The Long Earth Page 8

  As he thought it over, Joshua began to see the point of stepping in an airship – as long as you could get the thing to step in the first place, and how you’d do that he didn’t yet understand. One problem with stepping rapidly was obstacles. He’d discovered on his very first night of exploration of the Long Earth that some obstacles simply couldn’t be walked around, such as the ice cap, sometimes miles high, that typically blanketed much of North America during an Ice Age. The airship was an attempt to get around that: it would ride above such inconveniences as glaciers or floods, and a much smoother journey ought to be possible.

  He asked the air, ‘But did it have to be quite so grand, Lobsang?’

  ‘Why not be grand? We can’t hide, after all. I want my exploratory vessel to be like the Chinese treasure ships which struck awe into the natives of India and Arabia in the fifteenth century.’

  ‘You’ll strike awe, all right. And no iron in this thing, I take it?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. The impermeability of the reality barrier to iron remains a mystery even to Black Corporation scientists. I get plenty of theorizing, but few practical results.’

  ‘You know, when you talked about the journey, I thought I’d be carrying you, somehow.’

  ‘Oh, no. I am wired into the airship’s systems. The whole ship will be my body, in a sense. Joshua, I will be carrying you.’

  ‘Only sentient creatures can step—’

  ‘Yes. And I, like you, am sentient!’

  And Joshua understood. The airship was Lobsang, or at least his body; when Lobsang stepped, the airship carcass came with him, just as Joshua ‘carried’ over his body, his clothes, whenever he stepped. And that was how an airship could step.

  Lobsang was smug and boastful. ‘Of course this would not work were I not sentient. This is further proof of my claims of personhood, isn’t it? I’ve already trialled the technology – well, you know that, I traced your earlier expedition as I told you. All rather thrilling, isn’t it?’

  Joshua reached the base of the gondola and entered the observation deck he’d spotted before, a blister of reinforced glass giving spectacular views of this Low Earth’s Siberia. The construction site sprawled below, with ancillary workings cut into the forest, supply dumps, dormitories, an airstrip.

  Joshua, thinking it over, began to realize just what an achievement Lobsang had pulled off here – if the airship stepped as advertised. Nobody before had found a way to make a vehicle capable of stepping between the worlds the way a human could, and that was throttling the expansion of any kind of trade across the Long Earth. In parts of the Near East, and even in Texas, they had human chains carrying over oil by the bucket-load. If Lobsang really had cracked this, essentially by becoming the vessel himself – well, he was like a modern rail pioneer; he was going to change the world, all the worlds. No wonder security was so tight. If it worked. This was all experimental, evidently. And Joshua would be swimming across Long Earth in the belly of a silvery whale. ‘You seriously expect me to risk my life in this thing?’

  ‘More than that. If “this thing” fails I expect you to bring me home.’

  ‘You’re insane.’

  ‘Quite possibly. But we have a contract.’

  A blue door slid open, and, to Joshua’s blank astonishment, Lobsang showed himself in person – or rather, in ambulatory unit. ‘Welcome again! I thought I would dress for the occasion of our maiden voyage.’ The automaton was male, slim and athletic, with movie star looks and a wig of thick black hair, and it wore a black lounge suit. It looked like a waxwork of James Bond, and when it moved, and worse when it smiled, it did nothing to dispel the artifice.

  Joshua stared, struggling not to laugh.

  ‘Joshua?’

  ‘Sorry! Pleased to meet you in person …’

  The deck vibrated as engines bit. Joshua felt oddly thrilled at the prospect of the voyage in a small-boy kind of way. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Lobsang? I guess anything is possible if you go far enough. What about dragons?’

  ‘I would suggest we might expect to find anything that could possibly exist in the conditions found on this planet, within the constraints of the laws of physics, and bearing in mind that the planet has not always been so peaceful as it is now. All creatures on Earth have been hammered on the anvil of its gravity, for example, which influences size and morphology. So I am sceptical about finding armoured reptiles who can fly and spout flames.’

