ‘family’ actually were the biological fathers of the offspring they cared for.

  All this was set against a nondescript background: a dusty plain, a small copse with fruit bushes sprouting at its periphery, what sounded like a stream flowing not far away. Good country, if you were a troll. Joshua could still be in the world where he’d started building his stockade, or he could be far away.

  Wham. Without warning, food was rammed into his mouth – a slab of bloody meat, some kind of vegetable. The adult male was feeding him, roughly, but it felt like he’d been punched, and his mouth was suddenly so full he thought he would choke.

  He raised his hand and managed to yank out the bulk of the food. He dropped the meat in the dirt; it could be raw elephant for all he knew. But then, more cautiously, he picked up the vegetables, a broken-up root like raw potato, something green and tangled, something else soft and red – a kind of fruit. As he began to chew on the root he felt ravenously hungry. ‘My compliments on the side salad.’ The big male, still supporting him, tried to stuff more food into his mouth. But Joshua blocked the move, and instead picked out manageable chunks from the male’s offering with his own hand.

  The female, with the two cubs, crept closer, watching him. He was aware too of a wider band, more trolls at the edge of his vision, staring curiously. It struck him that maybe they weren’t used to seeing humans as old as he was.

  ‘I’m grateful,’ he said around chunks of food, still chewing. ‘I don’t know how I got here. I guess my buddy Sancho dumped me on you, and I don’t see him around anywhere . . .’ He sighed. ‘But I have a feeling I’m going to be imposing on you a while longer. And I can’t call you “adult male” or “non-specific-gender cub”. You’re Patrick.’ He pointed to the adult. ‘You, the mother, you’re Sally. I knew a Sally once . . . The boy is Matt, the girl is Liz. Where the hell did I get those names?’ He shook his head. He pointed to his own chest. ‘And I’m Joshua Valienté. Look me up in the long call.’

  Then he plucked up his courage, and, moving with caution, looked down at his damaged leg for the first time. To his huge relief it looked straight, more or less. His trousers were, however, shredded even worse than he remembered. The leg wasn’t splinted, of course, or bandaged, and from the waves of pain he felt as he moved, he evidently hadn’t been treated with anything resembling an anaesthetic.

  But if he could get the leg healed enough that he could stand unaided – and if he stayed alive – he had a reasonable prospect of stepping back to some inhabited world. And once back at Valhalla or a Low Earth, he could get some decent corrective surgery.

  If.

  He looked into the faces of the watching trolls. Patrick’s face crumpled quizzically. ‘Oh, for a troll-call. Look, I suspect you saved my life. Thank you . . .’

  Suddenly a wave of nausea caused his stomach to clench. He rolled away from Patrick, the adult male, despite flares of pain from his leg, and painfully vomited the half-chewed meal he’d consumed.

  Then he sat back, cradled in Patrick’s arms once again. Waves of heat pulsed through his body, his head. ‘Shit. I got infected. No surprise, I guess.’

  Beyond Sally, he saw a flash of spacesuit silver in the dirt.

  He squinted, cursing elderly eyes, trying to see more clearly, trying to sit up. The silver scrap was an emergency blanket. Heaped in the dirt beside it he made out other gear: his desert-camouflage pack, his outer coat, his aerogel mattress, his sleeping bag, the glint of his knives. It looked like Sancho had had the wit to empty out his stockade and bring his stuff here. Again his chances of living through this had just got incrementally better.

  ‘Sancho, you’re my hero.’

  ‘Ha?’

  ‘And spacesuit silver! I knew there had to be a reason that was bugging me. I guess I saw it out of the corner of my half-asleep eye. Patrick. Help me. Please bring over all that stuff . . .’

  It took some anxious sign language to get the message across. It was the male cub, Matt, in fact, who got it first, and soon the family were working together to lug over the gear. The human artefacts looked tiny in their big hands.

