‘Do the trolls understand what’s coming? Have any of them seen anything?’
‘So far as I can tell, no. But they imagine it as enormous, physically. To them it is a mix of physical and abstract. Like an approaching forest fire, maybe. A wall of pain.’
The complaints from the fabric of the Mark Twain were beginning to bother Joshua. He had no idea what maximum safe stepping speed the ship was capable of. And to plummet at such a rate into entire unknown worlds, and towards an unknown danger, seemed unwise to him to say the least. The earthometers, he saw, were whirling up ever closer to the two million mark.
But Lobsang was talking and talking, apparently oblivious to such concerns. ‘This is not the time to share all of my thinking with the two of you. Suffice it to say that it is clear we are dealing with some kind of genuine psychic phenomenon.
‘Here is the hypothesis. Humans broadcast their humanity in some way. We sense one another. But we have long evolved to live on a planet absolutely drenched with human thoughts. We don’t even notice it.’
‘Not until it’s gone,’ Joshua said.
Sally looked at him, curious.
‘I suggest that once upon a time some of these creatures, elves and trolls and perhaps other variants, did occasionally step into the Datum, and perhaps occasionally hung around for a spell. Thus giving rise to volumes of myth. But this was in the days of comparatively low human population. Now the planet is knee deep in humans, and for creatures that spend most of their time in the mindless calm of woodlands and prairies, it must be as if all the world’s teenage parties are being thrown at once. So these days they stay away from the Datum. However, the stepping species migrating from the West are fleeing from something that is irrevocably pushing them back towards the Datum. They are caught between the hammer and the anvil. And sometimes they panic. Joshua and I have seen what happens when they panic – even trolls may be capable of harm when roused, and remember the Church of the Cosmic Confidence Trick, Joshua?’
Joshua glanced at Sally. He would have expected nothing but scepticism from her. But, amazingly, she looked thoughtful. He prompted, ‘What are you thinking, Sally?’
‘That it’s all far-fetched. And yet… I mean, I’m like you, I’ll go into a city for a purpose, but while I’m in one I’m nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I can’t wait to get out, it pushes me out, back out into the empty worlds. Where I feel more comfortable.’
‘But you don’t run, right? And you don’t notice it the rest of the time. The way fish don’t notice water.’
Surprisingly, Sally smiled. ‘That’s very Zen. Almost Lobsang.’ She looked at him carefully. ‘And what about you?’
She knows, he thought. She knows all about me. And yet still he hesitated before answering.
Then he spoke to them, on this rushing airship, more freely than he ever had to anybody, even to Sister Agnes or Officer Jansson, about his own inner sensations.
He told them about the peculiar pressure in his head he felt every time he went back to the Datum. A reluctance, that eventually turned into a physical revulsion. ‘It’s something in my head. It’s like, you know how as a kid if you have to go to some party where everybody else is going to fit in, except you? Like you physically can’t take another step, like some magnetic field is pushing you away.’
Sally shrugged. ‘I never went to many parties.’
‘And you’re antisocial, Joshua,’ Lobsang said. ‘I think we knew that. What’s your point?’
‘Here’s the thing. Whatever it means, whatever causes this, I’ve been feeling something like it here. On the airship. A pressure, making it harder to go on.’ He closed his eyes. ‘And it’s getting worse, the further West we go. I feel it now. Like a repulsion, deep inside. I can stand it when we stay still, but it’s harder to bear when we travel, and it worsens.’
Lobsang asked, ‘Something out in the far West, pushing you away?’
‘Yes.’
Sally asked angrily, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? You let me blab about the soft places, about my family’s secrets. I opened up to you,’ she said almost with a snarl. ‘And all the time you were hiding this?’
He just looked at her. He hadn’t told her because you kept your weaknesses to yourself, in the Home, and in most places he’d had to survive in since then. ‘I’m telling you now.’
She backed down with an effort. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I believe you. So this is all real. I admit it now. I am officially scared.’
Lobsang sounded excited. ‘Now can you see why I am so eager to bring on this encounter? We are pursuing a mystery, Joshua, Sally! A mystery from the ends of the Long Earth!’
