The Long Earth

I am not inside the drinks machine. Well, not wholly, that is.’

‘Stop teasing the man, Lobsang,’ said Selena, turning to Joshua. ‘Mr Valiente, I know you were … elsewhere, when the world first heard about Lobsang. He is unique. He is a computer, physically, but he used to be — how can I put this? — a Tibetan motorcycle repairman.’

‘So how did he get from Tibet to the inside of a drinks machine?’

‘That is a long story, Mr Valiente…’

If Joshua hadn’t been away so long he’d have known all about Lobsang. He was the first machine to successfully convince a court that he was a human being.

‘Of course,’ Selena said, ‘other sixth-generation machines had tried it before. Provided they stay in the next room and talk to you via a speaker they can sound at least as human as some of the lunkheads you see around, but that proves nothing in the eyes of the law. But Lobsang doesn’t claim to be a thinking machine. He didn’t claim rights on that basis. He said he was a dead Tibetan.

‘Well, Joshua, he had them by the shorts. Reincarnation is still a cornerstone of world faith; and Lobsang simply said that he had reincarnated as a computer program. As was deposited in evidence in court — I’ll show you the transcripts if you like — the relevant software initiated at precisely the microsecond a Lhasan motorcycle repairman with a frankly unpronounceable name died. To a discarnate soul, twenty thousand teraflops-worth of technological wizardry on a gel substrate apparently looks identical to a few pounds of soggy brain tissue. A number of expert witnesses testified to the astonishing accuracy of Lobsang’s flashes of recall of his previous life. And I myself witnessed a small, wiry old man with a face like a dried peach, a distant cousin of the repairman, conversing with Lobsang happily for several hours, reminiscing about the good old days in Lhasa. A charming afternoon!’

‘Why?’ Joshua asked. ‘What could he gain out of it?’

‘I’m right here,’ said Lobsang. ‘He’s not made of wood, you know.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What did I gain? Civil rights. Security. The right to own property.’

‘And switching you off would be murder?’

‘It would. Also physically impossible, incidentally, but let’s not go into that.’

‘So the court’s agreed you’re human?’

‘There’s never actually been a legal definition of human, you know.’

‘And now you work for transEarth.’

‘I part-own it. Douglas Black, the founder, had no hesitation in offering me a partnership. Not only for my notoriety, though he’s drawn to that sort of thing. For my transhuman intellect.’

‘Really.’

Selena said, ‘Let’s get back to business. You took a lot of finding, Mr Valiente.’

Joshua looked at her and made a mental note to make it a lot more finding next time.

‘Your visits to Earth are infrequent these days.’

‘I’m always on Earth.’

‘You know what I mean. This one,’ said Selena. ‘Datum Earth, or even one of the Low Earths.’

‘I’m not for hire,’ Joshua said quickly, trying to keep a trace of anxiety out of his voice. ‘I like to work alone.’

‘Well, that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it?’

Joshua preferred life in his stockades, on Earths far from the Datum, too far away for most to travel. Even then he was wary of company. They said that Daniel Boone would pull up sticks and move on if he could as much as see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Joshua, Boone was pathologically gregarious.

‘But that’s what makes you useful. We know you don’t need people.’ Selena held up a hand. ‘Oh, you’re not antisocial. But consider this. Before the Long Earth, no one in the whole history of mankind had ever been alone; I mean really alone. The hardiest sailor has always known that there’s someone out there somewhere. Even the old moonwalker astronauts could see the Earth. Everyone knew that other people were just a matter of distance away.’

‘Yeah, but with the Steppers they’re only a knight’s-move away.’

‘Our instincts don’t understand that, though. Do you know how many people pioneer solo?’

‘No.’

‘None. Well, hardly any. To be alone on an entire planet, possibly the only mind in a universe? Ninety-nine out of a hundred people can’t take it.’

But Joshua never was alone, he thought. Not with the Silence always there, behind the sky.

‘As Selena said, that’s what makes you useful,’ Lobsang said. ‘That and certain other qualities we can discuss later. Oh, and the fact that we have leverage over you.’

Light dawned, for Joshua. ‘You want me to make some kind of journey. Into the Long Earth.’

‘That’s what you’re uniquely good at,’ Selena said sweetly. ‘We want you to go into the High Meggers, Joshua.’

The High Meggers: the term used by some of the pioneers for the worlds, most of them still little more than legend, more than a million steps from Earth.

‘Why?’

‘For the most innocent of all reasons,’ said Lobsang. ‘To see what’s out there.’

Selena smiled. ‘Information on the Long Earth is the stock in trade of transEarth, Mr Valiente.’

Lobsang was more expansive. ‘Consider, Joshua. Until fifteen years ago mankind had one world and dreamed of a few more, the worlds of the solar system, all barren and horribly expensive to get to. Now we have the key to more worlds than we can count! And we have barely explored even the nearest of them. Now’s our chance to do just that.’

‘Our chance?’ Joshua said. ‘I’m taking you with me? Is that the gig? A computer is paying me to chauffeur it?’

‘Yes, that’s the size of it,’ Selena said.

Joshua frowned. ‘And the reason I’ll do this — you said something about leverage?’

Selena said smoothly, ‘We’ll come to that. We’ve studied you, Joshua. In fact the earliest trace you leave in the files is a report by Madison PD Officer Monica Jansson, filed just after Step Day itself. About the mysterious boy who came back, bringing the other children with him. Quite the little pied piper, weren’t you? Once upon a time you would have been called a celebrity.’

‘And,’ Lobsang put in, ‘once upon another time you’d have been called a witch.’

Joshua sighed. Was he ever going to live that day down? He had never wanted to be a hero; he didn’t like people looking at him in that funny way. Or, indeed, in any way. ‘It was a mess, that’s all,’ he said. ‘How did you find out?’

‘The police reports, like Jansson’s,’ said the drinks machine. ‘The thing about the police is that they keep everything on file. And I just love files. Files tell me things. They tell me who your mother was, for instance, Joshua. Maria was her name, was it not?’

‘My mother’s none of your business.’

‘Joshua, everybody is my business, and everybody is on file. And the files have told me all about you. That you may be very special. That you were there on Step Day.’

‘Everybody was there on Step Day.’

‘Yes, but you felt at home, didn’t you, Joshua? You felt as if you’d come home. For once in your life you knew you were in the right place …’

3

STEP DAY. FIFTEEN years ago. Joshua had been just thirteen. Later, everybody remembered where they were on Step Day. Mostly they were in the shit.

At the time, nobody knew who had uploaded the circuit diagram for the Stepper on to the web. But as evening swept like a scythe around the world, kids everywhere started putting Steppers together, dozens in the