The Long Cosmos

by Terry Pratchett

  Lobsang had been a student of the trolls since the days of The Journey back in ’30. Once Lobsang had told Joshua how culture, unlike an instinctive behaviour, was stored outside the genome, outside the body, beyond any one individual’s memory. So human culture was stored in artefacts, books, tools, buildings, a whole heap of inventions and discoveries passed down from the past, there for each new generation to access. It was the same for trolls, except that everything they knew about the world was in the long call, the song that was outside the head of any one animal. Lobsang had spoken of the long call as analogous to a computing system, a vast, adaptable network of information encoded in the music.

  Well, maybe the Librarians, tough old survivors and full of experience, were like high-density memory stores embedded in that evanescent network, deep caches of the wisdom of a species.

  As Joshua reflected on this, Sancho patted his arm with odd tenderness. ‘Mom, pop, little kid alone, boo hoo. Old fart alone, who cares?’

  The troll felt sorry for him, Joshua realized suddenly. This animal felt sorry for him. Resentment sparked briefly. Joshua had never been comfortable under the scrutiny of others, and certainly didn’t welcome pity. But that feeling faded quickly. ‘You saved my life, old buddy. I guess you earned the right to feel that way.’

  ‘Boo hoo,’ the old troll said gently. Then he wrapped his other arm over his head, and got to work cleaning out the opposite armpit.

  That was when Joshua heard a dull droning noise, drifting down from the sky. It didn’t sound like any kind of insect swarm, or pterosaur.

  Sancho didn’t seem perturbed.

  ‘That sounds to me like an aeroplane, old buddy.’

  ‘Hoo?’

  ‘Give me those things . . .’ Joshua snatched the sunglasses back from the troll, and jammed them on his own face. He struggled to his feet and peered around, leaning on his crutch, hand over his eyes against the sun. The sound seemed to echo around the arid landscape. It took him a few seconds to spot the plane, a gleaming speck in the bone-dry sky. But it was heading his way now, maybe drawn by the silver gleam of the survival blanket.

  When it flew over the bluff with a waggle of wings, Joshua could see the aircraft’s smooth white hull, unmarked save for a registration number, and the stylized Black Corporation Buddhist-monk logo that marked a capability to fly stepwise. The wings were stubby, the tailplane fat, the main body a squat cylinder.

  The trolls were profoundly uninterested.

  But Joshua grinned. ‘Only rode in a plane like that once in my life. And I know who that must be.’ Leaning precariously on the crutch, he took off his hat and waved it in the air. ‘Rod! Rod Valienté! Down here!’

  31

  THE PLANE LANDED without fuss maybe a half-mile from the bluff. Joshua set off in that direction, hobbling on his home-made crutch.

  Sancho and the other adult trolls displayed a supreme indifference to the miracle of technology that had suddenly appeared out of an empty sky. Matt, though, bounded ahead of Joshua towards the plane, a bundle of curiosity and energy on the dusty ground.

  Matt had reached the plane by the time a hatch opened and Rod clambered out. He’d already changed out of his flight suit into a practical if faded shirt, traveller’s jacket, jeans and a broad-brimmed hat, and he carried a heavy-looking white pack on his back. Matt jumped up and down before him, slapping himself on the head and rolling in the dust. Joshua could see his son kneel down, grinning, to speak to Matt, and then he took something from his pocket and threw it in the air. Matt caught it one-handed, hooted and rolled, and then scampered back towards the bluff.

  Rod walked in and met his hobbling father not a hundred yards from the bluff. He slowed, somewhat warily, as if assessing Joshua’s mood. ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘Rod.’

  ‘Look, Dad, I know I’m breaking your sabbatical. I can also see you’re in trouble.’ He patted the pack, which Joshua guessed contained medical supplies. ‘Well, I came prepared. You’re either going to tell me I took my time getting here, or to piss off. Right?’

  ‘Rod—’

  ‘But I didn’t come out looking for you on a whim, or just because you’re overdue. I have some news for you—’

  ‘Shut your yap.’ Joshua stumbled forward and embraced his son. Rod smelled of the plane, of engine oil and electricity and a new-carpet cabin smell. Joshua dreaded to think what he smelled like. ‘I am in trouble. I busted my damn leg. Thanks for coming, son.’