Joshua ignored him and kept his attention on Sally. ‘We’re both scared. But we’re going to face this, right? You won’t run away. Animals flee. The trolls have to flee. We keep on going, trying to find out what scares us, and deal with it. That’s what humans do.’
‘Yeah. Until it kills us.’
‘There is that.’ He stood up. ‘Shall I get some coffee?’
Later, Joshua realized he should have been paying attention, especially in the final few minutes. The last couple of hundred worlds, worlds where the calm green below was broken up by craters punched like great footprints into the ground. Should have stayed alert, despite the gathering pressure in his head. Should have raised the alarm.
Should have halted the journey, long before the airship fell into the Gap.
45
SUDDENLY JOSHUA WAS falling. He was rising up into the air, off the floor. The observation deck was still around him, its frame, the big windows, but the glistening display panels on the walls were fritzing out one by one. Through the windows he could see the bulk of the airship, its envelope damaged, torn silvery cloth fragments spilling away from the skeletal frame.
Beyond that was only the sun, dazzling bright, against blackness. The sun was just where it had been before, but it was all that was left of the outside world now, as if the rest, the blue sky, the green world, was a stage set that had been ripped away to reveal darkness. But now even the sun was drifting slowly to the right. Maybe the gondola was rolling.
Lobsang was silent, his ambulant unit fixed to the deck but still as a statue, apparently not functioning. The cat was in mid-air, paddling with her limbs, an expression of apparent fear on her small synthetic face. And there was a hand on Joshua’s shoulder: Sally, floating in the air, her hair, loose, rising around her head like a space station astronaut’s.
The deck creaked. Joshua thought he heard a hiss of escaping air. He couldn’t seem to think. His chest ached when he tried to take a breath.
Then the gravity came back, and blue sky unfolded.
They all hit the floor, which was, for the moment, the wall. A kettle full of water spun its way across the deck, much to the apparent terror of Shi-mi the cat, who scrambled to her feet and fled into a compartment. All above and below and around them was a symphony of high technology parting company with itself.
Joshua said, ‘We found the Joker of Jokers, didn’t we?’ And then his stomach convulsed and he threw up. He straightened, embarrassed. ‘I’ve never got nauseous after stepping before.’
‘I don’t think it was the stepping.’ Sally rubbed her own stomach. ‘It was the weightlessness. And then the sudden return of gravity. It was like falling.’
‘Yeah. It really happened, didn’t it?’
‘I think so,’ Sally said. ‘We found a gap. A Gap in the Long Earth.’
The gondola slowly righted, but now the deck’s lights went out, leaving only the daylight. Joshua could hear the sound of spinning metal things gradually ceasing to spin, worryingly.
Lobsang suddenly came to life: his head, his face, though his body remained inanimate. ‘Chak pa!’
Sally looked at Joshua. ‘What did he say?’
‘Tibetan swearing, I think. Or possibly Klingon.’
Lobsang sounded oddly cheerful. ‘Oh boy, is my face red! So t
o speak. Well, to err is human. Is anyone hurt?’
Sally said, ‘What have you run us into, Lobsang?’
‘We have run into nothing, Sally, pure nothing. Vacuum. I stepped back in a hurry, but it seems the Mark Twain has taken a beating. Some systems are inoperative. Fortunately the gas sacs are intact, but some of my personal systems are compromised. I am checking, but it doesn’t look good.’
Sally was furious. ‘How did you manage to hit a vacuum on Earth?’
Lobsang sighed. ‘Sally, we stepped into a place where there is no Earth. A total vacuum, interplanetary space. At some point in time there was an Earth there, I suspect, but presumably some catastrophe destroyed it. An impact, probably. A big one, one that would make the dinosaur-killer look like pea-shooter fire bouncing off an elephant. One that would dwarf even the Big Whack, the moon impact.’
‘Are you saying you anticipated this?’
‘As a theoretical possibility.’
‘But you went plummeting into the dark anyhow? Are you crazy?’
