Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

‘I’ve been thinking. What an opportunity the Gap represents!’

Since the galley was mostly inoperative, Joshua was hammering a grill out of a defunct piece of equipment. ‘An opportunity for what?’

‘Space travel! You could just put on a pressure suit and step off, into space. None of that messy business of climbing out of Earth’s gravity well on rockets. You’d presumably be in solar orbit, just as Earth is. Once you had some kind of infrastructure in place in the Gap itself, you could simply sail off. It would be a great deal more energy-efficient to get to Mars, say…

‘You know, I was always a space buff. Even back in Tibet. I personally have invested some money in the Kennedy Space Center, where they’re not even taking care of the museum-piece rockets any more. Our pathetic handful of microgravity orbital factories gives the illusion that we are still a space-going species, but the dream has gone — gone even before the Long Earth was opened up. As far as we know there is nowhere else in the universe where a human being can exist unprotected. And now, with millions of Earths available to us, who wants to go up into the cold, scorching emptiness in a spacesuit smelling faintly of urine? We could have been out there , applying to join the galactic federation, not slashing and burning our way across endless copies of the same old planet.’

Sally said, ‘But you’re leading the slashing and the burning, Lobsang.’

‘Well, I don’t see why I can’t have both. And, don’t you see, if we can develop the Gap, maybe we can find a way to do all that after all. From the Gap the solar system is your oyster Kilpatrick. Don’t forget this conversation, Joshua. When you get back to the Datum, stake a claim to the Earths on either side of the Gap before the rush starts, and mankind finds that there is such a thing as a free launch. Think what might be out there! Not just the other worlds of our solar system — though surely a universe that has manufactured the Long Earth has manufactured the Long Mars as well? Think about that .’

Joshua tried. It made his head spin. He concentrated on finishing his grill. The galley ovens were out, but he planned to barbecue most of what, had it been on Earth, might have been called a deer, the result of some brisk hunting by Sally.

The ship stopped stepping, without warning.

And Joshua heard …

It wasn’t a voice. Something wormed inside his brain, a sensation clear and sharp, and offering no hint of anything other than its existence.

Only that it was calling to him.

He managed to say, ‘Lobsang, can you hear anything? On the radio frequencies, I mean?’

‘Of course I can. Why do you think I halted the stepping? We’re being pinged, with coherent signals at a range of frequencies. It appears to be an attempt at the language of the trolls. I will concentrate on the decoding, if you will excuse me.’

Sally looked from one to the other. ‘What’s happening? Am I the only one who isn’t hearing anything? Is it coming from that thing underneath us?’

‘What thing?’ Joshua looked out of a galley window at the ocean below.

‘ That thing.’

‘Lobsang,’ Joshua asked, ‘is your port camera working?’

JOSHUA AND SALLY rappelled down the panic rope, the only way to the ground now the winches were jammed.

Once down, Joshua clambered on top of a bluff for a look around. Under a sunless, clouded-over sky, a dense green ocean lapped reluctantly at a muddy beach. Inland, a bare landscape stretched away to folded hills, far in the distance. But, just to the south of here, there was a tremendous crater, like Meteor Crater in Arizona. Without warning a huge pterosaur-like creature swept out of the crater, utterly silent, heading over Joshua’s head and out into this world’s version of the Pacific. Silhouetted against a darkening sky, it was like a nuclear bomber heading for Moscow.

And something moved in this remote version of the Pacific. Something vast, like a living island. Joshua’s headache had gone. Cleared utterly. But the sensation he had always called the Silence had never been more profound.

The voice of Lobsang chattered crisply from a small speaker in Joshua’s backpack. ‘We are back on the Washington State coast of this planet… My aerial drones are no longer functional; my view is limited. The object appears to be twenty-three miles long and approximately five miles wide. It’s a creature, Joshua. Without a clear analogue on the Datum. I have noticed several appendages along its flank that are changing size and shape — you might think it is a technology park; I see what appear to be antennas, telescopes, but the instruments are morphing one into the other, extraordinary — and a certain amount of movement along the carcass as a whole. I can’t estimate threat. I can’t imagine that something like this could make a sudden movement, but for all I know right now it might develop wings and fly…’

There was a steady rippling along the thing’s upper surface. It was slightly white, slightly transparent. Its movements affected Joshua somehow, viscerally, a sensation seeming to arrive in his consciousness by no discernible pathway.

‘Sally, have you ever seen anything like this before?’

She snorted. ‘What do you think?’

Lobsang said, ‘I have just shaken hands with it.’

Sally snapped, ‘What the hell are you talking about now?’

‘Communications protocols, Sally. We are in contact… It is evidently a remarkable intellect; I can tell that immediately from the sheer information-theoretic complexity of its communications. So far I’ve learned one thing from it. Its name—’

‘It has a name ?’

‘Its name is First Person Singular, and before you shout at me about that, Sally, I know that because it has now told me as much in twenty-six different languages of Earth. Including, I’m proud to say, Tibetan. I have been beaming information at it, and it’s learning fast; it has already downloaded much of the ship’s data store. I believe that it’s harmless.’

‘What?’ Sally growled. ‘Something alive and the size of a small reservoir de facto can’t possibly be harmless. What’s it for? Above all, what does it eat?’

Joshua slipped his packs off his shoulders and dropped them on the beach. There was no noise here, he realized. No animal cries, not even the distant honking of the pterosaur fliers. Only the soft, oily spilling of small waves on the shore. Nothing but the Silence . What he had been hearing all his life, in the gaps between people. Huge thoughts, like the echoes from some tremendous brass gong. Now here it was, before him.

More than two million worlds from Earth, he felt oddly as if he had come home.

He walked towards the ocean.

Sally called, ‘Joshua. Take it easy. You don’t know what you’re dealing with…’

He kicked off his boots and pulled off his socks. Barefoot, he walked into the water until his ankles were covered. He could smell salt, and the sweetly rotten stink of seaweed. The water was warm, and thick, dense, almost syrupy. And it swarmed with life, tiny creatures, white and blue and green and mobile. Some were like tiny jellyfish, with pulsing sacs and trailing tentacles. But there were things like fish in there too, with huge, strange eyes, and things like crabs with clever-looking claws.

And, a little further out, the thing. Joshua waded out, towards its tremendous edge. The voice of Lobsang chattered in his ear, but he ignored it. The flanks of First Person Singular were translucent, like inferior glass, and if he squinted he could just about see what was inside. And what was inside was … everything. Fish. Animals. A troll ? It was embedded in glutinous fluid, swathed in some kind of frond, like seaweed, eyes closed. It looked asleep rather than dead. At peace.