The Long Cosmos (35 page)

He goggled. ‘You need a
licence
?'

‘I'd be happy to drive you.'

‘I don't want to trouble you—'

‘I need to go pick up some stores tomorrow anyhow.' She smiled. ‘I mean, it's not like there's a bus service. Not out this far.'

Joshua suppressed a sigh. The great Valienté, the Long Earth wanderer, leaning on a stick, forgotten even in Datum Madison, and reduced to getting a ride from some fresh-faced kid. ‘Well, that's kind of you.'

‘In the morning, then.'

‘Thank you, Ms – umm—'

‘Green. Phyllida Green.' She stuck out her hand.

He shook her hand, startled. Helen's family had been Greens. It was a common enough name. But Madison was a small city, and the hair colour looked about right. Was it possible? . . . Well, if this was some distant cousin of his wife, it felt OK to let her take care of him, just a little bit. Even if she had never heard of him.

‘Are you sure you're feeling all right?'

‘I'm fine, Ms Green. Just more old memories.'

‘This way, then. Watch the step now.'

50

T
HE ROOM WAS
a hutch, but the walls seemed to be well enough insulated, and Joshua wasn't cold. Phyllida Green made him a meal, omelette and French fries and beans, and she had a refrigerator stocked with some kind of local homebrew beer in recycled Coke bottles.

The web connection was a bust, but the TV worked well enough; Joshua guessed it was feeding off a signal from some satellite. He channel-surfed, the way he always did when he came back to the Datum, if only because it was still pretty much the only place you
could
do that. ‘That's one thing you don't get in the High Meggers,' he said to himself. ‘A sprained thumb from a TV remote.'

Most of the output, though, was ageing comedy or drama, some of it even dating from before Step Day. There were a few news channels, just the day's headlines delivered by talking heads, with little in the way of field reports. The most interesting stuff was documentaries, even if most of it was pretty crudely made, just a small team and a camera or two burrowing away in the corners of the Long Earth. Here was a piece on hucksters in Miami West 4, under the eggshell-blue thread of a space elevator, selling Stan Berg T-shirts, emblazoned with the eleven words of his Sermon Under the Beanstalk. ‘The only Bible you'll ever need,' said one gum-chewing salesman.

Here was some kind of self-styled adventurer in a broad-brimmed hat that looked like it had come straight out of some fancy city store, clutching a copy of the
Stepper's Guide
, and bragging about the places he could take you, if you only signed up to his twain-based Long Earth tour business. ‘In a world on the edge of the Corn Belt, I've explored the bed of a bone-dry Mediterranean. On a world far beyond the Gap, I've climbed the flank of the greatest volcano anybody ever found, a thousand times more powerful even than Yellowstone. Thirty-five million steps from the Datum, I've walked the only continent in an entire world, drained by a single river that makes the Mississippi look like a rivulet—'

‘Been there, done that. Actually I don't have the T-shirt. Next.' A documentary on Valhalla:

‘With its grid-layout of streets, its industrial zones and parks, the schools and hospitals and shops, and its showpiece central square that has been named Independence Place ever since a bold declaration of autonomy was made here back in 2040, Valhalla has its own history. But as cities go, it is unique. Valhalla is the greatest city of mankind beyond the Datum and the Low Earths, indeed the only substantial city in the High Meggers. And what makes Valhalla unlike any other city in the Long Earth is that
nobody farms
anywhere near Valhalla. The citizens of this place inhabit a thick band of worlds to either stepwise side, worlds which have been kept largely undeveloped, and where people gather fruit from the trees and hunt the big animals. So a population of hunter-gatherers is able to sustain a modern city. This is a way of living that was not possible before stepping. The Valhallans got the best of both worlds!

‘But now there is a kind of wistfulness about the place. Some buildings, even whole districts, are dark, boarded up. Even the bars seem half-empty. As if the people are trickling away.

