The Long Earth (6 page)

Of course you didn’t want to become prey of anything yourself – but prey of what? There were animals that could take you down, certainly. Lynxes, dog-sized cats that stared at you and ran off in search of easier targets. Cougars, animals the size of German shepherds with faces that were the essence of cat. Once he saw a cougar bring down a deer, jumping on its back and biting into the carotid. Further out he’d glimpsed wolves, and more exotic animals – a thing like a huge beaver, and a sloth, heavy and stupid, that made him laugh. All these animals, he supposed, had existed
in
Datum Madison before humans came along, and now were mostly extinct. None of these creatures of the stepwise worlds had ever seen a human before, and even ferocious hunters tended to be wary of the unknown. Mosquitoes were more trouble than wolves, in fact.

In those early days Joshua had never stayed long, only a few nights at a time. Sometimes he perversely wished his stepping ability would switch off, so he’d be stuck out there, and see how he survived. When he came home Sister Agnes would ask him, ‘Don’t you find it lonely and frightening out there?’ But it hadn’t been lonely enough. And what was there to be frightened of? You might as well have said somebody who had stuck their toe into the water on a Pacific beach should be frightened of all that ocean.

Besides, pretty soon, in the Low Earths you couldn’t move for trippers, coming to see what it was all about. Steely-eyed folk, some of them, with serious shorts and determined knees, striding across this new territory, or at least getting tangled in the underbrush. Folk with questions like, ‘Whose land is this? Are we still in Wisconsin? Is this even the United States?’

Worst of all were the ones fleeing from the wrath of God, or maybe looking for it. There was an awful lot of that. Was the Long Earth a sign of the End of Days? Of the destruction of the old world, and a new world made ready for the chosen people? Too many people wanted to be among the chosen, and too many people thought that God would provide, in these paradisiacal worlds. God provided in abundance, it was true, vast amounts of food that you could see running around. But God also helped those who helped themselves, and presumably expected the chosen to bring warm clothing, water purification tablets, basic medication, a weapon such as the bronze knives that were selling so well these days, possibly a tent – in short, to bring some common sense to the party. And if you didn’t, and if you were lucky, it would only be the mosquitoes that got you.
Only
. In Joshua’s opinion, if you wanted to extend the biblical metaphor, then this apocalypse had
four
horsemen of its own, their names being Greed, Failing to Follow the Rules, Confusion and Miscellaneous Abrasions. Joshua had got sick of having to save the Saved.

He was soon sick of them all, actually. How did these people have the right to trample all over
his
secret places?

Worse yet, they got in the way of the Silence. He was already calling it that. They drowned out the calmness. Drowned out that distant, deep presence behind the clutter of the worlds, a presence he seemed to have been aware of all his life, and had recognized as soon as he was far enough away from the Datum to be able to hear it. He started resenting every tanned hiker, every nosy kid, and the racket they made.

Yet he felt compelled to help all these people he despised, and he got confused about that. He also got confused about having to spend so much time alone, and the fact that he
liked
it. Which was why he broached the subject with Sister Agnes.

Sister Agnes was definitely religious, in a weird kind of way. At the Home, Sister Agnes had two pictures on the walls of her cramped room: one of them was of the Sacred Heart, the other was of Meat Loaf. And she played old Jim Steinman records far too loudly for the other Sisters. Joshua didn’t know much about bikes, but Sister Agnes’s Harley looked so old that St Paul had probably once ridden in the sidecar. Sometimes extremely hairy bikers made interstate pilgrimages to her garage at the Home on Allied Drive. She gave them coffee, and made sure they kept their hands
off
the paintwork.

All the kids liked her, and she liked them, but especially Joshua, and especially after he had done a dream of a paint job on her Harley, including the slogan ‘Bat Into Heaven’ painstakingly delineated on the gas tank in a wonderful italic script that he had found in a book from the library. After that, in her eyes, Joshua could do no wrong, and she allowed him to use her tools any time he liked.

If there was anyone he could trust, it was Sister Agnes. And with her, if he’d been away too long, his usual taciturn reserve sometimes turned into a flood of words, like a dam breaking, and everything that needed saying got said, all in a rush.

