The Long Cosmos (37 page)

‘Well. That's the plan. And the very first step is to speak to Sister John. Shall we return to West 5? If we simply step over we'll be at the centre of town, of course, where a more comfortable transport cart is available. This cart will find its own way home.'

‘And then we must plan our next steps,' Nelson said firmly.

When they'd gone, the electric cart, its gleaming white flanks stained by soot and ash, sat silently for five full minutes. Some of the insects attending the flowers that flourished in the wreck of the Capitol mound inspected it curiously; finding no nectar, they turned away.

Then the cart swivelled neatly and started to roll back the way it had come, towards the west. Moving almost silently, in all the Red Zone it was the only object in motion larger than a cat.

53

I
N THE END
it took a month for the Space Cowboys to follow the breadcrumb trail from their first meeting with the Sisters at the Home in Madison, to the moment when Lobsang's twain popped into the air over the world called Apple Pi.

And Joshua, sitting alongside Lobsang on the bridge of this small airship, found himself looking down at a landscape of glistening technology that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was a July morning on all the worlds of the Long Earth, and the low sun threw back highlights from distant surfaces, like reflections from the windows of tower blocks. The carpet of engineering was broken here and there by huge cylindrical shafts, over which heated air shimmered. Everywhere twains hovered like low clouds, vast components dangling in cradles beneath their bellies. It was an entirely inhuman spectacle, save for scraps of natural green where tents and shacks huddled, and corporate and national flags fluttered from poles.

Aside from Lobsang and Joshua, the twain's only other passenger was Sancho the Librarian troll, sought out and brought here at Joshua's specific request. After all the wonders Sancho had shared with Joshua and Rod, it seemed only right that the troll should be here to add this new miracle to his voluminous memory store on behalf of the troll nation. Now Sancho hooted in wonder, his flat nose pressed against a window. Well, that was Joshua's own reaction, pretty much.

The twain was buffeted as Lobsang brought it down. ‘There's a lot of turbulence,' he muttered, concentrating. ‘All that machinery gives off a lot of heat. In fact those big shafts are cooling vents. They can pump out so much heat they create permanent low-pressure systems – unending rain storms.'

Joshua said, ‘A computer that makes its own weather? But it looks like a blight to me. Some kind of vast infestation. From space it must be an ugly scar.'

‘Indeed. And that's not a bad analogy. The structure was begun with imports of materials and labour from the other human worlds of the Long Earth. But now, it seems, a kind of self-assembly process has kicked in. Self-replication. It has begun to spread out from its edge, converting the stuff of this Earth into its own substance. Exactly like a parasite, in as much as it will be mostly composed of materials transformed from the raw matter of this world.'

‘Like the silver beetles.'

‘That is an unfortunate parallel, yes.'

Joshua asked, wondering, ‘But what's it all for, Lobsang?'

‘If we're ever to find the Traversers, that's what we'll have to discover, Joshua.'

‘
I
can't tell you what it's all for,' said Maggie Kauffman. ‘Not yet, not definitively. Not even our Next colleagues know that . . . At least I don't think so.'

The Admiral herself met them at the foot of the debarkation ramp, when the twain had touched down in an island in the Thinker that Joshua learned was called ‘Little Cincinnati'. Upright in her uniform, Kauffman looked strong, brisk, and a hell of a lot fitter than Joshua was, even though she must be roughly the same age. A young officer stood at her side, a woman, conspicuously armed. Joshua was impressed that Lobsang had managed to get the commander of this operation herself to greet them – evidently, in fact, to welcome them as some kind of consultants. But then, he told himself, he should have learned by now never to underestimate Lobsang.

Kauffman went on, ‘Well, the big mysteries will keep. For now it's good to meet you again, Mr Valienté.' Briskly she shook Joshua's hand; he offered his right hand, not the prosthetic left. Her grip was as impressive as the woman herself. ‘I've never forgotten how you helped me through that dreadful dilemma of Happy Landings and a nuclear weapon.'

He shrugged. ‘I was just trying to help a friend.'

‘I suppose that's all any of us can do. Listen, how's that leg of yours? Looks like you've been in the wars.'

