Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Also by Terry Pratchett
Also by Stephen Baxter
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Terry and Lyn Pratchett and Stephen Baxter 2016
Cover photographs: space background and planet Earth image © NASA; landscape and figures © Shutterstock.
Design by R. Shailer/TW
Specifications of the USN space vessel Uncle Arthur here illustrated by Richard Shailer
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448167654
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9780857521798 (tpb)
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Jacks Thomas and Malcolm Edwards, for their prodigious dinner parties at one of which the Long Earth series was reborn
T.P.
Seconded. And to Sandra, as always
S.B.
THE LONG EARTH project was born in the course of a dinner party conversation in early 2010, when Terry Pratchett mentioned to me a science-fiction storyline he’d set aside long ago. Before that party was over, we’d decided to develop the idea as a collaboration. Initially we planned two books, but by December 2011, when we had completed our draft of Volume 1 (The Long Earth), that first book had split into two, we couldn’t resist exploring a ‘Long Mars’ in Volume 3, and we were planning how to reach a grand cosmic climax for the whole series . . . So at that point we were able to present our heroically patient publishers with plans for a five-book series.
The books have been published annually, but we worked faster than that; time was not on our side, and Terry had other projects he wanted to pursue. Volumes 1 and 2 of the series were published in 2012 and 2013 respectively. But by August 2013 we had presented our publishers with drafts of the final three volumes of the series, including the present book. We did continue to work on the books subsequently. The last time I saw Terry was in the autumn of 2014, when we worked on, among other things, the ‘big trees’ passages of The Long Cosmos (chapter 39 onwards). It has been my duty to see this book through its editorial and publishing stages.
S.B.
ON THE MOVE, ‘down’ was always the direction of Datum Earth. Down to the bustling worlds. Down to the millions of people. ‘Up’ was the direction of the silent worlds and the clean air of the High Meggers.
Five steps West of Datum Madison, Wisconsin, in a small cemetery plot outside a children’s home, Joshua Valienté stood over his wife’s marker stone. Down almost as far as it was possible for him to be down. It was a bitterly cold March day. Helen Green Valienté Doak. ‘What’s it all about, honey?’ he asked softly. ‘How did we come to this?’
He’d brought no flowers. He didn’t need to, so well did the children tend the little plot, presumably under the kindly supervision of Sister John, the old friend of Joshua’s who now ran the place. It had been Sister John’s idea to set up this marker, in fact, as a consolation for Joshua when he visited; Helen had insisted on being buried in the Datum, at a much less accessible site.
The stone was marked with the date of Helen’s death, in 2067. Three years on, Joshua supposed he was still trying to come to terms with the brutal reality.
He was a man who had always sought to be alone, for big chunks of his life at least. Even his experiences on Step Day had come about because of that drive for solitude. It was now more than half a century since an irresponsible genius called Willis Linsay had posted the specifications of a simple home-workshop gadget called a ‘Stepper box’ online. And when you built it, strapped it on your belt, and turned the switch on the top, you found yourself stepping, a transition out of the old world, which everybody now called Datum Earth, and into another: a world silent and choked by forest, if you stepped over from a location like Madison, Wisconsin, as thirteen-year-old Joshua had. Turn the switch the other way and you went back to where you started – or if you were bold enough, as Joshua had been, you could take a step further away, on into one world after another . . . Suddenly the Long Earth was open for business. A chain of parallel worlds, similar but not identical – and all save the original Earth, Datum Earth, empty of humanity.
For a loner kid like Joshua Valienté, a perfect refuge. But wherever you fled to, you had to come back in the end. Now, sixty-seven years old, his wife dead, Sally Linsay long lost – the two women, polar opposites, who had defined his life – with even his only son more or less estranged, Joshua had no choice but to be alone, it seemed.
Joshua had a sudden, sharp headache, like a shock through the temples.
And, standing there, he thought he heard something. Perhaps like the subsonic rumble of a deep quake, sound waves so huge and energy-dense they were felt rather than heard.
Joshua tried to focus on the here and now – this plot, his wife’s name on the stone, the slab-like buildings of this Low Earth, all timber walls and solar panels. But the distant sound nagged.
Something calling. Echoing in the High Meggers.
And, much further from the Datum, in an empty star-littered sky where an Earth should have been:
‘It’s impossible,’ said Stella Welch, staring at a tablet.
Dev Bilaniuk sighed. ‘I know.’ Stella was in her sixties, more than thirty years older than Dev. Not only that, Stella was Next: so smart that when she really took off on some line of speculation or analysis, Dev, who with a doctorate from Valhalla U was no dummy himself, could barely see her dust on the horizon. Granted she didn’t look all that smart now, from Dev’s perspective, dangling upside down in the cavernous volume of this chamber deep within the Brick Moon, with her mass of zero-gravity grey hair stuck out at all angles.
And she did seem to be as baffled by the ‘Invitation’, the message the radio telescope called Cyclops had picked up, as Dev was.
