The Long Earth

Wyoming, to figure out what it was all for.

She’d never been indecisive. She made a random choice of direction, grinned, and stepped. Around her, the lake, the clumps of trees persisted. But the footpath, the rowboats, the idiot on the windsurfer had gone.

8

PEOPLE HAD GONE OFF every which way in those early days, with a purpose or just for the hell of it. But nobody had gone further than Joshua.

In those first months, still aged only thirteen, fourteen, he’d built himself refuges in the higher Earths. Stockades, he called them. And the best of them were stockades, like Robinson Crusoe’s. People had the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a determined, cheerful man heavily into goatskin underwear. But at the Home had been an old, battered copy of the book itself, and Joshua, being Joshua, had read it from cover to cover. Robinson Crusoe had been on his island for over twenty-six years, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Joshua approved of this; the man obviously had his head screwed on right.

It had been harder when he’d first started. In Madison, Wisconsin, what you found on the other side of the reality walls, to East and West, was mostly prairie. Joshua knew now that the first time he’d stepped through he’d been lucky it hadn’t been winter, which could have plunged him unprepared into temperatures of forty below. And that he hadn’t landed in some marsh, in some place that on Datum Earth had been drained by people and turned into farmland long before he’d been born.

The first time he’d gone out alone into the wild worlds and tried to spend a night had been kind of rough. Blackberries had been the only food he’d recognized, but he got water from rainfall in cup plants. He’d taken a blanket, and it had been too warm for that, but he’d needed it as a mosquito net. He’d slept up a tree for security. It was only later that he’d learned that cougars could climb trees…

After that he’d taken over a few books from the Home and the city library to help him recognize stuff, and he asked Sister Serendipity, who knew about cookery through the ages, and he’d begun to see you’d have to be pretty stupid to starve out there. There were berries, mushrooms, acorns, walnuts, and cat-tails, big green reeds with roots rich in carbs. There were plants to use if you were ill — even wild quinine. The lakes were rich in fish, and traps were easy to make. He’d tried his hand at hunting, once or twice. Rabbits were OK, but the bigger game, the white-tailed deer and elk and moose, would have to wait until he was older. Even turkeys took some running down. But why bother, when there were passenger pigeons that were so dumb that they’d sit and wait for you to walk up to them and knock them over? The animals, even the fish, seemed so innocent. Trusting. Joshua had developed a habit of thanking his catch for its gift of its life, only to learn later that that was how Indian hunters treated their prey.

You had to prepare. You took over matches or a Fresnel lens for fire; he’d taught himself how to make a fire bow in an emergency, but the effort sucked for everyday use. He’d got mosquito repellent free from Clean Sweep, a government exchange for household chemicals on Badger Road. And household bleach, for purifying the water.

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