The Long Earth Read online

  ‘Uh huh. We’re living in a dream, but it’s somebody else’s dream. I want my own dream.’

  ‘But our son the phobic—’

  ‘Don’t use that word.’

  ‘Well, it’s what people say, Tilda. He won’t be able to share that dream.’

  She sipped her coffee. ‘We have to think about what’s best for all of us. For Katie and Helen too, as well as Rod – we can’t be tied down by that. It’s a unique moment, Jack. Just now, under the aegis rules and the new Homestead Acts, the government is practically giving away the land in the stepwise Americas. That’s a window that’s not going to stay open for ever.’

  Jack grunted. ‘It’s all ideology.’ The New Frontier: that was the slogan, borrowed from an old John F. Kennedy election pitch. The federal government was encouraging emigration to the new worlds by Americans, and indeed by others, the sole understanding being that under the American aegis you would obey American laws, and pay American taxes: you would be an American. ‘The federal government just wants to make sure all those stepwise versions of the US are colonized by us before somebody else moves in.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. The same sort of impulse drove the expansion west in the nineteenth century. Of course it’s intellectually interesting that most Americans choose to go West, even though that’s just an arbitrary label with no reference to geographical west. Similarly I heard that most Chinese emigrants are heading East …’

  ‘Christ, the journey itself takes months. All for a chance to dump the kids in an uncivilized wilderness. And what use is a software engineer going to be out there? Or a lecturer in cultural history, come to that.’

  She smiled fondly. It was infuriating; he could see she wasn’t taking him remotely seriously. ‘Whatever we need to know, we’ll learn.’ She put down her coffee and slipped her arms around him. ‘I think we need to do this, Jack. It’s our chance. Our generation. Our kids’ chance.’

  Our kids, he thought. All save poor Rod. Here was his wife, one of the most intelligent people he’d ever met, her head full of idealism about the future of America and mankind, and yet contemplating abandoning her own son. He rested his cheek on her greying hair, and wondered if he would ever understand her.

  15

  DREAMS OF THE Long Earth, all across the old world. Some dreams were new, and at the same time very, very old…

  The mates sat near the car, deep in the bush, drinking beer and pondering the changing world, and the stepping boxes they had all made that were resting on the red sand. Overhead, the central Australian sky was so full of stars that some had to wait their turn to twinkle.

  After a while one of them said gloomily, ‘Something clawed Jimbo’s guts out, left him looking like a dugout canoe. You know that, don’t you? It ain’t no joke! A cop went in there too! He came out with his face off!’

  Billy, who tended not to speak until he had thought for a while, like maybe a week, said, ‘It’s dreamtime stuff, mate, like it was before the ancestors came here. Don’t you remember what that scientist bloke told us, one time? They dug up the bones of big, big animals all over the bloody place, as big as you like! Big, slow food, but with big, big teeth. All these new worlds under the same sky! And no people to be seen in any of them, right? Like this world before it was buggered up! Just think what we could do if we got out there!’

  Somebody opposite the fire said, ‘Yeah, mate, we could bugger it up all over again. And I like my head with a face on it!’

  There was laughter. But Albert said, ‘Know what happened? Our ancestors bloody well killed them all, ate them up. They wiped out everything except what we got now. But we don’t have to do that, right? They say the world out there is just like here, except no men, no women, no policemen, no cities, no guns, just the land over and over again. The waterhole here is the waterhole there, all ready and waiting for us!’

  ‘No, it isn’t. The waterhole’s half a mile over there.’

  ‘Near enough, you know what I mean. Why don’t we give it a go, boys?’

  ‘Yeah, but this is our country. This one right here.’

  Albert leaned forward, eyes sparkling. ‘Yes, but you know what? So are those others! All of them! I heard the scientist guys talking. Every rock, every stone, all there. It’s true!’

  In the morning, the little group, slightly hungover, tossed coins to select the one who would give it a go.

