The Long Cosmos Read online

  And now the Next were coming here. Dev felt Lee’s hand slip into his own.

  They had come out a little early; waiting for their Next visitors to arrive, they’d been too nervous to sit around. Lee, tall, slim, dark, wearing her hair shaven close to her scalp, was a few years younger than Dev, in her mid-twenties, and he was her nominal superior in the GapSpace management hierarchy, such as it was. She was ferociously bright, however, and he had a feeling that their working relationship wouldn’t stay the same for long – even if their tentative personal relationship lasted. For now, though, she needed his support.

  He squeezed her hand. ‘Take it easy. I mean, you know Prof Welch from Valhalla U. The Next might browbeat you, but they don’t actually bite.’

  ‘It’s not that. Well, maybe a little. It’s like being back at college, and being brought in before some ferocious supervisor who’s going to pick your work apart.’

  ‘And they have been bringing money into GapSpace, remember. Why, the Cyclops radio telescope project was their initiative in the first place.’

  ‘But they weren’t interested in us before, were they? They saw the Gap as just a handy place to hang a big space antenna. But now there’s the Invitation, and here they come, taking over.’

  Dev shrugged. ‘Well, they’re not taking over—’

  ‘And we’ll get railroaded.’

  The Next were a new kind of people – genetically and morphologically distinct – who had emerged in the strange crucible that was the Long Earth. And they were, without a doubt, categorically smarter than regular-issue folk.

  ‘Humans are kind of disposable when the Next are around. That’s what they say.’

  ‘We can deal with it . . .’

  A sleek airship appeared above their heads with a soft pop of displaced air. As soon as it arrived it began to descend, and a passenger ramp like a long tongue unrolled and reached for the ground not far from the facility’s security gate. Shadowy figures moved in the ship’s interior.

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ Lee said nervously.

  Even the Next had to follow the proper security procedure when entering the compound.

  Not that there was much malevolence directed at GapSpace nowadays, but this was still a fragile, high-technology, high-energy facility, and while security in the Long Earth had always been a challenge, there were ways to achieve it. The only orderly way into GapSpace was the way Stella Welch and Roberta Golding were coming in now: stepping through from the lower worlds to arrive outside the security perimeter and be processed through the gate.

  And it was the job of Dev and Lee to welcome them.

  Dev led Lee towards the twain. ‘To tell the truth I’m more nervous about what they’re going to be wearing. There are these rumours about how the Next live, in the wild . . .’

  ‘Nude except for pockets. That’s what I heard. But Professor Welch is like a hundred and eight.’

  ‘Not that old—’

  ‘Without her clothes she’ll look like she’s melted.’

  He laughed. ‘I’ll tell her you said so.’

  Two women were walking down the ramp from the twain, followed by a crewman pushing a trolley heaped with luggage. To Dev’s relief neither of the Next was semi-nude; they wore what looked like serviceable travelling clothes – jackets and slacks in sombre shades. A few more crew followed the party down, and began fixing anchor ropes to the ground.

  Dev recognized Stella Welch, of course, who had visited GapSpace several times before. He’d never met Roberta Golding, but she was rumoured to be senior in whatever organization the Next had set up for themselves in the Grange, their secretive base. Slim, dark, bespectacled, with a rather pinched face, she looked younger than he’d expected – mid-forties, maybe.

  ‘See,’ Dev said. ‘They look normal enough.’

  ‘Hm. For a given value of “normal” . . .’

  The introductions, with cursory handshakes, were brief.

  Dev said, ‘We’re honoured you’ve come out to see us, Ms Golding.’

  She looked faintly puzzled, as if he’d said something inappropriate. ‘That’s polite of you. But this is business, of course. The project we propose—’

  Stella Welch interposed, ‘Oh, but this goes beyond business, Roberta. At least as far as these two former students of mine are concerned. We’re going to ask them to put aside their own personal programmes to help us facilitate the Clarke Project. They are among the most able here.’

  Dev felt his own polite expression become strained at this faint praise. And he glanced at Lee. The Clarke Project? I never heard that name before.

