The Long Earth (9 page)

Joshua switched off the screen. Another rule: Sister Agnes held it as a matter of faith that all left-on computer screens exploded sooner or later. He sat back in the silence, and thought.

Was Lobsang human, or an AI aping humanity? A smiley, he thought: one curve and two dots, and you see a human face. What was the minimum you needed to
see
a human being? What has to be said, what has to be laughed? After all, people are made of nothing but clay – well, metaphorically, although Joshua was not too good at metaphors, seeing them as a kind of trick. And you had to admit that Lobsang was pretty good at knowing what Joshua was thinking, just as a perceptive human would be. Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.

But … the ends of the Long Earth?

Was there an end? People were saying there must be a whole circle of Earths, because the Stepper box took you either East or West, and everybody believed that East must meet West! But nobody
knew
. Nobody knew what all the other Earths were doing out there in the first place. Perhaps it was time somebody tried to find out.

Joshua looked down at the latest Stepper box he had just finished, using a double-pole, double-throw switch he had bought over the internet. Sitting on the desk beside him it was red and silver and looked very professional, unlike his first box, which had utilized a switch taken off Sister Regina’s elderly stairlift. He had carried a Stepper ever since it had dawned on him that since he did not know how he stepped, the sensible thing would be to carry a Stepper box
anyway
; a talent that had come suddenly and inexplicably might just as easily disappear the same way. And besides, a box was cover. He didn’t want to stand out from the stepping crowd.

Turning the box over in his hands, Joshua wondered if Lobsang realized what was the most interesting thing about Stepper-box construction. He’d noticed it on Step Day, and it was obvious when you thought about it; it was a strange little detail nobody seemed to think was important. Joshua always thought that details were important. Officer Jansson noticed details like this. It had to do with following the instructions. A Stepper would only work for you if you built it yourself, or at least finished its assembly.

He drummed his fingers on the box. He could go with Lobsang, or not. Joshua was twenty-eight years old; he didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission. But he did have the damn congressional review hanging over him.

And he always liked the idea of being out of reach.

Despite Jansson’s promises all those years ago, the bad guys had got to him once or twice. There had been that trouble not long after Step Day, when men with badges had pushed their way into the Home and tried to send him to sleep so they could take him away, and Sister Agnes had laid one of them out with a tyre iron, and pretty soon the cops were called, and that meant Officer Jansson showed up, and then the mayor had got involved, and it turned out that one of the kids who were helped by Joshua on Step Day had been his son, and that had been that, the three black anonymous cars had hightailed it out of town … That was when
the
rule was laid down that if anyone wanted to talk to Joshua then they had to talk to Officer Jansson first. Joshua was not the problem, the mayor had said. The problem was crime and escapes from jails and no security left in the world. Joshua, the city council was told, was perhaps a little strange, but also marvellously gifted and, as was testified by Officer Jansson, had already been of great help to the Madison police department. That was the official position.

But that wasn’t always much comfort to Joshua himself, who hated being
looked at
. Who hated the fact that a growing number of people
knew he was different
, whether they thought he was a Problem or not.

In recent years Joshua had stepped alone, going further and further into the Long Earth, far beyond the Robinson Crusoe stockades he’d built as a teenager, out to worlds so remote he didn’t have to worry about the crazies, even the crazies with badges and warrants. And when they did come he just stepped away again; by the time they had finished throwing up Joshua could be a hundred worlds away. Though sometimes he stepped back to tie their bootlaces together while they barfed. You had to have something to entertain yourself. Longer and longer jaunts, further and further away. He called these his sabbaticals. A way of getting away from the crowds – and from the odd pressure in his head when he was back on Datum Earth, or even the Low Earths nowadays. A pressure that got in the way of listening to the Silence.

So he was strange. But the Sisters said that the whole world was getting stranger. Sister Georgina had told him as much, in her polite English accent. ‘Joshua, you may be just a little ahead of the rest of the human race. I imagine the first
Homo sapiens
felt the way you do when you look at the rest of us with our Stepper boxes and our vomiting. Like
H. sap
. wondering why the other chaps take such a long time to string two syllables together.’ But Joshua wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of being different, even if it was different in a superior sort of way.

