The Long Cosmos (5 page)

‘No.'

‘
Avatar . . . The Mouse on the Moon . . . Galaxy Quest
!' ‘That one.'

‘Ha! I knew it.'

‘He started asking questions, like he'd never seen the movie before, and you know he's seen it twenty times. “What's that place called?” “Well, it's a planet.” “But what's its name? Is it real?” “It's just in the movie.” “Could you go there for real? What's really out there in space? Are there people like us there?” And so on. Over and over. And you don't dare guess at an answer, not even about a detail of some dumb old movie, or you
know
he'll check it out and come after you.'

‘It's not so strange for a ten-year-old boy to be interested in space.'

‘I know,' Sister Coleen sighed. ‘It's just he's so – you know –
Jan.'

‘I'll speak to him.'

So Sister John quietly arranged to spend an evening with Jan. She promised him they'd sit together on an elderly sofa watching one of his old movies, or reading one of his books, whatever he liked.

They settled down before a big wall-mounted screen that was showing
Contact
, a movie she had seen with him so many times she recognized each frame. Jan was making notes on a handheld tablet. And he had a couple of old novels on the couch beside him: one was
Contact
, the book of the movie – or maybe it was the other way around – and the other was called
Ringworld
. The two of them sat there viewing philosophically, and crunching on popcorn.

Right now the screen showed radio astronomer Ellie Arroway as a kid, with her father. Jan remarked, ‘You know, this movie is eighty years old. Something like that. But they talk just the way people talk now.'

What kind of perception was that for a ten-year-old boy? It was the kind of thing Jan came out with that perpetually surprised people. ‘I guess so. Why do you think that is?'

He shrugged. ‘Because we all watch the same old movies. Nobody makes new stuff any more.'

She supposed that was true. ‘I did read that the TV industry suffered after Step Day, because you couldn't transmit stuff between the stepwise worlds. Then Yellowstone kind of killed it off for good. You know, the big volcano back in '40.'

‘So we all watch the same stuff, over and over,' Jan said. ‘It's like it froze.'

She smiled. ‘I guess. Nobody's sure who the Pope is any more, but we all know Captain Kirk.'

‘I never heard of
him
.'

‘You will, Jan. You will. So why do you like this movie particularly?'

‘
Contact
? I like the way she looks for patterns, you know? In the signal from the sky. All those numbers. That's why I wanted to watch this movie, because they really did pick up a signal in the sky, didn't they? At the Gap. Did they find numbers in that signal?'

‘I don't know,' Sister John said honestly. She hadn't been much interested in the signal when it was briefly news; most of the reporting she'd seen had been lurid speculation.

Jan munched popcorn complacently. ‘I found some books in the library. About finding patterns in numbers and stuff. Patterns in nature, like you get the same kind of spiral in a sunflower and a galaxy.'

‘Really?' Sister John had never been a scholar. She was reminded sharply of Sister Georgina, long dead now, who had been the most academic of the nuns. The books Jan had consulted might even have been Georgina's once. Georgina had never ceased to remind everybody that she had studied at Cambridge. Sister John murmured,‘Not-the-one-in-Massachusetts-Cambridge-University-the-real-one-you-know-in-England . . .'

Jan looked at her quizzically. ‘Huh?'

‘Nothing. Just remembering . . .' And she made an intuitive leap. ‘Patterns. Is that why you like listening to the stories people tell? Are there patterns in those too?'

He shrugged, chewing his popcorn.

Maybe he didn't recognize himself what he was doing, Sister John thought.
Pattern-seeking
: looking for logic in a chaotic life.
Contact
: looking for a way to reach the absent other. The movie had made the same connection, actually; there was a slightly cheesy scene where the young Ellie tried to contact her dead father through CB radio.

It made sense, given Jan's background. He'd never even met his father, and his mother had been little more than a kid herself, with significant learning and cognitive difficulties. He'd spent his first four years more or less alone with the mother, in a post-Yellowstone Low Earth refugee camp that had become a sink of poverty and dependence. One downside of the great opening up of the Long Earth was that it offered a lot more room for such cases to go unnoticed. The mother had done her limited best, but she hadn't even taught Jan to speak properly; they had communicated with a kind of home-developed baby-talk.

