‘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
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 Valiente 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.
‘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
‘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
That was the main thing about the Long Earth, in Jansson’s mind. Joshua Valiente’s behaviour had shown it right from the beginning. It offered
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
‘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
