The Long Cosmos (8 page)

Lee said, ‘And you think it's imperative that we pick up this Invitation and figure it out.'

Roberta looked back at her. ‘Of course. What could be more important than that? For one thing, has it occurred to you to wonder why it should be
now
that they attempt to contact us? Somehow they must know that we, or something like us, are here: a technological civilization, I mean. This despite the fact that our own radio signals cannot have travelled more than one per cent or so of the distance to the galactic core.'

‘We also know the Invitation is being picked up across the Long Earth,' Dev mused. And, so the unscientific outernet rumours went, it had been detected in ways that had nothing to do with radio telescopes – such as, directly by the roomy heads of those enigmatic humanoids, trolls. He kept his mouth shut about this; he'd learned that his Next overlords didn't want to hear such lurid speculation. But on the other hand there seemed another coincidence of timing here, to him. ‘Maybe,' he said cautiously, ‘they sensed we've started to move out stepwise. And that was why they reacted now . . .'

Stella ignored him. ‘Of course we must exract all the information we can from the Invitation – all of it, if we're to make an informed decision on how to react.'

Lee said, ‘You mean how to respond.'

Roberta said calmly, ‘Not necessarily. We have received an invitation; we don't have to accept it. Not until we're sure it's in our best interest.'

Lee snorted. ‘The best interest of the Next?'

‘In the interest of all of us, all the inhabitants of the Long Earth.'

Dev smiled. ‘It's an old debate – goes back to Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. Contact optimists versus the pessimists.'

Roberta nodded gravely. ‘It is an authentic dilemma. We too debate these issues. First things first: we must learn what we are dealing with.'

Stella said, ‘Well, certainly listening can't do any harm. As for the telescopes, we have a new design that will soon surpass the capabilities of the Cyclops.' She swiped her tablet over the bubble's consoles, and the big display screens on the walls filled with new images.

Dev saw a graphic of a sphere suspended in space, from which towers extended in all directions, like spines, dwarfing the central mass. It looked oddly like a sea urchin.

Lee asked, ‘What is this?'

Roberta said, ‘Tell me what you see.'

Lee shrugged. ‘It looks like an asteroid with towers sticking out of it.'

‘It is an asteroid,' Roberta said evenly, ‘with towers sticking out of it.'

‘This is your Clarke Project?'

‘Named after a writer of the last century who proposed—'

Dev swallowed. ‘Those spines must be hundreds of miles long.'

‘Thousands, actually.'

‘And where are you going to get your asteroid?'

Roberta glanced out of the window. ‘We will use the object you have already harvested. Your “Lump”.'

‘That's intended for other purposes. More
O'Neill
s—'

‘We can pay,' Roberta said dismissively.

Lee said, ‘I guess I can see the purpose. With a thing that scale you'd be able to pick up very long wavelength radiation – well beyond the usual radio lengths, tens of kilometres, even. Gravity waves too?'

‘That's the idea. We've no reason to think the Invitation is restricted to the wavelengths at which we've detected it so far. We want it
all
.'

Dev's engineering chops began to tingle. ‘It's one hell of a construction project. The
O'Neill
took us a decade to build. How long do you estimate it will take you to build that behemoth?'

Roberta said blandly, ‘Two months.'

Now it was Dev's turn to laugh. Lee just looked blank. Even Stella seemed surprised.

Dev asked, ‘How can you possibly do it so quickly? Given the manufacturing capacity we have at GapSpace – even if you suddenly expanded it one hundred per cent—'

Stella said, ‘
Replicators.
You're talking about using silver-beetle technology to build the Clarke, aren't you? That's the only way you could get it done so quickly.'

Roberta said, ‘It's under consideration.'

Dev glanced at Lee, who winked back. It was nice to see these Next disagreeing with each other, even if Dev had no idea what they were talking about. He asked pleasantly, ‘And what is “silver-beetle technology”?'