‘On Datum Earth, before Step Day, cities used to be magnets of population. People would drift in from the countryside in search of an easier life. But out in the Long Earth it's the opposite. If you can avoid the dirty water and the mosquitoes, living off the land is easy, cheap . . . In the Long Earth people drift
away
from cities, not into them. Even from the steppers' dream that was Valhalla—'

Depressed – remembering his father-in-law Jack, firebrand of Valhalla's Gentle Revolution – Joshua flipped channels.

A documentary about the Long Mars, a quarter of a century on from the pioneering expedition by Sally Linsay and her father:

‘In Australia we had forty thousand years of civilization before the savages landed. It's not our fault that Captain Cook couldn't see what was in front of his nose. My daughter, you know, her art is to make shields of eucalyptus bark, and she signs them with handprints on the back – you blow the pigment through a straw and leave a shadow. And in European Ice Age caves you can find stuff that they signed just the same way . . .'

In the background, behind the face of the polite middle-aged woman, some kind of kangaroo went past, across a crimson plain. It looked tall – taller than the spacesuited humans around it – and, maybe in some adaptation to the lower gravity, it seemed to
walk
, one step after another, rather than hop.

‘Of course I wouldn't say we were more advanced than you. Not much. But we were settled, we were sophisticated, we were embedded in our landscape, our ecology. We had mapped the continent, not with pictures but with words and songs. And not only that, we
stepped.
Right from the gitgo. There are rock paintings in the Low Earths that prove it. Stepping for thousands of years, because the outback is sure a useful place to have such a skill –
tens
of thousands of years, like it was normal, it was what we did. And then when the rest of you “discovered” the Long Earth, the way you “discovered” Australia, we were there already. No wonder more of us as a percentage went walkabout in the Long Earth after Step Day than any other group on the planet . . .'

And behind the roo, standing up from the smooth flatness of the seabed, were a series of dark bands, slender, vertical, black against the purplish sky of this world. Monoliths. Five of them. The image was sharp, the inscriptions on their surfaces clear, if utterly strange.

‘Well, now we have Mars, the Long Mars, another raw, arid, beautiful landscape, and an unending one. We'll probably spend another four hundred centuries singing our way across all of that. Then we'll figure out what to do next . . .'

‘Sleep well, Sally, wherever you are.'

At last Joshua found an old movie, a favourite of Lobsang's:
The Ballad of Cable Hogue.
He was falling asleep before the final reel, and dreamed of airship travel.

He woke before light.

This place no longer felt like Madison. It was too cold. It didn't
smell
the same – it didn't even smell like the Low Earth footprints of the town, so drastic had the climate shifts been. There was no traffic noise, but, lying there in the dark, without electric light, he heard the unmistakeable howl of wolves, and a gruff grunting closer by, the clatter of a garbage pail. A bear, maybe? Or just a raccoon? Some said that the wildlife of Canada was migrating south, fleeing advancing glaciers: lynx and moose and caribou. Some claimed you could even see polar bears not far north of Madison, in the worst of the winters.

He rolled over and tried to get some more sleep.

51

A
LITTLE AFTER
nine the next morning Joshua, with Phyllida Green, set off towards central Madison.

The electric cart followed Mineral Point Road, a straight-line drag that led dead east towards downtown, a route that would bring them almost to the gates of Forest Hill. The road surface was reasonably well maintained, the frost cracks and potholes roughly filled, though the edge of the asphalt was colonized by sturdy-looking saplings – pine and spruce trees. There were no markings on the road, no working lights or other traffic systems. Joshua guessed there wasn't the volume of road traffic to justify the upkeep.

It was a different way of life now, here on the Datum, Joshua was learning. The population densities had dropped so much, and the old globalized civilization had pretty much broken down. The days when you would use a cell phone made in Finland, to order a pizza made with ingredients from east Asia, and delivered by some guy who was an immigrant from Chile, were long gone. On the Datum, and indeed the stepwise worlds, people travelled a lot less geographically, and sourced their stuff much more locally, than they used to. Nobody used the roads any more, or the rail, or the planes.

