Read Online The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online

centre and grimy zero-gravity toilets, couldn’t have looked less inviting.
    Most long-lived space stations got shabby; they weren’t places where you could ever open the windows for a good spring-clean. And after all, this rough, decades-old construction had been humanity’s first colony in this Earth-less universe; embarrassment wasn’t an appropriate reaction. But Dev couldn’t help it.
    And he kept an eye on his guests. They had little trouble moving around, though their postures were a bit stiff, and Roberta in particular seemed to be recoiling from touching the grimy walls. Here and there boxes and pots held plants and flowers that grew in splashes of sunlight from the windows. The visitors’ eyes were drawn to the green – another primitive reaction, and one Dev found grimly satisfying to observe.
    They crossed paths with only a couple of people, both in GapSpace coveralls like Dev and his guests, who stared curiously back at the Next. The Brick Moon was never very crowded. There was a small station staff, rotated frequently, whose main job was to maintain the antique fabric and clean up the air and water. Otherwise there were only ever a few passengers in transit from one shuttle to another.
    At last they reached the sphere known informally as the observatory. Here much of the original troll-concrete shell had been replaced by a ribbing of steel and aluminium, and plates of toughened glass. There were bars for hands and feet to help visitors keep from drifting around the bubble. It was dark, the artificial light subdued.
    Beyond the windows no sun was visible, and the sky was pitch-black. The four of them spread out in the darkness.
    To Dev, whose father had been an Orthodox Catholic, this place always felt oddly like a chapel, and he spoke softly. ‘It’s best to wait a while to allow our eyes to adjust to the dark. The Brick Moon has some limited manoeuvrability, to maintain its station and its orientation. And it’s turned, very slowly, to ensure no one section is over-exposed to the sun. But this chamber is kept facing away from the light permanently—’
    â€˜I see a planet,’ Roberta said. She pointed at a light, emerging from the dark. She thought for a moment, and Dev imagined calculations processing through her high intelligence: an exercise in celestial mechanics, a determination of what she was seeing. ‘Mars,’ she announced.
    â€˜Yes,’ Dev said. ‘ A Mars, at any rate, the Mars of this stepwise universe. But its position is subtly different from that of our own Mars because of—’
    â€˜The lack of an Earth here. Of course.’
    Again she’d cut him off. He suppressed his irritation. These Next did seem to require an awful lot of forgiveness of the dim-bulbs they dealt with.
    He caught Lee grinning at him, her teeth bright in the subdued light.
    Roberta ran her finger around the equator of the sky. ‘And there are asteroids.’
    Dev could just see them now, emerging as a band of sparkles against a wider scatter of stars.
    Stella nodded. ‘It is the wreckage of the local Earth, of course. Dead Earth, as they call it. Much of the mass of the planet seems to have been lost in the impact – thrown out of the solar system altogether, probably – but what remains is a new asteroid belt, rich in silicate rock, iron.’
    Dev said, ‘This local belt has been essential in building up our facilities here. The big O’Neill , for example, was constructed of iron and aluminium and stocked with volatiles, all gathered from Dead Earth asteroids. The fact that these rocks are so close to us, compared to the classic asteroid belt, has made life a lot easier.’
    Roberta looked out with some interest. ‘“Dead Earth.” I understand there are some groups who oppose your exploiting this resource. It’s likened to grave-robbing.’
    Lee said, ‘But some say it’s as if we’re