The Long Earth (29 page)

36

THE AIRSHIP STOPPED
again, at a barren world, the air just about breathable when Joshua tried it, but stinking of ash under an overcast sky into which the usual sounding-rockets ascended.

Lobsang said, ‘An aftermath world. Possibly an asteroid strike, but my best guess would be a Yellowstone, maybe a century ago. There may be life in the southern hemisphere, but nature’s clean-up job will take a long time.’

‘It’s a wasteland.’

‘Of course it is. Earth kills her children over and over again. But the rules are different now. It is a certainty that the volcano under Yellowstone National Park on Datum Earth will become aggressively active in the near future. And what will happen? People will step away. For the first time in human history, such a calamity will be a nuisance rather than a tragedy. Until the sun itself dies there will always be other worlds, and mankind will persist, somewhere in the Long Earth, immune to extinction.’

‘I wonder if that’s what the Long Earth is
for
.’

‘I’m not yet qualified to comment.’

‘Why have we stopped, Lobsang?’

‘Because I am picking up a signal on an AM frequency. Rather bad reception. The transmitter is very close. Would you like to see who’s calling?’ Lobsang’s face was a perfect simulation of a grin.

The airship’s restaurant boasted a pretty good dining table, Joshua had to admit, and certainly better than the makeshift shelf on the
observation
deck he used when there wasn’t any company. The staple of the meal in front of him was a white meat, the flesh rather fine.

And he looked up, into the eyes of Sally.

She had provided the meat. ‘It’s a kind of wild turkey you see around in the local worlds,’ she said now. ‘Good eating if you can be bothered, but they are a prey species and can very nearly outrun a wolf. Sometimes I catch a parcel of them and sell them to the pioneers …’

For a near-recluse, she did talk a lot, Joshua reflected. But he understood why. Joshua meanwhile just ate, enjoying himself. Maybe he was getting used to the company of women. This woman anyhow.

Lobsang entered, holding a tray. ‘Orange sorbet. Oranges aren’t native to the New World, but I have brought seeds for planting at suitable locations. Enjoy.’ He served, turned away and disappeared through the blue door.

Sally had been reasonably polite upon learning the identity and nature of Lobsang. Well, since she’d stopped laughing. Now she lowered her voice. ‘What’s with the Jeeves bit?’

‘I think he wants to make you welcome. I knew you’d send a signal, you know.’

‘How?’

‘Because I would have done in your place. Come on, Sally. You came back to us, and we figure that’s because there’s something you want from us. So let’s trade. You know what we need to learn from you.
How did you get out so far?
’

She eyed him. ‘I’ll give you a clue. I’m not alone. There are more of us out here than you’d think. Every so often, a stepping box
stutters
, you might say. I met a man twenty thousand clicks from the Datum who was certain that he was one jump away from Pasadena, and puzzled by the fact that he couldn’t get home. I led him down to a halfway house and left him there.’

‘I always wondered why I kept coming across so many bewildered people. I thought they were just dumb.’

‘Possibly many of them were.’

The voice of Lobsang floated in the air. ‘I am aware of the phenomenon you mention, Sally, and would like to take the opportunity to thank you for giving it a most apposite label.
Stuttering
. But I have been unable to duplicate it.’

Sally glared at the air. ‘Have you been listening to everything we have been saying?’

‘Of course. My ship, my rules. Perhaps you will be good enough to answer Joshua’s question. You’ve given only a partial response; the mystery still divides us. How did you get out here? Rather more purposefully than stuttering, I would hazard.’

Sally looked out of the window. It was dark outside, but the stars glittered with a vengeance. ‘I still don’t entirely trust you two. Out in the Long Earth everybody needs an edge, and this is my edge. I’ll tell you one thing. If you go much further you will meet trouble coming the other way.’

That throb in Joshua’s skull was never far from his awareness. ‘
What’s
coming?’

‘Even I don’t know. Not yet.’

‘It’s caused the migration of the trolls and the other humanoids, hasn’t it?’

‘So you know about that? I guess you could hardly miss it.’

‘Lobsang and I think we need to pursue this. Find out what’s causing it.’

‘What, and save the world?’

