The Long Earth (28 page)

He could see a little more light than average to his right, so he got up and strolled that way. He emerged into a vast area of burned stumps and ash fields: not a recent fire, already new saplings were poking shoots through the stinking black mess, with green leaves apparent here and there. Just a forest fire, a dieback. It was all part of the great cycle of nature which, when you’ve seen it one point three million times, squarely pisses you off.

The airship was above him suddenly; its shadow sprawled across the clearing, an abrupt eclipse. Joshua clipped his earpiece back on.

Lobsang’s voice was an irritating whine. ‘We have lost her! Could you not have beguiled her into the ship? Clearly she has discovered a new way to step! And what’s more—’

Joshua plucked out his earpiece again. He sat down on a stump, a crumbling mass of colourful fungus. He felt stunned by the encounter with Sally, the blizzard of words that had evidently been pent up inside her. And she was travelling alone, as he used to. It was a slightly electrifying thought. On his
sabbaticals
, he had survived in any number of worlds like this.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he didn’t want or need a giant damn airship hovering over his head any more.

Joshua put the earpiece back on, and considered what to say. What was the phrase that Sister Agnes always used when some high-flying ecclesiastical or other tried to throw his weight around at the Home? ‘Can you hear me, Lobsang? You ain’t the boss of me, sir, you surely ain’t. The only thing you could do right now is kill me, and you
still
wouldn’t be the boss of me.’

There was no reply.

He got up and strolled downhill, in so far as there was a hill at all. But it was a definite slope, and that would mean a river, and
that
would mean open ground, cover and, almost certainly, game of some sort. All he’d need to survive here.

Lobsang replied at last. ‘You are right, Joshua. I am not the boss of you and have no desire to be. On the other hand I can’t believe you are serious in the hints you are giving that you might jump ship. We are travelling with a purpose, remember.’

‘Whatever your purpose I’m not about to kidnap anybody, Lobsang.’ He stopped. ‘OK, I’ll come aboard. But under certain conditions.’

The airship was right overhead now.

‘The foremost of these is that I come and go to the ground any time I wish, OK?’

This time Lobsang replied by loudspeaker, a booming celestial voice. ‘Are you trying to
negotiate
with me, Joshua?’

Joshua scratched his nose. ‘Actually I’m trying to demand, I think. And as for Sally, I have a feeling we shall see her very shortly, regardless of you and your plans.
You’ll
never be able to find a solitary human being in all these forest worlds, but she will find it very easy to see a damn great airship in the sky.
She
will find
us
.’

‘But she travels alone, as you do. She’s travelled much further in fact. Perhaps she doesn’t need people, and will not be motivated to find us at all.’

Joshua walked across the damp ashes towards the lift-ring that was descending to the ground. ‘She doesn’t need people. But I believe she
wants
people.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘Because of the way she talked to me. All those words pouring out, because they needed to be said. Because your precious mountain men were probably just the same at their rendezvous. Because
I’m
the same. Because this human called Joshua keeps going back home, just every now and then, to visit, to be with folk. To be fucking human, not to put too fine a point on it, and Daniel Boone can kiss my ass.’

‘I’ve said it before, Joshua. Travel has most definitely broadened your mind, if not your vocabulary.’

‘And besides, there’s something else, Lobsang. Something you’re missing. Do you imagine it’s
chance
that she happened to show up under our keel, with her campfire blazing?’

‘Well—’

‘She knew we were coming, Lobsang. I’m certain of it. She wants something from us. The question is what?’

‘Your point is well made. I’ll consider it. Incidentally I have captured and dissected several of those flying creatures. They appear to be remarkably like wasps, although they act more like bees. A new order. Which is why one should be wary of arbitrarily applying labels like “dinosaurs”.’

‘Have you changed your voice?’

‘Yes, indeed, it is warm and reflective, is it not?’

‘It makes you sound like a rabbi!’

