The Long Earth

18

DAY THREE (since Richmond West 10).

Three days already! But Captain Batson says it is going to take us a hundred days to cross the Ice Belt. And then we’ll take months more to cross the Mine Belt, whatever that is. We have to get to where we’re going before winter comes. And winter comes the same on all the worlds.

We’re doing about a step a minute, for about six hours of every day. We take pills to stop from being sick all the time, but it’s still an effort. They try to lead us to places where the ground level doesn’t change much from world to world. It’s a jolt if you drop down, and you can’t step at all if your ankles would be five inches underground. But it’s quite a sight to see two hundred people with all their packs and stuff twinkling out of sight, and then twinkling back in the next world, over and over.

I miss being online.

I miss my phone!!!

I miss school. Or some of the people in it, anyway. Not some others.

I MISS ROD. Even though he could be a weirdo.

I miss being a cheerleader.

Dad says I should say some of what I like too. Otherwise this journal won’t be a fun read for his grandchildren. Grandchildren!? He should be so lucky.

Day Five.

I like camping!

We used to do some of that in West 5, and we did it in pioneer studies, but it’s a lot more fun out here.

After a couple of days we palled up with a family called the Doaks. They have four kids, two boys and two girls, and we arranged it so I’m in with the two girls, they are called Betty and Marge, and it’s like a sleepover every night!

I can build a fire! I have a lens to start the flames, and I know about tinder and kindling and what wood burns best. I can find stuff to eat, weeds, roots, mushrooms. I know about hazelnuts and fruit and stuff too but it’s not the season. I can make a fishing line out of old thread or even nettle stalks. I know where to look for the fish. Cool.

Today Mr Henry showed us how to make a trout trap in the river. You make a sort of walled pool, and they swim in, and get stuck. Mr Henry grins when he clubs the fish. I felt like crying. Mr Henry says The Youngsters Have To Learn.

Marge Doak used to be a cheerleader! We practise routines.

Day Eight.

Yesterday we hit an ice sheaf.

We’re following a trail. There are markers and everything, and little cairns, and posts that tell you what number world you’re on like highway signs, and sometimes caches of stuff. Even little boxes you can put post in to be carried East or West, depending who passes.

So we came to a sign that said ICE NEXT. We passed through a few Ice Age worlds in the first day or two, but just one at a time, and you could just rush quickly through them. Now we were coming to a band of them. We all had to stop, and the porters came and handed out the Arctic coats and trousers and ski masks and stuff. The next morning Captain Batson had us all tie up in groups of eight or ten with ropes, and made sure the babies were snug in their little papooses, with no fingers or toes sticking out.

We stepped, and it was dazzling, no clouds in a bright blue sky, and not much ice, but the ground was frozen hard as rock under my feet. And then the cold got to me, like little needles working into my cheeks.

And we stepped on, again and again. More winter worlds. Sometimes you’d come out into a white-out, or a blizzard. And other times you would come out and it would be a bit warmer, and then the ground was boggy so we left tracks if we walked, and there were these strange dwarf trees, all bent over. And midges! I saw a huge deer, with antlers like a chandelier (spelled out by Dad). Ben Doak says he saw a woolly mammoth, but nobody believes anything he says.

This is why we had to come so far south, to Richmond, to walk West. Because Datum Earth is in the middle of the Ice Belt, a bunch of worlds where they have Ice Ages, so you have to go south of the ice to where it’s possible to step. But even away from the ice caps the whole world is affected by the cold.

Some people turned back after the first night in the cold. Said they hadn’t been told about that, although they clearly had been, and should have listened.

Day Twenty-Five.

At night you have to cram into these little tents. It’s a bit close. These are strangers after all. Marge Doak is OK, but Betty has this way of picking her teeth. And she snores.

Mom got in a fight with Mr Henry, who says the women should do all the cooking and cleaning! Captain Batson says Mr Henry’s not in charge. He didn’t say it to his face though, Dad says.

Trouble and strife, lah di dah!

Day Forty-Three.

I keep forgetting to write things down. I get too tired. Plus there’s too much going on.

In the middle of the ice worlds you get milder types that are like home, ‘interglacial’ worlds (spelled by Dad). The interglacial worlds are just FULL of animals. I saw huge herds that turned out to be horses and funny-looking cows and antelopes and camels. Camels! Dad says these are like animals that were probably around in America before humans came along. Wolves. Coyotes. Elk. Curlews. Bears! Grizzlies in the forest clumps, Captain Batson says, so we keep out of there. Snakes everywhere, you have to watch out for them. Crows, ravens, turkey buzzards, owls. By day you hear the birds, and at night the frogs croaking and the mosquitoes whining, if you’re anywhere near water. Sometimes the men hunt. Rabbit and duck and even antelope.

