The Long Earth

9

MEANWHILE, SIX MONTHS after Step Day, Monica Jansson’s own career path had taken a decisive knight’s-move sideways.

She had stood outside the Madison PD South District building, braced, slid the switch on her Stepper, and received the usual punch in the gut, as the station vanished to be replaced by tall trees, green shade. In a clearing cut into this scrap of primeval forest was a small wooden shack with the MPD crest on the door, and a low bench outside, and a Stars and Stripes hanging from a stripped sapling. Jansson sat on the bench, folded over, nursing the nausea. The bench was put here precisely to allow you to recover from the stepping before you had to face your fellow officers.

Since Step Day, things had moved on quickly. The techs had come up with a police-issue Stepper, robust components in a sleek black plastic case, resistant even to a close-range gunshot. Of course, as with all Steppers — just as she’d found at the start with Linsay’s prototype — to make it work for you, you had to finish the assembly of the working components yourself. It was a nice piece of kit, although you had to ignore the jokes about the potatoes needed to run it. ‘Do you want fries with that, Officer?’ Ha ha.

But nobody had been able to do anything about the nausea that incapacitated most people for ten or fifteen minutes after a step. There was a drug that was supposed to help, but Jansson always tried to avoid becoming dependent on drugs, and besides it turned your piss blue.

When the dizziness and nausea started to subside, she stood up. The day, in Madison West 1 anyhow, was still and cold, sunless but rainless. This stepwise world was still much as it had been the first time she’d stepped here, from out of the ruin of Willis Linsay’s house: the rustle of leaves, the clean air, the birdsong. But it was changing, bit by bit, as clearings were nibbled into the forest and the prairie flowers were cut back: householders ‘extending’ their properties, entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to exploit a world of high-quality lumber and exotic wildlife, official presences like the MPD establishing a foothold in world-next-door annexes to their principal buildings. Already, it was said, there was smoky smog on very still days. Jansson wondered how long it would be before she would see airplane contrails in that empty sky.

She wondered where Joshua Valienté was, right now. Joshua, her own guilty secret.

She was almost late for her appointment with Clichy.

Inside the shack, the smell of long-brewed coffee was strong.

There were two officers here, Lieutenant Clichy behind his desk staring into a laptop — customized and non-ferrous — and a junior patrol officer called Mike Christopher who was painstakingly handwriting some kind of report in a big ledger of lined yellow paper. Still largely without electronic support, all over the country cops were having to learn to write legibly again, or as legibly as they ever had.

Clichy waved at her, without taking his eyes from the laptop. ‘Coffee, seat.’

She fetched a mug of coffee so thick she thought it would dissolve the bronze spoon she used to stir it, and sat on a rough-hewn handmade chair across the desk. Jack Clichy was a squat, stout man with a face like a piece of worn-out luggage. She had to smile at him. ‘You look right at home, Lieutenant.’

He eyed her. ‘Don’t shit me, Jansson. What am I, Davy Crockett? Listen, I grew up in Brooklyn. To me, downtown Madison is the wild west. This is a freaking theme park.’

‘Why do you want to see me, sir?’

‘Strategy, Jansson. We’re being asked to contribute to a statewide report on how we’re intending to deal with this contingency of the extra Earths. Our plans in the short, medium and long term. A version will go up to federal level too. And the chief is bearing down on me because, as he points out, we don’t have any plans, either short, medium or long term. So far we’ve just been reacting to events.’

‘And that’s why I’m here?’

‘Let me find the files …’ He tapped at the keyboard.

Christopher’s radio crackled, and he murmured in response. Cellphones wouldn’t work over here, of course. Conventional radio transmitters and receivers were OK so long as they were customized to exclude iron components, so they could be carried over intact. There was talk of laying down some kind of network of old-fashioned phone lines, copper wire.

‘Here we go.’ Clichy swivelled the laptop so that Jansson could see the screen. ‘I got case logs here, snippets of video. I’m trying to make sense of it all. Your name kept on coming up, Jansson, which is why I called you in.’

She saw links to her reports on the fire at the Linsay residence, the first-night panic over the missing teenagers.

‘So we had a tough first few days. Those missing kids, and the ones that came back with broken bones from falling through high-rise buildings, or with chunks bitten out of them by some critter or other. Prison escapes. A wave of absenteeism, from the schools, businesses, the public services. The economy took an immediate hit, nationwide, even globally. Did you know that? I’m told it was like an extra Thanksgiving break, before the assholes drifted back to work, or most of them …’

Jansson nodded. Most of those first-day Steppers had come quickly back. Some had not. The poor tended to be more likely to stay away; rich people had more to give up back in Datum. So, out of cities like Mumbai and Lagos, even a few American cities, flocks of street kids had stepped, bewildered, unequipped, into wild worlds, but worlds that didn’t already belong to somebody else, so why shouldn’t they belong to you? The American Red Cross and other agencies had sent care teams after them, to sort out the Lord of the Flies chaos that followed.

That was the main thing about the Long Earth, in Jansson’s mind. Joshua Valienté’s behaviour had shown it right from the beginning. It offered room. It offered you a place to escape — a place to run, endlessly as far as anybody knew. All over the world there was a trickle of people just walking away, with no plan, no preparation, just walking off into the green. And back home there were already reports of problems with the desolate, resentful minority who found they couldn’t step at all, no matter how fancy their Steppers.

Lieutenant Clichy’s priority, of course, was the way the new worlds were being used against Datum Earth.

‘Look at the log,’ he said. ‘After a few days people start to figure out this shit, and we get more calculated crimes. Elaborate burglaries. A rash of suicide bombers in the big cities. And the Brewer assassination, or the attempt. Which is where your name started to get flagged up, Officer Jansson.’

Jansson remembered. Mel Brewer was the estranged wife of a drug baron, who had cut a deal with the DA to testify against her husband, and was headed for witness protection. She barely escaped the first attempt on her life by a stepping assassin. It had been Jansson who had come up with the idea of stashing her in a cellar. On the stepwise worlds West 1 and East 1, the space the cellar occupied was solid ground, so you couldn’t step straight in. You’d either have to dig a parallel hole, or else come in at ground level and fight your way down. Either way, the element of surprise was lost. By the following morning the belowground facilities in all the police stations, even in the Capitol building, were being fitted out as refuges.

‘You weren’t the only one to figure that out, Jansson. But you were among the first, even nationally. I hear the President herself sleeps in some bunker under the White House now.’

‘Glad to hear it, sir.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Then it started getting more exotic.’

‘Odd to hear you using that term without the word “dancer” attached to it, sir.’

‘Don’t push it, Jansson.’ He showed her reports of various religious nuts. Apocalypse-minded types had gone flooding into the ‘new Edens’, believing their sudden ‘appearance’ was a sign of the End of Days. One Christian sect believed Christ must have survived the crucifixion and stepped out of the tomb by the time His disciples came looking for His body — and, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude, He was probably still out there in the Long Earth somewhere. All this presented public order challenges for the police.

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 hemoglobin, 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.