  Roberta said now, ‘You have our transport waiting?’

  Dev said, ‘The stepper shuttle to the Gap? Whenever you’re ready. But if you’d like to look around the facility first—’

  ‘We’d rather get on with it,’ Stella said. She headed towards the gate – after all, she knew the way. ‘We went through the necessary bio-screening on board the twain; the formal permissions are being downloaded now.’

  Dev and Lee fell in behind the two of them. ‘You seem in a hurry.’

  Roberta barely glanced back. ‘We are.’

  ‘So,’ Lee murmured to Dev, ‘we’re among the most able here, are we? Maybe we could go swing on a tyre. They might throw us a couple of bananas.’

  ‘Hush,’ he whispered, suppressing a grin.

  8

  THE HANGAR CONTAINING the stepper shuttles was at the heart of the complex, a concrete box surrounded by fuel-store facilities. The shuttles stood in a neat row. Each conical craft looked like an old Apollo command module, but standing on four legs with a stubby engine block and spherical fuel tanks beneath.

  Using the Gap, this was all you needed to reach space. You didn’t even need to take your shuttle out of this hangar.

  The processing was swift. The bulk of the visitors’ luggage was taken away to residential facilities elsewhere on the site, leaving them with small items of hand luggage. Supervised by attendants in hooded white coveralls, the four of them were put through a final medical screen, culminating in antiseptic showers. Then they were fitted with fresh coveralls in a rich NASA-type blue, each equipped with temperature-control elements, an emergency oxygen supply, and clumsy sewn-in diapers in case of other kinds of emergency.

  The Next visitors put up with all this with a kind of bored patience. Dev, watching them, supposed this must be a posture that Next working among humans got used to adopting. Bored patience.

  They all climbed easily into their shuttle, and strapped themselves into couches, selecting them at random from banks fixed on a couple of decks in the interior of the little craft. Automated, the shuttle needed no pilot.

  Dev found himself slipping into tour-guide mode. ‘This is all very routine,’ he said. ‘We make hops over in shuttles like this every day—’

  ‘We can do without such trivial observations,’ said Roberta mildly. ‘We are not – tourists.’

  ‘The safety record they’ve achieved is a non-trivial matter,’ Stella said to her. ‘Although it has got better yet since we showed up and ran a few reviews.’

  Roberta considered Dev. ‘And the cultural development here is non-trivial, of course. Dev Bilaniuk – I’m guessing your names have different origins? They sound Indian and Slavic—’

  ‘Mother from Delhi, father from Minsk. Both drawn here to the Gap. I’m a second-generation Gapper.’

  ‘You could surely have moved away, had you chosen to. Evidently you inherited their dream of space.’

  Lee leaned forward against her straps. ‘That’s not so unusual. Especially when you see what else is on offer in the Long Earth. Slaving in factories at the feet of space elevators in the Low Earths, or else wandering around in hand-me-down clothes, picking fruit and chasing after funny-looking deer. I’m a second-generation Gapper too. At least here we’re pursuing an authentic human aspiration, one that predates stepping itself. And one you people stay out of, unless you need something.’


  Dev said, ‘Lee—’

  Stella held up a hand. ‘It’s OK.’

  And, under the control of the shuttle’s AI, they stepped.

  One step further West, they fell into a hole where an Earth should be. Beyond the windows, where there had been washed-out English sunlight, there was only darkness. And as always, without gravity it felt to Dev like they were suddenly falling.

  Then the shuttle swivelled sharply and fired its thrusters, producing a fierce deceleration.

  Every object on the surface of the Earth, at GapSpace’s latitude, was moving through space at hundreds of miles per hour, and in the Gap that velocity had to be shed. And that was what the rocket fire was for.

  Dev was glad the transition had put a stop to the conversation. And spitefully glad too to observe discomfort on the faces of the two Next – even Stella, who had made this journey a number of times before. Superhuman intellects they might be, but right now he suspected they were discovering that their inner ears and stomachs were just as human and just as maladapted to shifting gravity as his own.