Joshua was getting used to her mockery. She was resolutely unimpressed by Lobsang’s treasure-ship dirigible, and by his grandiose talk and dreams, as well, it seemed, as by Joshua’s own reputation. ‘So why have you come back to us? To laugh at us, or to help us? Or because of what we can do for you?’

‘Among other things. It will keep.’ She stood up. ‘Goodnight, Joshua. Have Jeeves make up another stateroom, please. One that is not right next to yours, preferably. Oh, don’t look so alarmed, your honour is safe. It’s just that I snore, you see …’

37

THE SHIP STEPPED
all through the night, and, for once, Joshua thought he could feel every step. He sagged into something like sleep just before dawn, and got maybe an hour before Sally hammered on his door.

‘Show a leg, sailor boy.’

He groaned. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Last night I gave Lobsang some coordinates to aim for. We’ve arrived.’

Once decent, Joshua hurried down to the observation deck. The ship was motionless. They weren’t far from the Pacific coast in this version of Washington State. And below, far, far into the deep Long Earth, far beyond the consensus on where the colonizing wavefront might yet have reached, was a township, where no township had a right to be. Joshua just stared. It sprawled along the bank of a reasonably sized river, with a clutter of buildings, tracks threading through a thick, damp forest. But there were no fields, as far as he could see, no sign of agriculture. There were people everywhere, doing what people always did when there was an airship overhead, which was to point upwards and chatter excitedly. But without farms, how could they live in such a densely populated community?

Meanwhile, by the river, there were familiar hulking forms … Not quite human. Not quite animal.

‘Trolls.’

She glanced at him, surprised. ‘That’s what they’re called out here. As you know, evidently.’

‘As Lobsang knew before we set off.’

‘I suppose I should be impressed. You’ve met them, have you? Joshua, if you want to understand the trolls, if you want to understand the Long Earth, you need to understand this place. That’s why I’ve brought you here.

‘Orientation, Joshua. If this was the Datum we would be hovering over a township called Humptulips, in Grays Harbor County. We’re not so far from the Pacific coast. Of course the details of the landscape differ, the track of the river. I hope they’ve got the clam chowder boiling.’

‘Clam chowder? You know this place that well?’

‘Of course I do.’

In her way, she could be as irritatingly smug as Lobsang.

The airship came down over a broad dirt square at the heart of the township. The buildings scattered around the square struck Joshua immediately as
old
, of weathered wood, some on eroded-looking stone bases. He had an immediate sense that this township, of maybe a couple of hundred people, had been here long before Step Day. The square itself was dominated by a stout communal wooden building that Sally said was known simply as ‘City Hall’, and she led the way there. Inside, the building, constructed on a frame of impressive cedar beams, had a high ceiling, polished wooden floors and furniture, glassless windows at eye-level, and large doors at either end. The fire pit in the centre added a decent enough glow.

Lobsang had descended with them, his ambulant unit clothed in saffron robes for the occasion. Despite his 1980s body-builder bulk, he had never looked more Tibetan. And he seemed oddly self-conscious – as well he might, because the hall was full of staring, smiling townsfolk, and
trolls
, mixing with the people as unnoticed as family dogs at a picnic. The air was full of their distinctive, faintly unpleasant musk.

In City Hall there was indeed chowder to be had, boiling up in huge pots, a thoroughly incongruous treat given their remoteness from the Datum.

The mayor greeted them. He was a small, sleek man who had an accent like a middle European with good English. Of course Sally knew him. She handed him a small package as soon as they met, and he led them to a central table.

Sally saw Joshua’s glance at this exchange. ‘Pepper.’

‘You do a lot of bartering, do you?’

‘I guess. Don’t you? And I stay over. Not just here. If I find settlers who are interesting enough, I stop a while and help them out with their farming, whatever. That’s the way to learn a world, Joshua. Whereas you two, rattling along in your great big penis in the sky, are learning nothing.’

‘Told you so,’ Joshua murmured privately to Lobsang.

‘Perhaps,’ Lobsang replied quietly. ‘But even so, for all our flaws, she came back to us. You’re right, Joshua. There is something she wants from us. Among all these distractions we must persist in finding out what that is.’

Sally was saying now, ‘This place is pretty unique, among my stopovers, however. I call it Happy Landings.’

