The Long Earth (41 page)

She had reached Capitol Square. Most days this was cluttered with art fairs or farmers’ markets, now expanded to feature the exotic produce of a dozen worlds, or else some protest rally or other. Today there was a concentration of cops and Homelands types and FBI officers, some in nuclear-biological-chemical protection suits, as if
that
would make a difference, and their vehicles, including helicopters hovering overhead. The bravest of the brave, she thought, running
towards
the bomb. As she ripped around the square Jansson looked down State Street, that linked the main UW campus with the Square in a straight west–east line. State was still full of bustling restaurants, espresso bars and shops, despite the Long Earth recession and the depopulation, still the city’s beating heart. This afternoon it swarmed with students and shoppers. Some were evidently hurrying for shelter, but others sipped their coffees and inspected their phones and laptops. Some were laughing, even though Jansson could clearly hear the echoing voice of a cop loudspeaker urging everybody to get indoors or step away, on top of the sirens’ wail.

‘People aren’t believing it, Chief.’

‘Tell me about it.’

She abandoned the car and, flashing her badge at everyone who got in her way, pushed through the lines to the Capitol mound. The racket of the sirens, echoing from the concrete, was deafening, maddening. Down the four big staircases around the Capitol building itself people were spilling out, members of the State legislature, lobbyists, lawyers, in sharp-pressed business suits. And at the foot of one flight of steps a more ragged group of civilians was sitting, watched over by a loose ring of armed cops and Homelands officers. These folk, it turned out, had been in the Square when the warning came, and had been immediately
rounded
up, their Steppers confiscated along with their phones and any weapons. Jansson, just outside the perimeter, searched for familiar faces among the resentful, scared crowd of tourists, shoppers, business types. Some of them wore proud-to-be-a-Stepper wrist bands that they brandished at the officers who contained them.
I’m no Humanity-Firster! Look at this!

And there was Rod Green, sitting a little way from the rest.

She sat down with Rod. He was eighteen years old, she knew, but looked younger. He wore jeans and a dark jacket, his strawberry-blond hair cut short. He looked like any other student. But there were lines around his mouth, his eyes. Frown lines, lines of resentment and hate.

‘You did this. Didn’t you, Rod?’ She had to yell to make herself heard over the sirens. ‘Come on, kid, you know me. I’ve kept an eye on you for years.’

He eyed her. ‘You’re the one they call Spooky.’

‘You got me. Did you do this?’

‘I helped.’

‘Helped who? Helped how?’

He shrugged. ‘I brought it to the square in a big backpack. I delivered it, but I don’t know where it’s stashed. I also don’t know how it was armed. Or how it can be disarmed.’

Shit, shit. ‘Is this necessary, Rod? Do all these people have to die just so you can get back at Mommy?’

He sneered. ‘Well,
that
bitch is safe.’

That shocked Jansson. Maybe he didn’t even know that his mother, Tilda Lang Green, off in a colony on some remote Earth, was dead of a cancer. Now wasn’t the time to tell him. ‘Do you even think it’s going to do any good? I know you people have it in your heads that Madison is some kind of stepping hub. But you can’t stop up the Long Earth. Even if you flatten the whole of Wisconsin people will just keep on stepping from wherever—’

‘I only know one thing about the bomb.’

She grabbed his shoulders. ‘What? Tell me, Rod.’

‘I know
when
.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Two minutes forty-five seconds. Forty-four. Forty-three …’

Jansson stood up and yelled at the cops, ‘Did you hear that? Report it in. And get these people out of here. Their Steppers – for God’s sake, give them back their Steppers!’

The cops didn’t need telling twice, and their captives rose in a mob, panicked by Rod’s overheard words. But Jansson stayed by Rod’s side.

‘It’s all up for me,’ Rod said. ‘I can’t step. That’s why I came here. It seemed right.’

‘Right, hell.’ Without warning she grabbed him, picking him up under knees and shoulders like a child, and, straining, lifted him off the ground. He was too heavy for her, and she immediately fell under him, but she switched her Stepper before the two of them hit the ground.

