The Long Cosmos (6 page)

At minimum, in most states, as in many countries around the world, natural steppers were being forced to wear markers of some kind, such as electronic wristband tags. The argument was that the tags were needed to keep track of potential criminals.
Yellow stars
, the critics called the markers. Jansson imagined this foolishness would pass soon enough. In the meantime it had become a fashion among the young to wear dummy stepper tokens as a badge of defiance. It had even generated a kind of street art, as designers extended the wristband concept into loops of copper or even platinum, supposed representations of the chain of worlds that was the Long Earth.

None of which had anything much to do with Bettany Diamond, lawyer, wife, mother. In the Datum Madison hospital another patient had actually assaulted her just because she was admitted for her sight problems, a condition apparently
related
to stepping. It didn't help that she defiantly wore a pro-stepper bracelet, but that was hardly an invitation to attack.

Jansson asked, ‘So what do you make of her condition?'

Mann sipped his coffee. ‘It's very early to say. Perhaps we need more cases like hers to make sense of the phenomenon. In the past, after all, we learned a lot about how the brain functions from instances of damage. You broke a bit on the inside, and saw what stopped working on the outside.

‘I do firmly believe, however, that stepping is an attribute of human consciousness – or at least humanoid. Animals with significantly different kinds of consciousness do not step, as far as we know. Now, the best theories we have of how the Long Earth works, and they are only tentative, are based on quantum physics: the possibility that many realities exist in a kind of cloud around the actual. And in some quantum theories consciousness has a fundamental role to play.'

‘Like the Copenhagen Interpretation.'

He smiled. ‘You've done your homework.'

‘It's a long way from police academy, so go easy on me . . .'

‘Maybe consciousness, observing some quantum phenomenon - the cat in the box, neither dead nor alive until you look at it – chooses one possibility to become the actual. Thus, conscious seeing creates reality, in a way. Or maybe it takes you there. Some believe that what happens, when you step, is that similarly you can suddenly
see
Earth West 32, or whatever, and taste and smell and touch it, and that's what
transports
you there. Almost as if you are collapsing some enormous set of quantum wave functions. Sorry – that's a bit technical.

‘It's all very preliminary, because we understand so little of the basics. Even the mechanism of sight itself is a mystery. Think about it.' He picked up his red coffee mug. ‘You can recognize this mug from above or below, in bright light or in the shade, against any background. How do you
do
that? What kind of pattern is being matched in your cortex?

‘But even beyond the neurology, you have the mystery of consciousness. How does all this information processing relate to
me
– to my internal experience of redness, for instance, or roundness, or mug-ness? And then there's the further mystery of the interaction of consciousness with the quantum world.

‘The whole field of Long Earth studies is still nascent, and it's a cross-disciplinary quagmire of neurology, philosophy, quantum physics. What we do know is that even sight comes with a group of barely understood exotic disorders that we call agnosias, usually caused by some kind of brain damage. There's an agnosia for faces, where you can't recognize your family; there's an agnosia for scenes, for colour . . .'

‘So maybe Bettany has some kind of stepwise agnosia?'

‘Perhaps, though that's doing little more than attaching a label to something we don't understand. Look – what
I
believe is that something's gone wrong for Bettany, in that tangle of processing. She does the
seeing
without the
stepping
. For several hours a day, the world she sees is no longer necessarily the one she's living in. So she blunders into furniture while seeing her kids playing in the world next door, but she can't hear them or touch them, and they, of course, can't see her. And meanwhile the doctors can't treat what they don't understand. They do say the time she spends seeing wrongly is increasing. Give her another year and her sight will be stuck permanently stepwise.'

‘She won't be able to see her kids, even when they're right beside her.'

‘But she can hold them,' Mann said. ‘Touch them. Hear them.'

Jansson said, ‘She told me today she heard birdsong, of a kind she'd never heard before.'

‘Birdsong?'

‘Why shouldn't this affect her other senses? Is it possible her whole mind will come adrift, ultimately? And she'll fully experience one world while her body lies comatose in the other?'

‘I don't know, Lieutenant. We'll just have to make sure she is protected, whatever happens.'

From elsewhere in the house they heard Bettany calling for her children. Jansson wished Joshua Valienté was around, to help her figure this out.

Just as, later, after her death, Joshua would often miss Jansson's advice.

And Jan Roderick, making his notes on his tablets in his childish vocabulary, would try to figure out what the story of the Damaged Woman meant in terms of seeing, and stepping, and living in an infinite ensemble of potential worlds.

And beyond.

7

T
HE
I
NVITATION CAME
to all the worlds of the Long Earth from space. And it was on a world on the edge of space that the work of responding to the Invitation began.

Dev Bilaniuk and Lee Malone, in identical blue jumpsuits, stood nervously outside the entrance of the GapSpace facility. It was a cool April day. Around them stretched the local version of northern England, a sandy, grass-strewn coastal plain studded with scratchy farms and workers' villages, giving way to rounded hills further inland. The songs of trolls, contentedly labouring in the fields and building yards, lifted on the fresh breeze off the sea. It was a mundane panorama, Dev thought, and it was hard to believe they were some two million steps from the Datum.

But before them stood the tall fence that contained the heavily policed interior of the GapSpace facility, with all its expensive and high-energy engineering. To support the facility was the sole purpose of the scattered community in this landscape.

And beyond
that
, in a sense, lay infinity.

Forty years earlier Joshua Valienté had discovered an alternate Earth that was no Earth at all. Big spaceborne rocks hit the planet all the time, and in that particular universe the all-time champion world smasher had happened to hit dead centre. The result was the Gap, and it had turned out to be damned useful for those elements of humanity who still harboured dreams of spaceflight. Because from here, to reach space, you didn't need Cape Canaveral and rocket stacks the size of cathedrals. You only needed to step sideways, into a Gap where an Earth used to be, into vacuum. People had been venturing into space from this place ever since.

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

T
HE 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.