Still, he liked Sister Georgina almost as much as Sister Agnes. Sister Georgina read Keats and Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson to him. Sister Georgina had studied at Cambridge or, as she put it, ‘Not-the-one-in-Massachusetts-Cambridge-Universitythe-real-one-you-know-in-England.’ Sometimes it occurred to Joshua that the nuns who ran the Home were not like the ones that he saw on television. When he asked Sister Georgina about that she laughed and said, ‘Maybe it’s because we are just like you, Joshua. We’re here because we didn’t quite fit anywhere else.’ He was going to miss them all, he realized, when he went travelling with Lobsang.

Somehow the decision had made itself.

12

A WEEK AFTER
his interview at transEarth Sister Agnes took Joshua to Dane County Regional Airport on the back of her Harley, a rare honour. He would always remember her saying as they arrived that God must have wanted him to catch that plane, because every stop light they encountered turned to green just before she needed to slow. (In so far as Sister Agnes ever did slow.) Joshua, however, suspected that the subroutines of Lobsang were responsible for this, rather than the hand of God.

Joshua had walked on countless Earths, but he had never actually flown before. Sister Agnes knew the routine, and she marched him to the check-in desk. Once the clerk had entered his booking reference he went very quiet, and picked up the phone, and Joshua began to realize what it meant to have a friend in Lobsang, as he was whisked away from the lines of passengers and led along corridors with the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

He was brought to a room with a bar the length of the burger counter in Disney World. Impressive though this was, Joshua didn’t often drink, and would actually have preferred a burger. When he mentioned this jokily to the young man who was nervously dancing attendance on him, he received, after only minutes, a perfect burger so stuffed with trimmings that the patty could have fallen out and not been missed. Joshua was still digesting
this
when the young man reappeared and led him to the plane.

His seat was right behind the flight deck, and discreetly hidden from the other travellers by a velvet curtain. No one had asked to see his passport, which he didn’t have in any case. No one bothered to check whether he was carrying explosives in his shoes. And nobody, once he was on the flight, spoke to him. He watched a news summary in peace.

At Chicago O’Hare he was taken to another plane some way from the main terminal, a surprisingly small craft. Within, what wasn’t leather-upholstered was carpeted, and what wasn’t leather-upholstered or carpeted seemed to consist of the dazzling teeth of a young woman who, as he sat down, provided him with a Coke and a telephone. He tucked his small personal pack under the seat before him, where he could see it. Then he turned on the phone.

Lobsang called immediately. ‘Good to have you on board, Joshua! How are you enjoying the journey so far? The plane is all yours today. You will find a master bedroom behind you which I’m told is exceedingly comfortable, and don’t hesitate to take advantage of the shower room.’

‘It’s going to be a long journey, is it?’

‘I’ll be meeting you in Siberia, Joshua. A Black Corporation skunk works. You know what that means?’

‘A facility that’s off the radar.’ Where, he wondered, they were building
what
?

‘Right. Oh, didn’t I mention Siberia?’

There was a sound of engines starting.

‘You’ve a human pilot, incidentally. People seem to like a warm uniformed body at the controls. But don’t be alarmed. In a real sense
I
am the controls.’

Joshua sat back in the luxurious seat and put his thoughts in order. It occurred to him that Lobsang was full of himself, as the Sisters would have said. But maybe he had a lot of himself to be full of. Here was Joshua cocooned
in
Lobsang, in a sense. Joshua wasn’t
big
on computers, and the marvellously interconnected electronic civilization of which they were part. Out in the stepwise worlds you never got a cellphone signal, after all, so the only thing that counted was
you
, and what you knew, and what you could do. With his prized knife of hardened glass he could keep himself alive, no matter what was thrown at him. He kind of liked that. Maybe there was going to be some tension with Lobsang over that – or with however much of Lobsang was ported along for the ride.