‘For one thing,’ she said, ‘we haven’t even finished Cyclops yet.’
‘Sure. But the tests of the sub-arrays have proved successful so far. And we were just switching around various sample targets when this – this SETI thing – just showed up in the data feed and downloaded itself and—’
‘Also we’ve had reports that other ’scopes, mostly in the Low Earths and the Datum, have been picking this up too. That is, on other worlds stepwise. This isn’t just some beacon firing off radio messages in this particular sky. This is a Long Earth wide phenomenon. How the hell can that be?’
Hesitantly Dev said, ‘There have been some odd reports on the outernet too. Funny stuff out in the Long Earth. Nothing to do with radio astronomy. Strange stuff in the trolls’ long call—’
She seemed to dismiss that. ‘And then there’s the decryption.’ She looked again at the tablet screen, the two blunt words, in plain English: JOIN US.
‘There seems to be a lot of information buried under that basic pattern,’ Dev said now. ‘Maybe we’ll need the full Cyclops array to be up and running to extract all of that.’
‘But the point is,’ she said heavily, ‘that what we have received came with its own decryption algorithm encoded into it, like some kind of computer virus. An algorithm capable of translating its own meaning into English.’
‘And other languages too,’ Dev said. ‘Human languages, I mean. We tested that. We downloaded the thing into a tablet owned by a native Chinese speaker among the crew here . . .’
Dev had got a corporate reprimand for that. But the tense relations between China and the western nations down on the Datum meant nothing here, two million worlds away.
‘How?’ Stella snapped now. ‘How the hell can it speak to us? Presumably without any prior knowledge of humanity and our languages? We think this was sent by some civilization far off in the direction of Sagittarius, many light years away, maybe even somewhere close to the centre of the Galaxy. Our radio leakage can’t have got that far, even from the Datum.’
Dev, bombarded, lost his patience. ‘Professor Welch. You’re senior to me in the field by decades. You wrote the texts I studied from. Also you’re a Next. Why are you asking me?’
She eyed him, and he saw a glint of humour under her irritated impatience. ‘Tell me what you think anyway. Any ideas?’
He shrugged. ‘I guess that, unlike you, I’m used to sharing a world with beings smarter than I am. These – Sagittarians – are smarter than that again. Smarter than you. They wanted to talk to us, and they knew how. The important thing, Professor, is to figure out what to do next.’
She smiled. ‘We both know the answer to that.’
He grinned back. ‘We’re gonna need a bigger telescope.’
And even further from Datum Earth:
One day Joshua Valienté would call this elderly troll Sancho. But he already had a name, of sorts, in this troll band – not a name any human could recognize or pronounce, more like a complex summary of his identity, a motif in the trolls’ endless song.
And now, feeding with the others on rich bison meat, as the light of an early spring day slowly faded, Sancho was disturbed. He dropped his chunk of rib, stood up and scanned the horizon. The others grunted, briefly distracted, but they soon returned to their meal. Sancho, though, stood still, listening, watching.
It had been a good day for these trolls, here at the heart of a different North America. For some days they had been tracking a herd of animals that were like bison but not quite, with the trolls’ cooperative, communal eye on one particular elderly male who, limping heavily, had been trailing behind the migration. As the trolls had moved steadily towards the setting sun, invisibly paralleling the bison’s motion in worlds a few steps away, their scouts had continually flicked across to watch the prey, stepping back to report their observations in dance and gesture and hooting cries.
At last the elderly bison had stumbled.
For the bison himself it was the end of a slow-burning, lifelong story. One hind leg had never properly healed from a splintering break he had suffered as a mere calf; now that leg finally betrayed him.
And the bison, downed, panting in the heat, was immediately surrounded by hunters, big heavy humanoids, their hair black as night, stone blades and sharpened sticks in their massive hands. They closed in, cutting and slashing, aiming for tendons and hamstrings, seeking to sever veins, trying to stab to the heart. Trolls were sublimely intelligent in their way, but not as toolmakers. They did use shaped stones and sharpened sticks, but they had no way of striking at a prey from a distance; they had no bows, not even throwing spears. And so their hunting was direct and close-up and gloriously physical – big muscular bodies thrown at the prey until it was worn down through the sheer application of strength.
The bison was old and proud, and he bellowed as he tried to stand, to fight back. But he fell again under waves of assault from the hunters.
It had been Sancho who had struck the final blow, smashing the bison’s skull with a single blow from a massive rock.
The trolls had gathered over the fallen beast and sung their victory song, of joy at the prospect of a meal, of respect for the bison’s gift of life. Then they had fallen to the work of butchering the carcass, and the feasting began: the liver first, the kidneys, the heart. Soon the news of this kill would resonate in the trolls’ long call, shared by bands across thousands of worlds – and it would lodge for ever in the deep memories of certain older trolls, like Sancho.
But now, as this happy day was ending, Sancho was distracted from the kill, the feasting. He had heard something. Or . . . not heard.