And she landed on her back, on green grass. Blue sky overhead, just like on the Datum today. The sirens had gone away. The scaffolding frame that had been erected here in West 1 to interface with the Capitol loomed over her.

Rod, lying on top of her, convulsed, puked over her, and started to froth at the mouth. A paramedic in an orange jumpsuit pulled Rod aside.

‘He’s a phobic,’ Jansson said. ‘He needs—’

‘We know, ma’am.’ The paramedic took a syringe from her pack and shot him up in the neck.

The convulsions eased. Rod looked Jansson in the eye. He said clearly, ‘Two minutes.’ Then his eyes rolled up and he was unconscious.

Two minutes
. The word went out across Madison Zero, and its nascent twins to East and West, and around a watching world.

And the stepping began.

Parents carried their children, and went back for their own old folk, and their elderly neighbours. In care homes, some bewildered
senior
citizens had Steppers slapped on them and were sent East or West for the first time in their lives. In the schools, teachers carried over their students, and big kids carried little kids. In the hospitals the staff and the healthier outpatients found ways to lift and step the heaviest, most immobilized patients, even coma victims and babies in incubators, and went back for more, and then waited as surgeons hurried to close up interrupted operations, and carried those patients over too. All across Madison, the majority of humanity who could step aided the minority who couldn’t. Even extreme phobics like Rod Green who couldn’t tolerate a single step were met by medics who did their best to stabilize them, until they could be hurried away from the danger zone and taken back to the Datum.

In Madison West 1, Monica Jansson watched the results unfold. There were TV cameras all around the area, and eye-in-the-sky images relayed down from drone aircraft. For Jansson, it felt very odd to be
safe
in such a crisis, but the medics had taken away her Stepper, and there was nothing more she could do. So she watched. Somebody even brought her a cup of coffee.

From the air, here in West 1, you could clearly see the lakes, the isthmus, the distinctive geography of the area laid out like a map, a twin of the region on the Datum, a twin that had been entirely un inhabited two decades ago. Madison West 1 had started to make its own mark in this world, with swathes of forest cleared and marsh drained, and some tracks wide and metalled well enough to be called roads, and clusters of buildings, and steam and smoke rising from the mills and forges. But today the inhabitants of West 1 were scrambling to accommodate and help the incoming, fleeing from the Datum.

Here they came. Jansson saw them emerge, one by one or in little groups. There were even some in the lakes, steppers coming over from their boats or their surfboards. Rowboats cut across the bright blue waters to each waving speck.

And, on land, as the steppers crossed, Jansson saw a kind of map
of
the Datum city emerge on the green carpet of West 1. There were the university students, a multicoloured blur that marked the location of their campus, stretching south from the shore of Mendota. There were the hospitals, St Mary’s and Meriter and the UW Hospitals and Clinics, little rectangular huddles of doctors and nurses and patients. There were the schools, teachers with their charges where their classrooms should have been. On the Monona shore the contents of the convention centre appeared, business types, in flocks, like penguins. The area around Capitol Square itself started to fill in, the diamond shape of the square, with the shoppers and diners from State and King lining up along the tracks of the streets leading off to west and east, and the office workers and residents of East and West Washington. It was indeed a map of Madison, she realized, a map made up of the people, with the buildings stripped away. She looked for Allied Drive, where a group of nuns stepped across realities from the Home, with the vulnerable children in their charge.

And in the very last second, she saw, in a view from ground level, that where the high-rise buildings of downtown stood, people started appearing in mid-air. Many were in business suits. They just stepped over from the upper floors because there was no time left to get to the elevator or the stairs, or do anything else. Three-dimensional ghosts of the doomed buildings coalesced, ghosts composed of people who seemed to hang in the air, just for an instant, before falling to the ground.

Somewhere near Jansson, a Geiger counter started clicking.

