Soon the clearing between the stones was empty once more. Gareth stared around at the stones, at the long shadows. The walls of the world seemed very thin.
All of which was how Lobsang and Joshua, on the
28
JOSHUA AND LOBSANG pressed deeper into the Long Earth, extending their tentative survey.
Embedded in the blandness of the Corn Belt were plenty of Jokers. Here was a locust world; the airship appeared right in the middle of a flying plague of big heavy insects that battered briefly against the gondola walls. They lingered in one world where, Lobsang suspected, the Tibetan plateau, an accident of tectonic collision, had never formed. His aerial drones revealed that without the Himalayas the climate of the whole of central and southern Asia, even Australia, was radically different.
And there were worlds they couldn’t understand at all. A world immersed in a perpetual crimson-red dust storm, like a nightmare version of Mars. A world like a bowling ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep blue sky.
The stepping halted again. There was that usual odd lurch, like falling off a swing. Joshua looked down. This was a world of yellowed grass and spindly trees. The airship drifted over a river that had shrivelled in its bed, exposing wide borders of cracked mud. Animals crowded thick around the water, eyeing each other nervously. Joshua glanced at the earthometer: 127,487. A meaningless string of digits.
‘You can see this world is suffering a particularly dry season,’ Lobsang said. ‘Which has drawn an unusual concentration of animals to the water. It gives us an opportunity to observe efficiently. You may have noticed I am making a habit of pausing at such convenient locales.’
‘There are a hell of a lot of horses.’
And so there were, small and large, ranging in size from a Shetland pony to a zebra, and of subtly different designs, some shaggier, some tubbier, some with two toes on each foot, or three or four… None of them looked quite like
But in amongst the herds, jostling to get to the water, were other animals. One family of tall, spindly beasts were like camels rebuilt to the plan of a giraffe. Their young, with legs like drinking straws, looked heartbreakingly fragile. And there were elephants, with a variety of tusk types. And things like rhinos, things like hippos… These herbivores, temporarily forced together, were skittish, nervous, for there were carnivores too. There were always carnivores. Joshua spotted what looked like a pack of hyenas, and a cat not unlike a leopard. Waiting, watching the throngs of wary drinkers at the lake.
Now a creature looking very much like a beefy ostrich approached. A family of rhino-like beasts backed off nervously. But the bird stretched out its neck, opened its beak wide, and fired out a ball, like a cannonball. This slammed into the ribcage of a big male rhino, that went down bellowing. The family scattered, and the bird closed in to feed on the fallen male.
Lobsang used an anaesthetic rifle mounted on the gondola to bring down the bird, and sent down his ambulant unit to inspect it. The bird had a separate stomach sac which filled up with a mixture of faeces, bones, gravel, bits of wood, other indigestibles. All this was mortared together with guano to make a large ball as hard as teak. The Long Earth truly was full of wonders, and for Joshua the cannonball bird duly took its place in the gallery.
The world was logged, and the airship moved on. That night the movie was Lobsang’s choice:
He woke to bright sunlight. The ship had stopped again, and sounding-rockets soared into an unsuspecting sky.
In this world, that bit warmer than those earlier — Lobsang observed a steadily warming trend as they ploughed ever further West — a string of lakes had been cut into the forest blanket. Lobsang speculated that they were the result of a multiple meteorite strike. Two of the lakes were separated by a narrow strip of land, a striking feature that reminded Joshua of the isthmus between Mendota and Monona at Madison.
Lobsang announced, ‘This is Earth West 139,171. We’re still in the Corn Belt.’
‘Why have we stopped?’
‘Look to the north.’
Joshua saw the smoke. It was a thin black column, a few miles away to the north-east.
‘It’s not a campfire,’ said Lobsang. ‘Or a forest fire. A burning township, perhaps.’
‘Human, then.’
‘Oh, yes. And I’m picking up a radio signal.’ Lobsang played a scrap of it, a pleasant recorded female voice broadcasting her presence to a silent world, in English, Russian, French. ‘Spindrift colonizers. The signal claims they are the First Heavenly Church of the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims. We are far from home; there can be few substantial settlements much further out… That fire is from burning buildings. Evidently something has gone wrong here.’
‘Let’s go see.’
‘The danger is unknowable. Unquantifiable.’
Joshua might be a loner, but there was an unwritten rule out in the reaches of the Long Earth that you helped the other, the wanderer, the community in trouble. ‘We’re going.’
The airship’s big rotors started up, and they moved off towards the smoke.
‘Shall I tell you about the Confidence Trick Victims?’
So Joshua learned that while the mainstream religions remained concentrated on the Low Earths because of access to the holy sites on the Datum — the Vatican, Mecca — many splinter religious communities had gone out deep into the Long Earth, each seeking freedom of expression, as similar communities had done for millennia on Earth. Such pilgrims would often choose places that (in Datum context) were geographically remote too, like this one: on this distant Earth they were still far to the east of the location of Moscow. And yet, even among these maverick groups, the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims stood out as somewhat unusual.
‘They consider their religion to reflect the truth about the universe, which is its essential absurdity. True Victims believe that there is one Born Again every minute. And they must be fruitful and multiply, to create more human minds to appreciate the Joke.’
Joshua murmured, ‘I don’t think this Joke has had a good punchline.’
They sailed over a few square miles of cleared forest around a central township, built around a hillock, the only high point on the isthmus. A relatively grand building sat atop the hillock. There were fields, marked by rows of stones. Lobsang pointed out a characteristic tint to some of the crops: marijuana plants, acres of them, which told you a lot about the nature of this community.
There were corpses everywhere.
Lobsang took the ship up to five hundred feet and hovered. Rooks, disturbed, flapped and rose, to descend again. The Victims of the Cosmic Confidence Trick apparently preferred to wear green robes, and so the central square and the dirt roads radiating away from it were littered with emerald splashes. Who would come all the way up here to wipe out several hundred peaceful souls, whose only eccentricity lay in believing life was a gold brick?
‘I’m going down,’ Joshua said.
Lobsang said, ‘This happened recently. This crime, this attack. Observe that the bodies have not yet been scavenged. Something, or somebody, butchered three hundred people, Joshua. The attackers may still be down there.’
‘And maybe the three-hundred-and-first is still alive.’
‘The big building in the centre of the village, on that hillock.’ The hill was the only high point on the isthmus. ‘That’s the source of the radio beacon.’