‘Ah yes, close enough; actually, it is the voice of David Kossoff, a Jewish actor prominent in the 1950s and 60s. I believe the occasional hesitation and slight air of bemused amiability has a friendly and calming effect.’

‘It does, but I’m sure you are not supposed to tell me that it does. It’s like a conjuror telling you how the trick was done—’ Damn it. Lobsang was making him laugh again. It was very hard to
stay
mad at him. ‘OK, I’m coming aboard. Now do we have an arrangement?’

The ring ascended smoothly.

Aboard, ambulant Lobsang was waiting for Joshua in his stateroom. There had been more upgrades.

Joshua burst out laughing, despite everything. ‘You look like a hotel doorman! What’s that all about?’

Lobsang purred, ‘I hoped to give the effect of a British butler circa 1935, sir, and rather spiffily, if you don’t mind me saying so. I believe the effect is not so creepy as the
Blade Runner
killer-replicant chic I experimented with before, although I am open to suggestions.’

Spiffily
. ‘Well, at least it’s a different kind of creepy. I guess it works. But knock it off with the sir, would you?’

The butler bowed. ‘Thank you … Joshua. Let me say, Joshua, that I think that on this journey we are
both
learning. For now, I will step us at no more than an average human’s daily pace until the young lady wishes to make her presence known.’

‘Good plan.’

There was the usual, brief feeling of mild disorientation as they began to step once more. Below, passing at a leisurely pace of just a few steps per hour, the Long Earth was like the old-fashioned slide-show kit that Joshua had once found among junk in the attic back at the Home. Click once and there was the Virgin Mary, click twice and there was Jesus. You stayed still while worlds went past. Pick the one you want.

That night on the saloon deck’s big screen Lobsang showed an old British movie called
The Mouse on the Moon
. In his mobile incarnation, he sat next to Joshua watching it, which would have been weird, Joshua thought, seeing the pair of them through Sally’s eyes, had not this voyage long gone past weird and sailed full speed into bizarre. Nevertheless they watched the ancient film, a spoof on the space race of the twentieth century – and Joshua spotted
David
Kossoff instantly. For what it was worth, Lobsang had got him exactly right.

After the movie had finished, Joshua was certain he saw a mouse run across the deck and disappear. ‘The Mouse on Earth Million,’ he quipped.

‘I will set Shi-mi on it.’

‘The cat? I wondered what had happened to that thing. You know, Sally told me how she’d grown up in a family of steppers. Natural steppers, I mean. She wasn’t ever alone, out in the stepwise worlds. But her family made her keep quiet about it, as
they
always had.’

‘Of course they did. As you have always attempted to, Joshua. It’s a natural instinct.’

‘Nobody wants to be different, I guess.’

‘There is that. With a power like stepping, once you might have got yourself burned as a witch. And even nowadays, since Step Day, there are an increasing number back on Datum Earth who are uncomfortable with the whole idea of stepping, and the Long Earth.’

‘Who?’

‘You really have no instinct for politics, do you, Joshua? Why, those who can’t step at all.
They
resent the Long Earth and those who travel it, and all that this great opening-up has brought. And those who are losing money, in the new order of things. There are
always
plenty of those …’

35

SO HERE WAS
Officer Monica Jansson, fifteen years after Step Day, her life distorted by the Long Earth phenomenon as much as anybody’s had been, trying to make sense of it all as one way or another the world transformed itself around her own ageing carcass – and through it all the police tried to keep the peace. This evening she stared gloomily at a screen which showed Brian Cowley, increasingly notorious figurehead of a poisonous movement called Humanity First, spewing out his manipulative bile, folksy homespun anecdotes hiding some smart, but very divisive and dangerous, politics. Impulsively she turned the sound off. Still the hatred seeped like sweat out of the guy’s face.

But then the whole phenomenon of the Long Earth had been laced with hatred and violence from the start.