Lobsang cleared his throat. He was getting better at that with practice, Joshua noticed absently. ‘Yes, I anticipated it. I made a study of likely contingencies based on perturbations of Earth’s history, and took sensible precautions. Which included the automatic step-back module that appears to have worked almost perfectly. Regrettably, however, leaving us with a sea of problems.’
‘Are we stuck here?’
‘ “Stuck” in comparative safety, Sally. You are breathing perfectly good air. This world, though right next door to the Gap, is a perfectly healthy one, it seems. However, my ambulant unit is largely inoperable; I cannot access its auto-repair function. I assure you, all is not lost. Back in the Low Earths, the Corporation’s airship development programme has continued. The Mark Trine should be completed by now and would be able to reach us within a matter of days at full step.’
More lights had come back on now. Joshua started tidying up the debris. From here, apart from the furnishings and some of the crockery everything looked shipshape, but he worried very much about what damage had been done beyond Lobsang’s blue doors. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the operators of the Trine, even assuming it’s flightworthy, will not be aware of our predicament. Will they, Lobsang?’
Relatively calmly, Sally said, ‘So we are stuck here?’
Lobsang asked silkily, ‘Are you concerned, Sally? What about all those famous soft places? And what are you thinking, Joshua?’
Joshua hesitated. ‘The bigger picture hasn’t changed, it seems to me. We must still investigate the migraine monster. You say that the gasbag is OK, yes? Then can you step?’
‘Yes. But I cannot steer, geographically I mean, and power is limited. The solar-cell surfaces appear to be intact, but much of the infrastructure—The problem, aside from rupture of gas sacs and pipelines, was the boiling-away of lubricants—’
Joshua nodded. ‘Fine. Then step forward. Let’s go on.’
‘Across the Gap?’ Sally asked.
‘Well, why not? We know the trolls and the elves have been fleeing through this area. Some at least must survive. They must be able to jump the Gap in some way – you know, a two-step. Stepping takes no time at all.’ He grinned. ‘We will be back in atmosphere long before our eyes explode and dribble down our faces.’
‘That’s a particularly graphic imagination you have there, mister.’
But Lobsang smiled glassily. ‘I’m glad to see you were paying attention during 2001, Joshua.’
‘We’ve come this far,’ Joshua said. ‘I vote we continue, even if that means we have to do it eventually on foot.’ He took Sally’s hand. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Are you kidding? Now?’
‘Before we talk ourselves out of it again. Double-step us please, Lobsang.’
Joshua was never able to make much sense of the memory of what came next. Did he really feel the stinging cold of space? Did he really hear the soughing of the wind of oblivion between the galaxies? Nothing seemed real. Not until he found himself gazing out at a clouded-over sky, and heard rain beating at the gondola windows.
They gave themselves a day to recover, to patch up the airship as best they could.
Then the Mark Twain stepped on, heading ever Westward, cautiously now, one world at a time every few seconds, maybe half their old cruising speed, and only in daylight.
After twenty or thirty worlds they stopped seeing the crater features that littered the worlds around the Gap, perhaps traces of chance near-misses of the object that had caused the Gap itself in nearby realities. They were somewhere beyond Earth two million by now. The worlds here were bland, uniform. In these deep footprints of America this was still the Pacific coast, and they stuck mostly to the coastal strip, trying to avoid the perils of the deep forest, and indeed of the ocean itself. It seemed a dull band of worlds to Joshua, lacking colourful flowers and insects and birds, and with the vegetation dominated by huge tree-like ferns. But at the sea’s edge they sometimes glimpsed spectacular fishing creatures, agile bipedal runners with big sickle-shaped claws on their arms that they dipped into the water to scoop out big fish, one after another, throwing them high up the beach.
Days passed. The character of the worlds began to change further. The forest retreated from the sea, leaving wider coastal bands of scrub and scattered trees. The sea changed too, becoming greener, Joshua thought. Stiller, as if the water itself had become glutinous, denser. They didn’t speak much. None of the coffee percolators would work, despite their experimental smartness, causing Sally’s mood to deteriorate quickly.