  Billy came back half an hour later, retching horribly, arriving out of nowhere. They picked him up and gave him water, and waited. He opened his eyes and said, ‘It’s true, but it’s bloody raining over there, mates!’

  They looked at one another.

  Somebody said, ‘Yeah, but what about all those creatures I’ve heard about, back in the old time? Roos with teeth! Bloody big ones! Big creatures with claws!’

  There was silence. Then Albert said, ‘Well, ain’t we as good as our ancestors? They saw off these buggers. Why can’t we?’

  There was a shuffling of feet.

  Finally Albert said, ‘Look, tomorrow, I’m going over for good. Who’s with me? It’s all there, mates. It’s all been left there waiting for us, since the beginning…’

  By the end of the next day the songlines had begun to expand, as the never-never began to become the ever-ever. Although sometimes the blokes came back for a beer.

  Later, there were towns, unfamiliar towns admittedly, and new ways of living, a mix of past and present, as old ways were seamlessly woven into new ones. The eating was good, too.

  And later still, surveys showed that in the great post–Step Day migration a greater proportion of Australian Aborigines left Datum Earth for good than any other ethnic group on the planet.

  16

  Excerpts from the Journal of Helen Green, resceptfully respectfully spellchecked by Dad, aka Mr J. Green:

  Here is the story

  of how the Green family

  walked across the Long Earth

  to our new home.

  February 11, 2026. We rode on a helicopter, yay! We are going to start out from Richmond West 10, that’s Richmond Virgina Virginia, because you have to trek from south of all the ice in the Ice Age worlds, and we went back to the Datum and we rode to Richmond on a helicopter!! But we had to say goodbye to Rod at Chicago airport and that was sad sad…

  Jack Green had always had to do plenty of travelling in the course of his work in software, and in recent years travel had become a lot more interesting. Everybody made their long geographical trips on the Datum, with its elaborate transport networks. A Stepper would take you a thousand worlds stepwise but it wouldn’t give you a foot of lateral movement. So transport had become one of the few boom elements in the Datum’s slumping post-step economy. The Datum, in fact, was starting to look like the crossroads of the Long Earth.

  And so you never knew who you might meet at the next rail station. Pioneer types, come back to buy a new set of bronze tools and to have their teeth fixed. High-tech hippies, trading goat cheese for mastitis cream. Once, a woman dressed like Pocahontas blissfully clutching a white wedding dress in a cellophane cover, and there was a whole short story just in her smile. People with new ways of living all jumbled up together in the Datum, at least for the duration of their journeys.

  So for this last trip down to Richmond, Jack and Tilda had decided to treat the girls to a helicopter hop. In the future they would be riding in ox-drawn carts and dug-out canoes; why not let them enjoy a little high technology while they could?

  Besides, it had distracted them from the distressing scene at the helipad where they had to say goodbye to Rod. Meryl, Tilda’s sister, was willing to take the boy, but she didn’t bother to hide her disapproval of how the family was being split up. And Rod, only thirteen years old, was blank. Jack suspected they had all been relieved when the chopper had finally lifted; he saw that small face upturned, the short-cut strawberry blond hair so like his mother’s, and they were on their way, the girls shrieking with delight.

  Richmond
West 10 was making a living as the mustering point for treks heading for stepwise editions of the eastern United States, including Tilda’s Company. Jack had had no idea what to expect.

  He found himself standing in a bare earth street, in a grid pattern of houses built of heavy logs, clapboard, even lumps of sod. Hand-painted signs told him that the buildings on the main street included churches, banks, inns, hotels, stores offering food, clothing, and other essentials for the treks that began here. The Stars and Stripes fluttered from poles and rooftops, with a few Confederacy flags in amongst them. The place bustled with people, some of them clean-looking newcomers wearing bright artificial fabrics like the Greens, but most in worn-looking ‘frontier’ gear – much-patched jackets and trousers, even coats and cloaks of hand-cut leather. It all aped former times when Datum Richmond itself had been a trading post for furs, hides and tobacco, on the edge of an empty continent.