52

JOSHUA AND SALLY
hurried through the last few Madisons, West 10, 9, 8 … Joshua wasn’t interested in these crowded worlds; all he wanted now was to get home. 6, 5, 4 … In one Low Earth they had taken the time to cross geographically, from Humptulips to Madison, flying the airship on the one engine Franklin Tallyman, boy genius of Reboot, had managed to fix up for them. 3, 2, 1 … There were barriers in the last few worlds, some kind of system of warning signs; they hurried on—

Zero.

Madison was gone.

Joshua stood in shock, gasping. Sally clutched his arm. They stood in a plain of rubble. Gaunt shapes, fragments of wall sticking out of the ground. A few twisted tangles that must be the remains of reinforced-concrete structures. Dust, dry as hell, choked him immediately. The battered airship hung blindly over these ruins.

Somebody was standing before them. Some guy in a coverall suit, no, a woman, Joshua realized, seeing her face through a dusty visor.

‘We’re here to meet steppers,’ she said, her voice a relay from a speaker. ‘Get out of here. Go straight back.’

Alarmed, shocked, Joshua and Sally stepped hand in hand back to West 1, taking the airship with them. Here, in the bright sunlight, another young woman in a FEMA uniform approached them with a clipboard and data pad. She looked up at the airship, shook her head in disbelief, and said reproachfully, ‘You’re going to have
to
go through decon. We do post warnings in the neighbouring worlds. Hey, you can’t catch everybody. Don’t worry, you’ve broken no law. I’ll need your names and social security numbers …’ She started to peck at her pad.

Joshua began to take in the surroundings. This parallel Madison was crowded, compared with the last time he was here. Tent cities, feeding hospitals, feeding stations. A refugee camp.

Sally said bitterly, ‘Here we are in the land of plenty, with everything anybody could ever want, multiplied a million times over. Nevertheless somebody wants to start a war. What a piece of work is a man.’

‘But,’ Joshua said, ‘you can’t start a war if nobody turns up. Listen, I need to get to the Home. Or where the Home would be …’

The FEMA official’s phone rang, at her waist. She looked at the screen, seemed puzzled, and glanced at Joshua. ‘Are you Joshua Valienté?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s for you.’ She handed him the phone. ‘Go ahead, Mr Lobsang.’

Acknowledgements

We chose to use Madison, Wisconsin as a location in this novel partly because as we were developing the book it occurred to us that in July 2011 the second North American Discworld convention was to be held there, and we could get a hell of a lot of research done, as we authors like to say, on the cheap. That convention became in part a kind of mass workshop on the Long Earth. We’re grateful to all the contributors to that discussion, who really are far too numerous to list here, but particularly to Dr Christopher Pagel, owner of the Companion Animal Hospital in Madison, and his wife Juliet Pagel, who gave up an unreasonable amount of their time to show your authors Madison both primeval and modern, from the Arboretum to Willy Street, and on top of that made an incredibly helpful read-through of a draft of this book. Thank you Madisonians, and we hereby apologize for what we have done to your lovely city. All errors and inaccuracies are of course our sole responsibility. Our thanks also to Charles Manson, the Tibetan Subject Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for helping us build Lobsang’s world.

T.P.
S.B.
December 2011, Datum Earth

About the Authors

Author of the bestselling Discworld series,
Terry Pratchett
is one of the UK’s most popular – and bestselling – writers. His books have sold over 70 million copies worldwide and been translated into nearly 40 languages. He is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. He lives in Wiltshire.

Visit
www.terrypratchett.co.uk
to discover everything you need to know about Terry Pratchett and his writing, plus all manner of other things you may find interesting, such as videos, competitions, character profiles and games.

Stephen Baxter
is one of the UK’s most acclaimed writers of science fiction and a multi-award winner. His many books include the classic
Xeelee
sequence,
A Time Odyssey
novels (written with Arthur C. Clarke) and
The Time Ships
, a sequel to H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
. He lives in Northumberland.

More details of Stephen Baxter’s works can be found on
www.stephen-baxter.com

ALSO BY TERRY PRATCHETT

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