And the countryside through which this road threaded was transformed too. In places the ground was flooded, and culverts and banks had been hastily dug to preserve the road itself. Joshua imagined drains clogging after a few years without maintenance, and the land reverting to the marsh from which much of the city's real estate had long ago been reclaimed. On higher ground, meanwhile, the old prairie had mostly died back, the lovely waist-high flowers that had once characterized this time of year gone, leaving sparse plains colonized by short grasses – it almost looked like Arctic tundra to Joshua. The forest clumps looked ravaged, with the green of pine trees sprouting from clusters of dead oaks and spruce. Even the state tree, the sugar maple, was supposedly extinct here, he'd learned.

The world was silent too, the birds stilled. Joshua vaguely wondered what was going on in the lakes, which ought to be clear of ash and human pollutants by now. He guessed the birds would be back, northern-latitude species anyhow. But what about the fish?

The trouble was that after Yellowstone it was as if the climate zones had suddenly all shifted hundreds of miles south, maybe as much as a thousand, so that the latitude of Madison was now like the southern coast of Alaska had been. And life couldn't react that quickly. Only a handful of the native species were able to prosper in the new landscape. One day, he supposed, the north Canadian flora would transplant itself down here wholesale, the pines and the birch and the tall grass prairie. But for a long while this landscape was going to look desolate.

They did pass a field crowded with strange, swollen shapes, each taller than an adult human being, and with a strange scent of cheese on the air. Joshua remembered how he and Lobsang had found such fungi on a world far beyond the Datum, in the course of their pioneering Journey all those years ago: a fungus that had proven easy to grow and yet highly nutritious, which Lobsang had threatened to bring home and sell to the fast-food industry. Now, in this long post-Yellowstone winter, that discovery seemed to have at last come into its own.

After a couple of miles they crossed the West Beltline Highway. Here there was still a working lights-controlled crossing system, and they had to wait. Though some of its lanes had been closed, and the bridge by which the highway had once crossed over Mineral Point Road was evidently disused, the highway itself was still open, and it supported a trickle of traffic. Most of the vehicles Joshua saw were electric, like Phyllida's, but there was some older pre-Yellowstone stock refitted with big fat gasifier cylinders, fuel derived from the burning of wood: it was a sight like a news clip from World War Two, to Joshua's eyes.

The highway junction was blazoned with bright orange warning signs, and that gave Phyllida the chance to chatter about the radiation-danger Zone system that had been established around Madison. Joshua remembered some of this, but he had never stayed in Datum Madison long enough for it to matter. The Red Zone extended a couple of miles around the Capitol building, or its ruin, where the anti-steppers' nuke had been detonated, back in '30. These days you were allowed in there at your own risk, but there were nightly sweeps by automated units and foot-patrol cops to stop anybody staying over. An Amber Zone stretched the best part of ten miles out from downtown, and so spanned the whole of Madison to the west to beyond the Beltline, to the south beyond Lake Monona and to Fitchburg, to the east well beyond the interstate to communities like Cottage Grove, and off to the north up beyond Dane County airport to De Forest and Sun Prairie. Phyllida said a kind of lobe of amber extended further to the east, because that was where the prevailing wind had happened to blow much of the fallout on the day of the nuke. Here you were allowed to reside, but you were subject to mandatory annual health checks, especially the children. And then there was a Yellow Zone that spread in a rough circle of radius fifty miles around downtown, just to keep you aware of the blight that lay at the heart of the area.

They drove on in, through more built-up neighbourhoods, mostly abandoned.

‘Some people think the Zoning should be dropped,' Phyllida said brightly. ‘The residual radiation's supposed to be back to not much above the old background level by now. Except for caesium-137 of course,' she said with an air of familiarity. ‘
That
is still a menace in the food chain, such as in game and freshwater fish and mushrooms, which was
just
what people were living off after we ran out of food after Yellowstone, wouldn't you know it? But everybody says the ash and stuff from the volcano will probably do you a lot more harm than the radiation ever would. The authorities just want to monitor things, I suppose, and there's no harm in that.'

Joshua shrugged. ‘I suppose nobody knows for sure.'