The Long Cosmos Read online

  ‘And maybe that’s where all the local rabbits and hares went,’ he said to the air. ‘Underground, where you’re safe from the death-gators and super-pterosaurs and whatever else the elephants here are armoured against. Not safe from a clever enough troll, though. Or from Joshua, the mighty hunter. Ha!’

  And just as he said this, he became aware of the troll watching him.

  The big silverback male was back. He was sitting just beyond the glow cast by Joshua’s fire. Even by the uncertain light of the evening Joshua could see blood smeared around the big humanoid’s mouth. Surely he had been drawn here by the scent of the cooking. Trolls loved cooked meat, and would use fires when they came across one such as after a lightning strike, but had never mastered the art of making fire.

  ‘There never was a King Louie of the trolls, buddy.’

  ‘Hoo?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  With a pang of regret, Joshua picked up the rabbit he’d half eaten, and the other, cooked but still whole, and carried them both out to the troll. He sat in the dirt before the troll, and laid the intact carcass before him, like a respectful waiter. ‘Your rat, sir, well done just as you ordered . . .’

  ‘Hoo!’

  The troll tore into the meat.

  Joshua sat down and ate with the troll, if more slowly, and considered his distant relative.

  From Step Day, the archaeologists, including a young Nelson Azikiwe, had tried to understand the absence of mankind in the new worlds. They had found flint tools in the dusty footprints of Olduvai. They had found fossil hearths in the depths of caves in stepwise Europes. But a certain spark had never been lit behind heavy brows on any world save Datum Earth. Perhaps, the comedians said, on every other world the black monolith just mislaid the man-apes’ address . . .

  But what you did get out in those human-free worlds were other kinds of humanoids, evolved from the same basic root stock as mankind, presumably – they were all thought to be descendants of Homo habilis, Handy Man, two million years extinct – but with wildly different natures, some more pleasant to encounter than others. And some had evolved to take full advantage of the extended landscape of the Long Earth.

  Of which cousins of mankind, the trolls were the epitome.

  Joshua said now, ‘Look at us, buddy. Two old bookends in the wilderness. Here was me thinking I was Crusoe, and all of a sudden you show up. I can’t call you Friday. Sancho – how about that?’

  ‘Ha?’

  ‘Help me, Sister Georgina. We did get through that book together in the original Spanish, just once . . . La mejor salsa del mundo es el hambre.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Eat well, my friend.’

  The wind picked up, and sparks from the fire rose up into the tall dark of the empty sky.

  13

  IT WAS ON the ninth day that Joshua tried hunting for rabbit-moles alone.

  Sancho the troll couldn’t explain how he tracked down his prey, of course. Joshua could only observe, guess, imitate, learn.

  But he slowly began to recognize the outward signs of a rabbit nest. There would be a broad, circular discoloration in the earth, maybe twenty paces across – the piss of thousands upon thousands of rabbits in their dense underground warren seeping into the ground, perhaps. And over the central chamber there could be a slight uplift of the ground, a very shallow dome, only barely visible to Joshua if he lay down and spied it with one eye shut. Even then you had to get to the very middle of the mound, where the central chambers with their comparatively thin roofs were to be found, and once there you had to wait a long time, still as a statue, while the rabbits, alarmed by the fall of your footsteps, returned from the deeper tunnels where they would have fled, and got back to whatever business they conducted in the shallower chambers. Then all you had to do was smash open the thin roof – Joshua augmented his small human fists with a rock for that – and dive in among the wriggling packets of meat before they could all run away again.

  So, after three successful hunts with Sancho, here was Joshua alone, scouting a suspicious-looking area not far from a forest clump. The faintest of circles on the ground – check. The shallowest of domes, barely visible in the dry drifting dust – check. Joshua spent a tough half-hour standing there in the sun, motionless, still as a statue, holding a rock the size of his head.

  It was just as he raised his rock that the baby elephant came bursting from the forest clump.

