The Long Cosmos Read Free

yet, Admiral, and the most hazardous stretch—’
    â€˜Bah. I could pilot this tub through that “hazardous stretch” in my sleep.’
    â€˜I’m afraid the recall is quite unambiguous, ma’am. We have to turn back. They don’t send out fast-pursuit boats to deliver such a command every day. And after all, the note is for you . Admiral Cutler is calling for your return specifically.’
    â€˜Why, Ed Cutler couldn’t command a leaky bathtub.’
    â€˜I couldn’t comment on that, ma’am.’
    â€˜I’m retired!’
    â€˜Of course you are, Admiral.’
    â€˜I don’t have to take any damn orders from that old desk jockey.’
    â€˜But I do, ma’am,’ said Sheridan softly.
    Maggie sighed, and looked out through the sturdy windows of this observation deck, at the churning volcanic landscape of the latest stepwise Earth, and at the pursuit boat, a sleek craft that hung in the sky alongside the Duke . ‘But we came so far,’ she said plaintively. ‘And it’s been so long.’ Twenty-five years since she’d left a science party on West 247,830,855, a very strange Earth, an Earth that was a mere moon of a greater planet. More than twenty years since a relief mission found they’d vanished. ‘They’re my people, Jane.’
    â€˜I know, ma’am.’ Sheridan was in her late twenties but, highly capable, had the air of someone significantly older. ‘But the way I see it is this. After twenty-five years they’re either dead, or they found a way to survive. Either way they’ll keep a little longer.’
    â€˜Damn it. Not only are you ridiculously young, you’re also ridiculously right. And damn Cutler. What’s all this about – some kind of invitation?’
    â€˜I don’t know any more than you right now, Admiral . . .’
    Even as they argued, the Duke began its long trip home, and the subtle swing-like sense of regular stepping resumed. Beyond the windows whole worlds flapped by, one a second, then two, then four: sun and rain, heat and cold, landscapes and suites of life and climate systems, there and gone in the blink of an eye. But nobody was watching this routine miracle.
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    And elsewhere:
    On this chill March day the shaven-headed novice, sitting cross-legged behind a low desk and labouring over texts that had originated in the eighth century after Christ, was distracted by a distant noise. A faint call.
    Not the talk and laughter of the villagers in the clean Himalayan air, the old men with their smoky pipes, the women with their laundry, the little children playing with their home-made wooden toys. Not the clank of cow bells from the passes. It had been like a voice, the boy thought, echoing from the cold, white, ice-draped face of the mountain that loomed over this valley, deep in old Tibet.
    A voice that chimed inside his own head.
    Words, softly spoken:
    . . . Humanity must progress. This is the logic of our finite cosmos; ultimately we must rise up to meet its challenges if we are not to expire with it . . . Consider. We call ourselves the wise ones, but what would a true Homo sapiens be like? What would it do? Surely it would first of all treasure its world, or worlds. It would look to the skies for other sapient life forms. And it would look to the universe as a whole . . .
    The boy called, ‘Joshua?’
    The master slammed the palm of his hand flat on the desk, making the boy jump. ‘Pay attention, Lobsang!’
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    The words rained down from the sky across the Long Earth, wherever there were ears to hear and eyes to see and minds to understand.
    Standing by his wife’s grave marker, Joshua Valienté didn’t want any invitation. ‘Leave me alone, damn it!’ He stepped away angrily.
    The air he displaced created a soft breeze that touched the petals of the flowers on the grave.
    Yet the voice from