What was it? His mind was not like a human’s, but it was roomy and full of dusty memory. He knew no human words. But if he had, he might have called what he heard, or sensed, the Invitation.
Sancho looked around at the pack, males and females and cubs feeding contentedly. He had spent years with this band, seen the little ones born, the old fail and die. He knew them as well as he knew himself. They were his whole world. Yet now he saw them for what they were: a handful of animals lost in an empty, echoing landscape. Huddling, vulnerable in the dark.
And, from beyond the horizon, something was coming.
And in a world only a few steps from the Datum, in a new stone-built chapel in the footprint of an ancient English parish called St John on the Water:
Nelson Azikiwe was seventy-eight years old and officially retired. Indeed, he had come back to this place because his old parish on the Datum, although icebound on a world still suffering through a long volcano winter, was the place where, in his long and peripatetic life, he had felt most at home. Where else to retire?
But to a man like Nelson retirement was only a label. He continued to work to the limits of his strength on his various projects, as much as he ever had. It was just that now he was entitled to call it play, not work.
Of course it helped greatly that the growing technological infrastructure of this Low Earth provided the communications he needed to keep in touch with the wider world, and indeed worlds, without his needing to leave the comfort of his lounge. Thus he spent time each day communicating with the Quizmasters, an online group of ageing, grumpy paranoid obsessives – none of whom, as far as he knew, he had ever met in person – who were now scattered over the Low Earths and beyond, and yet across the decades had managed to remain in regular touch with each other, if necessary through the stepwise swapping of memory chips. It was an odd fact of the Long Earth that, more than half a century after Step Day, still nobody had figured out how to send a message across the stepwise worlds save by carrying it by hand.
Just now the phenomenon that was becoming known as the Invitation was snagging the Quizmasters’ attention. The news of the receipt of an apparent SETI signal by a radio telescope at the Gap had been a nine-day wonder in the news media of the Low Earths, insular and inward-looking and obsessed with local politics and celebrities as they were. There had been a flurry of reports, a firestorm of speculation over mankind’s galactic future or its imminent cosmic doom, before it was all forgotten. But not by the Quizmasters.
Some believed it must be what it most obviously looked like, some kind of SETI message from the sky: the fulfilment of the dreams of the decades-long Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a message whispering into radio telescopes on any stepwise world where they had been established. Others believed it couldn’t be that precisely because that was the most obvious explanation. Maybe this was a covert military experiment, or some kind of corporate viral infiltration, or the first moves in the long-anticipated Chinese invasion of a prostrate post-Yellowstone America.
And it was as Nelson was sifting through another day’s communications on this burning topic that he received an invitation of his own.
The screens of all his tablets and other devices suddenly blanked. Nelson sat back in his chair, startled, suspecting a power outage – not uncommon in a world that relied on the careful burning of wood for its electricity supplies. But then one screen after another lit up with a familiar face: a man’s face, calm, head shaven.
Nelson felt a tingle of anticipation. ‘Hello, Lobsang. I thought you’d gone away again.’
The face smiled back, and the multiple devices in Nelson’s room resounded to a voice like the beating of a gong in a Buddhist temple. ‘Good afternoon, Nelson. Yes, I have – gone away. Think of this presence merely as a kind of messaging service . . .’
Nelson wondered how much of Lobsang he was talking to. Since Lobsang, when fully functioning, had seemed to run much of Datum Earth, for him vocal speech must have been about as efficient a method of communication as yodelling in Morse. Probably this avatar wasn’t much more than a sophisticated speech generator. And yet, Nelson reflected, he had taken the trouble to have this ‘messaging service’ smile at his old friend.
Lobsang said now, ‘I have some news for you.’ The tablet before Nelson cleared again, and Lobsang’s face was replaced by that of a child, a sun-kissed boy aged maybe ten or eleven. ‘This is somebody I only just discovered myself. A remote probe called in, rather belatedly . . .’
‘Who is he?’
‘Nelson, he’s your grandson.’
And much further from the Datum, indeed more than two hundred million steps out:
The USS Charles M. Duke wasn’t Admiral Maggie Kauffman’s boat. At sixty-eight she was much too old for operational command, and was in fact formally retired, not that that kept her from troubling her former superiors and nominal successors in the echelons of what remained of the US Navy. Yet this latest mission into the deep Long Earth was her idea, her inspiration – hell, the result of a twenty-five-year-long campaign on her part to resolve an item of unfinished business.
And, she realized, when Captain Jane Sheridan told her about the note that had been received from Datum Hawaii, it was a bit of business that was going to have to be left unfinished a while longer yet.
Maggie did put up a fight, though. ‘But we’ve come so close. Two hundred million worlds plus change!’
‘With another fifty thousand to go yet, Admiral, and the most hazardous stretch—’
‘Bah. I could pilot this tub through that “hazardous stretch” in my sleep.’
‘I’m afraid the recall is quite unambiguous, ma’am. We have to turn back. They don’t send out fast-pursuit boats to deliver such a command every day. And after all, the note is for you. Admiral Cutler is calling for your return specifically.’