Only two days after Step Day itself, terrorists had hit both the Pentagon and the British Houses of Parliament. It could have been worse. The boy who stepped into the Pentagon hadn’t got his distances and angles right, and his makeshift bomb was triggered in a corridor, the only fatality being its creator. The British terrorist had clearly paid more attention in geometry class, and appeared slap (and instantly) bang in the chamber of the House of Commons – but had failed to finish his homework, so that the last thing
he
ever saw was five Members of Parliament debating a rather insignificant bill about herring fishing. Had he thought to make his appearance in the Commons bar, he would have reaped a greater harvest of souls.

Nevertheless, both of the explosions echoed around the world, and authority panicked. There was concern among private individuals too; it didn’t take a genius to figure out that, suddenly, anybody could step into your house while you slept. And where there is panic, profit isn’t far behind. Instantly anti-stepper devices were being developed in workshops and private homes everywhere, some of them clever, many of the worst stupid – and quite a few deadly, more often than not to their owner rather than any would-be thief. Attempts to criss-cross the empty spaces of an unoccupied room with anti-stepping hazards ended up trapping children’s fingers and maiming pets. The most effective deterrent, as people soon worked out, was simply to cram a room with furniture, Victorian-style, to leave no room for steppers.

In truth, the threat of wholesale burglaries-by-stepping was more about urban fears than reality. Oh, a lot of people jumped worlds to avoid debts, obligations or revenge, and there were plenty of agents who would follow them – and there would always be a few who stole and raped and killed their way across the worlds, until somebody shot them. But in general crime was low, per capita, out in the Long Earth, when the social pressures that sparked so much crime and disorder on the Datum were largely absent.

Of course governments weren’t too happy with their tax-payers stepping out of reach. But only Iran, Burma and the United Kingdom had ever actually tried to
ban
stepping. Initially most governments in the free world adopted some equivalent of the US aegis plan, demanding sovereignty of their country’s footprint down all the endless worlds. The French, for example, declared that all the French footprints were available for colonization by anybody who wanted to
be
French, and was prepared to accept a carefully put together document which outlined what being French
meant
. It was a brave idea, slightly let down by the fact that despite a nationwide debate it appeared that no two Frenchmen could agree exactly on what being French did mean. Although
another
school of thought held that arguing about what made you French was
part
of what made you French. In practice, though, whatever regime was imposed, it didn’t take you long to step out to a place where the government had no say, simply because the government wasn’t there, benevolent or not.

And the people? They just stepped, here, there and everywhere, heading not so much
to
where they wanted to be, as, quite often,
from
where they emphatically didn’t want to be any more. Inevitably many went out unprepared and without forethought, and many suffered as a consequence. But gradually people absorbed the lessons learned by folk like the Amish long ago, that what you needed was other people, and preparation.

Fifteen years on, there were successful communities thriving far out across the empty landscapes of the Long Earth. The emigration push was thought to be starting to decline, but it was estimated that fully a fifth of Earth’s population had walked away to find a new world – a demographic dislocation comparable to a world war, it was said, or a massive pandemic.

But it was still early days, in Jansson’s opinion. In a way, mankind was only slowly beginning to adjust to the idea of infinite plenty. For without scarcity, of land or resources, entirely new ways of living became available. On television the other night Jansson had watched a theoretical anthropologist work her way through a thought experiment. ‘Consider this. If the Long Earth really is effectively endless, as it is beginning to look, then
all mankind
could afford to live
for ever
in hunter-gatherer societies, fishing, digging clams, and simply moving right along whenever you run out of clams, or if you just feel like it. Without agriculture Earth could support perhaps a million people in such a way. There are ten billion of us, we need ten thousand Earths – but, suddenly, we have them, and more. We have no need of agriculture, to sustain our mighty numbers. Do we have need of cities, then? Of literacy and numeracy, even?’

But as this vast perturbation of the destiny of mankind
continued
, it was becoming increasingly clear that there were an awful lot of folks for whom the ambiguous treasures of the Long Earth were for ever out of reach, and they were increasingly unhappy about it.

And that, fifteen years after Step Day, as she watched Brian Cowley perform with gathering dismay, was what increasingly concerned Monica Jansson.