The Long Earth Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Lyn and Rhianna, as always

  —T.P.

  For Sandra

  —S. B.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The plan for Willis Linsay’s original ‘Stepper’ as anonymously posted online. (please note: the publisher accepts no responsibility for the inappropriate use of this diagram or the technology it represents.)

  1

  IN A FOREST GLADE:

  Private Percy woke up to birdsong. It was a long time since he had heard birdsong, the guns saw to that. For a while he was content to lie there in the blissful quiet.

  Although he was slightly worried, in a concussed kind of way, why he was lying in damp though fragrant grass and not on his bedroll. Ah yes, fragrant grass, there hadn’t been much fragrance where he’d just been! Cordite, hot oil, burned flesh and the stink of unwashed men, that was what he was used to.

  He wondered if he was dead. After all, it had been a fearsome bombardment.

  Well, if he was dead then this would do for a heaven, after the hell of noise and screams and mud. And if it wasn’t heaven, then his sergeant would be giving him a kicking, pulling him up, looking him over and sending him down to the mess for a cup of tea and a wad. But there was no sergeant, and no noise except the birdsong in the trees.

  And, as dawn light seeped into the sky, he wondered, ‘What trees?’

  When had he last seen a tree that was even vaguely in the shape of a tree, let alone a tree with all its leaves, a tree not smashed to splinters by the shelling? And yet here were trees, lots of trees, a forest of trees.

  Private Percy was a practical and methodical young man, and therefore decided, in this dream, not to worry about trees, trees had never tried to kill him. He lay back, and must’ve dozed off for a while. Because when he opened his eyes again it was full daylight, and he was thirsty.

  Daylight, but where? Well, France. It had to be France. Percy couldn’t have been blown very far by the shell that had knocked him out; this must still be France, but here he was in woods where woods shouldn’t be. And without the traditional sounds of France, such as the thunder of the guns and the screams of the men.

  It was all a conundrum. And Percy was dying for a drink of water.

  So he packed up his troubles in what remained of his old kit bag, in this ethereal bird-haunted silence, and reflected that there was some truth in the song: what was the use of worrying? It was really not worthwhile, not when you have just seen men evaporate like the dew of the morning.

  But as he stood up he felt that familiar ache in his left leg, deep in the bone, the relic of a wound that hadn’t been enough to send him home but had got him a cushier posting with the camouflage boys, and a battered paint box in his kit bag. No dream this if his leg still hurt! But he wasn’t where he had been, that was for sure.

  And as he picked his way between the trees in the direction that appeared to have fewer trees in it than any other, a shimmering steely thought filled his mind: Why did we sing? Were we mad? What the hell did we think we were doing? Arms and legs all over the place, men just turning into a mist of flesh and bone! And we sang!

  What bloody, bloody fools we were!

  Half an hour later Private Percy walked down a slope, to a stream in a shallow valley. The water was somewhat brackish, but right now he would have been ready to drink out of a horse trough, right alongside the horse.

  He followed the stream until it joined a river, not a very wide river as yet, but Private Percy was a country boy and knew there would be crayfish under the river bank. And in half an hour said crayfish were cooking merrily, and never had he seen such big ones! And so many! And so juicy! He ate until it hurt, twirling his catch on a green stick over his hastily built fire and tearing them apart with his hands. He thought now: Perhaps I really am dead and have gone to heaven. And that is good enough for me, because, O Lord, I believe I have seen enough of hell.

  That night he lay in a glade by the river, with his kit bag for a pillow. And as the stars came out in the sky, more brilliant than he had ever seen, Percy began to sing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. He fell silent before finishing the song, and slept the sleep of the just.

  When the sunshine touched his face again, Percy woke, refreshed, sat up – and froze, motionless as a statue, before the calm gazes that inspected him. There were a dozen of the fellows in a row, watching him.

  Who were they? What were they? They looked a bit like bears, but not with bear faces, or a bit like monkeys, only fatter. And they were just watching him placidly. Surely they couldn’t be French?

  He tried French anyway. ‘Parley buffon say?’

  They stared at him blankly.

  In the silence, and feeling that something more was expected of him, Percy cleared his throat and plunged into ‘Pack Up Your Troubles.’

  The fellows listened with rapt attention until he had finished. Then they looked at one another. Eventually, as if some agreement had been reached, one of them stepped forward and sang the song back at Percy, pitch perfect.

  Private Percy listened with blank astonishment.

  And, a century later:

  The prairie was flat, green, rich, with scattered stands of oaks. The sky above was blue as generally advertised. On the horizon there was movement, like the shadow of a cloud: a vast herd of animals on the move.

  There was a kind of sigh, a breathing-out. An observer standing close enough might have felt a whisper of breeze on the skin.