‘Why, Ed Cutler couldn’t command a leaky bathtub.’
‘I couldn’t comment on that, ma’am.’
‘I’m retired!’
‘Of course you are, Admiral.’
‘I don’t have to take any damn orders from that old desk jockey.’
‘But I do, ma’am,’ said Sheridan softly.
Maggie sighed, and looked out through the sturdy windows of this observation deck, at the churning volcanic landscape of the latest stepwise Earth, and at the pursuit boat, a sleek craft that hung in the sky alongside the Duke. ‘But we came so far,’ she said plaintively. ‘And it’s been so long.’ Twenty-five years since she’d left a science party on West 247,830,855, a very strange Earth, an Earth that was a mere moon of a greater planet. More than twenty years since a relief mission found they’d vanished. ‘They’re my people, Jane.’
‘I know, ma’am.’ Sheridan was in her late twenties but, highly capable, had the air of someone significantly older. ‘But the way I see it is this. After twenty-five years they’re either dead, or they found a way to survive. Either way they’ll keep a little longer.’
‘Damn it. Not only are you ridiculously young, you’re also ridiculously right. And damn Cutler. What’s all this about – some kind of invitation?’
‘I don’t know any more than you right now, Admiral . . .’
Even as they argued, the Duke began its long trip home, and the subtle swing-like sense of regular stepping resumed. Beyond the windows whole worlds flapped by, one a second, then two, then four: sun and rain, heat and cold, landscapes and suites of life and climate systems, there and gone in the blink of an eye. But nobody was watching this routine miracle.
And elsewhere:
On this chill March day the shaven-headed novice, sitting cross-legged behind a low desk and labouring over texts that had originated in the eighth century after Christ, was distracted by a distant noise. A faint call.
Not the talk and laughter of the villagers in the clean Himalayan air, the old men with their smoky pipes, the women with their laundry, the little children playing with their home-made wooden toys. Not the clank of cow bells from the passes. It had been like a voice, the boy thought, echoing from the cold, white, ice-draped face of the mountain that loomed over this valley, deep in old Tibet.
A voice that chimed inside his own head.
Words, softly spoken:
. . . Humanity must progress. This is the logic of our finite cosmos; ultimately we must rise up to meet its challenges if we are not to expire with it . . . Consider. We call ourselves the wise ones, but what would a true Homo sapiens be like? What would it do? Surely it would first of all treasure its world, or worlds. It would look to the skies for other sapient life forms. And it would look to the universe as a whole . . .
The boy called, ‘Joshua?’
The master slammed the palm of his hand flat on the desk, making the boy jump. ‘Pay attention, Lobsang!’
JOIN US
JOIN US
The words rained down from the sky across the Long Earth, wherever there were ears to hear and eyes to see and minds to understand.
Standing by his wife’s grave marker, Joshua Valienté didn’t want any invitation. ‘Leave me alone, damn it!’ He stepped away angrily.
The air he displaced created a soft breeze that touched the petals of the flowers on the grave.
Yet the voice from the sky did not cease.
JOIN US
JOIN US
JOIN US
WHEN BILL CHAMBERS arrived at the office, the final April morning before Joshua left for his latest sabbatical, he had trouble opening the door – and it was the door of his own office, Bill being the current mayor of Hell-Knows-Where, Joshua realized with chagrin.
Joshua was in the small private bathroom. When he heard muffled cusses he came out bare to the waist, towel around his neck, half his face covered with shaving foam. Though the morning was well advanced, the blinds were still down, and the room was gloomy. Bill was trying to get across the office without stepping on some crucial piece of travelling gear, and it was a challenge. Not only did Joshua have Bill’s fold-out cot still piled with bedding, but the rest of his kit was strewn out in rows and heaps across the floor, even on the desk.
‘Mother of mercy, Josh, what is it ye’re packing here?’ Bill’s faux Irish got stronger every time they met. ‘Hell-Knows-Where is a sophisticated place now, you know. I’ve got to sort out the quarterly cross-taxes by the end of the week.’
‘Bill, I thought you had a computer to handle that sort of stuff.’
Bill looked pained. That is to say, more pained than previously. ‘Ye can’t leave it to the computer, man! True accountancy is the last refuge of the creative mind.’
‘I did once sit in that chair myself, remember? I’ll be out of your hair—’
‘What hair?’ Bill tried to push a bit further into the room, taking long strides, tottering on awkwardly placed feet. ‘And by God it smells like a troll’s jockstrap in here.’ He pulled up a blind and yanked a cord to open the wooden sash window.
Cool air flowed in, laden with a scent of dust, hay and spring flowers: air from a world that was chilly compared to others in this stretch of the Long Earth, cool enough to deliver a frost as late as June, sometimes. Kind of refreshing, Joshua had always found it.
