He shrugged. ‘I brought it to the square in a big backpack. I delivered it, but I don’t know where it’s stashed. I also don’t know how it was armed. Or how it can be disarmed.’
Shit, shit. ‘Is this necessary, Rod? Do all these people have to die just so you can get back at Mommy?’
He sneered. ‘Well, that bitch is safe.’
That shocked Jansson. Maybe he didn’t even know that his mother, Tilda Lang Green, off in a colony on some remote Earth, was dead of a cancer. Now wasn’t the time to tell him. ‘Do you even think it’s going to do any good? I know you people have it in your heads that Madison is some kind of stepping hub. But you can’t stop up the Long Earth. Even if you flatten the whole of Wisconsin people will just keep on stepping from wherever—’
‘I only know one thing about the bomb.’
She grabbed his shoulders. ‘What? Tell me, Rod.’
‘I know when.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Two minutes forty-five seconds. Forty-four. Forty-three…’
Jansson stood up and yelled at the cops, ‘Did you hear that? Report it in. And get these people out of here. Their Steppers – for God’s sake, give them back their Steppers!’
The cops didn’t need telling twice, and their captives rose in a mob, panicked by Rod’s overheard words. But Jansson stayed by Rod’s side.
‘It’s all up for me,’ Rod said. ‘I can’t step. That’s why I came here. It seemed right.’
‘Right, hell.’ Without warning she grabbed him, picking him up under knees and shoulders like a child, and, straining, lifted him off the ground. He was too heavy for her, and she immediately fell under him, but she switched her Stepper before the two of them hit the ground.
And she landed on her back, on green grass. Blue sky overhead, just like on the Datum today. The sirens had gone away. The scaffolding frame that had been erected here in West 1 to interface with the Capitol loomed over her.
Rod, lying on top of her, convulsed, puked over her, and started to froth at the mouth. A paramedic in an orange jumpsuit pulled Rod aside.
‘He’s a phobic,’ Jansson said. ‘He needs—’
‘We know, ma’am.’ The paramedic took a syringe from her pack and shot him up in the neck.
The convulsions eased. Rod looked Jansson in the eye. He said clearly, ‘Two minutes.’ Then his eyes rolled up and he was unconscious.
Two minutes. The word went out across Madison Zero, and its nascent twins to East and West, and around a watching world.
And the stepping began.
Parents carried their children, and went back for their own old folk, and their elderly neighbours. In care homes, some bewildered senior citizens had Steppers slapped on them and were sent East or West for the first time in their lives. In the schools, teachers carried over their students, and big kids carried little kids. In the hospitals the staff and the healthier outpatients found ways to lift and step the heaviest, most immobilized patients, even coma victims and babies in incubators, and went back for more, and then waited as surgeons hurried to close up interrupted operations, and carried those patients over too. All across Madison, the majority of humanity who could step aided the minority who couldn’t. Even extreme phobics like Rod Green who couldn’t tolerate a single step were met by medics who did their best to stabilize them, until they could be hurried away from the danger zone and taken back to the Datum.
In Madison West 1, Monica Jansson watched the results unfold. There were TV cameras all around the area, and eye-in-the-sky images relayed down from drone aircraft. For Jansson, it felt very odd to be safe in such a crisis, but the medics had taken away her Stepper, and there was nothing more she could do. So she watched. Somebody even brought her a cup of coffee.
From the air, here in West 1, you could clearly see the lakes, the isthmus, the distinctive geography of the area laid out like a map, a twin of the region on the Datum, a twin that had been entirely uninhabited two decades ago. Madison West 1 had started to make its own mark in this world, with swathes of forest cleared and marsh drained, and some tracks wide and metalled well enough to be called roads, and clusters of buildings, and steam and smoke rising from the mills and forges. But today the inhabitants of West 1 were scrambling to accommodate and help the incoming, fleeing from the Datum.
Here they came. Jansson saw them emerge, one by one or in little groups. There were even some in the lakes, steppers coming over from their boats or their surfboards. Rowboats cut across the bright blue waters to each waving speck.
And, on land, as the steppers crossed, Jansson saw a kind of map of the Datum city emerge on the green carpet of West 1. There were the university students, a multicoloured blur that marked the location of their campus, stretching south from the shore of Mendota. There were the hospitals, St Mary’s and Meriter and the UW Hospitals and Clinics, little rectangular huddles of doctors and nurses and patients. There were the schools, teachers with their charges where their classrooms should have been. On the Monona shore the contents of the convention centre appeared, business types, in flocks, like penguins. The area around Capitol Square itself started to fill in, the diamond shape of the square, with the shoppers and diners from State and King lining up along the tracks of the streets leading off to west and east, and the office workers and residents of East and West Washington. It was indeed a map of Madison, she realized, a map made up of the people, with the buildings stripped away. She looked for Allied Drive, where a group of nuns stepped across realities from the Home, with the vulnerable children in their charge.
And in the very last second, she saw, in a view from ground level, that where the high-rise buildings of downtown stood, people started appearing in mid-air. Many were in business suits. They just stepped over from the upper floors because there was no time left to get to the elevator or the stairs, or do anything else. Three-dimensional ghosts of the doomed buildings coalesced, ghosts composed of people who seemed to hang in the air, just for an instant, before falling to the ground.
Somewhere near Jansson, a Geiger counter started clicking.
52
JOSHUA AND SALLY hurried through the last few Madisons, West 10, 9, 8… Joshua wasn’t interested in these crowded worlds; all he wanted now was to get home. 6, 5, 4… In one Low Earth they had taken the time to cross geographically, from Humptulips to Madison, flying the airship on the one engine Franklin Tallyman, boy genius of Reboot, had managed to fix up for them. 3, 2, 1… There were barriers in the last few worlds, some kind of system of warning signs; they hurried on—
Zero.