‘I'm surviving.'

‘Maybe my ship's medics could check you over. Military medicine, better than the civilian flavour nowadays. Well, you won't have to walk far. I'll escort you to our tour vehicle in a moment. As for my other guests—' She turned to Sancho.

The troll looked back at her, grizzled, fearless, curious. ‘Hoo.'

‘They call you Sancho.' As she spoke she signed, in the lab-rat pidgin that had evolved wherever trolls lived and worked, or were confined and studied, alongside humans. ‘I apologize that I have no troll-call with me; there will be some in the vehicle.'

Sancho signed back.
So there should be.

‘Maybe he'll be able to help,' Joshua said. ‘Sometimes I think he knows more about the Invitation, about this whole strange business, than we do.'

‘I've had trolls and other non-human sapients on my crew before. I see no reason to believe the Invitation wasn't meant for them as much as for us. Sancho certainly has a right to be here.' Now she turned to Lobsang. ‘As have you – shall I call you Mr Abrahams?'

‘Lobsang will do.' He smiled, still and calm as ever. ‘I think we're all rather too old for false identities and other silly tricks now.'

‘Indeed. What a bunch of oddballs we are, and all as old as Methuselah. Well, it's going to get odder. This way, please.' She led them across the asphalt. ‘And, by the way, call me Maggie. But not in front of the lower ranks . . .'

Joshua hobbled on his stick through an orderly layout of tents and prefabricated huts. Electric trucks and carts rolled through a grid of dirt tracks, and military personnel, mostly young, crisply uniformed, hurried to and fro with gleaming tablets and bundles of paper. Above his head a forest of antennas probed the sky. This small camp was evidently a node of command and communications, from which Kauffman was controlling the human side of the Thinker operation with the military precision Joshua would have expected. Yet Joshua noted that all this was surrounded by a wire fence, and armed troopers peered down from watchtowers. Little Cincinnati evidently needed big security.

They were led to a small convoy, a couple of heavy-looking armoured vehicles flanking what appeared to be a tourist bus, a big, heavy double-decker covered with blister-like viewing windows.

Kauffman said as they boarded the bus, ‘We're going to take a brief tour. I'm behind with my own inspection routine anyhow, and I'm due to witness the installation of a new type of component. Which is in the hands of this young person . . .'

A woman aged around twenty-five stood nervously before them, clutching a kind of crystalline slab, hugely complicated. She was staring at the grizzled troll behind Lobsang.

‘Cat got her tongue, evidently,' Maggie said dryly. ‘Her name is Lee Malone. She's a volunteer originally from GapSpace, so highly skilled technologically. And I want you to meet our lead driver. Dev Bilaniuk is another volunteer from the Gap.'

A smiling man, aged perhaps thirty. ‘Space pilot in training,' Dev said. ‘Bus driver pro tem.'

Joshua did the presidential handshake thing. ‘I'm sure you'll keep us safe and sound.'

Maggie said, ‘I want to impress on you the broad range of communities and interests represented here. The Aegis government has put me in charge of security, policing and overall administration. But this is
not
a military project. In a real sense it is an effort by all mankind, scattered as we are across the Long Earth. So you have volunteers like these two space cadets . . . But it's never been our initiative, I mean humanity's, or under human control.'

With difficulty Joshua climbed into the interior of the bus, following Sancho and Lobsang. The seat belt he would have to wear was more like a harness, but otherwise the bus was pretty luxurious. A half-dozen armed Navy personnel climbed aboard with Maggie.

‘Nice ride,' Joshua said, strapping in.

Lobsang smiled. ‘I recognize the design of the vehicle. The Black Corporation?'

‘You're right, as always, Lobsang,' came a new voice.

A screen mounted on the ceiling lit up to reveal an image of what looked to Joshua like a hospital ward. A very wizened, very old man lay in the bed, propped up by a heap of pillows. A drip snaked into his arm, and a translucent mask was strapped to his face. He said, ‘I wouldn't be too impressed by the scale of all this, by the way. Size isn't everything. I'm just about old enough to remember the first cellphones; they were the size of house bricks. I bet on the planet Tatooine or wherever this thing originated, they've got it down to a thing the size of a dime . . .'