  ‘Sounds a little drab.’

  ‘However, I would not be human if I did not acknowledge one important factor, which is that I might be totally wrong. And that would be very exciting.’

  ‘Well, we’ll find out – if this thing actually steps.’

  Lobsang’s synthetic face folded into a smile. ‘Actually we’ve been stepping for the last minute or so.’

  Joshua turned to a window and saw that it was true. The construction site had cleared away; they must have passed out of the sheaf of known worlds in the first few steps – although that word ‘known’ was something of a joke. Even the stepwise worlds right next to the Datum had barely been explored; humans were colonizing the Long Earth in thin lines stretched across the worlds. Anything could be living out back in the woods… And he, evidently, was going deeper into those woods than anybody before him.

  ‘How fast will this thing go?’

  ‘You’ll be pleasantly surprised, Joshua.’

  ‘You’re going to change the world with this technology, Lobsang.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. Up to now the Long Earth has been opened up on foot. It’s been medieval. No, worse than that, we haven’t even been able to use horses. Stone Age! But of course, even on foot humans have been moving out since Step Day. Dreaming of a new frontier, of the riches of the new worlds …’

  13

  MONICA JANSSON HAD always understood very well that it was the promise of the riches of the new worlds that drew the likes of Jim Russo out into the Long Earth to try their luck, over and over, with the law seeming at times no more than a minor obstacle in the face of their ambition.

  On her first visit to Portage East 3, ten years after Step Day, it had taken Jansson a minute or two, even after she’d gotten over the step sickness, to figure out what was familiar about the place. This new Portage had big steam-driven sawmills with chimney stacks belching smoke, and foundries with a burned-metal smell. She heard the cries of the workers, the steam hooters, the steady clank of the smiths’ hammers. It was like something out of a certain kind of fantasy novel that she’d read as a kid. Oh, in no novel she’d ever read would there have been teams of labourers hauling twelve-yard lengths of timber up on to their shoulders, and then vanishing. But she could testify that on this particular world, the modestly named Long Earth Trading Company was turning a corner of a stepwise Wisconsin into a steampunk theme park.

  And here came the man who was driving it all.

  ‘Sergeant Jansson? Thank you for stepping over to see my little enterprise.’

  Jim Russo was shorter than she was. He wore a crumpled grey suit, and had well-tended hair of a suspiciously vivid brown hue, and a broad grin between cheeks that might or might not have had a little help to stay perky. She knew Russo was forty-five years old, had been declared bankrupt three times before but had always bounced back, and had now mortgaged his own home for seed-corn money for this new inter-world enterprise.

  ‘No need to thank me, sir,’ she said. ‘You know we have a duty to investigate complaints.’

  ‘Ah, yes, more anonymous whining from the hired hands. Well, it’s par for the course.’ He led her over the muddy ground, evidently hoping to impress her with the scale of his operation here. ‘Although I think I would have expected a visit from the Portage PD. That’s the local department.’

  ‘Your registered office is in Madison.’ And besides, ‘Spooky’ Jansson was often called into the more high-profile cases involving Long Earth issues around wider Wisconsin.

  They paused to watch anot
her team of handlers pick a tremendously long-looking log off a heap; a foreman called out a countdown – ‘three, two, one’ – and away they stepped, with a soft implosion.

  ‘You can see this is a busy place, Sergeant Jansson,’ Russo said. ‘We started with nothing, of course. Nothing more than we could carry over, and no iron tools. In the early days the foundries were a high priority, after the sawmills. Now we have a flow of high-quality iron and steel, and soon we’ll be building steam-driven harvesters and collectors, and then you’ll see us rip through these forests like a hot knife through butter. And all this timber is stepped back to the Datum, to waiting fleets of flatbed trucks.’ He brought her to an open-front log cabin that served as a kind of showroom. ‘We’re expanding into a lot of areas other than just raw materials. Look at this.’ It was a kind of shotgun that gleamed like brass. ‘No iron parts at all, meant for the new pioneer market.

