The Long Mars

21

Professor Wotan Ulm, now of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial book An Untuned Golden String: The Higher-Dimensional Topology of the Long Earth, appeared on a news channel run by the Britain West 7 Broadcasting Corporation, responding to questions on the nature of “soft places’, as those mysterious short cuts, widely rumoured to be more than mere stepper legends, were increasingly becoming known.

“I do see that going through a soft place would be like wearing seven-league boots, Wotan—may I call you Wotan?”

“No, you may not.”

“But it would help if I understood how you can make these seven-league-boot jumps.”

“Actually a better metaphor for a soft place is a wormhole. A fixed passageway between two points. As in the movie Contact. You remember that?”

“Is that the porno where—”

“No. Stargate, then. What about that? Oh, for some modern cultural references. Never mind! There is in fact some relevant theory. Young man, have you ever heard of a Mellanier Sequence diagram?”

“No.”

“It’ll never be properly drawn until they invent n-dimensional printing, but basically it portrays the Long Earth as a tangled ball of string. Or, if you can stomach it, as a vast intestine. Datum Earth is a dot somewhere in the region of the appendix. Mathematically this tangle may—and I emphasize the ‘may’—be represented by a solenoid, a particular mathematical structure like a self-crossing string, a mixture of linear order and chaos… You look as blank as a chimp faced with a banana fitted with a zip. Well, never mind.

“The point is that simple Stepper technology allows us to move ‘up’ or ‘down’ the gut, you see, along the string of worlds. But Mellanier, even before the existence of the soft places started to become widely known, argued on theoretical grounds that it might be possible to break through into an adjoining strand. Rather than walk all the way around the string, you see. An effective short cut.”

“Mellanier. I do remember him. Face all over the media a few years after Step Day. Princeton, isn’t he?”

“That’s him. He got a lot right, but only dipped his toe in the theoretical waters.”

“You don’t seem to like him very much, Wotan. Why should some rival academic from Princeton get your goat?”

“Because Claude Mellanier is a fraud who fed off the analyses of Willis Linsay, and mine, repackaged them, dumbed them down, and passed them off as his own.”

“The man won a Nobel Prize, didn’t he, Wotan?”

“That’s because the Nobel committee are idiots nearly as blithering as you.”

“Also he published a bestselling book—”

“And don’t call me Wotan. Oh, must you plant me before these pithecine buffoons, Jocasta?”