  They broke, awkwardly, and began to plod, at Joshua’s snail pace, back to the bluff.

  If they were shy of each other, Matt was shy of neither of them. He came back, trailed by his sister Liz, and they both rolled and hooted alongside Rod as he walked. Rod dug into his pockets again. ‘Here, you guys, plenty of sugar for both of you.’ They snatched the white lumps out of the air and crammed them into their broad mouths.

  ‘You’re good with trolls,’ Joshua observed.

  ‘What, is that a surprise? Dad, we, my family, we live among trolls. Or they live among us. You ought to know that. You would, if you ever spent any time with us.’

  ‘OK, OK. But you won’t stay popular with their mothers and fathers if you keep feeding them sugar.’

  Rod raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s gen-enged, Dad. No dental caries, and slips through the digestive system harmlessly. You’re behind the times.’

  They reached the rock bluff, and Joshua’s rough camp. Sancho still sat on top of the bluff, wrapped once again in the survival blanket. He observed Rod’s approach with a grave but remote interest. Rod bowed to him and said, ‘Hoo?’

  ‘Hoo.’ Sancho turned away, evidently accepting Rod as simply as that.

  Joshua said, ‘This band of trolls saved my life. Especially Sancho here, after the break. I wouldn’t have made it otherwise.’

  Rod looked back at Sancho, and nodded. ‘I’m impressed. Not surprised, but impressed. Let me get that leg seen to.’

  They settled in the shade of the bluff. Rod dropped his pack and unzipped it. In with the med gear he had a small cooler bag, from which he extracted bottles of cold beer. He handed one to his father, with an opener. ‘Anaesthetize yourself. Valhalla’s finest.’

  Sitting in the dirt, Joshua popped off the cap and took a long, luxurious draught. ‘That is unreasonably good.’

  Rod took a beer for himself, and eyed Sancho. Then he passed a bottle up to the troll.

  Sancho took it – the bottle was almost lost in his huge black-haired hand – and eyed it suspiciously. He reached for his troll-call and asked, ‘Lite?’

  ‘No way,’ Rod said.

  The troll grunted, flipped off the cap with a tooth like a tombstone, and took a long pull on the bottle.

  Rod washed his hands with a sterilizing fluid, pulled on surgical gloves, and got to work on Joshua’s leg. He cut away the rough bandaging, and levered away splints that were stuck to the flesh by chewed-up vegetable matter, a mass of dark green. Rod poked at this. ‘A troll poultice?’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘I guess. I was out when they did this for me. I reapplied some of it myself.’

  ‘I’ve seen them do this. They gather the stuff, grind it up between their back teeth, and plaster it on. There’s a lot of folk medicine stored in those big heads of theirs, and specific to the worlds, or the bands of worlds, they visit . . . There’s no sign of infection. Hell, I’d be able to smell it by now. I’ll clean all this away, give you a shot of antibiotics.’ He looked at his father. ‘Look, all I know is field medicine. I’ll be clumsier than the trolls probably. You want a painkiller?’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’ As Rod got to work, Joshua leaned back, cradling the beer. ‘So how did you find me?’

  ‘Not hard. Your old buddy Bill Chambers helped a lot. When you were overdue, he called me.’

  ‘Overdue? How the hell could I be overdue? I’m on a sabbatical. By definition, you’re not “overdue” on a sabbatical.’

  Rod just laughed. ‘Bill showed me a spreadsheet he keeps on you.’<
br />
  ‘A spreadsheet?’

  ‘How long your average stay is, with ninety per cent confidence limits, before you check in with him. Bill knows you as well as anybody, I guess, ever since you were both raising hell in that Home in Madison of yours.’

  ‘I don’t check in with anybody.’

  ‘Of course you don’t, Dad. So he knows how long you’ll be out. And he also has a way of predicting where in the High Meggers you’ll go next, based on all the places you visited before. You could call it an algorithm.’

  ‘An algorithm?’

  ‘He keeps all this stuff in a box file.’

  ‘A box file?’