  ‘I know the opening up of the Long Earth has knocked us into an economic dip, but that’s short term. The loss of a percentage of the low-grade workforce, a glut of some precious metals – that will pass. Back on Datum Earth the US went from colonial days to the moon in a few centuries. There’s no reason we can’t do the same again, on any number of other Earths. Personally I’m very excited. It’s a new age, Sergeant Jansson, and with products and commodities like these I mean to be in on the ground floor …’

  As did hundreds, thousands of other needy entrepreneur types, Jansson knew. And most of them were younger than Russo, smarter, not yet weighed down by previous failures, in Russo’s case beginning with a comically naive attempt to go mine a stepwise copy of Sutter’s Mill for gold, almost a cliché of a misunderstanding of the economic realities of the new age.

  ‘It’s a problem, isn’t it, Mr Russo, to balance the profit you make against the pressure on your labour force?’

  He smiled easily, prepared for the question. ‘I’m not building pyramids here, Sergeant Jansson. I’m not whipping slaves.’

  But neither was he running a philanthropic foundation, Jansson knew. The workers, mostly young and ill-educated, often had no real idea of what was going on out in the Long Earth before they came out here to work in places like this. As soon as they realized that they could be using their strength to build something for themselves, they tended to start agitating to join one of the new Companies and go trekking off into the deep crosswise to colonize – or else, as it dawned on them that there was an infinity of worlds out there none of which were owned by people like Jim Russo, they simply walked away, into the endless spaces. Some people just seemed to keep walking and walking, living off the land as best they could. Long Earth Syndrome, they called it. And that was where the complaints about Russo were coming from. He was said to be tying his workers up with punitive contracts to keep them from straying, and then going after them with hired muscle if they reneged.

  She had the sudden instinct that this man was going to fail, as he had before. And when it all started going belly-up he was going to be cutting even more corners.

  ‘Mr Russo, we need to get down to the specifics of the complaints against you. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’

  ‘Of course …’

  All over the nearby Earths, Jansson knew, on worlds becoming sweatshops overnight, people were dreaming of escape, of freedom. As she waited for a coffee Jansson spotted a flyer in Russo’s own in-tray, just a page crudely printed on pulpy paper, about the formation of yet another new Company to go trek up West. Dreams of the new frontier, even here in this minor businessman’s office. Sometimes Jansson, nearing forty now, wondered if she should up sticks and go out herself, and leave the Datum and the increasingly murky Low Earths behind.

  14

  DREAMS OF THE Long Earth. Dreams of the frontier. Yes, ten years after Step Day, Jack Green had understood that. Because they had been his wife’s dreams, and Jack had feared they were tearing his family apart.

  January 1. Madison West 5. We came to stay at a lodge here for New Year after Cristmas Christmas at home but we will have to go bak back to the Datum for school. My name is Helen Green. I am elven eleven years old. My mother (Dr Tilda Lang Green) says I should keep a jurnal jorunal journal in this bok book which was a Christmas presnt present from Aunt Meryl because there mite might be no electrics electronics this thing have no spellchecker it drive me CRAYZEE!!!…

  Jack Green carefully turned the pages of his daughter’s journal. It was like a fat paperback book, though with the pulpy graininess of much of the paper produced here in West 5. He was alone in Helen’s room, on a bright Sunday afternoon. Helen was out playing softball in ParkZone Four. Katie was out too, he wasn’t sure where. And Tilda was downstairs talking with a group of the friends and colleagues she had managed to snag into the idea of forming a Company to go West.