Stella looked at him. ‘I guess you'll find out soon enough. Highly efficient replicator and reassembly technology.
Alien
technology. It already destroyed one stepwise Earth, as far as we know.'

Dev just stared. ‘It
destroyed an Earth
?'

‘Long story,' Stella said.

Roberta said, ‘No technology is dangerous if handled correctly. And it would allow an extremely rapid construction, just as you say. The Clarke telescope would be very large, but mostly structurally simple. An ideal application of replicator techniques. Of course, preliminary results would begin to come in much earlier than full construction – and then we will have decisions to make on how to react. I think I've seen enough here. We must talk in more detail. I need to meet your senior people, while avoiding having them take us for tours of the
O'Neill
– Stella, what
do
they do on that object?'

Stella grinned. ‘They walk on grass, and chase zero-gravity chickens along the spin axis.'

Lee flared. ‘You dismiss us, don't you? Everything we've built here. Spaceflight is an ancient dream, cherished for longer than people like you have even been in existence, and we're achieving it at last.'

‘Perhaps. But, child,' Roberta said sadly, ‘can you not see that all of this has already been swept away? Because the Galaxy is now reaching down to you. Well. There is much to do. Shall we return to our shuttle?'

10

J
OSHUA SPENT HIS
first night alone on Earth West 1,520,875 up a tree.

Not that he tried too hard to keep count; this was a sabbatical after all, and counting kind of wasn't the point. And since the deletion of a whole world, of Earth West 1,217,756, doomed by an infestation of alien creatures, and with the Long Earth sealed up to either side of that wound, such numbers were probably meaningless anyhow.

Just now, in fact, the choice of tree had been more significant than the choice of world.

He had found this tree, standing on this rocky bluff, had selected a stout branch, and lodged himself in the angle of branch and trunk. He made sure his pack was hanging where he could reach it, pulled his outer coat up over his legs, and then tied himself in place with a few loops of rope. This had been his habit when striking out alone since he was a boy, when he had first sought safety high in trees.

He laughed at himself. ‘I learned all I know about surviving in the wilderness from Robinson Crusoe,' he told the empty world. Because climbing a tree was exactly what Crusoe had done, on the first night on his island. As it happened Joshua had a copy of the book itself in his pack – one of just two books he'd brought with him. The Crusoe was an ancient paperback, the very copy he had read himself as a boy in the Home – it was heavily annotated in his own rounded child's handwriting, an act of graffiti that had earned him punishment detail from Sister Georgina. Potato peeling, as he recalled. Well, he fully intended to return this copy to the bookshelf that Sister John, only half joking, called the Joshua Valienté Library. ‘I won't be out here for ever,' he told himself.

He was dog tired. He'd tried napping, without success. Then again, the sun had yet to set.

Chewing on jerky, sipping water, he inspected his new home. This was a distant relative of Montana, more than one and a half million steps from the Datum. He was somewhere near the loosely defined border between the band of rich green worlds in which the footprints of North America were dominated by a vast, shallow inland ocean – the so-called Valhallan Belt – and the much more arid, less-travelled worlds further out, worlds so unwelcoming they had only a scientist's label, the Para-Venusian Belt. For sure this looked like a transitional world, with the eroded aridity of a Para-Venus broken up by water courses and clumps of trees of species unknown to him but looking vaguely deciduous, seasonal, water-loving.

He was alone, just like Crusoe. Nobody knew he was here. In fact he'd gone to some trouble to ensure that.

After he'd told Agnes and the Sisters and Bill Chambers and Rod and a few other selected contacts that he was off on a sabbatical, he'd taken one of the few big commercial twains that still sailed the Long Mississippi run from the Low Earths to the city of Valhalla, one point four million steps West. In the few days on board he had fattened himself up with the richest food he could find, and soaked his ageing body repeatedly in clean soapy water, and he'd got his teeth fixed by the onboard dentist. He'd even had his prosthetic left hand serviced by a Black Corporation technician attached to the crew.

