The Long Cosmos (27 page)

‘You forgot the Chinese,' Jane Sheridan said with a flash of humour.

‘Cripes, yes. Who want a piece of the alien pie for their own economic purposes. And because of
that
you have Long Unity desk jockeys here too . . .'

Actually Maggie quietly approved of the Long Unity, a kind of low-key offshoot of the old UN that was extending carefully into the Long Earth, offering help, support, connectivity across an increasingly scattered mankind. The Long Unity, at least, was harmless.

‘To get all this built the Next've been using sly ways of influencing folk, recruiting them to the cause. It's all over the Aegis. Not just the big industrial combines: cottage industry stuff. Hobbyists. Kids in home workshops, building pieces of it. We only discovered all this after the fact. Well, the President set up an advisory committee. You've got the National Science Foundation, NASA, the DoD, the National Security Council, the security agencies, and every goddamn futurologist and think tank we can find. But the whole operation was up and running before we were properly aware of it; we've been playing catch-up from the start.'

‘And so they called in the Navy.'

Cutler grinned. ‘Well, hell, we were here already. Because we're everywhere. Maggie, you know as well as I do that things have kind of dissolved in the years since Yellowstone. It's only the Navy that has kept its shape, especially in the form of the twain fleets. Yes, they sent for the Navy, because across the Aegis there's nobody else to send for . . .'

The President sent for the Navy, Maggie thought sourly, and the Navy sent for me
.
Well, it was obvious the science was going to be a big element here. She made a mental note to send for Margarita Jha, who had served as her science officer on expeditions that had taken them to even stranger places than this . . .

Cutler was still doing his best to alarm her. ‘We don't know what kind of threat we're facing here. What does this—' he waved a hand at the industrialized landscape ‘—this almighty boondoggle mean for our economic capacity? And although it's contained within the US Aegis – within this copy of the North American landmass – that seems to be chance, it's where the Next happened to choose to build the thing;
they
don't recognize our international boundaries, as you know, Maggie, any more than we care about chimp territories in the jungle. So how are we going to square all this with the Chinese and the rest? What's it going to do to our relationship with the Next?
That
is a strategic question, believe me. And, above all – what
is
this thing? What's it for? What will it be capable of doing when it's complete?'

Maggie glanced at Roberta. ‘Reasonable questions, I would think. Given that all this is being built in the US Aegis.'

Roberta said smoothly, ‘Well, the location was specified in the Invitation – as we discovered once we had begun to decode it. As to what the Thinker is for—'

That was the first time Maggie had heard the name. ‘The Thinker? What the hell is it thinking about?'

Roberta smiled. ‘We believe it will tell us itself, when it's ready.'

Cutler snarled, ‘And in the meantime we have to trust it, and you. And all we get out of you Next is the same platitudinous bull crap.'

Maggie said, ‘The President's experts must have some ideas.'

Cutler shrugged. ‘Only guesses. You know me, Maggie. I tend to side with more conservative opinions. The woolly space dreamer types tell me I'm paranoid. Why would anybody bother to reach out from the centre of the Galaxy to harm
us
? Well, I say, they've reached out all that way for
something
.'

Roberta said, ‘We too are divided. But most of us believe implicitly in the benevolent nature of this project. This gesture from the stars.'

Cutler glanced at Maggie meaningfully. ‘And
we
remember New Springfield.'

Maggie understood Cutler's unspoken meaning. If Roberta Golding was wrong, if this machine did turn out to be harmful after all – well, then, it would be Maggie's duty to stop it.

If she could figure out how.

36

O
NCE OUT OF
the relatively clear spaces of the Navy camp, they drove along narrow dirt tracks through a landscape crowded with incomprehensible machinery.

Cutler pointed to a wooden post with a red-painted top and a number etched into its side. ‘You can see we're trying to impose some organization on this place.'

