The Long Earth (7 page)

Clichy pushed away the laptop and massaged the top of his fleshy nose. ‘Who am I, Stephen Hawking? My brain is boiling. Whereas you, on the other hand, Officer Jansson, have taken to all this like a pig to shit.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, sir—’

‘Just tell it to me the way you understand it. The most basic problem – I mean for Madison’s finest – is that we can’t carry through our pieces intact. Right?’

‘Not even a Glock, no, because of the steel parts. No metallic iron can be carried over, sir. Or steel. You can take through whatever you can carry, save for that. I mean, there’s iron ore in the other worlds, and you can dig it up and process it and manufacture iron over
there
, but you can’t carry that stepwise either.’

‘So you need to build a forge on every world you settle.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll tell you what puzzles even a doofus like me, Jansson. I thought we all got iron in our blood, or something. How come that doesn’t get left behind?’

‘In your blood, the iron’s chemically bound up in organic
molecules
. Inside your haemoglobin, one molecule at a time. Iron molecules can go over if they are in chemical compounds like that, just not in the form of metal. Why, rust can be carried over, because that’s a compound of iron with water and oxygen. You can’t take your piece over, sir, except for all the rust on the shaft.’

He eyed her. ‘That isn’t some kind of lewd remark, is it, Jansson?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

‘Anybody know why things are this way?’

‘No, sir.’ She had been following the discussions, as best she could. Some physicists had pointed out that iron nuclei were the most stable in nature; iron was the end result of the complicated fusion processes that went on at the heart of the sun. Maybe its reluctance to travel between the worlds was something to do with that. Maybe stepping between the worlds was something like quantum tunnelling, a low-probability passage between energy states. As iron had the most stable atomic nucleus, maybe it lacked the energy to escape from its energy well on Datum Earth … Or maybe it was magnetism. Or something. Nobody
knew
.

Clichy, a practical man, just nodded. ‘At least we know the rules. Kind of a gut-wrench for most Americans to have gun control suddenly imposed on ’em, however. What else? There are no people in these other worlds, right? I mean, except for the ones who leaked over from ours.’

‘That’s right, sir. Well, as far as anybody knows. There has been no systematic exploration even of the nearby worlds, not yet. You can’t know what’s hiding over the next ridge. But they have sent up a few spy balloons and such, aerial cameras. No sign of people, anywhere we can see.’

‘OK. So there’s a whole chain of these worlds, right? In two directions, East and West.’

‘Yes, sir. You just step from one into another, like passing down a corridor. You can go one way or another, East or West – though those are just arbitrary labels. They don’t correspond to real directions, in our world.’

‘No short cuts? I can’t just beam over to world two million?’

‘Not that anybody knows, sir.’

‘How many of these worlds? One, two, many? A million, a billion?’

‘Nobody knows that either, sir. We don’t even know how far out people have walked. It’s all –’ She waved a hand. ‘– loose around the edges. Uncontrolled.’

‘And every one of these worlds is a whole separate Earth, right?’

‘As far as we know.’

‘But the sun. Mars and Venus. The fucking moon. Are they the same as ours? I mean—’

‘Every Earth comes with its own universe, sir. And the stars are the same. The date is the same, in all the worlds. Even the time of day. The astronomers have established that with star charts; they could tell if there were a slippage of a century, or whatever.’

‘Star charts. Centuries. Jeez. You know, this afternoon I have to attend a conference chaired by the Governor about jurisdiction. If you commit a crime in Madison West fucking 14, do I even have the authority to arrest you?’

Jansson nodded. Not long after Step Day had come to pass, while some people had just drifted away into the wild, others had started staking claims. You settled down, hammered in your markers, and prepared to plant your crops and raise your kids, in what looked like virgin country. But who, in reality, owned what? You could stake your claim, but would the government endorse it? Were the parallel Americas even United States territory? Well, now the administration had decided to take a position on that.