  ‘Anyhow, once you were overdue, Bill put the word out, and I came looking in the likely spots. And once I’d found the right world I was led here by your radio signal, and the survival blanket draped over your buddy there—’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Sorry. You sure you won’t have a painkiller?’

  ‘I could take another beer.’

  Rod passed him the bottle, and continued working. ‘I’ll be honest, Dad. When I set off, I did wonder what I’d find. Or if there’d be anything to find.’

  Joshua frowned. ‘Is that what you think? That I was on some kind of death march?’ But was it really a shock that Rod should think that way of him? He imagined Bill Chambers’s face, as lined and leathery as his own, peering at him sceptically. I warned ye, if ye kept on goin’ out there alone, ye’d get yerself killed, ye fecking eejit. You don’t know half the truth about yerself, do ye? . . .

  Rod flinched at the bluntness of Joshua’s words. But he said, ‘It is difficult for the rest of us to figure out why you need to take these sabbaticals, Dad. Over and over.’

  ‘It’s what I’ve done all my life. Ever since I was trusted by Agnes and the Sisters to be away from the Home for a night on my own.’ He struggled to explain. ‘Ever since Step Day, when the Long Earth opened up – for me, personally, anyhow – to go back to the Datum, to billions of people packed together on a sliver of a world, a world no thicker than the edge of a knife – it grips your mind like a fist.’

  ‘Hmm. But you’re closer to seventy than seventeen now, Dad.’ He gestured at the damaged leg with a gloved hand stained vegetable green. ‘And it could have been even worse. Bill told me you usually avoid worlds where the troll population is large.’

  ‘They’re supposed to be solitary trips. Trolls, bless them, can be kind of noisy neighbours if you’re in search of silence. Or, the Silence.’

  ‘So you were lucky. Dad, you have people who need you. Family.’

  Joshua glared at him. ‘Family who walked away from me.’

  Rod looked away, concentrating on his medicine. ‘Yeah, well, maybe things are different now.’

  ‘Different how?’ Joshua thought back. ‘You said you had news for me. What news?’

  Rod shrugged. ‘Good news, bad news. And some news that won’t surprise you.’

  ‘Tell me what won’t surprise me.’

  ‘Lobsang’s asking for you.’

  Joshua sipped his beer, leaned back and laughed. ‘No, that doesn’t surprise me, damn it. I thought he disappeared again, that he had another of his periodic breakdowns.’

  ‘As I understand it, he did. But your old buddy Nelson Azikiwe went to bring him back.’

  ‘Went where? Never mind. So there’s some new crisis blowing up in the Long Earth, is there?’

  ‘Isn’t there always? And they want you back, Dad, Nelson and Lobsang—’

  ‘Same old same old. Tell me the bad news,’ Joshua said bluntly.

  Rod looked at him. ‘Sister Agnes died.’

  ‘Ah. OK.’

  ‘There was a kind of service, at the Home. I’m sorry, Dad. I know how close you were.’

  ‘Sure. Even after she was brought back by Lobsang, she was still Agnes. Adds up to a lot of decades, I guess. But we said our goodbyes. So what’s the good news?’

  And now, Joshua could swear, Rod blushed under his tan. ‘Sofia is pregnant. Now, Dad, if you don’t remember who she is—’

  ‘Sofia Piper. Give me some credit. Your . . .’ He hesitated, not wanting to use the wrong word. ‘Partner?’

  ‘Close enough.’

  ‘So you’re going to be a father.’ Again, was that the right word, when it applied to Rod’s extended family? ‘A biological father, I mean.’

  ‘Sure. And you’re going to be a biological grandfather,’ Rod said dryly.

  Well, that was good news. And unexpected. In fact, a shock. It felt as if the world was reconfiguring around Joshua, as if everything around him, his relationship with his son, even the rocks and the trees and the trolls, had a new significance.

  And so much for any auto-destruct loops, if they existed in the first place.

  ‘Wow,’ he said at length.

  ‘So what are you thinking?’ Rod asked.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any cigars in there.’

  ‘Have another beer.’

  ‘You always said you weren’t going to do this. Have a kid of your own.’

