The Long War by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter Page A

vain for plausible reasons, and found none. It wasn’t as if many of those who poured out their bile could have any personal grudge: none of them, for example, had been executives of the moribund companies whose careers might have been ruined by Black’s rise. It seemed the worst you could say about Douglas Black as a human being was that he was a workaholic, who worked hard and expected people to work hard for him. Maybe this had cost him, even significantly. There had been an online legend that Black’s serendipity lab was even behind the Stepper box that had opened up the Long Earth. Somehow Black had pissed off the inventor, and in the end the box design had been dumped into the public domain, galvanizing all mankind, but earning not a penny for anybody, not directly at any rate.
    That was all behind the scenes. And yet Black was hated, by some.
    The minds hiding behind the various pseudonyms Nelson found himself staring at among the Quizmasters were not stupid. They could not be, given the high bar set for entrance in the first place; indeed it sometimes felt as if a membership of Mensa might just about qualify you to make the coffee for this particular metaphorical kaffee-klatch. Not stupid, no. But . . .
    Nelson had met many people in different walks of life, and he thought he could read at least some of them. These men and women were bright, truly bright. But in some, even through the impersonal medium of the chat rooms, he sensed something dark and hidden, sometimes betrayed by the occasional comment, or curious turn of phrase. Envy, to start with. Paranoid suspicion, for another. A kind of seam of malevolence – a capacity for cold hatred – a capacity that needed an outlet, any outlet. A man like Black, who presented a public face, who could seem either an object of envy, or too good to be true and therefore deserving of suspicion, was an ideal target. This didn’t show itself often, no, but it was apparent to those who really watched other people.
    And especially to a man who had grown up a black kid in South Africa, and had not forgotten the experience.
    Anyhow, whatever you thought about Black, Nelson did like the Black Corporation, in all its wonderful and manifold manifestations. And in particular he liked the mysteries their various activities threw up for him to ponder over.
    For example, as he had drifted somewhat aimlessly through the periphery of the information cloud that surrounded Black, he had started to notice how often the ‘Lobsang Project’ was mentioned. But it was always a dead end in any search, a link to nowhere. Lobsang : of course the name meant ‘big brain’ in Tibetan, which showed that somebody in the Black Corporation had not only a sense of humour but also some skills when it came to languages. But Lobsang was a personal name too, and, slowly, Nelson had come to envisage Lobsang as a person. A person to be tracked down. Him and his ‘Project’.
    And now Nelson, all alone in this rather chilly rectory, with all eight screens windows to the world, smiled. For suddenly his search had borne fruit.
    One of his screens filled up with an image of the airship Mark Twain , rather battle-worn after its now famous journey, being towed into what remained of Madison, Wisconsin, after the nuke attack ten years back: towed by Joshua Valienté and a young woman whom no one to Nelson’s knowledge had subsequently been able to identify.
    Nelson was pretty sure that he’d seen just about everything that Joshua Valienté had brought back from the extraordinary voyage of the Mark Twain . The Black Corporation – in a gesture typical of Douglas Black – had dumped Godzillabytes of data from the voyage into the archive of any university that wanted it, for open public access and study. ( Godzillabytes : Nelson had an irrational dislike of ‘petabytes’, the recognized term for a particular, and particularly large, wodge of data. Anything that sounded like a kitten’s gentle nip just