And Joshua found it increasingly difficult to endure the stepping.
Sally patted his arm. ‘Getting close to that teenage party, are we, Joshua?’
He always resented people seeing any weakness in him. ‘Something like that. Don’t you feel anything?’
‘No. I wish I did. I told you, I’m jealous, Joshua. You have some kind of real talent there.’
That evening, as they relaxed as best they could while the ship stepped cautiously on, Lobsang startled Joshua by talking about access to space.
‘I’ve been thinking. What an opportunity the Gap represents!’
Since the galley was mostly inoperative, Joshua was hammering a grill out of a defunct piece of equipment. ‘An opportunity for what?’
‘Space travel! You could just put on a pressure suit and step off, into space. None of that messy business of climbing out of Earth’s gravity well on rockets. You’d presumably be in solar orbit, just as Earth is. Once you had some kind of infrastructure in place in the Gap itself, you could simply sail off. It would be a great deal more energy-efficient to get to Mars, say…
‘You know, I was always a space buff. Even back in Tibet. I personally have invested some money in the Kennedy Space Center, where they’re not even taking care of the museum-piece rockets any more. Our pathetic handful of microgravity orbital factories gives the illusion that we are still a space-going species, but the dream has gone – gone even before the Long Earth was opened up. As far as we know there is nowhere else in the universe where a human being can exist unprotected. And now, with millions of Earths available to us, who wants to go up into the cold, scorching emptiness in a spacesuit smelling faintly of urine? We could have been out there, applying to join the galactic federation, not slashing and burning our way across endless copies of the same old planet.’
Sally said, ‘But you’re leading the slashing and the burning, Lobsang.’
‘Well, I don’t see why I can’t have both. And, don’t you see, if we can develop the Gap, maybe we can find a way to do all that after all. From the Gap the solar system is your oyster Kilpatrick. Don’t forget this conversation, Joshua. When you get back to the Datum, stake a claim to the Earths on either side of the Gap before the rush starts, and mankind finds that there is such a thing as a free launch. Think what might be out there! Not just the other worlds of our solar system – though surely a universe that has manufactured the Long Eart
h has manufactured the Long Mars as well? Think about that.’
Joshua tried. It made his head spin. He concentrated on finishing his grill. The galley ovens were out, but he planned to barbecue most of what, had it been on Earth, might have been called a deer, the result of some brisk hunting by Sally.
The ship stopped stepping, without warning.
And Joshua heard…
It wasn’t a voice. Something wormed inside his brain, a sensation clear and sharp, and offering no hint of anything other than its existence.
Only that it was calling to him.
He managed to say, ‘Lobsang, can you hear anything? On the radio frequencies, I mean?’
‘Of course I can. Why do you think I halted the stepping? We’re being pinged, with coherent signals at a range of frequencies. It appears to be an attempt at the language of the trolls. I will concentrate on the decoding, if you will excuse me.’
Sally looked from one to the other. ‘What’s happening? Am I the only one who isn’t hearing anything? Is it coming from that thing underneath us?’
‘What thing?’ Joshua looked out of a galley window at the ocean below.
‘That thing.’
‘Lobsang,’ Joshua asked, ‘is your port camera working?’
46
JOSHUA AND SALLY rappelled down the panic rope, the only way to the ground now the winches were jammed.
Once down, Joshua clambered on top of a bluff for a look around. Under a sunless, clouded-over sky, a dense green ocean lapped reluctantly at a muddy beach. Inland, a bare landscape stretched away to folded hills, far in the distance. But, just to the south of here, there was a tremendous crater, like Meteor Crater in Arizona. Without warning a huge pterosaur-like creature swept out of the crater, utterly silent, heading over Joshua’s head and out into this world’s version of the Pacific. Silhouetted against a darkening sky, it was like a nuclear bomber heading for Moscow.
And something moved in this remote version of the Pacific. Something vast, like a living island. Joshua’s headache had gone. Cleared utterly. But the sensation he had always called the Silence had never been more profound.
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