And this was the air of home for Joshua now, as much as anywhere – the place he kept his most significant stash of stuff, anyhow. Hell-Knows-Where wasn’t a place Joshua had founded, or helped to found, but a place he’d made his home for decades, with his wife Helen and his son Rod. When he’d come here, in fact, the nascent town’s only fixed point had been the smithy. As iron couldn’t be stepped between worlds, the smithy was a kind of thumbtack that had pinned the community to this particular Earth, and back then it had served as a meeting point and a gossip focus. Later, it was no coincidence that Joshua and Bill and the others had used the location to build this, Hell-Knows-Where’s first town hall. And on its inauguration they had hung an iron horseshoe over the door. An oddity when you thought about it, making horseshoes on a world without horses yet, but people wanted the good luck that came with it.
But Joshua’s marriage had broken down. Helen had moved out of here to go back to her Corn Belt home town of Reboot. And then she had died. Now Joshua hardly ever saw his son Rod; he was supposed to show up today, but . . . Well, that was the plan.
Stepping back from the window into the gloom, Bill ran straight into a row of Joshua’s lightweight shirts and pants, hanging on a line. ‘Feck! Funnily enough I don’t remember a clothesline in here. So where have ye fixed it? Ah, I see, to the bust of the town’s founder on top of the bookcase here. Knotted around her neck. It’s what she would have wanted.’
‘Sorry, man. I had to improvise. You want a coffee? I have a pot running in the kitchen space back here.’
‘You mean, would I like some of my best coffee before it walks out of here in your bladder? Ah, what the hey, give me a shot.’
Joshua, mopping foam from his face, poured the brew into the least disreputable mug he could find in the small cupboard over the sink. ‘Here you go. No milk, no sugar.’
‘Never.’ Bill cleared a corner of his desk and sat.
‘Cheers.’ They touched their mugs.
‘You know, Bill, there was a time when you’d have asked for – how did you use to put it? – a drop of something a bit fortifying in there. Even at this hour of the morning.’
‘I did have a mature man’s tastes—’
‘Started when you were fourteen years old, as I recall, Billy Chambers, whenever you could swing it, and don’t deny it.’
‘Ah, well, I’ve changed since those days. Those decades. And I’ve got Morningtide to thank for that.’
‘You’re lucky to have her, and your kids.’
‘My liver generally agrees with that sentiment. Just as you were lucky to have Helen.’
‘So I was.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘Absent friends,’ Bill said at last, and they touched their mugs again. Bill gingerly moved a broad-brimmed hat from the seat behind his desk. ‘All these piles of shite, man. Is it all strictly necessary?’
‘You bet.’
‘And all laid out in order.’ He glanced around the room. ‘Cold-weather gear, I see, so you’re planning to be out for a few months. Universal maps . . .’ These were maps of features that generally persisted as you travelled across the Long Earth: nothing human like towns and roads, but the underlying mountains, rivers, coastlines, landmarks. ‘Silver-foil emergency blankets – check. Where’s your roll-up mattress?’
‘You’re out of touch. Look at this.’ In his left hand Joshua hefted a pack the size of a baseball. ‘Aerogel – a whole mattress that you can hold in your fist.’
‘Or in your case your Terminator cyber-claw.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Boots. Camp sandals. Socks! You can never have enough socks. Water tablets. Food, jerky and stuff – emergency rations, I take it?’
‘I’ll be living off the land. Hunting and trapping.’
‘You always were a bit rubbish at that, but you could afford to lose a little weight.’
‘Thanks.’
‘A med pack, check: anti-diarrhoea pills, antihistamines, painkillers, laxatives, antifungal treatments, disinfectant, bug killers, vitamin tablets . . . What else? Arrowheads. Line for making bows. Snares. Nets. Lightweight bronze axe. More knives than a butcher’s back drawer. The usual electronic gadgets: a radio transceiver, a tablet, a location finder.’ This would exploit GPS on worlds developed enough to host such systems, but would otherwise deliver a best-guess location based on the position of the sun and moon, the constellations, the length of the day, any fortuitous events like solar or lunar eclipses. All this was technology that encoded the hard-won wisdom of decades of travelling in the Long Earth. ‘A flint firestarter. And matches, good move. A solar oven.’ A little inverted open-out umbrella, its inner surface reflective, that could be set up on a stand to catch the sunlight and focus it to boil water. ‘Colostomy bags. Denture glue.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘I’m only barely jokin’, Methuselah. Coffee. Spices. Pepper! Trade goods, of course. Ah, and weapons. A couple of bronze revolvers – electromagnetic impulse?’
‘Yeah.’ Joshua hefted one of the small handguns. ‘The latest thing. Charges up on solar power, or you can just pump it up by squeezing the grip.’ He pointed it downward, fired the thing, and drilled a fine hole through the corner of Bill’s desk.
‘Hey, show some respect! This desk’s an antique.’
‘No, it’s not. We built it.’
‘Well, it never will be an antique now. And all this will fit into a single backpack, I take it? Ye’ve got some lovely widgets, Josh, I’ll give you that.’
‘And they say that innovation stalled after Step Day.’
