The Long Earth Read online

  Nobody she worked with knew her, she felt. Not even the gentlemen who, periodically, when she was known to be working, broke into her flat and searched it, always very carefully, no doubt sharing a little smile as they carefully replaced the tiny sliver of wood she pushed between the front door and its frame every day. Very similar to her own little smile when she noted that their big flat feet had once again crushed the scrap of meringue that she always dropped on the carpet just inside the living room door, a scrap they never ever noticed.

  Since she never took off her gold ring, no one but she and God knew that inscribed, quite expensively, around the inner surface of the ring was a line from a Dylan song called ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ She wondered, these days, if any of the busy little bodies she worked with, including most of the ministers, would even recognize where the quote came from.

  And now, a few years after Step Day, as the latest panicky discussion went on in the Cabinet Office, she wondered if she was too old to get a job with the masters, as opposed to the fools.

  ‘Then they should be licensed. Stepper boxes. The Long Earth is a sink as far as the blessed economy is concerned, but penalizing the use of the boxes you need to access it would yield some tax revenue, at least!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be absurd, man.’ The Prime Minister sat back in his chair. ‘Come on. We can’t just ban a thing because we can’t control it.’

  The minister responsible for health and safety looked startled. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s never stopped us before.’

  The Prime Minister tapped his pen on the table. ‘The inner cities are emptying. The economy’s imploding. Of course there is a bright side. Immigration is no longer a problem …’ He laughed, but he seemed to crumple, and when he spoke again he sounded, to Hermione, almost in despair. ‘God help us, gentlemen, the science chaps tell me that there might be more iterations of the planet Earth out there than there are people. What policy options can we possibly conceive in the face of that?’

  Enough was enough: quite suddenly, that was how Hermione felt about all this.

  As the picky, preposterous, pointless conversation continued, with a faint smile on her lips Hermione wrote a couple of lines of her immaculate Pitman shorthand, laid her pad on the desk in front of her, and after a nod of permission from the Prime Minister she stood and left the room. Probably nobody else even noticed she was gone. She walked out into Downing Street, and stepped into the London next door, which swarmed with security guards, but she was such a familiar sight after all these years that they accepted her identity card and let her pass.

  And then she stepped again. And again, and again…

  Much later, when she was missed, one of the other secretaries was called in to translate the little note that she had written, the delicate strokes and swirling curves.

  ‘It looks like a poem to me, sir. Or a song lyric. Something about people criticizing what they can’t understand.’ She looked up at the Prime Minister. ‘Mean anything to you, sir? Sir? Are you all right, sir?’

  ‘Have you got a husband, miss—sorry, I don’t know your name?’

  ‘It’s Caroline, sir. I’ve got a boyfriend, a steady boy, good with his hands. I can get you a doctor if you want.’

  ‘No, no. It’s just we’re all so bloody inadequate, Caroline. What a farce it is, this business of government. To imagine we were ever in control of our destinies. If I were you, Caroline, I would marry your steady boy right now, if you think he’s any good, and go, go to another world. Anywhere but here.’ He slumped in the chair and shut his eyes. ‘And God help England, and God help us all.’

  She wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake. At length she slipped out, taking Hermione’s abandoned pad with her.

  11

  WITHIN A WEEK OF her meeting with Clichy, Jansson’s colleagues had started calling her ‘Spooky’ Jansson.

  And within a month, she had made an appointment at the Home, as Joshua called it. It was an orphanage, a run-down converted section-8 apartment complex on Allied Drive, in an area that was about as rough as it got in Madison. But you could see the place was well kept. And there she quietly met, once more, fourteen-year-old Joshua Valienté. She had sworn that if Joshua dealt through her she would guarantee that nobody would treat him as a Problem, but as somebody who might be able to help out, maybe, you know? Like Batman?

  That was how, for several years after Step Day, Joshua’s young life had been shaped.

