mascot. And a meal was always his for the asking from any of the halfway houses, the travellers’ lodges that were springing up across the nearer Earths. But it didn’t pay to be a scrounger, Sister Agnes had always said, and so he always took a fresh-killed deer along, or some wild fowl. The greener pioneers liked their meat fresh but had as yet not come to terms with the idea of chopping up Bambi, so Joshua would spend a little time field-dressing his catch. He’d generally come away with maybe a couple of bags of flour and a basket of eggs, as long as he had a basket to carry them away in.
Well, the airship’s galley was rather more luxuriously appointed than any halfway house. There was a freezer with a sufficiency of bacon and eggs, and a dry cabinet stacked with sacks of salt and pepper. Joshua was impressed with this: on many worlds a handful of salt would buy you dinner and a night’s shelter, and the pepper was even more valuable. Joshua got to work on the bacon.
The voice of Lobsang startled him. ‘Good morning, Joshua. I trust you slept well?’
Joshua flipped his bacon and said, ‘I don’t even remember dreaming. It’s as if we weren’t moving. Where are we now?’
‘We are more than fifteen thousand steps from home. I have slowed the stepping for your comfort while you eat, and have steadied us at three thousand feet, occasionally going lower if the sensors find anything interesting. In many of the local worlds this morning it’s a sunny day with a bit of dew on the grasses below, so I suggest you finish your breakfast and come down to the observation deck and enjoy the view. By the way, there are sacks of muesli in the larder; Sister Agnes would, I’m sure, want you to keep your bowel movements regular.’
Joshua glared at the empty air, given the lack of anyone to glare at, and said, ‘Sister Agnes isn’t here.’ Even so, guiltily, bearing in mind that nuns somehow knew what you were up to wherever you were, he rummaged in the larder and munched his way through dried fruit and nuts, with a side order of watermelon.
Before he went back to his bacon.
And made himself a fried slice to mop up the bacon fat. After all, it was chilly up here; he needed the fuel.
Prompted by that thought, he went back to his stateroom. In its roomy closet, alongside the cold-weather gear he’d worn on arrival, he found a range of intermediate clothing, some of it in various camouflage patterns. Lobsang was thinking of everything, that was clear enough. He selected a parka and went down to the observation deck, and sat alone, watching Earths go by like a slideshow of the gods.
Without warning, the ship crossed a sheaf of ice worlds.
The light hit Joshua: dazzling, blinding sunlight reflecting from the ice and filling the air, as if the whole deck had suddenly turned into a flashbulb, with Joshua an insect trapped inside. The worlds below were plains of ice, gently folded, with only an occasional ridge of high ground showing as a dark bony stripe through the ice cover. And then into cloud, then hail, then sunlight again, depending on the local climate in each passing world. The flickering light was painful on the eye. From Earth to Earth the level of the ice cover rose and fell, he saw, like some tremendous tide. In each world the great ice sheet covering Eurasia must be pulsing, ice domes shifting, the southern edge rippling back and forth century by century; he was passing over snapshots of that tremendous continental flux.
And when the ice band had passed and they were sailing over interglacial worlds, mostly he saw tree tops. The Long Earth was big on tree tops, Earth after Earth, tree after tree.
Joshua seldom got bored. But as the morning wore on he was surprised to find himself growing bored now, so quickly. After all he was looking over thousands of landscapes no one, probably, had ever seen before. He remembered Sister Georgina, who liked her Keats:
At the time he’d thought a wild surmise was some kind of exotic bird. Well, he was now looking out over the new worlds with somewhat of a tame surmise.
There were footsteps behind him. Lobsang’s ambulant unit appeared. He was dressed for the occasion in safari shirt and trousers. And how quickly, Joshua reflected, Lobsang had become a
‘It can be disorienting, can’t it? I recall my reactions to my own pioneer flight. The Long Earth goes on and on, Joshua. A surfeit of wonders will dull the mind.’
At random they paused at a world somewhere around twenty thousand. The sky here was overcast, threatening rain. Without the sunlight the rolling grassland below was a dull grey-green, with scattered clumps of darker forest. On this particular world Joshua could see no sign of mankind, not so much as a thread of smoke. Yet there was movement. To the north he saw a huge herd drifting over the landscape. Horses? Bison? Camels, even? Or something more exotic? And by the shore of a lake below he made out more groups of animals, a black fringe by the water.
Now they had stopped, the
‘This will be our regular routine when we stop to sample an Earth,’ Lobsang said. ‘A way for me to extend my study of any particular world beyond this single viewpoint. I will gather some data now, and data from ongoing observations will be downloaded from the probes when we return through this world, or when another craft passes this way in the future.’
Among the creatures by the lake below were some kind of rhino, giant beasts with oddly slender legs. They clustered at the water’s edge, shoving each other aside as they tried to get a drink.
Lobsang said, ‘You’ll find binoculars and cameras throughout the observation deck. Those animals look something like an elasmotherium, perhaps. Or a much-evolved descendant.’
‘That means nothing to me, Lobsang.’
‘Of course not. You want a species of your own? Name them if you like; I’m recording everything we see, hear, say and do, and will lodge the claims when we get home.’
Joshua sat back. ‘Let’s go on. We’re wasting time.’
‘Time? We’ve all the time in the worlds. However—’
The stepping began again, and the rhino-like herd disappeared. Joshua felt the ride now as a gentle jolting, like a car with good suspension travelling over a rutted road.
He figured they were now crossing an Earth every couple of seconds, over forty thousand new worlds a day, if they kept this up around the clock (which they wouldn’t). Joshua was impressed, but he wasn’t about to say so. Landscapes swept beneath the prow of the ship, only their broadest features possible for him to discern, whole worlds passing to the beat of his own pulse. Animal herds and lone beasts were no sooner glimpsed than they were gone, whisked into the unreality of stepwise otherness. Even the tree clumps shifted in shape and size from world to world, shift, shift, shift. And there were flickers — plunges into brief darkness, occasional flares of light, washes of odd colours across the landscape. Exceptional worlds of some kind, pulled from his sight before they could be comprehended. Otherwise there was only the chain of worlds, Earth after Earth smoothed to uniformity by the ship’s motion.
‘Joshua, do you ever wonder where you are?’
‘I know where I am. I’m here.’
‘Yes, but where is
Actually Joshua had wondered about that. It was impossible to be a stepper without asking such questions. ‘I know Willis Linsay left a note: “The next world is the thickness of a thought away.”’