Bill said simply, ‘Shame it is they haven’t yet developed an unbreakable heart.’
Joshua looked away.
‘Sorry, man,’ Bill said. ‘That was cheesier than a mouse’s wet dream. I never would have said such things once, would I? We were lads together, you and me. Feelings were for those fecking nuns to have, not us. Well, I changed. And you changed too. But you’ve changed – well, back.’
Joshua was a little shaken by that. To cover, he selected a shirt from the line and pulled it on. Suddenly Bill, sixty-eight years old, sitting on his own junk-cluttered desk, sipping his coffee in the gloom of the office, looked like a mayor to Joshua. Mature. As if mad old Bill the fake Irishman had somehow grown up when Joshua wasn’t looking. Had, in fact, overtaken Joshua himself. ‘What do you mean, changed back?’
Bill spread his hands. ‘Well, for instance, when it was all kicking off with those rebel types in Valhalla, and all the trolls in the Long Earth went AWOL, remember? And you and me were handed a twain by that fecker Lobsang and told to go off and find Sally Linsay.’
‘Jeez, Bill, that must be thirty years ago.’
‘Sure. And as far as I remember we just slept on it, and up and left, and pissed off to the ends of the Long Earth. I don’t remember you doing all this packing. Counting your fecking socks.’
Joshua looked around the room, at all his gear in its neat rows and piles. ‘You have to do it right, Bill. You’ve got to make sure you have everything, that it’s all in working order. Then you have to pack it right—’
‘There you go. That’s not Joshua the mayor of Hell-Knows-Where talking, Joshua the father, Joshua Valienté the hero of half the fecking Long Earth. That’s Josh the boy I used to know at the Home, when we were eleven or twelve or thirteen. When you used to make your crystal radio sets and model kits, just the way you’re doing your packing now. You’d lay everything out first, and fix any bits that were damaged—’
‘Paint before assemble.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what Agnes used to say to me. “You’re the sort of boy who always, but always, paints before assembling.”’
‘Well, she was right.’
‘She usually was. In fact she usually still is . . . And she’s supposed to come by to see me today, no doubt to be right one more time. Well, Bill, so what?’
‘There’s always a balance, man. You’ve got to hit the right proportion. And, just to raise another point, Mister Chairman, aren’t you getting too fecking old to run off playing Daniel Boone?’
‘None of your business,’ Joshua snarled.
Bill held up his hands. ‘Fair enough. No offence.’
There was a knock at the door.
Bill stood. ‘Maybe that’s Sister Mary Stigmata now, right on cue. I’ll leave you to it. I mean, I won’t get any work done in here until you’re out of it anyhow.’
‘Bill, I appreciate it—’
‘Just remember one thing. Put a bloody marker somewhere high up where a twain can see it, an emergency blanket on top of a rock, so they can find you when you do yourself in.’
‘Roger.’
The rap on the door was harder this time.
‘All right, all right.’
The opened door revealed, not Agnes, but Joshua’s son. Bill Chambers cleared off fast.
DANIEL RODNEY VALIENTÉ was thirty-eight years old. Framed in the doorway, taller than his father, he was as pale of complexion as his mother had been, but his hair was as dark as Joshua’s. He wore a practical-looking hooded coverall, and carried a small leather bag on a strap slung over one shoulder. Joshua suspected that this would be all the possessions he had with him – all the permanent possessions he owned at all, maybe.
Now he stalked into the mayor’s office, looked around with faint disgust at the heaps of gear, vacated Bill’s chair of junk, and sat down. All this without a word.
Joshua suppressed a sigh. He felt moved to button up his shirt, however, in his son’s stern presence. Then he collected Bill’s half-empty mug from the desk and moved to the kitchen area. ‘So,’ he said.
‘So.’
‘You want a coffee? There’s some in the pot.’
Rod, as he now insisted on being called, shook his head. ‘I managed to lose my caffeine addiction years ago. One less craving you have to fulfil out in the High Meggers.’
‘Water, then? The town supply’s been clean again since—’
‘I’m fine.’
Joshua nodded, dumped the mugs, and sat on a stool from which he had to clear a set of climbing grips. ‘I’m glad you came.’
‘Why?’
Joshua sighed. ‘Obviously, because since your mother died we’re all we’ve got, you and I.’
Rod was stone-faced. ‘You haven’t “got” me, Dad. Nor have I “got” you.’
‘Rod—’
‘And why, once again, are you disappearing into the wilds of the Long Earth? Just as you did throughout my childhood, periodically. Just as you did when your marriage to my mother broke down. An outernet note to say, “Hi, I’m off again” doesn’t really cut it, Dad. Besides, aren’t you too damn old for these stunts now?’
‘You know, Rod – Daniel – I feel like I’ve had a lifetime of your judgements. Maybe everybody blames their parents—’
Rod cut him off. ‘I only came here to talk about your will.’
‘OK. Look, it’s all duly witnessed and notarized, both here in Hell-Knows-Where and in an Aegis office back in Madison West 5.’