  ‘That must seem a long time ago to you now,’ Selena said smoothly, leading Joshua deeper into the transEarth complex.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘So you became a hero. Did you wear a cape?’ asked Selena.

  Joshua didn’t like sarcasm. ‘I had an oilskin for rainy days.’

  ‘Actually, that was a joke.’

  ‘I know.’

  Yet another forbidding door opened in front of them, another corridor was revealed.

  ‘Makes Fort Knox look like a colander, this place, doesn’t it?’ Selena said nervously.

  ‘Fort Knox is a colander nowadays,’ said Joshua. ‘It’s just lucky that people can’t carry out bars of gold by hand.’

  She sniffed. ‘I was merely making a comparison, Joshua.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  She halted. The way he’d paused in the middle of that reply was annoying, and even more annoying when what she’d really been trying to express was that, even now, all this business of stepwise worlds could be so frightening. Not to Joshua, it seemed. She forced a brief smile. ‘This is where I leave you, at least for now. I am not allowed to get too close to Lobsang. Very few people are. I know Lobsang wants to discuss your difficulties with the congressional review that’s been looking into the outcome of your earlier jaunt into the remote stepwise worlds.’

  She was fishing, of course. Joshua suspected that this was, in fact, the leverage Lobsang hoped to use to recruit him.

  He said nothing, and she couldn’t gauge his reaction.

  She guided him gently into the room beyond. ‘Nice to have met you face to face, Joshua.’

  He said, ‘May I wish you the security rating you desire, Selena.’

  She stared at the closing door. She was sure that impassive face had broken into a smile.

  The room within this fortress-like inner sanctum was decorated like the study of an Edwardian gentleman, even down to the log fire blazing in the fireplace. The fire was a fake, however, and not entirely convincing, at least to Joshua, who lit a genuine log fire every night out in the wild. The leather on the chair standing invitingly beside the fire, however, was real.

  ‘Good afternoon, Joshua,’ said a voice from the air. ‘I regret that you cannot see me, but in point of fact there is very little of me here to see. And what there is, I feel sure, would be quite dull to observe.’

  Joshua settled down in the chair. For a time there was silence, almost companionable. Beside him, the fire crackled artificially. You could tell, if you listened, because of certain sequences of crackle, that the soundtrack was repeated every forty-one seconds.

  The voice of Lobsang said soothingly, ‘I ought to have paid more attention to that. Yes – I mean the fire. Oh, don’t worry, Joshua, I’m no mind-reader, not yet; you were glancing at the fire every few seconds and you have a tendency to move your lips soundlessly when you are counting. Interestingly enough, nobody else has noticed that little flaw, with the fire.

  ‘But of course, Joshua, you do notice. You watch, and listen, and analyse, and inside that roomy cranium of yours you play yourself little videos of all the possible outcomes of the current situation that you can envisage. It was once said of an English politician that if you kicked him in the butt not a muscle would move on his face until he had decided what to do about it. It’s one of the qualities that makes you so useful, that watchfulness.

  ‘And you are not apprehensive, are you? I can detect no fear in you, none whatsoever. I believe this is because you are the only person who has been in this
fortress of a room who knows that he could get out at any moment. Why? Because you can step without a Stepper box – oh, yes, I know about that. And without getting nauseous afterwards, too.’

  Joshua did not rise to that. ‘Selena said you had something to tell me, about the congressional review?’

  ‘Yes, the expedition. You got into trouble with that one, didn’t you, Joshua?’

  ‘Look – there are only two of us in here, aren’t there? So, if you give it some thought, there is no reason whatsoever why you should repeatedly tell me what my name is. I know why you’re doing it. Dominance.’ This was a lifelong bugbear for Joshua. ‘I may not be too clever, Lobsang, but you don’t have to be clever to work out what the rules are!’

  For a while there was nothing but the repeated crackling of the false fire. Later, Joshua came to understand that if there was a pause in a conversation with Lobsang, it was for effect; at the clock speeds he worked at, Lobsang could answer any question a fraction of a second after you asked it, yet after the equivalent of a lifetime of contemplation.

