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THE BENCH, BESIDE a modernlooking drinks machine, was exceedingly comfortable. Joshua Valienté was not used to softness these days. Not used to the fluffy feeling of being inside a building, where the furnishings and the carpets impose a kind of quiet on the world. Beside the luxurious bench was a pile of glossy magazines, but Joshua was not particularly good at shiny paper either. Books Books were fine. Joshua liked books, particularly paperback books: light and easy to carry, and if you didnt want to read them again, well, there was always a use for reasonably thin soft paper. Normally, when there was nothing to do, he listened to the Silence. The Silence was very faint here. Almost drowned out by the sounds of the mundane world. Did people in this polished building understand how noisy it was The roar of air conditioners and computer fans, the susurration of many voices heard but not decipherable, the muffled sound of telephones followed by the sounds of people explaining that they were not in fact there but would like you to leave your name after the beep, this being subsequently followed by the beep. This was the office of the transEarth Institute, an arm of the Black Corporation. The faceless office, all plasterboard and chrome, was dominated by a huge logo, a chesspiece knight. This wasnt Joshuas world. None of it was his world. In fact, when you got right down to it, he didnt have a world; he had all of them.
This was a source of immense irritation for experts such as Professor Wotan Ulm of Oxford University. All these parallel Earths, he told the BBC, are identical on all but the detailed level. Oh, save that they are empty. Well, actually they are full, mainly of forests and swamps. Big, dark, silent forests, deep, clinging, lethal swamps. But empty of people. The Earth is crowded, but the Long Earth is empty. This is tough luck on Adolf Hitler, who hasnt been allowed to his war anywhere It is hard for scientists even to talk about the Long Earth without babbling about mbrane manifolds and quantum multiverses. Look: perhaps the universe bifurcates every time a leaf falls, a billion new branches every instant. Thats what quantum physics seems to tell us. Oh, it is not a question of a billion realities to be experienced; the quantum states superpose, like harmonics on a single violin string. But perhaps there are times when a volcano stirs, a comet kisses, a true love is betrayed when you can get a separate experiential reality, a braid of quantum threads. And perhaps these braids are then drawn together through some higher dimension by similarity, and a chain of worlds selforganizes. Or something Maybe it is all a dream, a collective imagining of mankind.
The truth is that we are as baffled by the phenomenon as Dante would have been if hed suddenly been given a glimpse of Hubbles expanding universe. Even the language we use to describe it is probably no more correct than the packofcards analogy that most people feel at home with: the Long Earth as a large pack of threedimensional sheets, stacked up in a higherdimensional space, each card an Earth entire unto itself. And, most significantly, to most people, the Long Earth is open. Almost anybody can travel up and down the pack, drilling, as it were, through the cards themselves. People are expanding into all that room. Of course they are This is a primal instinct. We plains apes still fear the leopard in the dark; if we spread out he cannot take all of us. It is all profoundly annoying. None of it fits And why has this tremendous pack of cards been dealt to mankind just now, when we have never been more in need of room But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldnt be much of a career path, would it Well whatever the answers to such questions, believe you me, everything is changing for mankind Is that enough, Jocasta Some idiot clicked a pen while I was doing the bit about Dante.
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