The plane took off, making about as much noise as would Sister Agnes’s sewing machine in an adjacent room. During the flight Joshua watched the first episode of
Star Wars
, sipping gin and tonic, wallowing in boyhood nostalgia. Then he took a shower – he didn’t need one but just for the hell of it – and tried the enormous bed, whereupon the young lady followed him in and asked him a couple of times if there was anything else he wanted, and seemed disappointed when he only asked for a glass of warm milk.

Some time later he awoke to find the attendant trying to strap him in. He pushed her away; he hated being restrained. She remonstrated with the sugar-coated steeliness bequeathed by her training, until a phone chimed. Then: ‘I do apologize, sir. It would appear that the safety rules have been temporarily suspended.’

He had expected Siberia to be flat, windy, cold. But this was summer, and the plane descended towards a landscape where gentle hills were coated with dark shoots of grass, and wildflowers and butterflies were splashes of colour, red, yellow and blue. Siberia was unexpectedly beautiful.

The jet did not so much touch down as kiss the tarmac.

The phone rang. ‘Welcome to No Such Place, Joshua. I do hope you’ll fly with No Such Airlines in the future. You will find thermal underwear and appropriate outdoor clothing in the wardrobe just inside the door.’

Joshua refused, with a red face, the attendant’s suggestion that she should help him on with the thermal underwear. However, he
did
accept the offer of her assistance with the bulky outer clothing, which he thought made him look like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but was surprisingly light.

He climbed down from the plane to join a group of men dressed as he was. Joshua immediately began to sweat in the mild air. One man grinned, called ‘West!’ to Joshua in a distinctly Bostonian accent, pressed a switch on the box strapped to his belt, and vanished. A moment later his companions began to follow.

Joshua stepped West, and arrived in an almost identical landscape – save that he emerged into a blizzard and realized why he needed the winter gear. There was a small shack near by, with the Bostonian beckoning to him from a half-open door. It looked like a halfway house, a travellers’ rest stop of the kind becoming common in the stepwise worlds. But it was utilitarian, just a place out of the wind where a man could upchuck in something like comfort before stepping on.

The Bostonian, looking queasy, shut the door behind Joshua. ‘You really are him, aren’t you? Feeling fine, are you? I don’t suffer from it too bad myself, but …’ He waved a hand.

Joshua looked towards the back of the shack where two men were lying face down over the edge of narrow beds, each with a bucket under his face; the smell told it all.

‘Look, if you really feel OK, go on ahead. You’re the VIP here. You don’t have to wait for us. You need to take three more steps West. There are rest stations in each one – but I guess you won’t need them … Are you for real? I mean, how do you do it?’

Joshua shrugged again. ‘Don’t know. Kind of a knack, I guess.’

The Bostonian opened the door. ‘Hey, before you go, we like to say here: you’re stepping, wait for it, on the steppe!’ When Joshua tried but failed to summon up a laugh the Bostonian said apologetically, ‘You can imagine we don’t get too many visitors here. Best of luck, fella.’

The three further steps brought him out into rain. There was another shack near by, and another pair of workers, one of them a woman, who shook him by the hand. ‘Good to see you, sir.’ Her accent was richly Russian. ‘Do you like our weather? Siberia’s two degrees warmer in this world, and nobody knows why. I must wait a while for the rest of the gang, but you can just follow the yellow brick road.’ She pointed to a line of orange markers on sticks. ‘It’s a short walk to the construction site.’

‘Construction? Construction of what?’

‘Believe me, you won’t miss it.’

He didn’t, because he couldn’t. Acres of pine woodland had been cleared, and hovering over a circle of denuded land was what looked at first glance like a floating building. Floating, yes; through the rain he made out tethering wires. It was vast, an aerial whale. The partially inflated body was a bag of some toughened fibre plastered with transEarth logos, over a gondola like an Art Deco fantasy, several decks deep, all polished wood and portholes and plate glass.