  ‘You know, we are like-minded, you and I, my friend,’ said Lobsang.

  ‘Let’s stick to “acquaintance” for now.’

  Lobsang laughed. ‘Of course. I stand corrected. Or rather, float in a disembodied way corrected. But I would like to become your friend. Because, in the abstract, in any given situation, I believe that both of us are interested in finding out, above all, what the rules are.

  ‘And I believe that you are a remarkably valuable individual. You are smart enough, Joshua – you couldn’t have survived so much time out alone in the Long Earth otherwise. Oh, there are certainly others smarter than you, they are stacked high in the universities achieving little or nothing. But smart has to have a depth as well as a length. Some smart brushes over a problem. And some smart grinds exceeding slow, like the mills of God, and it grinds fine, and when it comes up with an answer, it has been tested. That’s how it is with you, Joshua.’ Lobsang laughed again. ‘And by the way my laughter is not a recording. Each laugh is a unique product of the moment, demonstrably different from any other laugh I have ever emitted. That was a laugh just for you. I was human, you know. I still am.

  ‘Joshua, let’s get to know one another. I want to help you. And of course I want you to help me. I cannot think of a better person to go with me on the expedition I am planning, which will involve some very far stepping indeed. I think it might rather appeal to you. You like to be far from the maddening crowd, Joshua, don’t you?’

  ‘Thomas Hardy’s title was about the madding crowd.’

  ‘Oh, of course it was. But it’s a good idea for me to make the odd little slip – not to appear all-knowing, every now and again.’

  Joshua was growing impatient with this clumsy seduction. ‘Lobsang, how are you going to help me?’

  ‘I know that what happened to the congressional expedition was not your fault. I can prove it.’

  Now they were getting down to brass tacks, Joshua thought. ‘The assholes,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes, assholes,’ said Lobsang, ‘and thusly you described them to the preliminary board of inquiry. An unknown species of primate resembling a particularly unpleasant carnivorous baboon. But I suspect the Linnaean Society will not approve your appellation. Assholes!’

  ‘I didn’t kill those men. Sure, I can get along without people. But I had no reason to kill anybody. Did you read the report? Those ass—’

  ‘Can we stick to baboons, please, Joshua? It looks better on the transcript.’

  It had been a paid jaunt for Joshua, a gig arranged by his old friend Officer Jansson. ‘You’ve grown up while I’ve grown old, Joshua,’ she’d said. ‘And now I’ve got you some government work. You’ll be a kind of bodyguard and guide …’

  It was an official journey to the far West worlds with a party of scientists, lawyers and a Congressman, accompanied by a platoon of soldiers. It had ended in slaughter.

  The scientists had been gathering data. The lawyers had been taking photographs of the Congressman setting foot on one world after another, making a kind of visual claim to the stepwise Americas, in order to establish symbolically the aegis of the Datum federal government. The soldiers complained about the food and the state of their feet. Joshua had been happy enough to help the party, for his fee, but sensible enough to make sure his ability to step without a box and without after-effects was concealed. So he carried a potion consisting of sour milk and diced vegetables that would pass muster as vomit, the product of stepping nausea. After all, who was going to look too closely?

  It all worked fine. They had all bitched, squabbled and complained their way through two thousand Earths, and after every step Joshua faked nausea with splashes of ersatz vomit. And then the murderous attack had come.

  They were apes, something like baboons, but smarter, more vicious. ‘Superboons’, some of the scientists had called them. ‘Assholes’, Joshua had decided, watching their pink butts go bobbing into the distance after he’d driven them off.

  Or anyhow, that was his story of what had become of the party. The trouble was there had been no witnesses to back him up, and it had all happened too far out for an expedition to be sent to investigate, so far.

  ‘The damn things could plan an attack! They never bothered me after I killed two of them, but the troops were overwhelmed, and the science guys never knew how to defend themselves worth a damn.’