So he’d told her about what it was like to have to keep on saving the lost and the silly and the unpleasant, and the way they stared, and the way they said, ‘You are him, aren’t you? The kid who can step without having to spend fifteen minutes feeling like dog shit.’ He never knew
how
they knew, but the news got out somehow, for all Officer Jansson’s assurances. And that made him different, and being different made him a Problem. Which was a bad thing, and you couldn’t forget that, even here in Sister Agnes’s study. Because just above those two pictures of the Sacred Heart and Meat Loaf, there was a little statue of a man who’d been nailed to a cross because He’d been a Problem.

She had said that it seemed to her that he might be trapped in a vocation, not unlike her own. She knew how difficult it was to make people understand what they didn’t want to understand, for instance when she insisted that ‘For Crying Out Loud’ was one of the holiest songs that had ever been recorded. She told him to follow his heart, and also to come and go whenever he liked, because the Home
was
his home.

And she said that he could trust Officer Jansson, a good policewoman and a good Steinman fan (inserting ‘Steinman fan’ into the conversation at the point where another nun might have used the word ‘Catholic’), who had been to see Sister Agnes, and had asked if she could meet Joshua, and ask for his help.

9

MEANWHILE, SIX MONTHS
after Step Day, Monica Jansson’s own career path had taken a decisive knight’s-move sideways.

She had stood outside the Madison PD South District building, braced, slid the switch on her Stepper, and received the usual punch in the gut, as the station vanished to be replaced by tall trees, green shade. In a clearing cut into this scrap of primeval forest was a small wooden shack with the MPD crest on the door, and a low bench outside, and a Stars and Stripes hanging from a stripped sapling. Jansson sat on the bench, folded over, nursing the nausea. The bench was put here precisely to allow you to recover from the stepping before you had to face your fellow officers.

Since Step Day, things had moved on quickly. The techs had come up with a police-issue Stepper, robust components in a sleek black plastic case, resistant even to a close-range gunshot. Of course, as with all Steppers – just as she’d found at the start with Linsay’s prototype – to make it work for you, you had to finish the assembly of the working components yourself. It was a nice piece of kit, although you had to ignore the jokes about the potatoes needed to run it. ‘Do you want fries with that, Officer?’ Ha ha.

But nobody had been able to do anything about the nausea that incapacitated most people for ten or fifteen minutes after a step. There was a drug that was supposed to help, but Jansson always tried to avoid becoming dependent on drugs, and besides it turned your piss blue.

When the dizziness and nausea started to subside, she stood up.
The
day, in Madison West 1 anyhow, was still and cold, sunless but rainless. This stepwise world was still much as it had been the first time she’d stepped here, from out of the ruin of Willis Linsay’s house: the rustle of leaves, the clean air, the birdsong. But it was changing, bit by bit, as clearings were nibbled into the forest and the prairie flowers were cut back: householders ‘extending’ their properties, entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to exploit a world of high-quality lumber and exotic wildlife, official presences like the MPD establishing a foothold in world-next-door annexes to their principal buildings. Already, it was said, there was smoky smog on very still days. Jansson wondered how long it would be before she would see airplane contrails in that empty sky.

She wondered where Joshua Valienté was, right now. Joshua, her own guilty secret.

She was almost late for her appointment with Clichy.

Inside the shack, the smell of long-brewed coffee was strong.

There were two officers here, Lieutenant Clichy behind his desk staring into a laptop – customized and non-ferrous – and a junior patrol officer called Mike Christopher who was painstakingly handwriting some kind of report in a big ledger of lined yellow paper. Still largely without electronic support, all over the country cops were having to learn to write legibly again, or as legibly as they ever had.

Clichy waved at her, without taking his eyes from the laptop. ‘Coffee, seat.’

She fetched a mug of coffee so thick she thought it would dissolve the bronze spoon she used to stir it, and sat on a rough-hewn handmade chair across the desk. Jack Clichy was a squat, stout man with a face like a piece of worn-out luggage. She had to smile at him. ‘You look right at home, Lieutenant.’