Once at Valhalla he'd hitched a ride at random on a smaller twain, a mineral prospector's private vehicle, and sailed off for another hundred thousand worlds or so, letting himself be carried crosswise geographically to the footprints of Montana. And
then
he'd stepped further, on foot, travelling deeper through this band of transitional worlds, heading steadily into the wilderness.

So here he was, in this world, on this bluff, high in this tree.

Plenty of people must have travelled through this world before him, heading on out West. He'd gone further out himself, many times. Maybe a few people had even settled here, although only the hardiest pioneers would be this far out. So what? Even most of the Low Earths, the alternates right next to the Datum, had never really been explored, not beyond the most easily habitable places. Why would you bother to go somewhere difficult? More than five decades after Step Day, go just a little way off the beaten track and you found yourself in exotic, untouched wilderness. Which was the way Joshua liked it.

He'd chosen his geographical location with care too. He wasn't far from a river. This particular tree he sat in, something like a small-leaved sycamore, was one of a clump that had sprouted on top of a sandstone bluff. Further down the bluff, on the south-west face and still a few yards above the sandy ground, he'd found a hollow – not quite a cave, but with some effort he could probably dig his way into the soft rock and deepen it. That would give decent shelter, and he'd get plenty of light and a good view of the landscape.

As for security, a look with an experienced eye had informed him it wouldn't be too much labour to construct a stockade to block off the ground approach to the hollow, the smoke from his fires ought to keep any critters off the bluff itself, and he could lay a few traps for any sneak attacks from humans or humanoids coming from above. And the forest clump above the bluff would serve as a reserve of firewood, if he did manage to get himself besieged in here. He could get it all constructed and stocked up for the winter – he'd arrived at midsummer – and anyhow Joshua hoped the cold wouldn't be too severe on this world.

He would have to learn the local landscape, the essentials like forest clumps and water sources, and landmarks for when he got turned around in a storm, or was fleeing a grizzly bear or some such and had to make snap decisions about which way to run. In time he would extend that mental map into a third dimension, to include similar landmarks in the nearby stepwise worlds. Once he'd invested all the labour in his stockade he was going to be tied to this world, at least until he chose to end the sabbatical altogether. But the stepwise worlds were always there as refuges – only sapients could step – and as alternate sources of food, of escape from bad weather, even hides to use when hunting. He'd never had any trouble with this kind of mental mapping. Lobsang had come to the conclusion that this sort of visualization of the world, or worlds, was at the core of his enhanced ability to step in the first place.

And it paid to be prepared, because there were always threats out there. At least you knew that what animals wanted of you was primal: either to eat you, or to avoid being eaten
by
you. Sapient threats were worse, both from malevolent humans and from some variants of humanoids. Some thought of the Long Earth humanoids as mere animals. Nobody would ever convince Joshua that there was no malice in the heart of some of the killer elves he'd encountered over the years.

‘Well, Crusoe had his cannibals,' he told the world now. ‘And I got bandits and elves. But he intended to live to tell the tale, and so do I.'

No reply.

This was a quiet world, he thought. No birdsong.

And he hadn't even heard the trolls' long call, not an echo of it. Which was kind of unusual; trolls were to be found most everywhere. But one reason he'd stopped here was precisely because of that absence. He liked trolls, but right now he didn't much want to be around any of them, because if a troll saw you he or she told the pack, who added the news to their long call – the endless improvised opera that united all trolls everywhere in a kind of bath of information. If your name was Joshua Valienté, the news tended to get out, and next thing you knew the whole Long Earth knew what colour your boxers were . . .

Now there
was
a sound in this quiet world. A deep rumble, from far away to the north, like a lion's roar maybe but deeper, almost like something geological. A big beast advertising its presence. Just as he needed to know his landscape, Joshua was going to have to learn about the creatures he shared his world with, although with any luck he'd never need to get close up and personal with most of them.

It was a classic High Meggers landscape. And, as the sun dipped towards the horizon, Joshua Valienté was king of all he surveyed.