  It was like a movie set for some old-fashioned western. Jack felt utterly out of place. He rubbed his stomach, willing away the stepping nausea.

  The Prairie Marble Inn turned out to be named after what it was mostly built from – ‘prairie marble’, sod piled up around a wooden frame. It was gloomy, dank, but a big place, and heavily occupied. The woman behind the counter said the rest of their party was gathering in the ‘ballroom’, which was a barn with rough-hewn wooden furniture set out on a rag carpet. It was pretty full, with maybe a hundred people, mostly adults, a few children and infants. One man was speaking, a boisterous fellow with a spectacular mane of grey-blond hair. He was delivering some kind of lecture about the need for rotas. A few of the others turned to the newcomers, warily, some half-smiling.

  Tilda smiled back. ‘Most of these are people I dealt with online when we set all this up. Never met them in person before …’

  These, Jack reflected, might be the people he would be spending the rest of his life with. Total strangers. Jack had left it all to Tilda, but he understood that it took some skill to assemble a viable Company for a trek. You had your professional captains to lead you, along with scouts, guides, porters; they were relatively easy to find and hire. But the core of the party were the people who would be settling together a hundred thousand worlds away. You needed complementary skill types: tailors, carpenters, coopers, smiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, weavers, furniture makers. Doctors, of course – a dentist if you could find one. Tilda, after being rejected by the first Companies she had approached, had retrained herself, packaging herself as a teacher and historian. Jack had gone for basic farming skills – he felt he was physically fit enough for that – and for backup medical competences.

  It struck Jack, on this first glance at his new companions, that they were mostly like him and Tilda. A mix of ethnicities, but they all looked prosperous enough, earnest, a little anxious – middleclass types setting off into the unknown. That was the classic profile of the Long Earth pioneer, just as, according to Tilda, it had been in the Old West. The very rich wouldn’t travel, for they were too comfortable back on the Datum to give it all up. And nor would the very poor, at least not in an organized party like this, for they didn’t have the means to pay for the trek itself. No, it was the middle classes who were heading off into the far West, especially those distressed in difficult economic times.

  The blowhard on his feet was called Reese Henry, Jack gathered, some kind of salesman, a survivalist in his spare time. He had moved on from latrine rotas. ‘Once again young Americans are going out into the wild, to places where the streetlights do not shine, where there isn’t a cop at the other end of a cellphone connection. Urbanized, online, civilized, pampered and preened – and now pitched back into nature in the raw.’ He grinned. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to reality.’

  17

  RICHMOND WEST 10’s only bookseller exulted with every sale he made to the would-be pioneers who passed through here. Books, printed on paper, every one of them! Dead tree technology! Information that, if carefully stored, would last for millennia! And no batteries required. It ought to be on a billboard, he thought.

  If Humphrey Llewellyn III could have his way, every book ever written would be treasured, at least one copy bound in sheepskin and illuminated by monks (or specifically by naked nuns, his predilection being somewhat biased in that direction). So now, he hoped, here was a chance to bring mankind back into the book-loving fold. He gloated. There was still no electronics in the pioneer worlds, was there? Where was your internet? Hah! Where was Google? Where was your mother’s old Kindle? Your iPad 25? Where was Wickedpedia? (Very primly, he always called it that, just to show his disdain; very few people noticed.) All gone, unbelievers! All those fancy toy-gadgets stuffed in drawers, screens blank as the eyes of corpses, left behind.

  Books – oh yes, real books – were flying off his shelves. Out in the Long Earth humanity was starting again in the Stone Age. It needed to know the old ways. It needed to know what to eat and what not to eat. It needed to know how to build an outdoor privy, and how to manure fields with human and animal waste in safe proportions. It needed to know about wells. About shoemaking! Yes, it had to know how to find iron ore, but also how to work graphite, and how to make ink. And so Humphrey’s presses ran hot, with geological maps and surveys and commonplace books and almanacs, reclaiming the knowledge that had been all but lost to the printed page.