He eyed her. ‘Don’t shit me, Jansson. What am I, Davy Crockett? Listen, I grew up in Brooklyn. To me, downtown Madison is the wild west.
This
is a freaking theme park.’

‘Why do you want to see me, sir?’

‘Strategy, Jansson. We’re being asked to contribute to a statewide report on how we’re intending to deal with this contingency of the extra Earths. Our plans in the short, medium and long term. A version will go up to federal level too. And the chief is bearing down on me because, as he points out, we don’t
have
any plans, either short, medium or long term. So far we’ve just been reacting to events.’

‘And that’s why I’m here?’

‘Let me find the files …’ He tapped at the keyboard.

Christopher’s radio crackled, and he murmured in response. Cellphones wouldn’t work over here, of course. Conventional radio transmitters and receivers were OK so long as they were customized to exclude iron components, so they could be carried over intact. There was talk of laying down some kind of network of old-fashioned phone lines, copper wire.

‘Here we go.’ Clichy swivelled the laptop so that Jansson could see the screen. ‘I got case logs here, snippets of video. I’m trying to make sense of it all. Your name kept on coming up, Jansson, which is why I called you in.’

She saw links to her reports on the fire at the Linsay residence, the first-night panic over the missing teenagers.

‘So we had a tough first few days. Those missing kids, and the ones that came back with broken bones from falling through high-rise buildings, or with chunks bitten out of them by some critter or other. Prison escapes. A wave of absenteeism, from the schools, businesses, the public services. The economy took an immediate hit, nationwide, even globally. Did you know that? I’m told it was like an extra Thanksgiving break, before the assholes drifted back to work, or most of them …’

Jansson nodded. Most of those first-day Steppers had come quickly back. Some had not. The poor tended to be more likely to stay away; rich people had more to give up back in Datum. So, out of cities like Mumbai and Lagos, even a few American cities, flocks
of
street kids had stepped, bewildered, unequipped, into wild worlds, but worlds that didn’t already belong to somebody else, so why shouldn’t they belong to you? The American Red Cross and other agencies had sent care teams after them, to sort out the
Lord of the Flies
chaos that followed.

That was the main thing about the Long Earth, in Jansson’s mind. Joshua Valienté’s behaviour had shown it right from the beginning. It offered
room
. It offered you a place to escape – a place to run, endlessly as far as anybody knew. All over the world there was a trickle of people just walking away, with no plan, no preparation, just walking off into the green. And back home there were already reports of problems with the desolate, resentful minority who found they couldn’t step at all, no matter how fancy their Steppers.

Lieutenant Clichy’s priority, of course, was the way the new worlds were being used against Datum Earth.

‘Look at the log,’ he said. ‘After a few days people start to figure out this shit, and we get more calculated crimes. Elaborate burglaries. A rash of suicide bombers in the big cities. And the Brewer assassination, or the attempt. Which is where your name started to get flagged up, Officer Jansson.’

Jansson remembered. Mel Brewer was the estranged wife of a drug baron, who had cut a deal with the DA to testify against her husband, and was headed for witness protection. She barely escaped the first attempt on her life by a stepping assassin. It had been Jansson who had come up with the idea of stashing her in a cellar. On the stepwise worlds, West 1 and East 1, the space the cellar occupied was solid ground, so you couldn’t step straight in. You’d either have to dig a parallel hole, or else come in at ground level and fight your way down. Either way, the element of surprise was lost. By the following morning the belowground facilities in all the police stations, even in the Capitol building, were being fitted out as refuges.

‘You weren’t the only one to figure that out, Jansson. But you
were
among
the first, even nationally. I hear the President herself sleeps in some bunker under the White House now.’

‘Glad to hear it, sir.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Then it started getting more exotic.’

‘Odd to hear you using that term without the word “dancer” attached to it, sir.’

‘Don’t push it, Jansson.’ He showed her reports of various religious nuts. Apocalypse-minded types had gone flooding into the ‘new Edens’, believing their sudden ‘appearance’ was a sign of the End of Days. One Christian sect believed Christ must have survived the crucifixion and stepped out of the tomb by the time His disciples came looking for His body – and, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude, He was probably still out there in the Long Earth somewhere. All this presented public order challenges for the police.