Then the mother too had disappeared. Neighbours had rescued a bewildered and terrified child from starvation. Suddenly, at age four, Jan Roderick had lost his only human contact and his sole means of communication. Bombarded by a blizzard of strangeness, he hadn't uttered a word for a whole year.

Sister John always tried to keep stuff like that in the back of her mind. A kid was a kid, after all, not a bundle of conditions. Yet such knowledge informed.

‘So what are you making notes about now?'

‘I'm proving Ellie Arroway is from Madison, Wisconsin.'

She did a double take. ‘Really?'

‘It doesn't say so out loud in the movie. But in the book, in the first chapter, Ellie's mom takes her for a walk down State Street.' He squinted. ‘There was a State Street in Datum Madison too, wasn't there, Sister?'

‘Yes, there was.'

‘And it says she lives by a lake in Wisconsin.' He flicked through his tablet, small fingers moving rapidly. ‘She goes to see her mother in a care home in Janesville. And look, in the movie . . .' Expertly he scrolled back to a scene where a wall map showed young Ellie's pattern of CB radio contacts: lines of tape connecting thumbtacks. ‘See the tack where her home is?'

‘Dead-on for Madison,' Sister John said, wondering.

‘Later her father says how far away Pensacola is—'

‘I believe you. Wow. Who'd have thought it? Cheeseheads make first contact. Whoo hoo!'

They exchanged a high-five slap, and Sister John dared to hug him, tickling him a little to make him laugh; he wasn't generally a physical kind of kid.

Then they subsided and watched more of the ancient movie.

She said carefully, ‘Sister Coleen says you've been asking questions about why people haven't gone to other worlds for real.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said reflexively.

For all her caution she'd got the tone wrong; too many of the kids in the Home were over-sensitized to criticism, and the punishment that had usually followed before they came here. ‘No. Don't be sorry. It's OK. We're just talking. Look, you know Americans did go to the moon and back.'

‘Sure. Like a hundred years ago. Not since then.'

‘I guess it's because of the Long Earth. Why go to the moon when you've got all those worlds you can just walk into?'

‘But they're all
boring
. They're all just Madison, without the people and stuff.'

‘I know what you mean. But there's a
lot
of worlds in the Long Earth, and you don't need a spacesuit, you can breathe the air . . .' Sister John remembered that Joshua, as a younger man, had said the same kind of thing: ‘Out in the High Meggers I am in fact a planetbound astronaut, which hasn't got the glamour of the old-time spacemen but does have the advantage in that you can stop occasionally for a crap . . .' She suppressed a smile.

‘Is the Long Earth bigger than the Ringworld?'

She had to glance at the book cover to get a rough idea of what a “Ringworld” was: some kind of huge structure in space. ‘Well, how big is the Ringworld?'

‘As big as three million Earths,' he said promptly.

‘Oh, the Long Earth is much bigger than
that
.'

‘Really?' His eyes widened in wonder. ‘
Cool.'

Later, when the spooky stuff began, she would think back to conversations like this. It was a strange thing that Jan Roderick's background had almost pre-adapted him for what followed.

Made him ready to respond to the Invitation.

The thing was, Jan Roderick had been right. Obsessed with SETI and mathematical puzzles and pattern-finding, he was slowly becoming aware of something new in the world – new and
real
. A pattern not of numbers, or contained in radio signals whispered from the sky: a pattern in the stories people were telling each other. Stories spreading across local nets in the Low Earths, and webs of telegraph and telephone cables and micro comsats in the more developed pioneer worlds, and further out through the outernet – the low-tech, self-organized communications system that spanned a million worlds of the Long Earth – even, when push came to shove, spreading by word of mouth, around campfires scattered across otherwise empty planets where travellers met and talked.

And – coincidentally, given Joshua's departing conversation with Agnes, which was the first time he had thought of his old friend Monica Jansson for some time – one such story concerned a strange encounter for Jansson herself, many years earlier . . .

6

W
HATEVER THE ULTIMATE
destiny of mankind in the unending landscapes of the Long Earth – and in the year 2029, just fourteen years after Step Day, that had been only dimly glimpsed – back on Datum Earth, in Madison, Wisconsin, and its footprints, the agenda of MPD Lieutenant Monica Jansson, then forty-three years old, had been increasingly occupied by the tension between steppers and non-steppers.