  By now Joshua was starting to feel dizzy, nauseous and seriously thirsty. He tried to prioritize, to do what he needed to do before the incoming tide of delirium rolled over him. First he gathered all the gear under the survival blanket, for protection from the weather. Then he dug a small radio transmitter out of his pack, set it in the sunlight for power, and started it broadcasting short-wave radio pleas for assistance. If anybody happened to come through this world, they ought to hear it – if they were listening, unlike most combers these days, and if they could be bothered to help. A long shot but better than none.

  Then he found some antibiotics and gobbled them down dry.

  He was almost finished. He found it hard to concentrate. But there was one more big job he needed to get done before he succumbed to the darkness.

  Patrick and Matt were still here, father and son, curiously poking at the heap of gear. He grabbed their arms, and made them look at him. ‘I need to fix my leg. If I roll around while I’m ill, I could snap the damn bone again. And with a splint the chances of it healing straight are much better.’ He rummaged through his pack. ‘I have this elasticized bandage. I’ll show you what to do. But I need you to bring me some planks. Timbers. Straight branches . . .’

  He was babbling. They were staring at him entirely without comprehension. He went into a sign-language pantomime, grabbing a couple of twigs from the ground nearby and pressing them against his leg, gesturing at the forest clump.

  Again it was Matt who got the idea first, and Joshua wondered if he’d had some exposure to humans before.

  It seemed to take for ever for them to find and bring over a couple of suitable branches. Joshua chugged a pep pill to stay conscious a little longer. He considered sacrificing one of his precious ampoules of morphine. No, he’d survived without that so far; he had no idea what was yet to come before he got out of here . . .

  When Patrick started wrapping the bandages tight around the splinted leg, the pain was astounding, even compared to what had gone before. It wasn’t just the superhuman strength but his careless rough handling that made it so bad. Patrick, Joshua knew, was doing his best. Joshua managed to sit up, and pushed and prodded, trying to make sure the bandages weren’t too tight; that way lay a dead leg and gangrene.

  At last he lay back, and spat out the bit of wood he’d clamped between his teeth. ‘OK, it’s my fault, Agnes! You warned me.’ His words dissolved into a scream as Patrick put the big muscles of his back into yanking the bandage. ‘I asked for it. My
bad, OK? Just make it stop! Make it stop! . . .’

  20

  DURING THAT SUMMER of 2070, as Joshua Valienté endured a sabbatical that had become a stranding, and Dev Bilaniuk and Lee Malone glimpsed the future of mankind at the Grange, Nelson Azikiwe undertook a long journey of his own. A long stepwise journey, despite the discomfort of stepping itself. But it was worth it, for Nelson. For he went in search of a grandson he had only just discovered existed.

  Despite his elderly eyes, Nelson was one of the first to spot the storm approaching this living island, this Traverser.

  He was sitting on the soft, pale sand of the island’s north beach – or rather, on the sand-covered flank that this island-like creature chose to present to the low northern sun that morning. The Traverser, which Lobsang, its discoverer, had chosen to call Second Person Singular during Nelson’s first visit all of thirty years ago, was always in motion, always responding to currents and breezes, to the cycle of the seasons – always underway, following its own imperatives.

  The sea stretched before Nelson, small waves lapping at the shore, further out placid and flat and a deep rich blue: placid for now, anyhow. This was the Tasman Sea, and somewhere to the east was New Zealand – or rather an uninhabited footprint of the Datum island group of that name. This balmy world was seven hundred thousand steps West of Datum Earth.

  And above the island, patiently station-keeping under the control of its onboard AI, hovered the small two-person twain that had carried Nelson all this way. Sleek, glittering with solar-energy panels, the twain was a reminder that Nelson did not belong here, that his own home was far distant, around the curve of the planet and many steps away along the mysterious chain of the Long Earth. But for now, here he sat, on this beach that wasn’t a beach, with his son, Sam. A son he hadn’t known existed until a few months ago.