The Long Earth

‘You couldn’t have done! It’s impossible to step that fast.’

‘So you say, Joshua. You’ll find out in due course. You did make an attempt to cover the corpses with stones, and you left grave markers, just as you mentioned at the inquiry. I brought back photographic records. Proof of what you said, you see?

‘In fact I reconstructed the whole thing. I used pheromone trails, checked angles of fire, the lie of the bodies. I found every bullet. And, of course, I took DNA samples. I even brought back the alpha’s skull — and the bullet that killed it. It all fits with your testimony. None of the soldiers put up an effective defence when your asshole-baboons attacked, did they? The superboons are maniacs by the standards of the animal world. Appallingly aggressive. But I don’t think they would have attacked if one of the grunts hadn’t got nervy and fired first.’

Joshua squirmed with embarrassment. ‘If you checked all this out, you know I crapped my pants in the course of the engagement.’

‘Should I think less of you for that? Throughout the animal kingdom, it has always made good sense to jettison the cargo in a threatening situation. All battlefields attest to that, as does every soaring songbird. But then you came back, and stabbed one of the superboons in the brain, and drove off the rest, stopping only when you’d shot the leader dead. You came back, and that excuses a lot.’

Joshua thought for a moment. ‘OK. That’s leverage, all right. You can clear me. But why do you want to recruit me in the first place?’

‘Well, we discussed that. It’s the same reason Jansson suggested you for Congressman Popper’s party in the first place. You have Daniel Boone syndrome, Joshua. Very rare. You don’t need people. You quite like people, at least some people, but the absence of people does not worry you. That’s going to be very useful where we’re going. I don’t expect to meet too many other human beings once the expedition is under way. Your assistance would be of great help to me because of that quality: you are able to focus, you’re not distracted by the extraordinary isolation of the Long Earth. And, as Officer Jansson saw from the beginning, your unique stepping talent, your ability to step unaided and, more important, to recover quickly from each step, will be useful if trouble strikes — as it surely will.

‘The rewards to you, should you agree to accompany me, will be excessively generous, and tailored to your particular preferences. Among them will be an authoritative account of the massacre of the congressional investigators, totally exonerating you, which will be received by the authorities on the day we depart.’

‘Am I worth that much?’

Lobsang laughed again. ‘Joshua, what is worth? What is value now, when gold is valued simply for its lustre, because every man can have a gold mine for himself? Property? The physics of the Long Earth means that every one of us can have a world entirely to himself, if he so wishes. This is the new age, Joshua, and there will be new values, new ideas of worth, including love, cooperation, truth — and above all, yes indeed, above all, the friendship of Lobsang. You should listen to me, Joshua Valiente. I intend to travel to the ends of the Earth — no, to the ends of the Long Earth. And I want you with me. Will you come?’

Joshua sat there, staring at nothing. ‘Do you know, the crackling of your fire now sounds absolutely random?’

‘Yes. Easy enough to fix. I thought it might put you a little more at your ease.’

‘So if I come with you, you’ll get that congressional review off my back?’

‘Yes, certainly, I promise.’

‘And if I don’t choose to go with you, what then?’

‘I’ll deal with the review nonetheless. You did everything you could have done, I believe, and the loss of those people was definitely not your fault. Evidence of this will be presented to the panel.’

Joshua stood up. ‘Right answer.’

That night Joshua sat in front of a screen in the Home and read up about Lobsang.

Apparently, so it was believed, Lobsang resided in extremely high-density, fast-access computer storage at MIT, and therefore not in the premises of transEarth at all. When Joshua read that, he felt a warm certainty that whatever was in a super-cooled box in MIT, it wasn’t Lobsang, not the whole of Lobsang. If Lobsang were smart, and he was most surely smart, he would have got himself distributed everywhere. A hedge against an off switch. And he’d be in a position where nobody could command him, not even his super-powerful partner Douglas Black. There was somebody who knew the rules, Joshua thought.

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 tire 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