  Rod shrugged again. ‘We’re human beings. A complex mystery. Guess what? We changed our minds.’

  ‘You fell in love with this Sofia, is what you did.’

  ‘I guess. Having her nephews around us the whole time kind of influenced us as well, I think. We always hated saying goodbye to them. The rest of the family threw a party when they found out. That’s our way.’

  ‘OK. But, Rod . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thanks for coming out. Thanks for telling me.’

  Rod looked embarrassed. ‘Well, I had to come save your ass anyway. I couldn’t not tell you—’

  ‘Thanks anyway.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  And, Joshua decided, now wasn’t the time to remind Rod about Oswald Hackett, and the Fund, and the gruesome genetic legacy of the Valientés. Joshua had chosen to live with it and move on; maybe Rod had made the same decision.

  Rod sat back at last and started peeling off his surgical gloves. ‘Done. That will hold until we get you back to Valhalla or the Lows. So.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘Time for lunch?’

  ‘Why not? I’ve been sharing with the trolls. My campfires, my spices, their meat. Rod, I’ve got to tell you that troll cuisine is most suitable for somebody who’s really, really hungry . . .’

  Rod grinned. ‘I know that, Dad. I’ll go get some more beers from the plane.’

  32

  THE KILLER STAR glared out of the early evening sky of Earth West 3,141.

  It was bright enough to cast a shadow, Sister Coleen saw, even in competition with the setting sun. Brighter than any star of the usual constellations – brighter than Venus, brighter than the moon. But that sky was obscured by drifting smoke. On the horizon a bank of forest burned fitfully, a line of fire spilling down a hillside like a special effect from The Lord of the Rings – another of Jan’s favourite movies. And a river beneath the airship’s prow seemed to be choked with the bodies of some big herbivore species, whole herds dead and washed away.

  ‘A supernova,’ Roberta said grimly.

  ‘Good grief,’ said Sister Coleen.

  Jan arrived, wide-eyed, still holding the hand of the young sailor who’d brought him to this observation deck.

  When the time had come for Jan to be taken to the Next’s project on West 3,141,592, for the leg to Valhalla Roberta had booked passage for the two of them on a commercial twain, an ordinary ship. The crew were used to handling kids and had been good with Jan. Now the boy stood between Roberta and Sister Coleen and stared out, uncomprehending. Coleen rested her hand on his shoulder.

  Roberta said, ‘Now, Jan, here’s what’s special about this pi world. Incredible to think that all this came from a star maybe a thousand light years away, a collapse that took just a second . . .’

  ‘A supernova,’ Jan said. ‘I read about that.’

  ‘A distant supernova, yes – not distant enough. There’d have been no
warning for the creatures of this world. The first wave of destruction would have arrived at the speed of light, with the image of the detonation itself: high-energy gamma rays, X-rays, battering down as soon as the explosion was visible. The ozone layer would have been stripped away, the surface pounded by solar ultraviolet. It was probably so sudden it would have overwhelmed even most stepping creatures. And the supernova isn’t done yet. There’s a wave of cosmic rays on the way, travelling slower than light, that will arrive here in a few years.’

  ‘Ma’am, we still don’t have a full count of human casualties,’ the sailor said. ‘The first reports came from travellers trying to pass through a few days later. Of course the Long Earth is a kind of disorganized place. They’ll probably have to wait for missing-person reports to come filtering in.’

  ‘Gee,’ Jan said simply, in a small voice. ‘Do they know which star it was?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Roberta said. ‘The astronomers at Valhalla U or the Gap will probably be able to figure it out. There are plenty of candidates. Big bloated stars, any one of which, through some chance event in this particular universe, might have gone up. Sirius, Canopus, Rigel, Altair, Deneb, Spica, Vega—’

  Jan looked at her. ‘Vega?’

  Sister Coleen hadn’t known about this event either. ‘And it’s scary this is so close to home. You think supernovas are things that happen out in the High Meggers. Not here—’

  ‘Not here in the Ice Belt,’ Roberta said. ‘Not in the Datum’s home belt, no. We estimate that a nearby supernova should affect only one in ten million stepwise worlds. So it’s unlucky to find one so close.