The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online Page A

consciousness do not step, as far as we know. Now, the best theories we have of how the Long Earth works, and they are only tentative, are based on quantum physics: the possibility that many realities exist in a kind of cloud around the actual. And in some quantum theories consciousness has a fundamental role to play.’
    â€˜Like the Copenhagen Interpretation.’
    He smiled. ‘You’ve done your homework.’
    â€˜It’s a long way from police academy, so go easy on me . . .’
    â€˜Maybe consciousness, observing some quantum phenomenon - the cat in the box, neither dead nor alive until you look at it – chooses one possibility to become the actual. Thus, conscious seeing creates reality, in a way. Or maybe it takes you there. Some believe that what happens, when you step, is that similarly you can suddenly see Earth West 32, or whatever, and taste and smell and touch it, and that’s what transports you there. Almost as if you are collapsing some enormous set of quantum wave functions. Sorry – that’s a bit technical.
    â€˜It’s all very preliminary, because we understand so little of the basics. Even the mechanism of sight itself is a mystery. Think about it.’ He picked up his red coffee mug. ‘You can recognize this mug from above or below, in bright light or in the shade, against any background. How do you do that? What kind of pattern is being matched in your cortex?
    â€˜But even beyond the neurology, you have the mystery of consciousness. How does all this information processing relate to me – to my internal experience of redness, for instance, or roundness, or mug-ness? And then there’s the further mystery of the interaction of consciousness with the quantum world.
    â€˜The whole field of Long Earth studies is still nascent, and it’s a cross-disciplinary quagmire of neurology, philosophy, quantum physics. What we do know is that even sight comes with a group of barely understood exotic disorders that we call agnosias, usually caused by some kind of brain damage. There’s an agnosia for faces, where you can’t recognize your family; there’s an agnosia for scenes, for colour . . .’
    â€˜So maybe Bettany has some kind of stepwise agnosia?’
    â€˜Perhaps, though that’s doing little more than attaching a label to something we don’t understand. Look – what I believe is that something’s gone wrong for Bettany, in that tangle of processing. She does the seeing without the stepping . For several hours a day, the world she sees is no longer necessarily the one she’s living in. So she blunders into furniture while seeing her kids playing in the world next door, but she can’t hear them or touch them, and they, of course, can’t see her. And meanwhile the doctors can’t treat what they don’t understand. They do say the time she spends seeing wrongly is increasing. Give her another year and her sight will be stuck permanently stepwise.’
    â€˜She won’t be able to see her kids, even when they’re right beside her.’
    â€˜But she can hold them,’ Mann said. ‘Touch them. Hear them.’
    Jansson said, ‘She told me today she heard birdsong, of a kind she’d never heard before.’
    â€˜Birdsong?’
    â€˜Why shouldn’t this affect her other senses? Is it possible her whole mind will come adrift, ultimately? And she’ll fully experience one world while her body lies comatose in the other?’
    â€˜I don’t know, Lieutenant. We’ll just have to make sure she is protected, whatever happens.’
    From elsewhere in the house they heard Bettany calling for her children. Jansson wished Joshua Valienté was around, to help her figure this out.
    Just as, later, after her death, Joshua would often miss Jansson’s advice.
    And Jan Roderick, making his notes on his tablets in his childish vocabulary, would try to