  And a woman was lying on the grass.

  Her name was Maria Valienté. She wore her favourite pink angora sweater. She was only fifteen, but she was pregnant, and the baby was coming. The pain of the contractions pulsed through her skinny body. A moment ago she hadn’t known if she was more afraid of the birth, or the anger of Sister Stephanie who had taken away her monkey bracelet, all that Maria had from her mother, saying it was a sinful token.

  And now, this. Open sky where there should have been a nicotine-stained plaster ceiling. Grass and trees, where there should have been worn carpet. Everything was wrong. Where was here? Was this even Madison? How could she
be here?

  But that didn’t matter. The pain washed through her again, and she felt the baby coming. There was nobody to help, not even Sister Stephanie. She closed her eyes, and screamed, and pushed.

  The baby spilled on to the grass. Maria knew enough to wait for the afterbirth. When it was done there was a warm mess between her legs, and a baby, covered in sticky, bloody stuff. It, he, opened his mouth, and let out a thin wail.

  There was a sound like thunder, from far away. A roar like you’d hear in a zoo. Like a lion.

  A lion? Maria screamed again, this time in fear—

  The scream was cut off, as if by a switch. Maria was gone. The baby was alone.

  Alone, except for the universe. Which poured in, and spoke to him with an infinity of voices. And behind it all, a vast Silence.

  His crying settled to a gurgle. The Silence was comforting.

  There was a kind of sigh, a breathing-out. Maria was back in the green, under the blue sky. She sat up, and looked around in panic. Her face was grey; she was losing a lot of blood. But her baby was here.

  She scooped up the baby and the afterbirth – she hadn’t even tied off the cord – wrapped him up in her angora sweater, and cradled him in her arms. His little face was oddly calm. She thought she’d lost him. ‘Joshua,’ she said. ‘Your name is Joshua Valienté.’

  A soft pop, and they were gone.

  On the plain, nothing remained but a drying mess of blood and bodily fluids, and the grass, and the sky. Soon, though, the scent of blood would attract attention.

  And, long ago, on a world as close as a shadow:

  A very different version of North America cradled a huge, landlocked, saline sea. This sea teemed with microbial life. All this life served a single tremendous organism.

  And on this world, under a cloudy sky, the entirety of the turbid sea crackled with a single thought.

  I…

  This thought was followed by another.

  To what purpose?

  2

  THE BENCH, BESIDE a modern-looking drinks machine, was exceedingly comfortable. Joshua Valienté was not used to softness these days. Not used to the fluffy feeling of being inside a building, where the furnishings and the carpets impose a kind of quiet on the world. Beside the luxurious bench was a pile of glossy magazines, but Joshua was not particularly good at shiny paper either. Books? Books were fine. Joshua liked books, particularly paperback books: light and easy to carry, and if you didn’t want to read them again, well, there was always a use for reasonably thin soft paper.

  Normally, when there was nothing to do, he listened to the Silence.

  The Silence was very faint here. Almost drowned out by the sounds of the mundane world. Did people in this polished building understand how noisy it was? The roar of air conditioners and computer fans, the susurration of many voices heard but not decipherable, the muffled sound of telephones followed by the sounds of people explaining that they were not in fact there but would like you to leave your name after the beep, this being subsequently followed by the beep. This was the office of the transEarth Institute, an arm of the Black Corporation. The faceless office, all plasterboard and chrome, was dominated by a huge logo, a chesspiece knight. This wasn’t Joshua’s world. None of it was his world. In fact, when you got right down to it, he didn’t have a world; he had all of them.

  All of the Long Earth.

  Earths, untold Earths. More Earths than could be counted, some said. And all you had to do was walk sideways into them, one after the next, an unending chain.

  This was a source of immense irritation for experts such as Professor Wotan Ulm of Oxford University. ‘All these parallel Earths,’ he told the BBC, ‘are identical on all but the detailed level. Oh, save that they are empty. Well, actually they are full, mainly of forests and swamps. Big, dark, silent forests, deep, clinging, lethal swamps. But empty of people. The Earth is crowded, but the Long Earth is empty. This is tough luck on Adolf Hitler, who hasn’t been allowed to win his war anywhere!

  ‘It is hard for scientists even to talk about the Long Earth without babbling about m-brane manifolds and quantum multiverses. Look: perhaps the universe bifurcates every time a leaf falls, a billion new branches every instant. That’s what quantum physics seems to tell us. Oh, it is not a question of a billion realities to be experienced; the quantum states superpose, like harmonics on a single violin string. But perhaps there are times – when a volcano stirs, a comet kisses, a true love is betrayed – when you can get a separate experiential reality, a braid of quantum threads. And perhaps these braids are then drawn together through some higher dimension by similarity, and a chain of worlds self-organizes. Or something! Maybe it is all a dream, a collective imagining of mankind.