Clichy said, ‘Word is the President is going to declare that all the stepwise Americas
are
US sovereign territory, over which US laws apply. The stepwise territories are “under the aegis of the federal government”, is the language. That will simplify things, I guess. If you can call having a beat suddenly become infinite “simple”. We’re all overstretched, all the agencies. You have the military being brought home from the war zones, Homeland dreaming up
endless
new ways the terrorists can get through, and meanwhile the corporations are quietly heading on out to see what there is to grab … Ah, shit. My momma told me I should have stayed in Brooklyn.

‘OK, listen, Officer Jansson.’ He leaned forward now, hands folded, intent. ‘I’ll tell you why I brought you in. Whatever the legal viewpoint, we’re still charged with keeping the peace in Madison. And, how lucky for us, Madison is a kind of magnet for the nutjobs over this.’

‘I know, sir …’

Madison had been the source of the Stepper technology in the first place, so it was a natural hub for that reason. And Jansson, studying reports about people coming here to begin long stepwise journeys, was also beginning to wonder if there was something else about the area that attracted them. Some way stepping was
easier
here. Maybe the Long Earth was about stability. Maybe the oldest, most stable parts of the continents were the easiest places to step – just as iron had the most stable nucleus. And Madison, sitting at the heart of North America, was one of the most stable places on the planet, geologically. If she saw Joshua again, she meant to ask him.

Clichy said, ‘So we got a special challenge. Which is why I need you, Jansson.’

‘I’m no kind of an expert, sir.’

‘But you keep functioning, right through all the
Twilight Zone
shit. Even on that first night, you kept your head clear and your mind focused on the policing priorities, while some of your esteemed colleagues were busy pissing their pants or puking up their pretzels. I want you to be point man on this. You understand? I want you to take a lead, both on the individual incidents, and the patterns behind them. For sure those rascals out there are going to keep figuring out more ways to use this shit against us. I want you to be my Mulder, Officer Jansson.’

She smiled. ‘Scully would be more appropriate.’

‘Whatever. Look, I’m not promising you anything in return. It’s an unconventional assignment. Your contribution will be hard to reflect in your record. I’ll do my best, however. You might end up spending a lot of time away from home. A lot of time alone, even. Your personal life—’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve a cat. She looks after herself.’

He tapped a key, and she knew he must be studying her personnel file. ‘Twenty-eight years old.’

‘Twenty-nine, sir.’

‘Born in Minnesota. Parents still there. No siblings, no kids. A failed gay marriage?’

‘I’m mostly celibate these days, sir.’

‘Jansson, I sincerely do not want to know. OK, go back to Datum Earth, rework your assignments with your sergeant, figure out what you need to set up in this station and the one in East 1 – hell, just go look busy for the mayor, Officer.’

‘Yes, sir.’

All in all Jansson had been pleased with the meeting, looking back on it, and her new assignment. It told her that guys like Clichy, and those in power above him, were handling this extraordinary phenomenon, the sudden opening up of the Long Earth, about as well as they could be expected to. Which wasn’t true, she had learned from the news and other sources, in every country in the world.

10

‘SURELY, PRIME MINISTER
, we could just ban stepping? It is a manifest security risk!’

‘Geoffrey, we might as well outlaw breathing. Even my own mother has stepped!’

‘But the population is fleeing. The inner cities are ghost towns. The economy is collapsing. We must do
something
…’

Hermione made a tactful minute of the exchange.

Hermione Dawes was extremely good at taking minutes. She prided herself on the skill; it was an art to sift what people meant from what they said, and she had been practising this art quite sat-is factorily for almost thirty years, for political masters of all hues. She had never married, and appeared to be quite comfortable with that fact, laughingly telling her fellow secretaries that her gold ring, which she wore all the time, was intended as a chastity belt. She was trustworthy, and trusted, and the only tiny flaw that her bosses had detected was that she owned every single track that Bob Dylan had ever cut.

Nobody she worked with knew her, she felt. Not even the gentlemen who, periodically, when she was known to be working, broke into her flat and searched it, always very carefully, no doubt sharing a little smile as they carefully replaced the tiny sliver of wood she pushed between the front door and its frame every day. Very similar to her own little smile when she noted that their big flat feet had once again crushed the scrap of meringue that she always dropped on the carpet just
inside
the living room door, a scrap they never ever noticed.

