The Long Earth (13 page)

So we came to a sign that said ICE NEXT. We passed through a few Ice Age worlds in the first day or two, but just one at a time, and you could just rush quickly through them. Now we were coming to a band of them. We all had to stop, and the porters came and handed out the Arctic coats and trousers and ski masks and stuff. The next morning Captain Batson had us all tie up in groups of eight or ten with ropes, and made sure the babies were
snug
in their little papooses, with no fingers or toes sticking out.

We stepped, and it was dazzling, no clouds in a bright blue sky, and not much ice, but the ground was frozen hard as rock under my feet. And then the cold got to me, like little needles working into my cheeks.

And we stepped on, again and again. More winter worlds. Sometimes you’d come out into a white-out, or a blizzard. And other times you would come out and it would be a bit warmer, and then the ground was boggy so we left tracks if we walked, and there were these strange dwarf trees, all bent over. And midges! I saw a huge deer, with antlers like a chandelier (spelled out by Dad). Ben Doak says he saw a woolly mammoth, but nobody believes anything he says.

This is why we had to come so far south, to Richmond, to walk West. Because Datum Earth is in the middle of the Ice Belt, a bunch of worlds where they have Ice Ages, so you have to go south of the ice to where it’s possible to step. But even away from the ice caps the whole world is affected by the cold.

Some people turned back after the first night in the cold. Said they hadn’t been told about
that
, although they clearly had been, and should have listened.

Day Twenty-Five
.

At night you have to cram into these little tents. It’s a bit close. These are strangers after all. Marge Doak is OK, but Betty has this way of picking her teeth. And she snores.

Mom got in a fight with Mr Henry, who says the women should do all the cooking and cleaning! Captain Batson says Mr Henry’s not in charge. He didn’t say it to his face though, Dad says.

Trouble and strife, lah di dah!

Day Forty-Three
.

I keep forgetting to write things down. I get too tired. Plus there’s too much going on.

In the middle of the ice worlds you get milder types that are like home, ‘interglacial’ worlds (spelled by Dad). The interglacial worlds are just FULL of animals. I saw huge herds that turned out to be horses and funny-looking cows and antelopes and camels. Camels! Dad says these are like animals that were probably around in America before humans came along. Wolves. Coyotes. Elk. Curlews. Bears! Grizzlies in the forest clumps, Captain Batson says, so we keep out of there. Snakes everywhere, you have to watch out for them. Crows, ravens, turkey buzzards, owls. By day you hear the birds, and at night the frogs croaking and the mosquitoes whining, if you’re anywhere near water. Sometimes the men hunt. Rabbit and duck and even antelope.

There are armadillos! Big ones, not like in zoos. Dad says they might have wandered up from South America where they evolved. Apparently people have seen apes, in America. Sometimes the continents join up and these animals cross over, and sometimes they don’t. Nobody really knows. Nobody has a map of any of these worlds.

In some worlds we can’t find any trees at all. Then we have to collect ‘buffalo chips’ for the fire.
Dung!!
It burns well, but you can imagine the smell, my dear.

And there are funny worlds, where everything is like ash, or like a desert, or something. Just one world thick. There are usually signposts if it’s dangerous, and we have to put on hats or cover our mouths with filters. Captain Batson calls these worlds Jokers.

Sometimes you see where people have been before. Scruffy places, the ruins of shacks, burned-out tepees. Even crosses, stuck in the ground. In the Long Earth, hoping for the best isn’t good enough, as Mr Batson puts it.

Day Sixty-Seven
.

Ben Doak got sick. He drank from a waterhole that hadn’t been checked out. They get polluted by buffalo piddle. He got pumped
full
of antibiotics. I hope he’s OK. We’ve had a few people get sick, but nobody died.

More people have turned back. Captain Batson tries to talk them round, and Mr Henry laughs at them and calls them weak. I don’t think it’s weak to admit you made a mistake. That takes strength, if you ask me.

We must look very strange, to these animals who live here, and have never seen a human before, probably. What business have we got coming through here and messing everything up?

Day One Hundred and Two
.

We’re out of the Ice Belt! And only two days behind schedule!

Strange to think we’ve travelled across thirty-six thousand worlds, but the distance we’ve covered sideways has only been a few miles. Well, we’re going to travel in earnest across this particular Earth, and go a few hundred miles north, to New York State. Then we’ll step on across another sixty thousand worlds or so until we get to the place we’re going to settle.