  ‘… Empires rise and they fall. Look at Turkey. That was a great empire once and you wouldn’t believe it now…’

  ‘… If you’re middle class you look to the left and see the activists undermining American values, and to the right and you see how free trade has exported our jobs …’

  ‘… We believed in America. Now we seem to be mired in mediocrity, while the Chinese steam ahead…’

  Tilda’s voice: ‘The notion of Manifest Destiny is historically suspect, of course. But you can’t deny the importance of the frontier experience to the making of the American consciousness. Well, now the frontier is opening up again, for our generation and maybe for uncountable generations to follow…’

  The group conversation broke up into a general susurrus of noise, and Jack smelled a rich aroma. Time for coffee and cookies.

  He returned to the diary. At last he came to an entry that mentioned his son. He read on, skimming over the spelling errors and crossings-out.

  March 23. We have moved to our new house in Madison West 5. It will be fun here in the summer. Dad and Mom take it in turns to go back, they have to work on the Datum for the money. And we had to leave Rod again with Auntie Meryl because he is a fobic [she meant phobic, a non-stepper – Jack tripped over that spelling] and can’t step it’s sad I cried this time after we stepped away but Rod didn’t cry unless he did after we had gone. I will write to him in the summer and will go back and see him IT IS SAD because it is fun here in the summer and Rod can’t come…

  ‘Tut tut.’ His wife’s voice. ‘That’s private.’

  He turned, guilty. ‘I know, I know. But we’re going through such changes. I feel the need to know what’s going on in their heads. I think that trumps the privacy thing, just for now.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s your judgement.’ She had brought him a coffee, a brimming mug. She turned and stood by the big picture window, the best in the house, the least flawed pane they could find of the locally manufactured sheet glass. They looked out over Madison West 5, across which the afternoon shadows were just beginning to stretch. She wore her slightly greying strawberry blonde hair cut short, and the graceful curve of her neck was silhouetted against the window. ‘Still a lovely day,’ she said.

  ‘Lovely place, too…’

  ‘Yes. Nearly perfect.’

  Nearly perfect. Under that phrase lurked a real bear trap.

  Madison West 5 sprawled comfortably over essentially the same landscape dominated by its elder brother back on the Datum. But this was a place of grace and light and open spaces, with only a fraction of true Madison’s population. That wasn’t to deny that many of the buildings were massive. The architectural styles that had developed on the Low Easts and Wests were characterized by weight. Raw materials were dirt cheap on the virgin worlds, which meant that buildings and furnishings could often be variations on the theme of slab. Thus the town hall with its cathedral-thick walls, and roof beams laser-cut from whole trees. But there were a lot of electronics and other kinds of smartness around, lightweight and easily imported from the Datum. So you saw little pioneer log cabins with solar paint on the roofs.

  But you could never forget you weren’t on
Earth, not on the Datum. At the perimeter of the city there was a wide system of fences and ditches, designed to keep out some of the more exotic wildlife. The migration of a herd of Columbian mammoths had once caused a rushed suburban evacuation.

  In the first years after Step Day, a lot of couples like Jack and Tilda Green, with careers and kids and savings in the bank, had started looking at the new stepwise worlds with a view to buying a little extra property, a place for their kids to go play. They rapidly found that Madison West 1 was too much of a slave to the Datum, a jumble of hasty extensions to homes and office developments. At first the Greens had rented a small cabin on West 2. But the place soon came to feel like a theme park. Over-organized, too close to home. And the land already belonged to somebody else.

  But then they’d discovered the project to develop Madison West 5, starting from a clean slate, high-tech, eco-friendly from the start, intended to be more than just another city. They’d both been enthused, and had invested a chunk of their savings to get in on the ground floor. Jack and Tilda had contributed a lot to the finalizing of the design, he as a software engineer working on details of the city’s smarts, she as a lecturer in cultural history devising novel forms of local government and community forums. It was only unfortunate that they couldn’t make enough of a living here, and they both had to cut back to the Datum to their regular jobs.

  ‘This is our city. But it’s only “nearly perfect”?’ he said.