The tension, and its victims.

Stuart Mann was a theoretical physicist, not a doctor or a psychologist. Monica Jansson had met him at one of the many academic conferences that she'd attended as she tried to get her head around the whole Long Earth phenomenon. Mann had struck her as one of the more human attendees, humorous, mostly comprehensible in his conversation, and with little of the spiky arrogance that so many academics seemed to display. Now, as he spoke gently to the Damaged Woman, here in the holiday cabin her family had built in this footprint of Maple Bluff – they were in Earth West 31, a fairly remote world but still a community tied to Datum Madison – Jansson thought Mann had a better bedside manner than most doctors she'd come across. Which was why Jansson had suggested he consult.

Mann sat on the sofa beside the patient and smiled, though it was evident the woman couldn't see him. He was around fifty, grey, portly, wearing a tweed jacket and a bright-scarlet bow tie, his one affectation. The patient was in a dressing gown. ‘Tell me what you can see,' he said simply.

The Damaged Woman turned her head in his direction. Her eyes weren't like the eyes of a blind person, in Jansson's experience. They flickered, moved, focused. She was seeing
something
. Just not Stu Mann. She plucked at the loops of copper wire around her wrist. She was called Bettany Diamond.

‘Trees,' she said. ‘I see trees. It's sunny. I mean, I can't feel the sun's heat, but . . . The kids are playing. Harry coming down from the tree house we built. Amelia running at me . . .' She flinched, sitting on her sofa, and Jansson imagined a little girl running through Bettany's visual field. One side of Bettany's face was a mass of bruises, a relic of the beating she'd taken in hospital, and her speech was distorted as a result. ‘Harry's getting his Stepper. He has his sick bag. We always make the kids carry sick bags when they step.'

Mann said gently, ‘He's going to step back here?'

‘Oh, yes. They're not allowed to go more than one world stepwise without us present.'

‘Can you tell me where he is? Where he's going to step back to?'

She pointed, to a spot in the middle of the living room carpet. ‘We laid out tape in the stepwise worlds. The outline of the house. It doesn't harm them if they try to step into a wall. You just get pushed away, you know, but it distresses them.'

And with a puff of displaced air Harry appeared, a grubby, sweating six-year-old, stepping straight from the forest on to the carpet. Exactly where Bettany was pointing.

Where she, stuck in Earth West 31, had seen him standing, in Earth West 32.

Harry's little face crumpled, and he held his sick bag to his mouth, but he didn't throw up. His mother reached for him, unseeing. ‘Good boy. Brave boy. Come here now . . .'

Mann and Jansson withdrew to the kitchen.

Bettany's husband made them a pot of coffee. He was in white shirt and tie, crisp slacks, black leather shoes; he'd come home from work when Bettany was released from the hospital so he could get the kids back from her sister where they'd been staying, and the family could be together again here in this holiday home, this refuge from the current anti-stepper madness back on the Datum. When he'd poured the coffee, the husband left them alone.

Mann sipped from his mug. ‘I can see why the doctors called you in, Lieutenant Jansson. Knowing of your, umm, vocation. The work you've done on stepping-related crime and social issues.'

‘But the doctors don't understand. She's actually a near-phobic, isn't she? Bettany Diamond. She has significant difficulties stepping, even though she's set up this holiday home thirty-one steps out. And though she's wearing a stepper bracelet. She
believes
in stepping and its benefits, even though she can't do it so well herself . . .'

This was a time when evidence was first spreading widely that some people were able to step naturally, that is without the aid of a Linsay Stepper box, despite the official cover-ups. And the tension between non-steppers and natural steppers was mounting. Humanity had found the latest in a long line of sub-groups to pick on, and a kit bag of discriminatory horrors inherited from the past was being rummaged through. In some Central Asian countries, according to human rights activists, they laced the bodies of steppers with iron, so that if you stepped away you'd bleed out of some pierced artery. Some states in the US were considering something horribly similar, where steel-based pacemakers would be installed into the bodies of high-category cons: step away, and your heart stopped.