‘Dad, I don’t care about the legal stuff. And I don’t want anything from you. I just want to be sure I understand it before you disappear and break your damn neck in the wilderness, and I never see you again.’
‘Fine. Well, you know the basic provision. Aside from a few gifts, such as to the Home in Madison, I left it all to your aunt Katie back in Reboot, or her surviving descendants. Simple as that . . .’
Katie was Helen’s older sister. Along with their parents, just a decade or so after Step Day, the Green sisters had trekked on foot off into the Long Earth, and had taken part in the founding of a new community, Reboot, on the edge of the band of fecund worlds that had become known as the Corn Belt. Helen had left Reboot when she met Joshua, but Katie had stayed, married, raised a couple of healthy daughters – and, eventually, granddaughters.
But there was a dark underside to the story. The Green girls had had a brother, Rodney, who was a phobic, as the jargon had emerged: constitutionally incapable of stepping. As the family trekked away, Rodney was left behind with an aunt. And in the end Rodney had taken part in the destruction of Madison, Wisconsin, with a backpack nuke, and had spent the rest of his life in jail. When he had learned the full family story, Joshua’s son Daniel Rodney had abandoned his childhood name, ‘Dan’, and adopted the name of his broken uncle. It was just one element of the tension between father and son.
Now Joshua said, ‘It’s not as if there’s anybody I could give it to on your side, is there?’
Rod sighed. ‘It’s called an extended marriage, Dad. I’m one of fifteen husbands now. There are eighteen wives and twenty-four kids at the last count. It’s kind of vague – we’re spread over many worlds, and we keep moving. Look, I’m in a steady relationship with Sofia, for now. Sofia Piper – you never met her, and never will. And kind of foster-uncle to her nephews. Step-uncle, whatever, the old labels don’t really apply. It’s flexible but stable, and it suits Long Earth migrants like me just fine. It’s already two decades since the first pairing that began it all.’
‘It’s trippy comber bullshit is what it is. And it’s not recognized in Aegis law. When it comes to inheritance of property—’
‘We don’t have any property to speak of, Dad. That’s kind of the point.’
‘You seem to have made a conscious choice not to have had a kid of your own.’
‘And take part in that disgusting old stepper mass-breeding experiment?’
‘It needn’t be like that—’
‘You yourself were the product of a planned match, Dad. And look how well that turned out. Your mother dead at childbirth, your father a sexual predator and a bum. A centuries-old conspiracy to selectively breed natural steppers! Things like that don’t just fade away. And look at what it unleashed on mankind – all the destabilization of Step Day.’
‘We wouldn’t be sitting here if not for that, Rod. Look – I was never approached. So the Fund didn’t seem to be functioning in my generation, did it? And certainly your mother and her family had nothing to do with any of that. Your own uncle was a full-on phobic.’
‘Bullshit. You can be the carrier of a gene without it necessarily expressing in you. Oh, whatever. For better or worse, this line of the Valienté family, at least, ends with me, along with our tainted genome.’
‘Fine,’ Joshua snapped. He looked at his son in the mayor’s chair, stiff, not remotely at his ease, as if he was about to light out of there at any moment. ‘You damn youngsters think you invented it all.’
Rod stood up. ‘I think we’re done here, don’t you? Oh, here, I brought you a gift. Sofia’s idea.’
He handed over a slim case. Inside were lightweight sunglasses. Joshua glanced through them and squinted. ‘These are prescription.’
‘Yeah. Your prescription. Found it in Mom’s files.’
‘Don’t need no spectacles—’
‘Sure you do. Oh, use them or not. So long, Dad.’
And he walked out. Joshua just stood there, holding the glasses, surrounded by his orderly rows of travel goods, for an unmapped time.
Then there was another knock at the door.
Sister Agnes.
AGNES, PRACTICAL AS ever, got to work packing Joshua’s bag. ‘I remember helping you with this kind of thing when you were a boy. Well, it was a case of you showing me how it was done. Spare trousers at the bottom, soft stuff against your back, knives and guns and other life-saving gear at the top.’ She accepted a mug of tea, though she pulled face at the cleanliness, or otherwise, of the mugs. ‘Billy Chambers always was a scruffy boy.’
‘You didn’t come all this way out just to see me, did you?’
She snorted. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been visiting some of my old friends from New Springfield. Do you remember Nikos Irwin, who found the silver beetles? Got kids of his own now.’
Her skirt, blouse and cardigan were clean and crisply ironed – no habit for Sister Agnes, not since her return from New Springfield, where she’d built a home with an avatar of Lobsang. Her face was authentically Sister Agnes’s face, Joshua thought. Even if it was, eerily, so much younger than the last time he’d seen the real Agnes, on her deathbed, all of thirty-five years ago.
‘You know, Agnes, I’m sixty-seven now, going on sixty-eight. Suddenly you’re younger than me.’
‘Hmmph. You’re not so old that I can’t tell you that you’re making a foolish mistake by going off alone into the wilderness at your age. Don’t come crying to me.’