  ‘The truth is that we are as baffled by the phenomenon as Dante would have been if he’d suddenly been given a glimpse of Hubble’s expanding universe. Even the language we use to describe it is probably no more correct than the pack-of-cards analogy that most people feel at home with: the Long Earth as a large pack of three-dimensional sheets, stacked up in a higher-dimensional space, each card an Earth entire unto itself.

  ‘And, most significantly, to most people, the Long Earth is open. Almost anybody can travel up and down the pack, drilling, as it were, through the cards themselves. People are expanding into all that room. Of course they are! This is a primal instinct. We plains apes still fear the leopard in the dark; if we spread out he cannot take all of us.

  ‘It is all profoundly annoying. None of it fits! And why has this tremendous pack of cards been dealt to mankind just now, when we have never been more in need of room? But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn’t be much of a career path, would it? Well – whatever the answers to such questions, believe you me, everything is changing for mankind… Is that enough, Jocasta? Some idiot clicked a pen while I was doing the bit about Dante.’

  Of course, Joshua understood, transEarth existed to profit from all these changes. Which, presumably, was why Joshua had been brought here, more or less against his will, from a world a long way away.

  At last the door opened. A young woman came in, nursing a laptop as thin as a sheet of gold leaf. Joshua kept such a machine in the Home, a fatter, antiquated model, mostly to look up wild-food recipes. ‘Mr Valienté? It’s so kind of you to come. My name is Selena Jones. Welcome to the transEarth Institute.’

  She was certainly attractive, he thought. Joshua liked women; he remembered his few, brief relationships with pleasure. But he hadn’t spent much time with women, and was awkward with them. ‘Welcome? You didn’t give me a choice. You found my mailbox. That means you’re government.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you’re wrong. We sometimes work for the government, but we’re certainly not the government.’

  ‘Legal?’

  She smiled deprecatingly. ‘Lobsang found your mailbox code.’

  ‘And who is Lobsang?’

  ‘Me,’ said the drinks machine.

  ‘You’re a drinks machine,’ said Joshua.

  ‘You are wrong in your surmise, although I could produce the drink of your choice within seconds.’

  ‘But you’ve got Coca-Cola written on you!’

  ‘Do forgive me my sense of humour. Incidentally, if you had hazarded a dollar in the hope of soda-based refreshment I would definitely have returned it. Or provided the soda.’

  Joshua struggled to make sense of this encounter. ‘Lobsang who?’

  ‘I have no surname. In old Tibet, only aristocrats and Living Buddhas had surnames, Joshua. I have no such pretensions.’

  ‘Are you a computer?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I’m damn sure there isn’t a human being in there, and besides, you talk funny.’

  ‘Mr Valienté, I am more articulate and better spoken than anybody you know, and indeed I am not inside the drinks machine. Well, not wholly, that is.’

  ‘Sto
p teasing the man, Lobsang,’ said Selena, turning to Joshua. ‘Mr Valienté, I know you were … elsewhere, when the world first heard about Lobsang. He is unique. He is a computer, physically, but he used to be – how can I put this? – a Tibetan motorcycle repairman.’

  ‘So how did he get from Tibet to the inside of a drinks machine?’

  ‘That is a long story, Mr Valienté…’

  If Joshua hadn’t been away so long he’d have known all about Lobsang. He was the first machine to successfully convince a court that he was a human being.

  ‘Of course,’ Selena said, ‘other sixth-generation machines had tried it before. Provided they stay in the next room and talk to you via a speaker they can sound at least as human as some of the lunkheads you see around, but that proves nothing in the eyes of the law. But Lobsang doesn’t claim to be a thinking machine. He didn’t claim rights on that basis. He said he was a dead Tibetan.

  ‘Well, Joshua, he had them by the shorts. Reincarnation is still a cornerstone of world faith; and Lobsang simply said that he had reincarnated as a computer program. As was deposited in evidence in court – I’ll show you the transcripts if you like – the relevant software initiated at precisely the microsecond a Lhasan motorcycle repairman with a frankly unpronounceable name died. To a discarnate soul, twenty thousand teraflops-worth of technological wizardry on a gel substrate apparently looks identical to a few pounds of soggy brain tissue. A number of expert witnesses testified to the astonishing accuracy of Lobsang’s flashes of recall of his previous life. And I myself witnessed a small, wiry old man with a face like a dried peach, a distant cousin of the repairman, conversing with Lobsang happily for several hours, reminiscing about the good old days in Lhasa. A charming afternoon!’