Madison was gone.
Joshua stood in shock, gasping. Sally clutched his arm. They stood in a plain of rubble. Gaunt shapes, fragments of wall sticking out of the ground. A few twisted tangles that must be the remains of reinforced-concrete structures. Dust, dry as hell, choked him immediately. The battered airship hung blindly over these ruins.
Somebody was standing before them. Some guy in a coverall suit, no, a woman, Joshua realized, seeing her face through a dusty visor.
‘We’re here to meet steppers,’ she said, her voice a relay from a speaker. ‘Get out of here. Go straight back.’
Alarmed, shocked, Joshua and Sally stepped hand in hand back to West 1, taking the airship with them. Here, in the bright sunlight, another young woman in a FEMA uniform approached them with a clipboard and data pad. She looked up at the airship, shook her head in disbelief, and said reproachfully, ‘You’re going to have to go through decon. We do post warnings in the neighbouring worlds. Hey, you can’t catch everybody. Don’t worry, you’ve broken no law. I’ll need your names and social security numbers…’ She started to peck at her pad.
Joshua began to take in the surroundings. This parallel Madison was crowded, compared with the last time he was here. Tent cities, feeding hospitals, feeding stations. A refugee camp.
Sally said bitterly, ‘Here we are in the land of plenty, with everything anybody could ever want, multiplied a million times over. Nevertheless somebody wants to st
art a war. What a piece of work is a man.’
‘But,’ Joshua said, ‘you can’t start a war if nobody turns up. Listen, I need to get to the Home. Or where the Home would be…’
The FEMA official’s phone rang, at her waist. She looked at the screen, seemed puzzled, and glanced at Joshua. ‘Are you Joshua Valienté?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s for you.’ She handed him the phone. ‘Go ahead, Mr Lobsang.’
Acknowledgments
We chose to use Madison, Wisconsin, as a location in this novel partly because as we were developing the book it occurred to us that in July 2011 the second North American Discworld convention was to be held there, and we could get a hell of a lot of research done, as we authors like to say, on the cheap. That convention became in part a kind of mass workshop on the Long Earth. We’re grateful to all the contributors to that discussion, who really are far too numerous to list here, but particularly to Dr Christopher Pagel, owner of the Companion Animal Hospital in Madison, and his wife, Juliet Pagel, who gave up an unreasonable amount of their time to show your authors Madison both primeval and modern, from the Arboretum to Willy Street, and on top of that made an incredibly helpful read-through of a draft of this book. Thank you, Madisonians, and we hereby apologize for what we have done to your lovely city. All errors and inaccuracies are of course our sole responsibility. Our thanks also to Charles Manson, the Tibetan Subject Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for helping us build Lobsang’s world.
T. P.
S.B.
December 2011, Datum Earth
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
TERRY PRATCHETT is one of the world’s most popular authors. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide and have been translated into nearly forty languages. In 2009 Queen Elizabeth II knighted Pratchett in recognition of his “services to literature.” Sir Terry lives in England.
STEPHEN BAXTER is an acclaimed, multiple award-winning author whose many books include the Xeelee sequence, the Time Odyssey trilogy (written with Arthur C. Clarke), and The Time Ships, a sequel to H. G. Wells’s classic The Time Machine. He lives in England.
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BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Dark Side of the Sun
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The Unadulterated Cat (illustrated by Gray Jolliffe)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
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The Carpet People
Nation
The Bromilead Trilogy
Truckers
Diggers
Wings
The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
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Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
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Eric (illustrated by Josh Kirby)
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Small Gods
Lords and Ladies
Men at Arms
Soul Music
Feet of Clay
Interesting Times
Maskerade
Hogfather
Jingo
The Last Continent
Carpe Jugulum
The Fifth Elephant
The Truth
Thief of Time
Night Watch
Monstrous Regiment
Going Postal
Thud
Where’s My Cow? (illustrated by Melvyn Grant)
Making Money
Unseen Academicals
Snuff
The Last Hero (illustrated by Paul Kidby)
The Art of Discworld (with Paul Kidby)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
The Wit and Wisdom of
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The Discworld Graphic Novels
The Color of Magic
The Light Fantastic
DISCWORLD FOR YOUNG ADULTS
The Amazing Maurice & His Educated Rodents
The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith
I Shall Wear Midnight
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BOOKS BY STEPHEN BAXTER
Anti-Ice
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Traces
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Evolution
The H-Bomb Girl
NORTHLAND
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
FLOOD
Flood
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MANIFOLD
Manifold 1: Time
Manifold 2: Space
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Weaver
DESTINY’S CHILDREN
Coalescent
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Transcendent
Resplendent
A TIME ODYSSEY
Time’s Eye (with Arthur C. Clarke)
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Raft
Timelike Infinity
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Ring
Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft,
Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring
Vacuum Diagrams
THE WEB
The Web: Gulliverzone
The Web: Webcrash
NONFICTION
Deep Future
Omegatropic
Revolutions in the Earth: James Hutton and the True Age of the World
CREDITS
Cover photo montage © Getty Images
Diagram of the Stepper by Richard Shailer
The extract in Chapter 43 from “Keep Right On to the End of the Road” by Harry Lauder (Sir Henry Lauder) is reproduced with the kind permission of Gregory Lauder-Frost (Sir Harry’s great-nephew).
COPYRIGHT
THE LONG EARTH. Copyright © 2012 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of Random House Group, Ltd.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
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