The Long War Read online

  This was a little-known chat room, access to which would only be vouchsafed to you by invitation – and the invitation was a series of tests. Nelson, intrigued by a quiz he’d been sent without explanation, had completed it after evensong one day a few weeks ago. It took him twenty-seven minutes. His reward was to be sent another quiz, of similarly fiendish intricacy. Over the following days more quizzes turned up randomly. Nelson had been impressed by the questions, which demanded not only knowledge in a vast number of fields but also the ability to make use of that knowledge against the clock, while drawing on a multiplicity of disciplines, including un-disciplines . . . In the nerdosphere, in pursuit of the elusive and the strange, the strongest intellect, Nelson knew, was good for nothing without a propensity for pack-rat fact accumulation, an appreciation of serendipity, and an endless interest in the incongruous, the out of place. And that was what the Quizmasters’ tests seemed to select for.

  The room had opened for him on the seventh day. That was the first time he’d learned the group’s name for itself. Initially the Quizmasters seemed like any other chat room, except that everybody in it knew that in some way they had been chosen, which gave a frisson to the proceedings. A self-selecting elite of the nerdosphere – and very useful, he’d found, if directed to a task.

  But time and again conversations in that room came round to the monopoly known as the Black Corporation, which was for the most part detested by the circle members. That itself being a puzzle, of course.

  When Nelson went online, or, more accurately, onlines, he mixed in cyberspace with a lot of people who had a marked dislike of black helicopters, governments, washing more than once a week, and above all, secrets – and, just to top it off, particularly didn’t like the Black Corporation. Which was kind of strange if you thought about it, since the infrastructure of the nerdosphere itself nowadays was more or less supported by Black products. Certainly the nerdosphere was always full of speculation, scuttlebutt and downright lies about what was happening in the most ultra-secret laboratories of the organization.

  Yes, everybody knew Black’s story, the elements of which had become as familiar, it sometimes seemed to Nelson, as the Nativity. It was a classic American narrative of its kind. It had all started when Douglas Black and his associates had set up ‘just another computer company’, with the help of Black’s late grandfather’s oil-money bequest. This was the early 1990s; Black had only been in his mid-twenties. From the beginning Black’s lines had included such much-longed-for-by-customers products as computers with long battery power and fault-free software, machines that were your partners, not just a gadget for extracting money from you, not just an ad for some superior future version of themselves. Machines that seemed mature. And from the beginning Black had begun to make philanthropic donations of various kinds around the world, including a scholarship programme in South Africa that Nelson himself had benefited from.

  With time the Black product line went from strength to strength, and began to innovate significantly. Black was entitled to rewards aplenty for his intellectual courage, as far as Nelson was concerned. He was after all the founder of the first ‘serendipital laboratory’. The logic was that since so many important new discoveries in science were made by accident, then the process would be speeded up if you set up a situation in which a very large number of accidents happened, and watched the results carefully. According to legend Black had even deliberately employed people who didn’t quite know what they were doing, or had a bad memory, or who were known to be congenitally unlucky and careless. It was, of course, a lunatic idea. Black did take some precautions, such as building his laboratory to the same safety standards as were employed by explosives manufacturers . . .

  Black’s innovations had won him huge sales, public praise, and a concerted attack by instant enemies. The established companies he was wrong-footing, and whose profits he was trashing, accused him of everything from monopolistic practices to a lack of patriotism. The public didn’t buy any of these lies, it seemed, but it did keep on buying Black’s neat stuff. And indeed the public bought into Black himself, who became a hero, a cheerful rogue thumbing his nose at older, lumbering companies, investing in spectacular super-rich indulgences like homes under the sea and jaunts into orbit, while sprinkling charities and good causes with staggering amounts of money.