‘Douglas Black,' murmured Lobsang.

‘It's good to see you again! We must discuss the financial performance of the transEarth Institute while you're here.'

‘Indeed,' Lobsang said uncomfortably. ‘I didn't know you were back.'

‘I do rather miss my Shangri-La. But you know me, Lobsang, ever the technology buff. I couldn't stay away from this engineering marvel. I'm afraid I'm not quite strong enough even for a bus ride any more. But I'll be with you in spirit, Lobsang. Looking over your shoulder, as ever!'

‘As ever,' Lobsang said neutrally.

Joshua wondered how Lobsang really felt about his life-long relationship with Black. As Joshua understood it, it had been Black's sponsorship that had restored Lobsang to ‘life' in the first place, by providing the innovations, notably information-processing gel, and the funds required to boot up Lobsang's ‘reincarnation'. Lobsang had grown far from those origins, in fact into an entity that spanned worlds – but there had always been limits. Just as the Next had only ever used him as a kind of bridge to humanity, so Black had always had a certain hold over him. When Black had disappeared for years to his remote Long Earth retreat, Lobsang hadn't even been consulted, Joshua knew. And now here was Black, back again, in the middle of Lobsang's life.

It was remarkable that Lobsang didn't actually
own
himself, and had never been in a position to buy himself out, despite years of effort by his loyal ally Selena Jones. And that was mostly because of Douglas Black.

Joshua touched Lobsang's arm. ‘You OK, buddy?'

‘He's up to something,' Lobsang muttered.

‘Who, Black? What, exactly?'

‘Well, he evidently hasn't confided in me. But he's
not
a man who's content merely to observe. Wait and see.'

Maggie tapped the big screen now, and brought up an image of three more individuals: an older man and woman, and a young girl, aged maybe eighteen. The woman wore a practical-looking coverall; the man and the girl wore black robes.

‘More acquaintances you'll need to make,' Maggie said. ‘And these are on the bus with us, though they insisted on a closed compartment of their own.'

Joshua peered. ‘They are Next. That woman is Roberta Golding.'

Maggie nodded. ‘I've known her a long time. She's evolved into a kind of unofficial ambassador of the Next to humanity. Useful in smoothing out the wrinkles between
us
and
them
.' She grinned. ‘So much so that I sometimes wonder if she's actually one of our super-brained overlords at all. Now, the man with her is called Marvin Lovelace. He's a Next also; he's from Miami West 4. Seems he worked undercover there at one time. Now he's out in the open, and is a front man for a group who call themselves the Humble.'

‘I know of this,' Lobsang said. ‘Next preachers working among humanity, particularly at sites of poverty, unemployment, stress. Based on the teachings of Stan Berg. And they have an agenda that differs from the Next mainstream – if that term has any meaning. Sceptical about the Thinker project, comparatively. In some ways the Next are divided over the wisdom of pursuing this contact just as much as humanity.'

Maggie said, ‘Well, I leave the theology to the chaplains. In practical terms, here at Apple Pi Lovelace and the others are like ferocious union bosses. If you want to get anywhere with the labour force, you have to work through them. But I leave
that
to the corporate management people, the Black Corporation, LETC. That position of power is one reason Lovelace is aboard here today, however. Meanwhile the girl is called Indra Newton. A second cousin to Stan Berg. Super-smart. And, it seems, she's inherited some of his unusually adept stepping ability.'

Joshua remembered. Sally Linsay had got to know Stan Berg. In addition to his precocious moral philosophizing, Stan had been able to step in ways even Sally, the queen of the soft places, couldn't follow – as if he could find, or even
create
, new linkages in the great tangle of connectivity that was the Long Earth. It was a talent that in the end had cost both Stan and Sally their lives, at New Springfield . . .

Lobsang asked, ‘So why is Indra here?'

‘Well, we don't know that yet,' Maggie said. ‘The Next appear to have some kind of strategy in dealing with the Thinker, which evidently involves Indra, but they don't confide in us totally. Even though we are the Navy. OK – introductions done. If you're in your seats and strapped in, this wagon train can roll . . .'