The Long Earth

times. And so that evening, when the labour pains first started, Maria tried to flee the home, and panicked, and stepped. At which point you entered the situation.

‘She actually stepped twice. She gave birth to you, and stepped back to the Datum, emerging near the road outside the Home where Sister Agnes caught up with her. Agnes tried to calm her down; Maria was clearly in a dreadful state. But she realized what she had done, and stepped yet again. And when she returned she brought you back with her, wrapped in her pink angora sweater, and handed you over to an astonished Sister Agnes, who understood nothing of what had happened. It was not until Step Day, when stepping became common, that she began to grasp the truth.

‘And Maria died, Joshua, of post-partum hemorrhaging. I’m very sorry. Sister Agnes, quick to react though she was, could not help her.

‘All of which leaves you, my friend, as most unique, being, at the moment of birth, if only for a matter of a minute or two, the only person, almost certainly, in a universe. Totally solitary, utterly alone! I wonder what that must have done to your infant consciousness?’

And Joshua, aware all his life of the far-off, solemn presence of the Silence, wondered about that too. My miraculous birth, he thought.

Lobsang went on, ‘Now — you weren’t aware of any of these details, were you? Does that help you understand yourself a little better?’

Joshua stared blankly at Lobsang. ‘I should serve the fish before it spoils.’

Silently, Lobsang watched Joshua eat a respectable part of the fish, cooked with finely chopped onions (there being no shallots on board), and green beans, and a dill sauce the composition of which even Lobsang’s forensic nose could not entirely work out although undoubtedly there was a lot of fennel in it. He watched as Joshua methodically washed and dried every utensil until it sparkled, and stacked everything away in an order that could only be called shipshape.

And then he watched Joshua wake up, it seemed to Lobsang, as if reality flowed over him like a spring tide.

Lobsang said gently, ‘I have something for you. Which I suspect your mother would have liked you to have.’ He produced a small item wrapped in soft paper and laid it gently on the bench, downloading as he did so a number of recommended works on dealing with grief and the aftermath of loss, and all the while making background system checks of the ship.

Joshua opened the packet cautiously. It contained his mother’s cheap, precious plastic bracelet.

Then Lobsang left Joshua alone.

Lobsang walked back along the length of the ship, surprised once more at how the process of walking helped thinking, just as Benjamin Franklin had once remarked. An aspect of embodiment, he supposed, embodied cognition, a phenomenon he must explore — or remember. Behind him, as he walked, lights dimmed as the ship went into night-running mode.

When he got to the wheelhouse he opened the screen, enjoying the freezing fresh air of world after world washing against the nanosensors embedded in his artificial skin, and he stared out at the Long Earth, as revealed by the light of many moons. The landscape itself seldom changed significantly: the basic shapes of the hills, the paths of the rivers — although occasionally there was sufficient volcanism to light up the sky, or a lightning-struck forest blazing in the dark. The moon, the sun, the basic geometry of the Earth itself, made a static stage for the shifting, swarming biologies on the fleeting worlds. But even the moonlight was not a constant across the worlds. Lobsang paid a lot of attention to the moons, and he saw how that familiar, ancient face shifted and flowed, subtly, as he crossed the worlds. While the ancient lava seas endured, in each reality a different selection of random cosmic rocks had battered the lunar surface, leaving a different pattern of craters and rays. Sooner or later, he knew, they were bound to come across a world with a missing moon, a negative moon. After all the moon was itself a contingency, an outcome of accidental collisions during the creation of the solar system. An absence of moon was an inevitability if you travelled far enough across the Long Earth; Lobsang only had to wait, as for many other contingencies he had anticipated.

He understood a great deal. But the further they travelled, the more the very mystery of the Long Earth worried Lobsang. Back home he employed tame professors who spoke of the Long Earth as some kind of quantum- physical construct, because that kind of scientific language seemed at least to paint the right picture. But he was coming to believe that on the contrary, his boffins might not just have the wrong picture, they might be in the wrong art gallery entirely. That the Long Earth might be something much stranger altogether. He didn’t know, and he hated not knowing things. This evening, he knew he would worry and watch until the moons set, and then he would worry until it was daylight and it was time for the chores of the day, which in his case would include … worrying.

24

THE NEXT DAY Joshua, almost shyly, asked Lobsang for more information about natural steppers. Others like himself, and his mother. ‘Not legends from history: modern-day examples. I imagine you have plenty of material.’

So Lobsang told Joshua the story of Jared Orgill, one of the first natural steppers to come to the attention of the authorities.

It had been just another game of Jack in the Box: that was what they called it in Austin, Texas, although kids had independently invented variants of the game across the planet, with lots of different names. And this particular day it was the turn of Jared Orgill, ten years old, to be Jack.

They’d found an old fridge on the illegal garbage dump, Jared and his friends. A big slab of stainless steel, lying on its back amid the garbage. ‘It looks like a robot’s coffin,’ remarked Debbie Bates. Once they’d pulled out the shelves and plastic boxes and stuff it was more than big enough to take one of them.

Jared wasn’t bullied into going into the box, though his parents would later protest otherwise. In fact he would have fought the others for his turn. He handed his cellphone to Debbie — you never took in a phone, of course — climbed in and lay down. It wasn’t comfortable, with the bumps and ridges of the fridge’s inner fittings poking into him, and there was a stink of some chemical or other. The big heavy lid slammed down, shutting out the sky, the grinning faces. It didn’t bother him, it would only be for a few minutes. For a while he heard bumps and bangs and scrapes, as the others followed the usual routine of heaping up garbage on top of the fridge to pin down the lid.

Then there was a moment of quiet, a few more scrapes — and the fridge started rocking. The other kids had thought of a better way of pinning him in there. It took them a minute to get organized, but soon the half-dozen of them were lined up, heaving at the heavy fridge, rocking it a little further with each pull. The fridge rolled over, and fell forward so its weight trapped the door closed. Jared, buffeted by the rolling in the dark, landed face down on the inside of the door … and he heard something crunch. His Stepper, at his waist, was just a plastic box full of a jumble of components, tied on to his belt with string. Kind of fragile.

The game was that he would wait five minutes, ten — maybe as long as an hour. Of course he couldn’t tell the time. Then he would step out to West 1 or East 1, move aside from the fridge, and step back — ta-da! — there would be Jack, out of the box.

But he’d fallen on his Stepper.

It might still work. He didn’t try it, not straight away. He didn’t want to look chicken by coming out too soon. Also, he didn’t want to know that the Stepper was broken, and that he was stuck.

He didn’t know how long he waited. The air already felt hot, stuffy. Maybe it was ten minutes, maybe more.

He felt for the sliding switch on the Stepper, closed his eyes, pulled it over to East. Nothing. Only the stuffy dark. Fear stabbed again. He pulled the slider to West, with no result. He yanked the slider this way and that, until it broke off in his hand. He tried not to scream. He turned on his back and pummelled at the fridge carcass. ‘Help! You guys! Get me out! Debbie! Mac! Help, get me out!’