  Then the gods truly smiled on Black’s project when an experiment to find a new type of surgical plaster was left too long in the sunshine and turned into ‘gel’, as it became known, a curious quasi-organic matter embedded with self-designing, self-repairing bio-neural circuitry, smart enough to morph itself physically to fit the circumstances it found itself in. The newspapers called it the intelligent bandage, after its first applications, but it had soon proved to be much more than that – and much smarter. As a self-correcting, self-repairing, physically malleable data and processing store, gel in all its forms had become the mainstay of the Black Corporation’s output. There was a wave of new products, and indeed new types of product. This time many of Black’s competitors were wiped out completely.

  Now it was the turn of governments to become suspicious. Black was simply too rich, too powerful – not to mention too generous and too popular – to be borne. The US administration made attempts to take control of Black’s operations under various national-interest fig-leaves, or at least to break up his empire. Eminent domain was quoted; militarization of Black’s enterprises was attempted.

  But Black hastily diversified into obviously non-security, non-military applications, such as medicine. Suddenly the corporation turned its attention to the disadvantaged: to letting the dumb speak and the lame walk. Nowadays there were people seeing, hearing, walking, running, swimming, even juggling, thanks to the prosthetic aids, implants, and other products developed by the Black Corporation and its subsidiaries. With such a portfolio behind him Black was able to argue that there was no national interest served in the government’s pursuit of him; its actions were anti-capitalist – whisper it quietly, socialist.

  Since then Black had made an even grander gesture when, nearly a decade ago, he had more or less gifted twain technology, through an international consortium of manufacturers, to the UN, governments worldwide, and the peoples of the new Earths. Nowadays the twains that plied the US Aegis – even the few police and military craft as well as the commercial fleets – were all Black Corporation products, built at cost. Not only that, the conglomerate disbursed even vaster funds to good causes, and Black became even more of a hero.

  Despite all this, however, the name of Douglas Black was anathema to many in the chat rooms.

  Nelson had searched in vain for plausible reasons, and found none. It wasn’t as if many of those who poured out their bile could have any personal grudge: none of them, for example, had been executives of the moribund companies whose careers might have been ruined by Black’s rise. It seemed the worst you could say about Douglas Black as a human being was that he was a workaholic, who worked hard and expected people to work hard for him. Maybe this had cost him, even significantly. There had been an online legend that Black’s serendipity lab was even behind the Stepper box that had opened up the Long Earth. Somehow Black had pissed off the inventor, and in the end the box design had been dumped into the public domain, galvanizing all mankind, but earning not a penny for anybody, not directly at any rate.

  That was all behind the scenes. And yet Black was hated, by some.

  The minds hiding behind the various pseudonyms Nelson found himself staring at among the Quizmasters were not stupid. They could not be, given the high bar set for entrance in the first place; indeed it sometimes felt as if a membership of Mensa might just about qualify you to make the coffee for this particular metaphorical kaffee-klatch. Not stupid, no. But . . .

  Nelson had met many people in different walks of life, and he thought he could read at least some of them. These men and women were bright, truly bright. But in some, even through the impersonal medium of the chat rooms, h
e sensed something dark and hidden, sometimes betrayed by the occasional comment, or curious turn of phrase. Envy, to start with. Paranoid suspicion, for another. A kind of seam of malevolence – a capacity for cold hatred – a capacity that needed an outlet, any outlet. A man like Black, who presented a public face, who could seem either an object of envy, or too good to be true and therefore deserving of suspicion, was an ideal target. This didn’t show itself often, no, but it was apparent to those who really watched other people.

  And especially to a man who had grown up a black kid in South Africa, and had not forgotten the experience.

  Anyhow, whatever you thought about Black, Nelson did like the Black Corporation, in all its wonderful and manifold manifestations. And in particular he liked the mysteries their various activities threw up for him to ponder over.

  For example, as he had drifted somewhat aimlessly through the periphery of the information cloud that surrounded Black, he had started to notice how often the ‘Lobsang Project’ was mentioned. But it was always a dead end in any search, a link to nowhere. Lobsang: of course the name meant ‘big brain’ in Tibetan, which showed that somebody in the Black Corporation had not only a sense of humour but also some skills when it came to languages. But Lobsang was a personal name too, and, slowly, Nelson had come to envisage Lobsang as a person. A person to be tracked down. Him and his ‘Project’.