Since she never took off her gold ring, no one but she and God knew that inscribed, quite expensively, around the inner surface of the ring was a line from a Dylan song called ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. She wondered, these days, if any of the busy little bodies she worked with, including most of the ministers, would even recognize where the quote came from.

And now, a few years after Step Day, as the latest panicky discussion went on in the Cabinet Office, she wondered if she was too old to get a job with the masters, as opposed to the fools.

‘Then they should be licensed. Stepper boxes. The Long Earth is a sink as far as the blessed economy is concerned, but penalizing the use of the boxes you need to access it would yield some tax revenue, at least!’

‘Oh, don’t be absurd, man.’ The Prime Minister sat back in his chair. ‘Come on. We can’t just ban a thing because we can’t control it.’

The minister responsible for health and safety looked startled. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s never stopped us before.’

The Prime Minister tapped his pen on the table. ‘The inner cities are emptying. The economy’s imploding. Of course there is a bright side. Immigration is no longer a problem …’ He laughed, but he seemed to crumple, and when he spoke again he sounded, to Hermione, almost in despair. ‘God help us, gentlemen, the science chaps tell me that there might be more iterations of the planet Earth out there than there are people. What policy options can we possibly conceive in the face of
that
?’

Enough was enough: quite suddenly, that was how Hermione felt about all this.

As the picky, preposterous, pointless conversation continued, with a faint smile on her lips Hermione wrote a couple of lines of her immaculate Pitman shorthand, laid her pad on the desk in front of her, and after a nod of permission from the Prime Minister she stood and left the room. Probably nobody else even
noticed
she was gone. She walked out into Downing Street, and stepped into the London next door, which swarmed with security guards, but she was such a familiar sight after all these years that they accepted her identity card and let her pass.

And then she stepped again. And again, and again …

Much later, when she was missed, one of the other secretaries was called in to translate the little note that she had written, the delicate strokes and swirling curves.

‘It looks like a poem to me, sir. Or a song lyric. Something about people criticizing what they can’t understand.’ She looked up at the Prime Minister. ‘Mean anything to you, sir? Sir? Are you all right, sir?’

‘Have you got a husband, miss—sorry, I don’t know your name?’

‘It’s Caroline, sir. I’ve got a boyfriend, a steady boy, good with his hands. I can get you a doctor if you want.’

‘No, no. It’s just we’re all so bloody inadequate, Caroline. What a farce it is, this business of government. To imagine we were ever in control of our destinies. If I were you, Caroline, I would marry your steady boy right now, if you think he’s any good, and
go
, go to another world. Anywhere but here.’ He slumped in the chair and shut his eyes. ‘And God help England, and God help us all.’

She wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake. At length she slipped out, taking Hermione’s abandoned pad with her.

11

WITHIN A WEEK
of her meeting with Clichy, Jansson’s colleagues had started calling her ‘Spooky’ Jansson.

And within a month, she had made an appointment at the Home, as Joshua called it. It was an orphanage, a run-down converted section-8 apartment complex on Allied Drive, in an area that was about as rough as it got in Madison. But you could see the place was well kept. And there she quietly met, once more, fourteen-year-old Joshua Valienté. She had sworn that if Joshua dealt through her she would guarantee that nobody would treat him as a Problem, but as somebody who might be able to help out, maybe, you know? Like Batman?

That was how, for several years after Step Day, Joshua’s young life had been shaped.

‘That must seem a long time ago to you now,’ Selena said smoothly, leading Joshua deeper into the transEarth complex.

He didn’t reply.

‘So you became a hero. Did you wear a cape?’ asked Selena.

Joshua didn’t like sarcasm. ‘I had an oilskin for rainy days.’

‘Actually, that was a joke.’

‘I know.’

Yet another forbidding door opened in front of them, another corridor was revealed.