I thought we’d have to walk. No! There’s a regular town here, well, a small one, a trading post. Here we can trade in our Ice Belt gear for stuff that’s more suitable for the Mine Belt worlds.

And there’s a wagon train waiting for us! With big covered wagons that Dad says are Conestogas. They look like boats on wheels, drawn by horses – funny-looking horses, but definitely horses. There’s a foundry here to make the iron they need, and the wagons have got tyres on their wheels, like car tyres. When we saw the wagons we just whooped and hollered and ran! Conestogas! I wonder if it will be more fun than the chopper ride?

Day One Hundred and Ninety-Nine
.

We are on Earth West Seventy Thousand Plus Change, as Dad would say. I’m writing in the early morning, before we break camp. Last night the adults stayed up late arguing about the chores. But
when
they’re all gassing in their Group Meetings, we kids can slip away, just for a while.

Not that we do anything bad. Well, not mostly. Mostly, we

(Pause for thought. Search for word.)

watch. That’s it. We watch. I know Dad frets that we’re all turning into zombies because there’s nothing to do out here but chores, and the schooling they try to force on us. But it’s not like that. We just watch, with nothing to distract us. That’s why we’re quiet. Not because our brains are mush. Because we watch.

And we see things the adults don’t see.

Some
very
odd animals and plants that don’t fit any storybook of evolution I ever read.

The Joker Worlds, in the middle of these boring, arid Mine Belt worlds. The adults think they’re mostly dead. They aren’t. Believe me.

And the Greys.

We call them that, even though they’re orange. They look like hairy little kids, but if you ever see one up close, and see the equipment in those orange crotches, believe me, they ain’t kids. And big eyes, like cartoon aliens. They flicker around the camp. There, gone. Stepping, obviously.

Animals that step!

The Long Earth is stranger than anybody thinks. Even Dad. Even Captain Batson. Even Mr Henry.

Especially
Mr Henry.

Day Two Hundred and Eighty-One
.

Is it November? Dad will know.

We made it!

We made it to Earth West 100,000! – or, Good Old Hundred K, as us hardened pioneer types call it. The start of the Corn Belt.

Good Old Hundred K has a
gift shop
. You can buy T-shirts and mugs. ‘I Stepped All The Way to Good Old Hundred K.’ But the labels say Made in China!

The worlds had been changing for a bit. Greener. Damper. A different set of animals. And, most important,
trees
. Trees, wood, that’s what you need above all else to build a colony and a town and all the rest of it. Which is why we’ve had to walk so far. Not enough trees in the Mine Belt. Here there is prairie and rainfall and trees: good farming country. Nobody knows how deep the Corn Belt is. Plenty of room out here, and it’s hard to see how it could be filled up any time soon.

Anyhow, now we’re here. And to prove the point they have a couple of fields out back of the shop where there’s corn stubble and sheep grazing, just like home. Sheep! Dad said they were descended from little lambs that had to be carried out here from the Datum in the arms of stepping people, because there’s no native sheep in North America, on any of the worlds that anybody’s found.

At the shop they made a fuss of us kids. They had beer and lemonade, homemade stuff with pips in that was the most delicious drink I ever had. They asked us questions about what’s going on back East on the Datum and the Low Earths. We yapped and bragged, and we told our own story, of our trek. Every year it’s a little bit different, apparently.

An English woman who introduced herself as Hermione Dawes wrote down our story in a sort of big ledger, in a little library place full of records like that. Ms Dawes told Mom her place in life was writing things down, and she was happy to be out here, to have some real history to record. She’ll probably be there for ever, writing stuff down as folk pass her by. People are strange, but if she’s happy that’s fine by me. Apparently she’s married to a cowgirl.

We shopped! What a luxury.

And meanwhile the adults had to go register their claims. There is a US government official, rotated out once every few years, here to check and validate the land grants we bought back on the Datum before we set off. We all compared claim forms to work out where to go. In the event the adults picked a world at random:
number
West 101,753. A week’s easy stroll. We formed up, the Doaks and Harry Bergreen and his fiddle, yay, and Melissa Harris, well, OK, and Reese Henry, the less said the better. A hundred in all.

And we set off. We stepped and camped with a discipline that would have made Captain Batson proud. Though Mrs Harris still didn’t take her turns with the laundry.