  The hard rocket thrust lasted only seconds, and died quickly. They were briefly weightless again. Then the shuttle turned once more, with pops of attitude thrusters that sounded as if somebody was beating the outer hull with a stick, and with a blip of the main engine began to edge towards its docking station.

  Now, through the small window before him, Dev glimpsed structures in space.

  Directly ahead of the shuttle was a mass of clustered concrete spheres, huge, marked with sunlight-faded black letters, A to K, with an oddly organic look – like a clump of frogspawn, perhaps. This was the Brick Moon, GapSpace’s first reception station here in the Gap, tracking the orbits of the Earths to either stepwise side. Further out, brilliant in the unfiltered sunlight, Dev could see the O’Neill, a new and much larger facility, like a glass bottle filled with glowing green light and surrounded by big, fragile constructions, paddles and bowls and net-like antennas. The whole affair rotated languidly on the bottle’s long axis. It was only the smaller craft swarming around the docking ports at the structure’s circular ends that gave a sense of its scale: that ‘bottle’ was twenty miles long, four miles wide.

  And behind all this, dwarfing even the O’Neill, hovered a lump of ice and rock. From here Dev could see work going on across its surface: the gleam of mass drivers, the spark of craft landing and taking off. Called only the Lump, this was an immense asteroid that had been nudged, over decades, into a position close to the Brick Moon, and steadily mined for its resources to build such structures as the O’Neill and the Cyclops telescope.

  ‘So that’s the Brick Moon,’ Roberta murmured. ‘Concrete mixed by trolls. Ha! What a start to humanity’s conquest of space.’

  Lee just glared.

  Dev began to unbuckle. ‘We need not stay long here; this is just a transit point. We’ve a ferry waiting to transfer us to the Gerard K. O’Neill. It’s a much more comfortable environment. With gravity, for one thing, provided by the spin. We’d be pleased to show you the projects we’re developing out here—’

  ‘Irrelevant,’ Roberta said simply. ‘Does this Brick Moon, this concrete box, have viewing facilities sufficient to view the progress on Cyclops? Also computational support, some kind of AI?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I have no desire to extend this visit beyond what is necessary. After all, we have to regard the situation as urgent; we have no idea how long we have before the Invitation ceases to transmit, and we must ensure we extract all the information it contains. The Clarke proposal is the one and only reason I am here.’ She laughed softly. ‘Not to sightsee your new toys.’

  Lee was fuming, and Dev tried to suppress his own irritation. He said, ‘Well, let’s hope you people are just as happy with your new toy, when we’ve built it for you.’

  Roberta and Stella exchanged a raised-eyebrow glance. The man-ape was being defiant.

  No more was said until the shuttle closed in on the Brick Moon, and docking latches rattled shut.

  9

  THERE WAS NO gravity in the Brick Moon. You moved by pulling yourself along ropes slung around the walls, and poles that criss-crossed the spherical chambers.

  The big spheres were connected by circular orifices, and as they moved deeper into the interior it was as if they were swimming into the centre of some vast honeycomb – or maybe, as one visitor from the Datum Earth had remarked, it was like a huge old Roman-era drainage system, all concrete vaults and cylindrical passages. And after decades of occupation the Brick Moon smelled that way too, despite periodic flushings of the entire volatile content, the water and all the air: a sour stink of people, of stale food and sweat and blood and piss, seemed to seep out of the very walls.

  It wasn’t a quiet place; there was an endless clatter of pumps and fans. And the walls, where they weren’t hidden by cabling and ducts and pipes, were crusted with decades’ worth of junk, from antiquated tablets and comms stations, to the relics of abandoned science experiments, to tokens left by those who had lived and worked here: faded photographs, children’s paintings, scribbled notes, graffiti on the concrete. Even the residential area, at the centre of the cluster, with bunk beds and galleys and a medical centre and grimy zero-gravity toilets, couldn’t have looked less inviting.

  Most long-lived space stations got shabby; they weren’t places where you could ever open the windows for a good spring-clean. And after all, this rough, decades-old construction had been humanity’s first colony in this Earth-less universe; embarrassment wasn’t an appropriate reaction. But Dev couldn’t help it.

