The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett Page A

hangar.
    The processing was swift. The bulk of the visitors’ luggage was taken away to residential facilities elsewhere on the site, leaving them with small items of hand luggage. Supervised by attendants in hooded white coveralls, the four of them were put through a final medical screen, culminating in antiseptic showers. Then they were fitted with fresh coveralls in a rich NASA-type blue, each equipped with temperature-control elements, an emergency oxygen supply, and clumsy sewn-in diapers in case of other kinds of emergency.
    The Next visitors put up with all this with a kind of bored patience. Dev, watching them, supposed this must be a posture that Next working among humans got used to adopting. Bored patience.
    They all climbed easily into their shuttle, and strapped themselves into couches, selecting them at random from banks fixed on a couple of decks in the interior of the little craft. Automated, the shuttle needed no pilot.
    Dev found himself slipping into tour-guide mode. ‘This is all very routine,’ he said. ‘We make hops over in shuttles like this every day—’
    â€˜We can do without such trivial observations,’ said Roberta mildly. ‘We are not – tourists.’
    â€˜The safety record they’ve achieved is a non-trivial matter,’ Stella said to her. ‘Although it has got better yet since we showed up and ran a few reviews.’
    Roberta considered Dev. ‘And the cultural development here is non-trivial, of course. Dev Bilaniuk – I’m guessing your names have different origins? They sound Indian and Slavic—’
    â€˜Mother from Delhi, father from Minsk. Both drawn here to the Gap. I’m a second-generation Gapper.’
    â€˜You could surely have moved away, had you chosen to. Evidently you inherited their dream of space.’
    Lee leaned forward against her straps. ‘That’s not so unusual. Especially when you see what else is on offer in the Long Earth. Slaving in factories at the feet of space elevators in the Low Earths, or else wandering around in hand-me-down clothes, picking fruit and chasing after funny-looking deer. I’m a second-generation Gapper too. At least here we’re pursuing an authentic human aspiration, one that predates stepping itself. And one you people stay out of, unless you need something.’
    Dev said, ‘Lee—’
    Stella held up a hand. ‘It’s OK.’
    And, under the control of the shuttle’s AI, they stepped.
    One step further West, they fell into a hole where an Earth should be. Beyond the windows, where there had been washed-out English sunlight, there was only darkness. And as always, without gravity it felt to Dev like they were suddenly falling.
    Then the shuttle swivelled sharply and fired its thrusters, producing a fierce deceleration.
    Every object on the surface of the Earth, at GapSpace’s latitude, was moving through space at hundreds of miles per hour, and in the Gap that velocity had to be shed. And that was what the rocket fire was for.
    Dev was glad the transition had put a stop to the conversation. And spitefully glad too to observe discomfort on the faces of the two Next – even Stella, who had made this journey a number of times before. Superhuman intellects they might be, but right now he suspected they were discovering that their inner ears and stomachs were just as human and just as maladapted to shifting gravity as his own.
    The hard rocket thrust lasted only seconds, and died quickly. They were briefly weightless again. Then the shuttle turned once more, with pops of attitude thrusters that sounded as if somebody was beating the outer hull with a stick, and with a blip of the main engine began to edge towards its docking station.
    Now, through the small window before him, Dev glimpsed structures in space.
    Directly ahead of the shuttle was a mass of clustered concrete spheres, huge, marked with sunlight-faded black letters, A to