A week later, when we got to 101,753, it was raining. So we all looked at each other, and held hands in our groups, and took another step into the sunshine.

And that was how we chose one whole world over another. Because it happened to be sunny when we got there! There might have been diamond mountains in Australia back in 753 and we’d never know. It didn’t matter. Earth West 101,754:
our
Earth. We’re there!

19

THAT FIRST AFTERNOON
of flight, the
Mark Twain
stepped again and again, each transition causing a thrill to travel down Joshua’s spine. The stepping rate was increasing, slowly, as Lobsang explored the capabilities of his ship. Joshua could count the passing worlds using little monitors Lobsang called earthometers, embedded in the walls of every cabin. They had enough digits, he saw, to allow them to count up to the millions.

And as it stepped, the airship was travelling laterally too, heading west across Eurasia. The monitors had a little map display so Joshua could follow its course; their position was derived from star sightings, but the layout of the landscapes they crossed on these unexplored worlds was based on guesswork.

On the observation deck, sitting opposite Joshua, Lobsang smiled his plastic smile. They both cradled coffees – Lobsang sipped his too, and Joshua imagined some tank in his belly filling up.

‘How’s the ride?’ Lobsang asked.

‘Fine so far.’ In fact it was better than fine. As always when Joshua left the Datum behind, the oppressive sense of enclosure he invariably experienced there dissipated quickly: a pressure he’d not really been aware of when he was growing up, not until it wasn’t there any more. The pressure of a world too full of other minds, he suspected, other human consciousnesses. It seemed to be a fine sensitivity; even on remote stepwise worlds he always registered it if somebody else showed up, anywhere near by, even a small party.
But
he’d discussed this strange quasi-telepathic facility, or disability, with nobody – bar Sister Agnes – not even Officer Jansson, and he didn’t choose to talk it over with Lobsang now. Still, the sensation of freedom, of release was there. That, and his peculiar awareness of the Silence, as of a mind far away, dimly sensed, like the toll of a huge and ancient bell in a far-off mountain range … Or rather he did sense this when Lobsang wasn’t talking, as he was now.

‘We will follow the line of latitude west, roughly. We can manage thirty miles an hour easily. A nice leisurely pace; we are out here to explore. That should bring us over the footprint of the continental US in a few weeks …’

Lobsang’s face was not quite real, Joshua thought, like a slightly off CGI simulation. But here in this fantastic vessel, in this realization of Lobsang’s astonishing dreams, Joshua was oddly warming to him.

‘You know, Lobsang, I caught up with your story when I went back to the Home, after my interview at transEarth. People were saying that the smartest thing that any supercomputer could do the moment it was switched on would be to make certain that it couldn’t be switched off again. And that the story about the reincarnated Tibetan was a front, precisely so you couldn’t be switched off. We all talked about that, and Sister Agnes said, well, if a computer has a desire not to be switched off then it has to have a sense of self, and that means a soul. I know the Pope decreed otherwise later on, but I back Sister Agnes against the Vatican any time.’

Lobsang thought that over. ‘I look forward to meeting Sister Agnes someday. I hear what you are saying. Thank you, Joshua.’

Joshua hesitated. ‘While you’re thanking me, maybe you could answer a question. Is this
you
, Lobsang? Or are
you
back on the Datum, in some store at MIT? Is that a meaningful question?’

‘Oh, certainly it is meaningful. Joshua, back on the Datum I am distributed across many memory stores and processor banks.
That’s
partly for security, and partly for efficiency and effectiveness of data retrieval and processing. If I wished I could consider my
self
to be distributed among a number of centres, of foci of consciousness.

‘But I am human, I am Lobsang. I remember how it was to look out of a cave of bone, from a single apparent locus of consciousness. And that is how I have maintained it. There is only one me, Joshua, only one Lobsang, though I have backup memory stores scattered over several worlds. And that “me” is with you on this journey. I am fully dedicated to the mission. And by the way, when I inhabit the ambulant unit, that too, for the duration, is “me”, though there remains enough of “me” outside that shell to enable the airship to fly. If I were to fail or were lost then a backup copy on Datum Earth would be initiated, and synched with whatever you were able to retrieve of my memory stores on the ship. But that would be another Lobsang; he would remember me, but he would not
be
me … I hope that’s clear.’