The Long Earth

couldn’t step, however, and that’s why he needed to invent something like the Stepper box. So he did. I first stepped when I was four. And I soon found out that Dad could step if he was holding my hand. They took a photograph of us. I never had any problem with it, the magic-door stuff, because of Mom. Mom was a reader, and she read to me Tolkien and Larry Niven and E. Nesbit and just about everything else. I was home- schooled, needless to say. And I grew up with my own Narnia! To tell the truth, since Step Day I’ve become pissed at having to share my secret place with the rest of the world. But back then Mom explained to me that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone what I could do.’

Joshua listened, dumbfounded. He could barely imagine how it must have been to be part of a family of steppers, a family all like himself.

‘It was pretty good in those days. I often hung out with Dad in his shed, because the shed was in another world — though, of course, I had to lead him in and out of that other Wyoming.

‘But Dad was hardly ever there, because he was always jetting away, wherever the Black people wanted him, and that could be anywhere from MIT to some research lab in Scandinavia or South Africa. Sometimes, late at night, a helicopter might turn up, and he’d get in, and then maybe an hour later he’d be back home and the chopper was flying away. When I asked him what he’d been doing, it was always, “Just some stuff, that’s all.” But that was OK by me because my Dad knew best. He knew everything.

‘I didn’t know anything about his work projects. But I wasn’t surprised when he succeeded in inventing the Stepper. He was an unusual mix of brilliant theoretician and hands-on engineer; I believe he’s come closer than anybody else to figuring out the true nature of the Long Earth… But it did him no good when Mom died. That was one problem he couldn’t untangle with technology. Things got weird after that.’ Sally hesitated. ‘I mean more weird than before.

‘He kept working. But I got the impression that he stopped caring about what he was working on, and what it was for. He’d always been ethical, you know? A hippie from a long line of hippies. Now he didn’t care.

‘But he was living a double life. He kept stuff like the Stepper hidden away. Dad did like hiding things. He said he learned it in his hippie days when he hid his marijuana plantation in the cellar. He showed me once. It had a secret door that would only open if one loose nail was pushed just so far and one of the paint pots was turned ninety degrees, and then a panel would slide, and there was a large space that you couldn’t believe was there, and you could still smell where the plants had been…

‘So that’s my story. I always stepped, I grew up with it; Step Day was just a bump in the road to my family. Whereas you had to discover stepping for yourself, didn’t you, Joshua? I heard you were brought up by nuns. It’s part of your legend.’

‘I don’t want a legend.’

‘Nuns, eh? Did they beat you up, or try anything … funny?’

Joshua narrowed his eyes. ‘There was none of that stuff. Well, apart from Sister Mary Joseph, and Sister Agnes had her out of there in an hour, boy, had she got the wrong number. But, yeah, it was a totally weird place, looking back. But the right kind of weird. Good weird. The nuns had a lot of freedom. We read Carl Sagan before the Old Testament.’

‘Freedom. Well, I can sympathize with that. That’s why my father walked out on Douglas Black. Douglas found out about the Stepper box one day, he somehow forced it out of my Dad. With Mom gone and everything I think Dad was beginning to hate people anyhow. But what Black did was the final straw. One day Dad just disappeared. He took a post at Princeton under phony credentials. But that was kind of high profile, so when he got a sniff of a pursuit by Black he went out to Madison, took a college post under another assumed name. He took the Stepper technology he was developing with him. I followed and went to college out there. Didn’t see much of him. I guess I kept a watching eye on him, however. His real name isn’t Willis Linsay, by the way.’

‘I didn’t think it was.’

‘And that was when he decided, because he suspected the Black Corporation was on his tail again, that he would give stepping to the whole world, so no one could own it or put chains around it, or slap a tax on it. He really didn’t like big industry, and he really didn’t like governments. I think he hoped the world would be a much better place if everybody was able to step out of their grasp. As far as I know he is still alive out here somewhere.’

‘And is that why you’re out here? Looking for him?’

‘One reason.’

There was a curious change in the air. The little dinosaurs stood, stretching, their gaze combing the sky. Joshua looked at Sally. She didn’t react; she was carefully retrieving the last wayward oyster in the pan with a stick.

He asked, ‘Do you think he was right to do what he did? With the Stepper?’

‘Well, maybe. At least he gave people a new option. Although he said people were going to have to learn to think, out there in the Long Earth. He said once, “I am giving mankind the key to endless worlds. An end to scarcity and, may we hope, war. And perhaps a new meaning to life. I leave the exploration of all these worlds to your generation, my dear, though personally I think you will fuck it up royally.” Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Your father said that to you?’

Sally shrugged. ‘I told you. He was a hippie born of generations of hippies. He was always saying things like that.’

At that moment the loudspeaker voice of Lobsang boomed out over the beach, startling the small dinosaurs again. ‘Joshua! Back to the ship right now! Emergency!’

There was a strange new smell in the air, like burning plastic. Joshua looked at the northern horizon; there was a grey cloud, and it was getting bigger.

‘I call them suckers,’ said Sally calmly. ‘Rather like dragonflies. They pump a venom into anything organic, which breaks down cells remarkably fast, and you become a bag of soup that they suck up, as if through a straw. For some reason they don’t bother the dinosaurs. Your electronic friend is right about the emergency, Joshua. Now run along, there’s a good boy.’

And she disappeared.

34

AS SHE STEPPED AWAY, Joshua took a step back, to the East, away from the direction of travel of the airship. That was the instinctive way when you were in danger, to step back into the world you’d just arrived from, because the world downstream might be even worse. Now he was in a timber world, fairly standard stuff, nothing but endless trees as far as he could see — which was only a hundred yards or so, because of the aforesaid trees. No girl, no dinosaurs, no airship.

He could see a little more light than average to his right, so he got up and strolled that way. He emerged into a vast area of burned stumps and ash fields: not a recent fire, already new saplings were poking shoots through the stinking black mess, with green leaves apparent here and there. Just a forest fire, a dieback. It was all part of the great cycle of nature which, when you’ve seen it one point three million times, squarely pisses you off.

The airship was above him suddenly; its shadow sprawled across the clearing, an abrupt eclipse. Joshua clipped his earpiece back on.

Lobsang’s voice was an irritating whine. ‘We have lost her! Could you not have beguiled her into the ship? Clearly she has discovered a new way to step! And what’s more—’

Joshua plucked out his earpiece again. He sat down on a stump, a crumbling mass of colourful fungus. He felt stunned by the encounter with Sally, the blizzard of words that had evidently been pent up inside her. And she was travelling alone, as he used to. It was a slightly electrifying thought. On his sabbaticals, he had survived in any number of worlds like this.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he didn’t want or need a giant damn airship hovering over his head any more.

Joshua put the earpiece back on, and considered what to say. What was the phrase that Sister Agnes always used when some high-flying ecclesiastical or other tried to throw his weight around at the Home? ‘Can you hear me,