‘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.
&nb
sp; 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.
36
THE AIRSHIP STOPPED again, at a barren world, the air just about breathable when Joshua tried it, but stinking of ash under an overcast sky into which the usual sounding-rockets ascended.
Lobsang said, ‘An aftermath world. Possibly an asteroid strike, but my best guess would be a Yellowstone, maybe a century ago. There may be life in the southern hemisphere, but nature’s cleanup job will take a long time.’
‘It’s a wasteland.’
‘Of course it is. Earth kills her children over and over again. But the rules are different now. It is a certainty that the volcano under Yellowstone National Park on Datum Earth will become aggressively active in the near future. And what will happen? People will step away. For the first time in human history, such a calamity will be a nuisance rather than a tragedy. Until the sun itself dies there will always be other worlds, and mankind will persist, somewhere in the Long Earth, immune to extinction.’
‘I wonder if that’s what the Long Earth is for.’
‘I’m not yet qualified to comment.’
‘Why have we stopped, Lobsang?’
‘Because I am picking up a signal on an AM frequency. Rather bad reception. The transmitter is very close. Would you like to see who’s calling?’ Lobsang’s face was a perfect simulation of a grin.
The airship’s restaurant boasted a pretty good dining table, Joshua had to admit, and certainly better than the makeshift shelf on the observation deck he used when there wasn’t any company. The staple of the meal in front of him was a white meat, the flesh rather fine.
And he looked up, into the eyes of Sally.
She had provided the meat. ‘It’s a kind of wild turkey you see around in the local worlds,’ she said now. ‘Good eating if you can be bothered, but they are a prey species and can very nearly outrun a wolf. Sometimes I catch a parcel of them and sell them to the pioneers…’
For a near-recluse, she did talk a lot, Joshua reflected. But he understood why. Joshua meanwhile just ate, enjoying himself. Maybe he was getting used to the company of women. This woman anyhow.
Lobsang entered, holding a tray. ‘Orange sorbet. Oranges aren’t native to the New World, but I have brought seeds for planting at suitable locations. Enjoy.’ He served, turned away and disappeared through the blue door.
Sally had been reasonably polite upon learning the identity and nature of Lobsang. Well, since she’d stopped laughing. Now she lowered her voice. ‘What’s with the Jeeves bit?’
‘I think he wants to make you welcome. I knew you’d send a signal, you know.’
‘How?’
‘Because I would have done in your place. Come on, Sally. You came back to us, and we figure that’s because there’s something you want from us. So let’s trade. You know what we need to learn from you. How did you get out so far?’
She eyed him. ‘I’ll give you a clue. I’m not alone. There are more of us out here than you’d think. Every so often, a stepping box stutters, you might say. I met a man twenty thousand clicks from the Datum who was certain that he was one jump away from Pasadena, and puzzled by the fact that he couldn’t get home. I led him down to a halfway house and left him there.’
‘I always wondered why I kept coming across so many bewildered people. I thought they were just dumb.’
‘Possibly many of them were.’
The voice of Lobsang floated in the air. ‘I am aware of the phenomenon you mention, Sally, and would like to take the opportunity to thank you for giving it a most apposite label. Stuttering. But I have been unable to duplicate it.’
Sally glared at the air. ‘Have you been listening to everything we have been saying?’
‘Of course. My ship, my rules. Perhaps you will be good enough to answer Joshua’s question. You’ve given only a partial response; the mystery still divides us. How did you get out here? Rather more purposefully than stuttering, I would hazard.’
Sally looked out of the window. It was dark outside, but the stars glittered with a vengeance. ‘I still don’t entirely trust you two. Out in the Long Earth everybody needs an edge, and this is my edge. I’ll tell you one thing. If you go much further you will meet trouble coming the other way.’
That throb in Joshua’s skull was never far from his awareness. ‘What’s coming?’
‘Even I don’t know. Not yet.’
‘It’s caused the migration of the trolls and the other humanoids, hasn’t it?’
‘So you know about that? I guess you could hardly miss it.’
‘Lobsang and I think we need to pursue this. Find out what’s causing it.’
‘What, and save the world?’
Joshua was getting used to her mockery. She was resolutely unimpressed by Lobsang’s treasure-ship dirigible, and by his grandiose talk and dreams, as well, it seemed, as by Joshua’s own reputation. ‘So why have you come back to us? To laugh at us, or to help us? Or because of what we can do for you?’
‘Among other things. It will keep.’ She stood up. ‘Goodnight, Joshua. Have Jeeves make up another stateroom, please. One that is not right next to yours, preferably. Oh, don’t look so alarmed, your honour is safe. It’s just that I snore, you see…’
37
THE SHIP STEPPED all through the night, and, for once, Joshua thought he could feel every step. He sagged into something like sleep just before dawn, and got maybe an hour before Sally hammered on his door.
‘Show a leg, sailor boy.’
He groaned. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Last night I gave Lobsang some coordinates to aim for. We’ve arrived.’
Once decent, Joshua hurried down to the observation deck. The ship was motionless. They weren’t far from the Pacific coast in this version of Washington State. And below, far, far into the deep Long Earth, far beyond the consensus on where the colonizing wavefront might yet have reached, was a township, where no township had a right to be. Joshua just stared. It sprawled along the bank of a reasonably sized river, with a clutter of buildings, tracks threading through a thick, damp forest. But there were no fields, as far as he could see, no sign of agriculture. There were people everywhere, doing what people always did when there was an airship overhead, which was to point upwards and chatter excitedly. But without farms, how could they live in such a densely populated community?
Meanwhile, by the river, there were familiar hulking forms… Not quite human. Not quite animal.
‘Trolls.’
She glanced at him, surprised. ‘That’s what they’re called out here. As you know, evidently.’
‘As Lobsang knew before we set off.’
‘I suppose I should be impressed. You’ve met them, have you? Joshua, if you want to understand the trolls, if you want to understand the Long Earth, you ne
ed to understand this place. That’s why I’ve brought you here.
‘Orientation, Joshua. If this was the Datum we would be hovering over a township called Humptulips, in Grays Harbor County. We’re not so far from the Pacific coast. Of course the details of the landscape differ, the track of the river. I hope they’ve got the clam chowder boiling.’
‘Clam chowder? You know this place that well?’
‘Of course I do.’
In her way, she could be as irritatingly smug as Lobsang.
The airship came down over a broad dirt square at the heart of the township. The buildings scattered around the square struck Joshua immediately as old, of weathered wood, some on eroded-looking stone bases. He had an immediate sense that this township, of maybe a couple of hundred people, had been here long before Step Day. The square itself was dominated by a stout communal wooden building that Sally said was known simply as ‘City Hall’, and she led the way there. Inside, the building, constructed on a frame of impressive cedar beams, had a high ceiling, polished wooden floors and furniture, glassless windows at eyelevel, and large doors at either end. The fire pit in the centre added a decent enough glow.
Lobsang had descended with them, his ambulant unit clothed in saffron robes for the occasion. Despite his 1980s body-builder bulk, he had never looked more Tibetan. And he seemed oddly self-conscious – as well he might, because the hall was full of staring, smiling townsfolk, and trolls, mixing with the people as unnoticed as family dogs at a picnic. The air was full of their distinctive, faintly unpleasant musk.
In City Hall there was indeed chowder to be had, boiling up in huge pots, a thoroughly incongruous treat given their remoteness from the Datum.
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