Roberta said, ‘To a large extent the whole facility is self-organizing. The Thinker itself has, or at least is incrementally developing, a knowledge of its own necessary layout—'

‘All of which wordy bullshit is no use to your average truck driver from Detroit trying to find his drop point. So we've sent up a couple of Navy twains to map and number the emerging zones, according to a system of our own.'

Roberta said dryly, ‘Painting all those little signposts does keep a lot of people in uniform gainfully occupied.'

‘Yeah,' Cutler said entirely without irony, ‘that's another advantage.'

They entered what Roberta called a manufacturing zone. The cart rolled to a halt outside a kind of factory, a long, low building of aluminium walls and big glass ceiling panels. As she walked in, crossing a floor of hastily laid concrete, Maggie saw what looked like assembly lines, and some equipment she recognized: angular construction robots that she'd expect to see in a twain shipyard, automated forklift trucks shifting loads to and fro, and a big overhead frame from which heavy chains dangled. More robots than people, she figured, but the people she could see were hard at work. What they were working
on
was the mystery.

Cutler said, ‘I picked this site to show you because it has a cast of characters of a representative type, as you'll see . . .'

‘Including my young friends from the Gap.' Roberta abruptly took the lead, striding across the floor to a small workshop area, curtained off floor to ceiling by dust-excluding translucent sheets. At their approach a couple of workers emerged: a man and a woman, both looking no older than thirty to Maggie, and wearing blue coveralls with GapSpace logos at the breast. The woman was holding a slab of some glass-like substance.

The man spoke. ‘Good to see you, Professor Golding.' He indicated himself and his co-worker. ‘Dev Bilaniuk. Lee Malone. Both GapSpace employees and shareholders . . .'

When Maggie and Cutler were introduced, the workers didn't seem fazed by their high ranks or military uniforms. Or, indeed, particularly interested, Maggie thought.

Lee said, ‘We were told you would want to see what we're working on. This is a sample.' She held up the slab of material. ‘Actually this item failed its integration tests, so it's safe to remove it from the sterile area. We'll break it up for components and reuse them later . . .'

Maggie was allowed to hold the assembly. It was indeed glass-like, with a complex internal structure dimly glimpsed, like some fantastically complicated quartz crystal. And yet it was evidently artificial, for she saw subcomponents within: what looked to her like silicon chips, threads of wire or cable, and tiny light sources that glowed in constellations, green and gold. ‘It's like a whole world in there,' she said.

Lee smiled. ‘Beautiful, isn't it? It wouldn't be meaningful to say that we
made
this. It's more a question of self-assembly – well, it's that way for all the Thinker's components, save the simplest structural pieces.'

Dev said, ‘We were assigned to this work because of our technical experience with GapSpace. Even using the Gap, the space programme depends a lot on miniaturization. Actually, we two got involved in the first place because we were working on the in-Gap RT that detected the Invitation.'

Maggie asked warily, ‘RT?'

‘Radio telescope,' Roberta murmured.

‘Tell her what she's looking at,' Cutler snapped.

‘It's one of the smarter submodules,' Dev said. ‘I mean, most of the components seem to be smart to some extent, and the whole assembly, when completed . . . Well, we haven't got a handle on how smart
that
will be yet. What you have there is an approximation to a kind of computronium.'

That left Maggie flailing again. ‘A what-now?'

Roberta smiled. ‘A human name for an alien technology.'

Lee said, ‘A substance where every grain – even every molecule, every atom – is devoted to information processing. This is probably some way short of the ultimate realization. But we can recognize computing systems on a variety of scales, all the way from the mechanical – see those little levers? – down through the electronic, transistors and such, through chemical and nano and, we think, quantum.'

Dev said, ‘But we think the real beef is in the material structure itself. It's a kind of diamond, engineered carbon, just as it looks. More advanced as a material even than space elevator thread.'

Roberta said, ‘And an innovation which alone is revolutionizing human industries.'

Cutler rubbed his chin. ‘Makes you think about the scale of what's going on here, doesn't it? You have rivers of twains in the sky, a steady flow of raw materials across the Long Earth. And you have
this
, in the palm of your hand, with a computer in every damn molecule.'