  Joshua could barely believe his eyes. He hadn’t even known the elephants used the forests, though there was no reason why the hell they shouldn’t. It took a heartbeat for him to take in the fact that the calf, fleeing whatever had alarmed it, was heading straight for his precious rabbit warren. Worse, its mother was coming out of the forest after her calf, trumpeting shrilly.

  And Joshua himself, the thoughts in his old brain flowing as slowly as jelly sucked through a straw, was standing right in the way of the parade. The baby elephant was fast, faster than he’d expected.

  Suddenly it was on him.

  He dropped the rock and, at the very last moment, rolled out of the way. The calf’s tusk-armour was immature but still hard as steel and bristling with sharp points; it missed him by inches. Now here came the mother, intent on catching her calf, barely giving Joshua a second glance.

  It was sheer bad luck that, as he crawled through the dirt, desperately scrambling to get away, she brought her heavy back foot down on Joshua’s leg.

  He felt the bone break. He heard it, like a twig snapping. And as he rolled away, he felt the raw faces of bone scraping across each other.

  ‘Stupid!’ he yelled. How could he have been so slow? Plus he was Joshua Valienté, the world’s most famous stepper. Why had he not just stepped away to safety? Because he’d been distracted by wanting to hold on to his prize rabbit-mole warren?

  Because you’re too old, he heard Sister Agnes whisper in his ear.

  And then the pain hit him, and he roared, and blacked out.

  When he came to, the pain in his leg seemed to have subsided to a kind of dull throb.

  He lay in the dirt where he had fallen. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t so much as rolled over. On the ground, vivid before his face, he could see the scuff marks where the elephants’ huge flat feet had passed, and a little trail of dry shit, a panic evacuation by the calf, probably, as it had run from whatever had spooked it in the forest. Strange, he thought, that elephant dung didn’t smell so bad. A benefit of a vegetarian diet, he supposed.

  And strange, or just dumb luck, that he was still alive, given he was lying here, inert, unprotected, a sack of meat bleeding into the High Meggers ground.

  He ran through his options. He’d thought through scenarios like this many times. He could step away in an emergency, if some set of teeth backed by an empty stomach came for him. Otherwise he would be horribly vulnerable to attack.

  But if he could manage it, it was best for him to stay in this world. This was where his gear was, in his barely begun stockade – his food stash, his water, his medical kit. If he could get back to his hollow in the rock, it wasn’t so far, maybe even get up into the refuge of his tree, he could try to weather it out until the injury had healed enough for it to be safe for him to move. As long as the winter didn’t close in on him first. How bad would winters get in this world? . . .

  That was a long way off, he told himself. First he had to get to the damn stockade, or he wouldn’t survive a night, let alone a season. He saw nothing he could use as a crutch, to take the weight off the broken leg. If he could drag himself to the forest clump close by, get hold of a fallen branch that he could lean on, hobble back . . .

  Good plan, his sceptical side said as he lay there.

  Focus, damn it.

  The first thing he had to do was turn over, on to his back. He swung his arm and rolled.

  And as his busted right leg shifted, the pain returned – worse than anything he’d experienced since those two beagles had, almost kindly, detached his hand at the wrist with their
teeth, all those years ago. He was flattened by the pain, dulled, almost knocked back to unconsciousness again.

  He forced his head up. At least the leg looked straight, and he could see no jutting bone. His trousers were ruined, though, the leg trampled and bloody. He slumped back.

  The break could have been worse, but evidently it was bad enough. He wasn’t going to be able to crawl out of here, let alone stand. What he needed was a medevac, a modern hospital, a surgeon and a team of nurses. Oh, and an anaesthetist. As it was, he didn’t even know where his water was, let alone whether he could reach it.

  Told you, Sister Agnes said in his ear. You’ve gotten too old. Taken one too many chances. You shouldn’t have gone out there again, alone.

  Bill Chambers chimed in, Ye didn’t even put the fecking spacesuit- silver blanket on the fecking rock like I fecking told ye, ye great fecking eejit.

  You’re going to pay for your pride, Dad, Rod said. With your life . . .

