Before he had gone a couple of hundred yards he heard the moaning.
It was a humanoid, lying in the dirt, on her back. Not a troll, perhaps a variant of elf, given Lobsang’s definition based on what he had found in the temple, but not identical to the one he’d inspected there — at any rate another species new to Joshua. Maybe five feet tall, skinny, coated with hair, she was a stretched, upright-posture chimp with a hauntingly human face, despite her flat, chimp-like nose. And, unlike the beast in the temple, her head seemed to bulge, the cranium outsized for her body to Joshua’s eyes — the brain was evidently larger even than a human’s. And she was in trouble. She was heavily pregnant. Barely conscious, she moaned and thrashed, and tore at the fur over her swollen belly, and watery blood leaked out between her legs.
As Joshua bent over her, her eyes opened. She had big slanting eyes, like a cartoon alien’s, but ape-brown, lacking the whites of a human’s. Eyes that widened in alarm, briefly, and looked at him imploringly.
He felt the creature’s stomach. ‘She’s close to term. Something’s wrong. The baby should have been born by now.’
Lobsang murmured, ‘I would have hazarded that the big head of this creature’s baby would make it impossible for her to deliver it.’
‘What did you put in this pack?’ Before Lobsang had a chance to reply he had the pack on his chest open and was rummaging inside it for the first-aid box. ‘And, Lobsang? Get that ship down here. I’m going to need more supplies before we’re done.’
‘Done with what?’
‘I’m going to get that baby out.’ He stroked the cheek of the female. His own mother had once lain alone in a world, in the throes of labour. ‘Too posh to push, are we? Let’s do it the American way.’
‘You’re going to perform a caesarean?’ Lobsang asked. ‘You don’t have the capacity to do that.’
‘Maybe not, but I’m quite certain you do. And we’re going to do this together, Lobsang.’ He dumped out the contents of the med kit, trying to think. ‘I’ll need morphine. Sterilizing fluid. Scalpels. Needles, thread…’
‘We’re very far from home. You’ll exhaust our medical supplies on this stunt. I have the facility to manufacture more, but—’
‘I need to do this.’ He could do nothing for the Victims, but he could do something for this elf female — or at least he could try. It was Joshua’s way of fixing the world, just a little bit. ‘Help me, Lobsang.’
An aeons-long pause. Then: ‘I have of course full records of most major medical procedures. Even obstetrics, though I scarcely imagined it would be needed on this trip.’
Joshua fixed the parrot so Lobsang could see what he was doing, and spread out his tools. ‘Lobsang. Speak to me. What’s first?’
‘We must consider whether to make a longitudinal incision or a lower uterine section…’
Joshua hastily shaved the beast’s lower stomach. Then, trying to keep a steady hand, he held a bronze scalpel over the abdomen wall. And just as he was about to cut into the flesh, the baby vanished. He felt its absence, as the womb imploded.
He sat back in shock. ‘It stepped! Damn it — the baby stepped!’
Then the adults came. Two females: a mother, a sister? They moved in a blur of sprint paces and steps, flickering in and out of existence all around him. Joshua wouldn’t have believed stepping at that speed was possible.
Lobsang murmured, ‘Just stay still.’
The adults glared at Joshua, scooped up the mother and disappeared with soft pops.
Joshua slumped. ‘I don’t believe it. What just happened?’
Lobsang sounded exhilarated. ‘Evolution, Joshua. Evolution just happened. All upright humanoids have trouble giving birth. You know that, and your mother learned it the hard way. As we evolved, the female pelvis shrank to allow for bipedalism, but at the same time the baby’s brain grew bigger — which is why we’re born so helpless. We emerge with a lot of growing to do before we’re independent.
‘But it appears that in this species the problem of the pelvis has been sidestepped. Literally.’ He laughed gently. ‘Here, the baby isn’t born through the birth canal. It
Joshua felt empty. ‘They care for their ill. If I’d have opened her up, the mother wouldn’t have survived the wound I’d have inflicted.’
Lobsang murmured in his ear, ‘You weren’t to know. You tried your best. Now come home. You need a shower.’
30
FURTHER WEST YET, the Long Earth gradually became greener, arid worlds rarer. The forested worlds were blanketed thicker, with oak-like trees spreading out of the river valleys and lapping at the higher ground, like a rising tide of green. Out on the rarely glimpsed plains the animals still mostly looked familiar to Joshua — kinds of horses, kinds of deer, kinds of camels. Yet sometimes he glimpsed stranger beasts, blocky, low-slung predators that were neither cats nor dogs, herds of huge long-necked herbivores that looked like elephants crossed with rhinos.
On the nineteenth day, around Earth West 460,000, Lobsang somewhat arbitrarily declared they had reached the limit of the Corn Belt. The worlds here were surely too warm, the forests too thick, to make farming worthwhile.
And about the same time they crossed the Atlantic coast of Europe, somewhere around the latitude of Britain. A journey that had become a dull jaunt across a largely unbroken green blanket of forest became duller yet as they sailed out over the breast of the sea.
Joshua sat in the observation deck for hour upon hour. Lobsang rarely spoke, which was a mercy for Joshua. The gondola was almost soundless, save for the whisper of the air pumps, the whirring of suspended instrument pallets as they turned this way and that. Cooped up in this drifting sensory deprivation tank, Joshua fretted about the loss of muscle tone and fitness. Sometimes he performed stretching exercises, yoga postures, or jogged on the spot. One thing the airship lacked was a gym, and Joshua didn’t feel like asking Lobsang to fabricate any equipment; he’d only end up in rowing-machine challenges with the ambulant unit.
Lobsang had increased their lateral speed over the ocean. On the twenty-fifth day they crossed the eastern coast of America, somewhere around the latitude of New York, and found themselves coasting over another forest-blanketed landscape.
There was no more talk of stopping, or turning back. They both recognized the need to go on as long as they could, until they had made some inroads into the mystery of whatever was driving the humanoid migration. Joshua found himself shuddering when he imagined the panicky carnage he had witnessed in the town of the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims unleashed in Madison, Wisconsin.
But, once over land again, they reached an arrangement. Lobsang travelled on during the night. This didn’t trouble Joshua’s sleep, and Lobsang’s senses were infinitely finer even in the dark than Joshua’s were by daylight. By day, however, Joshua negotiated a stay of at least a few hours each day in which he could stand on the good Earth, whichever good Earth it happened to be. Sometimes Lobsang, in the ambulant unit, came down in the elevator with him. To Joshua’s surprise he handled even rugged terrain with ease, strolling, occasionally taking a swim in a lake, very realistically.
Generally speaking the lapping forest endured, in these remote worlds. During his daily descents Joshua observed differences of detail, different suites of herbivores and carnivores, and a gradual change of character in the grander frame: fewer flowering plants, more ferns, a drabber feel to the worlds. Joshua was covering twenty or thirty thousand new worlds in every day-night cycle. But, truth to tell, as thousands more worlds clicked by it was a case of see one and you’ve seen them all. In between stops, while Lobsang catalogued his observations and drafted his technical papers, Joshua sat in his couch and slept, or let his mind float in green, teeth-filled dreams so vivid he wasn’t always sure if he was awake or asleep.
There were occasional novelties. Once, somewhere near where Tombstone would have been had anyone been there to name it, Joshua dutifully took samples from enormous man-high fungi that would have proved
