The Long Earth

That prompted Joshua to blurt out, ‘It’s the trolls. It’s got to be. We’ve discussed this before. Humans and trolls living side by side. Here, and nowhere else we know of. So it’s like no other human community, anywhere.’

She eyed him. ‘Well, now we know that minds shape minds, don’t we? We’ve learned that much. Too many humans, and trolls will flee. But if there are just the right amount of people the trolls will stick around. And for humans, maybe you can’t get enough trolls. Happy Landings is a warm bath of comfortable, happy feelings.’

‘But nobody disabled. Nobody mixed-up enough to commit a violent crime. Nobody who doesn’t fit.’

‘Maybe they’re kept out, perhaps not even consciously.’ She regarded him. ‘Sieved. That’s a rather sinister thought, isn’t it?’

Joshua thought it was. ‘But how? Nobody’s standing around with clubs to exclude the unworthy.’

‘No.’ Sally leaned back and closed her eyes, thinking. ‘I don’t think it’s a case of people being consciously excluded, not by the locals. So how does it happen? I’ve never seen any signs of anybody behind Happy Landings. No designer, no controller. Does Happy Landings itself somehow choose who comes here? But how can that happen?’

‘And to what end?’

‘You can only have an end if you have a mind, Joshua.’

‘There’s no mind involved in evolution,’ Joshua said, remembering Sister Georgina’s brisk homework classes at the Home. ‘No end, no intention, no destination. And yet that’s a process that shapes living creatures.’

‘So is Happy Landings some analogy of an evolutionary process?’

He studied her. ‘You tell me. You’ve been coming here a long time—’

‘Since I was a kid, with my parents. It’s just that since I met you two, the questions I have always had about it, I guess, have sharpened up. I ought to wear a bracelet. “What would Lobsang think?”’

Joshua barked laughter.

‘You know, this place always seemed a regular garden of Eden — but without the serpent, and I wondered where the serpent was. My family got on well with the people here. But I never wanted to stay. I never had the sense I fitted in. I would never dare to call it home, just in case I was somehow the serpent.’

Joshua tried to read the expression on Sally’s face. ‘I’m sorry.’

That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. She looked away. ‘I do think this place is important, Joshua. For all of us. All humanity, I mean. It’s unique, after all. But what happens when the colonists start getting here? I mean the regular sort, the wavefront, with their spades and picks and bronze guns, and their wife-beaters and fraudsters? How can this place survive? How many trolls will be shot, slaughtered and enslaved?’

‘Maybe whoever, whatever is running the experiment will start fighting back.’

She shuddered. ‘We are starting to think like Lobsang. Joshua, let’s get out of here and go somewhere normal. I need a holiday…’

50

A DAY LATER, ON A distant world, in a warm twilight, Helen Green was gathering mushrooms. She wandered across a scrap of high ground, a couple of miles out of the new township of Reboot.

And there was a kind of sigh, like an exhalation. Helen felt a whisper of breeze on her skin. She turned.

There was a man, standing on the grass, slim, dark. A woman stood at his side, and she looked as if she belonged there. Visitors stepping in weren’t an unusual occurrence. They rarely looked quite so confused as these two. Or as grubby. Or with frost glistening on their jackets.

And very few appeared with a gigantic airship hovering over their heads. Helen wondered if she should run and fetch somebody.

The man shielded his eyes against the sun. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Helen Green.’

‘Oh, the blogger from Madison? I hoped we’d meet you.’

She glared at him. ‘Who are you? You aren’t another tax man, are you? We drove the last one out of town.’

‘No, no. My name’s Joshua Valiente.’

‘The Joshua Valiente…’ To her horror she felt herself blush.

The woman with Joshua said witheringly, ‘Give me strength.’

To Joshua, Helen Green looked in her late teens. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair tied sensibly back from her face, and had a basket of some kind of fungi on her arm. She was dressed in shirt and slacks of some soft deer- like leather, and moccasins. She wouldn’t have fitted into the crowd on the Datum, but on the other hand she was no colonial-era museum piece. This wasn’t some retro re-creation of pioneering days past, Joshua realized. Helen Green was something new in the world, or worlds. Kind of cute, too.

There was no trouble finding a place to stay in Reboot, once they accepted you weren’t any kind of criminal or bandit, or worse yet a representative of the Datum federal government which had suddenly turned so hostile to the colonists. In their time here Joshua saw the locals welcome even the hobos, as they called them, a drift of rather vague-looking people wandering through the Long Earth, evidently with no intention of ever settling down, and therefore with not much to contribute to Reboot. But out here every new face, with a new story to tell, was welcome, however briefly they stayed, so long as they tilled a field or chopped some wood in return for bed and board.

In the evening, Joshua and Sally sat by the fire, alone together, under the dark hulk of the Mark Twain.

‘I like these folk,’ Joshua said. ‘They’re good people. Sensible. Doing things right.’ He felt like this because of the way he was, he accepted that; he liked it when people did what they had to do, such as build this community, properly and methodically. I could live here, he thought, somewhat to his own surprise.

But Sally snorted. ‘No. This is the old way of living, or an imitation of it. We don’t need to plough the land to feed vast densities of people. We don’t just have one Earth now, we have an infinite number and they can feed an infinite number of us. Those hobos have it more right. They are the future, not your starstruck little fan Helen Green. Look, I suggest we stay here for a week, help with the harvest, take our pay in supplies. What do you say? Then we’ll head for home.’

Joshua was embarrassed, but he said, ‘And then what? We can deliver Lobsang, or what’s left of him in the Mark Twain, to transEarth. Not to mention his cat. But then — I’m going to want to go back out, Sally. With Lobsang or without. I mean, it’s all out there. All these years since Step Day we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the Long Earth. I thought I knew it all, but I’d never seen a troll before this trip, never heard of Happy Landings… Who knows what might be left to find?’

She gave him her sideways look. ‘Are you suggesting, young man, that the two of us might travel together again?’

He’d never suggested such a thing to any other human being in his life. Not unless he was trying to save them. He evaded the question. ‘Well, there is the Gap. The Long Mars! Who knows? I’ve been thinking about that. Step far enough there and we might find a Mars that’s habitable.’

‘You’re beginning to dribble.’

‘Well, I did use to read a lot of science fiction. But, yeah, let’s go home first. It feels like it’s time. Check out Madison. See how people are. Sally, I would very much like to introduce you to Sister Agnes.’

She smiled. ‘And Sister Georgina. We can talk about Keats…’

‘And then, when Lobsang two point zero launches the Mark Trine, I intend to be on board. Even if I have to stow away with the damn cat.’

Sally looked thoughtful. ‘You know, my mother had a saying when us kids used to run around like wild things: “It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.” I can’t help thinking that if we keep pushing our luck with this wonderful new toy of a multiverse, sooner or later a big foot will come down on us hard. Though I guess you could