  And now Nelson, all alone in this rather chilly rectory, with all eight screens windows to the world, smiled. For suddenly his search had borne fruit.

  One of his screens filled up with an image of the airship Mark Twain, rather battle-worn after its now famous journey, being towed into what remained of Madison, Wisconsin, after the nuke attack ten years back: towed by Joshua Valienté and a young woman whom no one to Nelson’s knowledge had subsequently been able to identify.

  Nelson was pretty sure that he’d seen just about everything that Joshua Valienté had brought back from the extraordinary voyage of the Mark Twain. The Black Corporation – in a gesture typical of Douglas Black – had dumped Godzillabytes of data from the voyage into the archive of any university that wanted it, for open public access and study. (Godzillabytes: Nelson had an irrational dislike of ‘petabytes’, the recognized term for a particular, and particularly large, wodge of data. Anything that sounded like a kitten’s gentle nip just didn’t have the moxie to do the job asked of it. ‘Godzillabytes’, on the other hand, shouted to the world that it was dealing with something very, very big . . . and possibly dangerous.)

  Nelson had seen this particular clip, or variants of it from other camera angles, many times before, and he wondered why his search engines had thrown it up now. Watching, he saw that this bit of hasty amateur footage showed a scene where Valienté, in a radiation-exposure processing camp in West 1, seemed to be carrying a cat under one arm. Some bystander off-screen burst out laughing and called, ‘What’s that, the ship’s cat?’ And somebody else, almost certainly Valienté’s unknown companion though she was out of shot, called back, ‘Yeah, wiseass, and it can speak Tibetan.’

  You had to listen very carefully to make out this piece of nonsense. But that word was evidently what the search had picked on: ‘Tibetan’, a subsidiary search tag from ‘Lobsang’, had brought this fragment of the complicated saga of the Mark Twain drifting to the surface for his attention.

  What had the woman meant? Why use such a word, ‘Tibetan’, if it wasn’t somehow relevant? He had no idea yet where this was leading. But now he had a link between one of Black’s more high-profile projects, the Twain and its journey, and one of the most low-profile, Lobsang, embodied in that single word.

  Of course the complete absence of any other link was itself suspicious.

  For now the search was going no further; he was covering what he already knew. Nelson yawned, blinked and shut down the screens. There was a mystery here, he was sure, and he felt a tingle of anticipation at the prospect of following this trail further. And this was precisely why he was shedding his parochial duties: to have the time, while he had the resources and the strength, to follow such trails wherever they led him.

  But of course the overarching mystery that obsessed him in a background kind of way was the conundrum of stepping itself: of the sudden discovery of the Long Earth, into which Joshua Valienté and his airship and his loudmouthed partner and, apparently, his Tibetan-speaking cat had wandered so famously – of the utter realignment of the cosmos, in Nelson’s own lifetime. How could he not be intrigued? What could it all mean for mankind, the future – indeed, for God? How could he not pursue such questions?

  Well, the best strategy was usually to tackle smaller mysteries first. And right now, in that spirit, before getting ready for bed, he put on an apron, grabbed one of his toolboxes and walked to the stone-floored toilet. This throne was a massive edifice that even included straining bars, and would have been a wonderful asset if anybody over the years could have made it work properly, whereas now it worked in various forms of improperly. He had vowed to get the thing functioning before his tenure was over, taking especial care to find out why it always backed up during an east wind.

  On the whole, he thought, as he knelt before the cracked china sculpture, as if before a pagan idol, it was amazing what the English put up with.

  8

  SO THE VALIENTÉ family travelled to the High Meggers city of Valhalla, to catch a long-haul twain to Datum Earth. The twain journey, across less than three thousand Earths, took only a few hours.