  ‘And you left the bodies for the baboons?’

  ‘You know, it’s hard to dig a grave with a wooden shovel in one hand while holding a plastic gun in the other. I burned the camp and got the hell out of there.’

  ‘I thought the board of inquiry’s tentative verdict was rather unfair on you. It left doubt. Now I want you to know that I can prove that what you said was true. I can prove that there is an outcrop of black rock about a kilometre from the campsite by the waterhole, just as you said, behind which still lies the remains of the corpse of the alpha animal, which you shot. Incidentally the rock was low-grade coal.’

  ‘How can you know all this?’

  ‘I retraced your steps. The records you returned were quite accurate. I went back, Joshua.’

  ‘You went back? When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘You got back yesterday?’

  Lobsang said patiently, ‘I went and returned yesterday.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done! It’s impossible to step that fast.’

  ‘So you say, Joshua. You’ll find out in due course. You did make an attempt to cover the corpses with stones, and you left grave markers, just as you mentioned at the inquiry. I brought back photographic records. Proof of what you said, you see?

  ‘In fact I reconstructed the whole thing. I used pheromone trails, checked angles of fire, the lie of the bodies. I found every bullet. And, of course, I took DNA samples. I even brought back the alpha’s skull – and the bullet that killed it. It all fits with your testimony. None of the soldiers put up an effective defence when your asshole-baboons attacked, did they? The superboons are maniacs by the standards of the animal world. Appallingly aggressive. But I don’t think they would have attacked if one of the grunts hadn’t got nervy and fired first.’

  Joshua squirmed with embarrassment. ‘If you checked all this out, you know I crapped my pants in the course of the engagement.’

  ‘Should I think less of you for that? Throughout the animal kingdom, it has always made good sense to jettison the cargo in a threatening situation. All battlefields attest to that, as does every soaring songbird. But then you came back, and stabbed one of the superboons in the brain, and drove off the rest, stopping only when you’d shot the leader dead. You came back, and that excuses a lot.’

  Joshua thought for a moment. ‘OK. That’s leverage, all right. You can clear me. But why do you want to recruit me in the first place?’

  ‘Well, we discussed that. It’s the same reason Jansson suggested you for Congressman Popper’s party in the first place. You hav
e Daniel Boone syndrome, Joshua. Very rare. You don’t need people. You quite like people, at least some people, but the absence of people does not worry you. That’s going to be very useful where we’re going. I don’t expect to meet too many other human beings once the expedition is under way. Your assistance would be of great help to me because of that quality: you are able to focus, you’re not distracted by the extraordinary isolation of the Long Earth. And, as Officer Jansson saw from the beginning, your unique stepping talent, your ability to step unaided and, more important, to recover quickly from each step, will be useful if trouble strikes – as it surely will.

  ‘The rewards to you, should you agree to accompany me, will be excessively generous, and tailored to your particular preferences. Among them will be an authoritative account of the massacre of the congressional investigators, totally exonerating you, which will be received by the authorities on the day we depart.’

  ‘Am I worth that much?’

  Lobsang laughed again. ‘Joshua, what is worth? What is value now, when gold is valued simply for its lustre, because every man can have a gold mine for himself? Property? The physics of the Long Earth means that every one of us can have a world entirely to himself, if he so wishes. This is the new age, Joshua, and there will be new values, new ideas of worth, including love, cooperation, truth – and above all, yes indeed, above all, the friendship of Lobsang. You should listen to me, Joshua Valienté. I intend to travel to the ends of the Earth – no, to the ends of the Long Earth. And I want you with me. Will you come?’

  Joshua sat there, staring at nothing. ‘Do you know, the crackling of your fire now sounds absolutely random?’

  ‘Yes. Easy enough to fix. I thought it might put you a little more at your ease.’

  ‘So if I come with you, you’ll get that congressional review off my back?’

  ‘Yes, certainly, I promise.’