  ‘Not yet,’ Joshua growled. ‘Now here’s my plan . . . Sancho? Sancho! Sancho!’

  He called until he blacked out again. His last conscious thought was a vague prayer that the troll would in fact be the first beast that responded to his cries.

  Sancho tried to be gentle. In his way. He was, for his kind, as Joshua would learn, exceptionally intelligent. But he was a humanoid, the size and strength of a large orang-utan, and he had performed no action in his life more delicate than the chipping of a blade from a chunk of rock.

  He picked Joshua up and threw him over his shoulder like a sack of coal.

  Joshua screamed. But he was unconscious even before the troll had stepped away from the bloodstained ground where he’d been lying.

  14

  AT PRECISELY 11.30 a.m. the Reverend William Buckland lifted into midsummer air, smoothly and silently. Below its prow, the luxurious facilities of the Twenty-Twenty tourist resort diminished: a cluster of glass-walled buildings surrounded by a sprawl of twain landing pads, and further out the brilliant-green absurdity of golf courses cut into the pine forests that dominated this footprint of southern England, here in Earth West 20,000.

  Nelson Azikiwe and Sister Agnes sat side by side in front of a big observation window, watching this panorama unfold. A discreet waitress had served tea on a small table before them, with a china service, a pot and cups, a platter of biscuits, small paper napkins. Agnes was dressed in a long black skirt, sensible shoes, and a pale-pink cardigan over a white blouse. Her grey hair was cut short and neat. Nelson had never seen her wear a habit, and yet she seemed always to be in the shadow of the wimple, even now. Unconsciously Nelson touched his own throat, the open neck of his shirt.

  Agnes, being Agnes, noticed this and laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Nelson. You still look like a vicar – you probably did even before you became one – but I don’t think anybody here notices, or cares, do you?’

  Nelson glanced around at the other passengers. Many of them were the modern idle rich – mostly elderly couples sitting in silence together, dressed in the out-of-date and impractical pre-Yellowstone Datum Earth styles that had recently become a badge of disposable wealth – but it was their money that mostly kept this twain service in the air. In a corner sat a party of early-teens students with harassed teachers, probably on some kind of expensive ecology field trip out of a Low Earth college. A few more earnest types, young adults, busily made notes and took images on tablets, even as the twain sailed over the golf courses and lakeside saunas. And Nelson and Agnes, the most enigmatic of all if anybody knew their personal stories, were receiving no attention at all.

  ‘You’re right, of course. Nobody sees anybody else.’

  She twinkled. ‘And nobody in all the Low Earths knows you have a secret grandson, Nelson. Nobody but me and Lobsang.’

  His heart thumped, even now, months after he’d had that mysterious automated phone call with its extraordinary news.

  The shadow of the twain crossed a clump of forest and startled a small herd of what looked like deer. Surprising to see them so close to the resort, Nelson thought; maybe they were learning to scavenge garbage. Another subtle modification of animal behaviour by humanity.

  And here he was thinking about anything except his unexpected new family. A grandson . . .

  Then the twain began to step.

  The deer were whisked out of existence, the splash of concrete and glass that was the resort obliterated, to be replaced by lakes and virgin forest. And then it changed again. And again and again, a rippling of worlds that were soon passing at a rate of one a second or so, about the pace of a human heartbeat. The basic shape of the landscape endured: the river beside which the resort had been established, the contours of the hills of this remote footprint of southern England. But everything else was evanescent, even the trees, the clumping of the pines, the distribution of the grassy plains between them. After a dozen steps they passed out of sunshine into a world where a storm briefly battered the windows – and then out again, blink and it was gone, like a dip of lights powered by a faulty post-Yellowstone power grid.

  Agnes sighed, and pressed a finger to her temple.