Maggie said, ‘How smart, exactly?'

Dev said, ‘Well, we estimate the data store at ten to twenty-two power bits per gram.' At Maggie's blank expression, he said, ‘That's, um, ten billion trillion bits—'

Roberta said, ‘By comparison, a human brain, and a Next one come to that, stores around one hundred trillion bits. Smaller by a factor of a hundred million. In fact the number he quoted is ten times more than mankind's estimated current global data store.'

Cutler snorted. ‘That doesn't sound so much.'

Maggie said, ‘But he said,
per gram
.' She hefted the block. ‘What does this mass, about a kilogram? And it can store ten times as much as all humanity's knowledge, the whole of the Library of Congress,
per gram
.' She glanced around at the facility. ‘This is overwhelming. Damn it, Ed, you should have sent me some kind of brief.'

‘Would you have believed it? Come meet a few more of our citizen volunteers . . .'

‘Carly Maric.'

‘Jo Margolis.'

‘We're from the beanstalk facility at Miami West 17 . . .'

These were two bright, nervous twenty-year-olds who were applying experience of massive engineering gained from a space elevator construction project to one of the larger components. What they were building was a glistening, seamless structure of some pale, smooth substance, with a flaring base leading up to a complicated peak where something like a ball joint connected the lower entity to a flaring shield. Maggie thought it looked like the knee joint of some Dali-esque surreal monster.

‘We've
no
idea what it's for. Or even if it's finished yet,' Carly said.

‘But we just loved working on it,' said Jo. ‘Some of the pieces are made by conventional manufacture. We do some iron smelting here, there's steelwork, but most of the metal components are built of aluminium that's flown in by twain from stepwise extraction operations. There's some stuff built of fancier materials like carbon composites. And then there's
this.
If I'm honest, we don't quite know what it's made of. The chemists could tell you. It kind of grew in a big vat, layer by layer.'

Carly said nervously, ‘We have to look it over, check tolerances, keep an eye on the flow of materials into the vat, the temperature—'

‘We just love being here, General,' Jo blurted out.

‘Admiral,' Maggie corrected her automatically.

‘I mean there was just no work at home, not since they mothballed the beanstalk.'

And Maggie, who had commanded some peacekeeping missions at troubled, half-derelict industrial sites in the overdeveloped, underused communities of the Low Earths, sympathized completely.

But as they moved on, Cutler grumbled, ‘So much for a message from the stars. Sometimes it's like a damn welfare scheme. We've even got the Humble here, just like those Low Earth industrial wastelands.'

‘The Humble?'

‘Think of a labour union run by sanctimonious Next. You'll see soon enough. And you'll have to find a way to deal with them, and good luck with
that
,' Cutler said blackly.

The factory tour continued. Maggie's last encounter was, surprisingly, with a little kid with a matter printer. He was no older than ten, eleven. He just sat there feeding scrap into the machine's hopper, and out the other side came objects rather like heavy bolts, a couple of inches long, with broad heads but lacking any thread that Maggie could see. He'd been doing this for a while, evidently: there was a box of the bolts beside him, half-filled.

A nun sat with him, reading a novel on a tablet. She smiled and introduced herself as Sister Coleen; the boy was called Jan Roderick. They were from a children's home in Madison West 5.

‘Not just any home,' Cutler murmured to Maggie. ‘The same home that produced the great Joshua Valienté. You'd think one would be enough . . .'

Maggie knew all about Joshua Valienté, and the Home. She bent down. ‘You made all these?'

‘The matter printer did,' Jan said simply.

‘Well, yes—'

‘But I programmed it. I go around collecting waste material at the end of the shifts, and I recycle it into things like this.'

‘All very efficient,' Roberta said approvingly.

Maggie asked, ‘Do you know what these things are for?'

‘No. But nobody knows what any of this is for, not yet. They must be good for something or they wouldn't want them, would they?'