  And he kept an eye on his guests. They had little trouble moving around, though their postures were a bit stiff, and Roberta in particular seemed to be recoiling from touching the grimy walls. Here and there boxes and pots held plants and flowers that grew in splashes of sunlight from the windows. The visitors’ eyes were drawn to the green – another primitive reaction, and one Dev found grimly satisfying to observe.

  They crossed paths with only a couple of people, both in GapSpace coveralls like Dev and his guests, who stared curiously back at the Next. The Brick Moon was never very crowded. There was a small station staff, rotated frequently, whose main job was to maintain the antique fabric and clean up the air and water. Otherwise there were only ever a few passengers in transit from one shuttle to another.

  At last they reached the sphere known informally as the observatory. Here much of the original troll-concrete shell had been replaced by a ribbing of steel and aluminium, and plates of toughened glass. There were bars for hands and feet to help visitors keep from drifting around the bubble. It was dark, the artificial light subdued.

  Beyond the windows no sun was visible, and the sky was pitch-black. The four of them spread out in the darkness.

  To Dev, whose father had been an Orthodox Catholic, this place always felt oddly like a chapel, and he spoke softly. ‘It’s best to wait a while to allow our eyes to adjust to the dark. The Brick Moon has some limited manoeuvrability, to maintain its station and its orientation. And it’s turned, very slowly, to ensure no one section is over-exposed to the sun. But this chamber is kept facing away from the light permanently—’

  ‘I see a planet,’ Roberta said. She pointed at a light, emerging from the dark. She thought for a moment, and Dev imagined calculations processing through her high intelligence: an exercise in celestial mechanics, a determination of what she was seeing. ‘Mars,’ she announced.

  ‘Yes,’ Dev said. ‘A Mars, at any rate, the Mars of this stepwise universe. But its position is subtly different from that of our own Mars because of—’

  ‘The lack of an Earth here. Of course.’

  Again she’d cut him off. He suppressed his irritation. These Next did seem to require an awful lot of forgiveness of the dim-bulbs they dealt with.

  He caught Lee grinning at him, her teeth bright in the subdued light.

  Roberta ran her finger around the equator of the sky. ‘And t
here are asteroids.’

  Dev could just see them now, emerging as a band of sparkles against a wider scatter of stars.

  Stella nodded. ‘It is the wreckage of the local Earth, of course. Dead Earth, as they call it. Much of the mass of the planet seems to have been lost in the impact – thrown out of the solar system altogether, probably – but what remains is a new asteroid belt, rich in silicate rock, iron.’

  Dev said, ‘This local belt has been essential in building up our facilities here. The big O’Neill, for example, was constructed of iron and aluminium and stocked with volatiles, all gathered from Dead Earth asteroids. The fact that these rocks are so close to us, compared to the classic asteroid belt, has made life a lot easier.’

  Roberta looked out with some interest. ‘“Dead Earth.” I understand there are some groups who oppose your exploiting this resource. It’s likened to grave-robbing.’

  Lee said, ‘But some say it’s as if we’re honouring the planet, by making use of its wreckage.’ She faced Roberta defiantly. ‘I suppose you think either position is illogical.’

  ‘Not at all. One would have to have a very stunted emotional imagination not to have some response to this, the ruin of a world, of, presumably, a planetary biosphere every bit as mature and rich as that of Datum Earth itself. But what you’re doing here is neither right nor wrong. It simply is.’ She glanced around the sky. ‘Where is Cyclops?’

  Stella swam over next to her and pointed. ‘Up there, at four o’clock.’

  Looking that way, Dev could see only a disc of blackness, occluding the stars. He said, ‘Actually what you see is just the baffle, shielding the radio telescope from leakage from the habitats, the shuttles.’ He tapped a console, and a big display tablet brought up an image of a vast, lacy dish: the antenna of the spaceborne radio telescope itself.

  Roberta glanced up at the baffle, itself an immense structure. ‘A shame I can’t see it with the naked eye, but I sense the scale.’