  ‘Are you all right, Agnes? I’m no stepper myself, but there are medications, at least for an old-fashioned meat human like me. For you—’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. I’m no Joshua, but I could always step well enough with a box, when I needed to. And when Lobsang, ah, restored me, like some bit of old furniture he’d found in a dumpster, I found I’d become some kind of super-stepping steely-eyed android. But I never enjoyed stepping very much.’ She glanced at him. ‘After all, what was the point? Everything I cared about, the people, it was all right where I was – at home. Although of course stepping can be good for the conscience, can’t it? Which, I believe, is the idea behind this travel service you’ve helped set up.’

  ‘The Buckland? Yes, I suppose it was my idea, once I learned of the existence of the Twenty-Twenty centre, although I’m a small player in the commercial operation that came out of it . . . Have you noticed how worlds with neat round numbers always attract the big-money facilities? Especially golf courses. I wish I’d thought of that on Step Day and bought up some property! And it did appeal to the founders of Twenty-Twenty to run nature tours out of their resort.

  ‘Everybody talks about Joshua and his adventures, and the romance of the High Meggers, the very remote worlds. I’m no great stepper either, Agnes. And besides, I’ve always been drawn more to the nearby worlds: what they call the Ice Belt, worlds that are more or less like the Datum, more than thirty thousand of them to both East and West – I’m drawn to them precisely because they are like the Datum, our world.’

  ‘But the Datum without human beings.’

  ‘Indeed. Why, even here in Britain in East and West 1 you’ll find the wolf and the brown bear and the lynx roaming, beasts who shared these isles with us as recently as the Bronze Age. A landscape without its big predators is unbalanced – a pathology.’ He smiled. ‘You’ll notice I did manage to smuggle in a reference to a hero of mine.’

  ‘The ship’s name, you mean? William Buckland? Never heard of him.’

  ‘A churchman and a naturalist, early nineteenth century. And a diluvian. Even as the first fossils were being dug up, and as the geologists were starting to get a handle on how the world really works, Buckland continued to argue for the reality of Noah’s flood. But the thing with Buckland was that he stuck to the evidence. A perfect example of the tension between religion and science.’

  ‘Rather like Lobsang,’ Agnes said. ‘That Tibetan-Buddhist core within a high-technology body.’

  ‘Buckland himself found the very first dinosaur bone of all, you know, Agnes – of a megalosaurus, here in Britain, in Oxfordshire. Well, a party from the Natural History Museum went out – they had to go beyond the Gap, I think – and found something very like an extant megalosaurus, brought home a clutch of eggs, and now they run wild in a reserve in London West 3. The chicks are almost cute! But all that’s for others t
o explore.’

  Agnes peered down, distracted again by the scenery. Nelson saw that the flickering landscapes below were becoming more sparse now, those here-and-gone pine-tree clumps few and far between. The twain slowed, subtly, lingering in the air of one particular world for a few seconds. Huge forms, hairy, a deep mud-brown colour, moved across the landscape like the shadows of clouds. Once the passengers had been given time for a good look and a few photos, the stepping resumed, and the animal herd was whisked away.

  Agnes sat back. ‘Were they mammoths?’

  ‘I think so. Agnes, the Ice Belt worlds aren’t identical; some are more frozen than others. Here, as at the Twenty-Twenty resort, the climate is like southern Scandinavia – that is, Datum Scandinavia before Yellowstone messed up the climate. But around West 17,000 we’ll hit a sheaf of more heavily glaciated worlds. Tundra, where the only trees are willows clinging to the ground, and the big animals are mammoths and musk ox and woolly rhinos.’

  ‘Not much to see, I imagine.’

  ‘You can be lucky, but it’s a sparse terrain. The interglacial worlds – where the ice has retreated for a time – are more spectacular. Lions and hippos and elephants.’

  ‘I guess England is a more interesting place than I ever imagined.’

  Nelson smiled. ‘Well, not that interesting. It was good of you to come all this way to see me. I would have come out to you—’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mind adding another date to what I’m thinking of as a farewell tour. And I did have an ulterior motive, as you know. It was good of you to show me the material you found on Joshua’s family history – his father’s side. It does help me understand that poor boy, and his family, after all this time.’