Lobsang observed, ‘Evidently it has been here a long time.’

‘A
very
long time. Folk sort of end up here … It seems to be a kind of people magnet. You’ll see.’

The only name the mayor gave was Spencer. Over bowls of chowder he was happy to talk about his unique community.

‘A “people magnet” – yes, perhaps it is something like that. But over the centuries that people have been coming here they have given it other names, or have cursed it, in a multitude of languages. There is some very old building stock, and we find old bones, some in crude coffins. Centuries, yes. People have been arriving for a long, long time. Thousands of years, even!

‘Of course most of the population you see around you were born here – I myself was – but there is always a trickle of newcomers. None of those incoming settlers knows how they got here, and everybody who comes here fresh arrives with the same story: one day you are on Earth, the Datum as they call it now, minding
your
own business, and suddenly you’re here. Sometimes there’s stress involved, you’re trying to escape something, oftentimes not.’ He lowered his voice and added, ‘Sometimes there are lone children. Strays. Lost boys and lost girls. Even infants. Often they’ve never stepped before at all. They are always made welcome, you may be sure of that. Do try the ale, I like to think we are very good at it. Some more chowder, Mr Valienté? Where was I?

‘Of course nowadays the scientific types among us are lining up behind the idea that there is some physical singularity, some kind of hole in space, that leads people here. As opposed to the old thinking that this place is at the centre of some kind of mysterious curse – or possibly, in the circumstances, a
blessing
.

‘Anyhow here we are, marooned, as it were, although I daresay no shipwrecked mariner ever arrived on a more hospitable shore. We can hardly complain. From what we hear from recent arrivals, our older folk are generally glad they missed out on most aspects of the twentieth century.’ Spencer sighed. ‘Some get here thinking that they have landed in heaven. Most arrive disorientated and sometimes fearful. But everybody who arrives here is welcomed. From newcomers we can learn about how all the other Earths are going. And we welcome any new information, concepts, ideas and talents; engineers, doctors and scientists are especially welcome. But I am pleased to say that these days we are growing our own culture, as it were.’

‘Fascinating,’ Lobsang murmured, as he carefully spooned chowder between artificial lips. ‘An indigenous human civilization, spontaneously forming in the reaches of the Long Earth.’

‘And a new way of travelling,’ Joshua said, feeling faintly stunned at this latest conceptual leap. ‘A way to cut out the step-by-step plod.’ In fact, he thought, thinking of Sally, thinking of the ‘stuttering’ she had mentioned,
another
way.

‘Yes. The Long Earth is evidently even stranger than it seems; we may learn a lot about its connectivity by studying this place. But it remains to be seen how useful this new phenomenon will be.’

‘Useful?’

‘Less so if it is like a fixed wormhole, a tunnel between two fixed points …’

‘Like the rabbit hole to Wonderland,’ Joshua said.

‘We must learn all we can.’

Sally, meanwhile, was watching Lobsang eat, her mouth gaping. ‘Joshua … it
eats
?’

He grinned. ‘Wouldn’t it look odder if he didn’t, in this company? Nobody else is bothered. We’ll discuss it later.’

Spencer leaned back comfortably in his chair. ‘We know Sally very well, of course. Now, tell me about yourselves, please, gentlemen. The world is evidently changing, and the change brings your wonderful zeppelin! You first, Lobsang. You’ll forgive us our curiosity about your exotic presence particularly …’

For the first time in Joshua’s experience, here in this crowded, sociable place, and with trolls watching them like an audience at a cabaret, it seemed that Lobsang was flustered. This was one of those moments when Joshua genuinely couldn’t tell if Lobsang really was ultimately a human, or just an incredibly smart simulation that was adept at mimicking such subtle human aspects as being embarrassed.

Lobsang cleared his throat. ‘To begin with – I am a human soul, though my body is artificial. You are familiar, perhaps, with the concept of prosthetics? The use of artificial limbs, organs to sustain life … Consider me as an extreme case.’

Spencer looked totally unfazed. ‘Amazing! What a step forward. At my age you do begin to wonder why the universe places intelligence in such fragile receptacles as our human bodies. May I ask if you have any special talents to share with us? That’s what we ask all newcomers, so please don’t be offended.’