‘You’re the third person this morning to tell me so.’
‘Does that include your conscience?’
‘Ha ha.’
She left off folding socks and touched his hand – the flesh-and-blood right hand, as opposed to the prosthetic left. Her skin was nearly as liver-spotted as his, he saw. ‘You always have a place with us, you know. At the Home. I pop in myself from time to time, just to make sure young Sister John isn’t going too far off the rails.’
Young Sister John was close to Joshua’s own age, and had been running the Home for decades. ‘I’m sure she appreciates that,’ he said dryly.
‘And she’s told me all about that young boy they’re having so much trouble with, Jan – what’s his name?’
‘Jan Roderick, I think. I met him.’
‘Yes. How he’s hoovering up all those old books and movies you gave the Home, like a Chicago gangster snorting crack cocaine.’
‘Agnes!’
‘Oh, hush. Now there’s another complicated little boy, just as you were. And I’m sure it would be good for him to see more of you. One thing the Home doesn’t excel at, for obvious reasons, is providing good male role models.’
‘Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever been one of those . . . Look, Agnes, I’ve been drifting these last three years, since Helen died. I need to make some kind of break. I won’t be away that long. The Home will still be there when I return—’
‘I might not be.’
She said this so bluntly that he was shocked. ‘Agnes, your body’s artificial, your mind has been downloaded into Black Corporation gel – you could live until the sun goes out—’
‘Who would want to hang around to see that?’ She touched the papery skin of her cheek. ‘There has to be a finish, Joshua. I learned that lesson from Shi-mi, who decided that in the end all she wanted to be was a cat. I wanted to be a mother to Ben, and – well, that was all I wanted, and then I would be ready to lay down my burden. My adopted son is nineteen already.’
‘Really?’
‘Believe it. Time just pours away, doesn’t it? And I’m not sure how much longer I can fake all this ageing convincingly. Also there’s a question of good manners. I’ve been through old age myself, but who am I to live in some kind of mannequin, mimicking all that pain and suffering, for the sake of my own vanity? When I know I could switch it off at any time. When I could even be young again, if I chose. No, I think my time should come sooner rather than later. It’s right that way.’
‘Hmm. And Ben?’
‘He knows. He’s understood what we are since he was nine years old, myself and “George”. He accepts it.’
‘Does he have a choice?’
‘What choice do any of us have, Joshua?’
Suddenly this was too much for him. He pulled away, stood, and started gathering up more stuff to pack.
‘It’s hard on you,’ she said now. ‘I know.’
He grunted. ‘Hard on Lobsang too.’
She sighed. ‘Well, I think I discharged my obligation to that man long ago, Joshua. Depending which Lobsang you mean. The one I married, “George”, was lost when the Next closed off New Springfield’s world. The older copy that you brought back from that remote Long Earth became the master edition, so to speak. I know that identity with Lobsang is an odd concept. There’s never just one of him; his identity can be split up, joined, one copy poured into the other . . .’
Lobsang had come to awareness as an artificial intelligence running on a substrate of Black Corporation gel. From the beginning he had claimed to be human, in a sense – a reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman. To date, nobody had been able to prove him a liar. And since his awakening, his existence had been complicated.
Agnes went on, ‘The various copies were synched before “George” was trapped in New Springfield. The new version remembers me, our life together. But he was never my Lobsang. And anyway he’s gone missing.’
It had been years since Joshua had been in touch with any iteration of Lobsang. ‘What, again?’
‘Selena Jones at transEarth says he’s retreated into some kind of virtual environment, where he feels “safe”. I’ve no desire to know where, just now. Of course while his identity – I hesitate to use the word “soul” – has been removed, his outer functions are working just fine. Which is just as well for the fabric of the human world.’
‘This is a pattern, isn’t it, Agnes?’
‘It seems to be. He’s fine for a while, then there’s some kind of build-up of stress, and he retreats into a shell – just like when he played at being a farmer in New Springfield. And then the cycle starts all over again. Well.’
‘Is this goodbye, Agnes?’
‘It doesn’t have to be. Oh, it’s all so silly, Joshua! You’re not Daniel Boone, and you never were. You were just a boy who needed some space—’
‘There’s something out there calling me back, Agnes,’ he blurted. ‘I don’t have a choice.’
She studied him. ‘I remember the words you used as a child. The Silence. That’s back, is it? You know, I wondered if that might be going on, when I read all those silly news reports about the SETI signal they picked up. If all the oddness might be connected somehow. After all, it usually is.’ She sighed. ‘I often wish Monica Jansson was still around. Now there was a woman who could speak to that side of you better than I ever could. And she would have told you that whatever you’ve lost, you won’t find it up there.’ She stood. ‘I’ve said my piece, and I’ll take my leave.’
Suddenly he couldn’t look at her.
She said softly, ‘Oh, bright eyes.’
And he turned, and she folded him in her arms.
JOSHUA VALIENTÉ, AND