  He stroked a polished-leather volume. Oh, sooner or later all that knowledge once more would be precariously imprisoned by electricity. But for now the books had been patient long enough, and their time had come again.

  In another part of Richmond West 10, meanwhile, there was a kind of labour market, where Companies tried to find recruits to fill the remaining gaps. Franklin Tallyman carefully pushed his way through the crowd, holding his sign above his head. It was a hot day and he wished he had drunk more water.

  He was approached by a small party led by a middle-aged man. ‘You are Mr Tallyman, the blacksmith? We saw your résumé at the Prairie Marble Inn.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, sir, that’s me.’

  ‘We’re looking to complete our Company.’ The man stuck out a hand. ‘The name’s Green, Jack Green. This gentleman is Mr Batson, our Captain. Tallyman, isn’t that a Caribbean name?’

  ‘No, sir, it’s a Caribbean job description, as far as I know. I could be wrong. I’ve never been there; I was born in Birmingham. In England, not in Alabama. The original and best.’ He got back blank looks. ‘So you have looked at my résumé?’

  An anxious-looking woman asked, ‘You really can do all you say? Make bronze? Does anyone do that these days?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Back on West 1 I spent four years as apprentice to smiths who knew their stuff. As for iron, starting from scratch, all I need is the ore. I can make my own forge, I can make my own furnace, I can draw wires. By the way I’m a fair electrician; give me a waterwheel and I can fit up your colony with electricity. Oh, and weapons: I can knock up a decent musket – it couldn’t compete with a modern design, but good enough for hunting.

  ‘The engagement I’m looking for is three years.’ He was warming to his pitch now. ‘Under the aegis regulations I will have American citizenship by the end of the third year. You, ladies and gentlemen, will be way ahead of the curve.’ He held out his notebook, opened at a page. ‘And this is what you will pay me, please.’

  There was a gasp from the would-be citizens of the New Frontier. Eventually Green said, ‘Is this negotiable?’

  ‘Only upwards, I’m afraid. You can make a deposit in Pioneer Support. Oh, if you want me to train up an apprentice then that will be extra, on account of they would be more of a hindrance than a help.’

  He smiled before their doubtful faces. It wasn’t the moment for a hard sell, he decided. They looked a decent bunch, just folk keen to step Westward with a group of like-minded individuals, looking for a place to spread out, a place where you could trust your neighbours, in a world where the air was clean and you could start over in search of a better future.
It was the dream, it had always been the dream. Even their kids looked bright as buttons.

  ‘Look, Mr Green, I’ve done my homework too. I’ve seen your Company’s prospectus and I can see that a lot of thought has gone into your venture. You’ve got your medic, your carpenter, you’ve got a chemist. I like your style. Yours won’t be the only offer I could get today, but you guys appear to be a solid bunch with your heads screwed on right. I’m with you if you want me. Do we have a deal?’

  They had a deal.

  That night Franklin packed his bags and his non-ferrous toolbox for the journey. Now all he had to do was to make sure he kept his secret for the duration of the trek, and that meant making sure he didn’t try to step without a potato in his Stepper.

  He had heard about natural steppers on the net. Then, back in West 1, just for the hell of it, one night he’d tried to step with the potato out of the box, a box without power. He was amazed when it worked. Oddly enough, he still needed the box, to throw the switch. He needed to hear the click to be able to step, it seemed; how weird was that?

  Yes, he’d heard rumours about people like him. And other rumours, about beatings of such people. Like you were a freak, or unnatural. So he’d keep himself to himself on the trek, and replace the potato, and fake the nausea, and all the rest. It wasn’t so hard when you got the habit.

  Although you did start to wonder how many of those around you were similarly faking too.

  He slept well that night, dreaming of hot forges and distant hills.

  18

  DAY THREE (since Richmond West 10).

  Three days already! But Captain Batson says it is going to take us a hundred days to cross the Ice Belt. And then we’ll take months more to cross the Mine Belt, whatever that is. We have to get to where we’re going before winter comes. And winter comes the same on all the worlds.