  At Valhalla, Thomas Kyangu was waiting to greet them with a big handwritten sign: VALIENTÉ. Another old buddy of Joshua’s, Thomas was around fifty, with long black hair pinned back in a ponytail, and a wide grin splitting a dark, reasonably handsome face. His accent was thick Australian. ‘Greetings, clan Valienté! Welcome to Earth West One Million, Four Hundred Thousand. Well, officially it’s one point four million plus thirteen, since our founding fathers were stoned when they first got here and lost count, but we like to round it down for the TV ads . . . Good to see you again, Joshua.’

  Joshua grinned and shook his hand. Thomas dived in to help with their bags.

  Getting their bearings, some of them a little woozy from the step-nausea medication, they stood on a concrete apron under the swollen hull of the airship: Joshua, Helen, Dan and Bill Chambers, with their baggage accumulating at their feet. They and the other disembarking passengers were lost in the expanse of this apron, Joshua thought.

  And beyond sprawled the city of Valhalla itself, clusters of heavy buildings under a blue sky faintly tinged with smog, with a din of traffic, and construction engines clanking and roaring. The air was warm, warmer than at Hell-Knows-Where. But still, behind the hot tar and oil aroma of this brand-new city, Joshua could smell the salt of the nearby inland American Sea, just as he remembered from his first visit to these worlds ten years ago.

  A huge form swept over their heads, with a drone of engines and a wash of displaced air: a twain, a big one, a freight vessel heading for the transit routes to the Low Earths and the Datum. Valhalla’s principal function was as a transport nexus, one terminus of the river of airship traffic that flowed endlessly across more than a million Earths to the Datum and back again, carrying freight and passengers. And it was no coincidence that Valhalla had grown up on a location that in most stepwise Americas lay close to what in Datum terms was the Mississippi: the twains took you across the worlds, while the river could carry your goods across a world.

  Daniel Rodney Valienté, eight years old, had never seen ships of such a size, and he jumped up and down, thrilled. ‘Are we going to ride in one of those things, Dad?’

  ‘In a little while, son . . .’

  ‘And here comes Sally Linsay,’ Helen said. ‘Surprise, surprise.’

  ‘Give her a break,’ Joshua murmured to Helen. ‘I did arrange to meet her here.’

  Sally was wearing her usual pioneer-type gear, her signature fisherman’s jacket with the thousand pockets, and she carried a light leather p
ack. ‘What a racket,’ she said as she walked up, theatrically clamping her hands over her ears. ‘Noise, everywhere you go. We ought to call ourselves Homo clamorans. Noisemaking Man.’

  Helen just looked at her, unsmiling. ‘Travelling with us, are you? The great wanderer hitching a ride on a commercial twain?’

  ‘Well, we’re all going the same way. Why not get reacquainted? We can swap recipes for ice cream.’

  Joshua grabbed his wife’s arm in case she felt like throwing a punch. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  As he watched this byplay Thomas’s grin was becoming a little more fixed. ‘Ri-ight. I’m sensing a little tension here.’

  Bill murmured, ‘It’s complicated. Don’t ask.’

  Sally snapped, ‘Who’s this character?’

  ‘He’s called Thomas Kyangu,’ Joshua said. ‘An old friend of mine.’

  ‘You don’t know me, Ms. Linsay, but I know of you, through Joshua.’

  ‘Oh, God, a fan-boy.’

  Helen stepped forward. ‘And we still haven’t been properly introduced, Mr. Kyangu. My name’s Helen Valienté, née Green—’

  ‘The wife. Of course.’ Thomas shook her hand.

  ‘“The wife”?’ Sally laughed.

  ‘You have all your bags? I have a buggy just over there. Joshua sent a message ahead; I booked you all a hotel in Downtown Four . . .’ As they walked over the apron, through a dispersing crowd of passengers, Thomas said, ‘You can’t blame a Valhallan for following Joshua’s exploits, Ms. Linsay.’

  ‘He’s a married man,’ Helen said sternly. ‘There’ll be no more “exploits” if I have anything to do with it.’

  ‘Yes, but he did discover this Valhallan Belt itself, during The Journey. A band of North Americas with generous inland oceans, ripe for colonization.’

  ‘“Discover”?’ Sally snapped back. ‘I was there already, as I recall.’