There are armadillos! Big ones, not like in zoos. Dad says they might have wandered up from South America where they evolved. Apparently people have seen apes, in America. Sometimes the continents join up and these animals cross over, and sometimes they don’t. Nobody really knows. Nobody has a map of any of these worlds.

In some worlds we can’t find any trees at all. Then we have to collect ‘buffalo chips’ for the fire. Dung!! It burns well, but you can imagine the smell, my dear.

And there are funny worlds, where everything is like ash, or like a desert, or something. Just one world thick. There are usually signposts if it’s dangerous, and we have to put on hats or cover our mouths with filters. Captain Batson calls these worlds Jokers.

Sometimes you see where people have been before. Scruffy places, the ruins of shacks, burned-out tepees. Even crosses, stuck in the ground. In the Long Earth, hoping for the best isn’t good enough, as Mr Batson puts it.

Day Sixty-Seven.

Ben Doak got sick. He drank from a waterhole that hadn’t been checked out. They get polluted by buffalo piddle. He got pumped full of antibiotics. I hope he’s OK. We’ve had a few people get sick, but nobody died.

More people have turned back. Captain Batson tries to talk them round, and Mr Henry laughs at them and calls them weak. I don’t think it’s weak to admit you made a mistake. That takes strength, if you ask me.

We must look very strange, to these animals who live here, and have never seen a human before, probably. What business have we got coming through here and messing everything up?

Day One Hundred and Two.

We’re out of the Ice Belt! And only two days behind schedule!

Strange to think we’ve travelled across thirty-six thousand worlds, but the distance we’ve covered sideways has only been a few miles. Well, we’re going to travel in earnest across this particular Earth, and go a few hundred miles north, to New York State. Then we’ll step on across another sixty thousand worlds or so until we get to the place we’re going to settle.

I thought we’d have to walk. No! There’s a regular town here, well, a small one, a trading post. Here we can trade in our Ice Belt gear for stuff that’s more suitable for the Mine Belt worlds.

And there’s a wagon train waiting for us! With big covered wagons that Dad says are Conestogas. They look like boats on wheels, drawn by horses — funny-looking horses, but definitely horses. There’s a foundry here to make the iron they need, and the wagons have got tires on their wheels, like car tires. When we saw the wagons we just whooped and hollered and ran! Conestogas! I wonder if it will be more fun than the chopper ride?

Day One Hundred and Ninety-Nine.

We are on Earth West Seventy Thousand Plus Change, as Dad would say. I’m writing in the early morning, before we break camp. Last night the adults stayed up late arguing about the chores. But when they’re all gassing in their Group Meetings, we kids can slip away, just for a while.

Not that we do anything bad. Well, not mostly. Mostly, we

(Pause for thought. Search for word.)

watch. That’s it. We watch. I know Dad frets that we’re all turning into zombies because there’s nothing to do out here but chores, and the schooling they try to force on us. But it’s not like that. We just watch, with nothing to distract us. That’s why we’re quiet. Not because our brains are mush. Because we watch.

And we see things the adults don’t see.

Some very odd animals and plants that don’t fit any storybook of evolution I ever read.

The Joker Worlds, in the middle of these boring, arid Mine Belt worlds. The adults think they’re mostly dead. They aren’t. Believe me.

And the Greys.

We call them that, even though they’re orange. They look like hairy little kids, but if you ever see one up close, and see the equipment in those orange crotches, believe me, they ain’t kids. And big eyes, like cartoon aliens. They flicker around the camp. There, gone. Stepping, obviously.

Animals that step!

The Long Earth is stranger than anybody thinks. Even Dad. Even Captain Batson. Even Mr Henry.

Especially Mr Henry.

Day Two Hundred and Eighty-One.

Is it November? Dad will know.

We made it!

We made it to Earth West 100,000! — or, Good Old Hundred K, as us hardened pioneer types call it. The start of the Corn Belt.

Good Old Hundred K has a gift shop. You can buy T-shirts and mugs. ‘I Stepped All The Way to Good Old Hundred K.’ But the labels say Made in China!

The worlds had been changing for a bit. Greener. Damper. A different set of animals. And, most important, trees. Trees, wood, that’s what you need above all else to build a colony and a town and all the rest of it. Which is why we’ve had to walk so far. Not enough trees in the Mine Belt. Here there is prairie and rainfall and trees: good farming country. Nobody knows how deep the Corn Belt is. Plenty of room out here, and it’s hard to see how it could be filled up any time soon.

Anyhow, now we’re here. And to prove the point they have a couple of fields out back of the shop where there’s corn stubble and sheep grazing, just like home. Sheep! Dad said they were descended from little lambs that had to be carried out here from the Datum in the arms of stepping people, because there’s no native sheep in North America, on any of the worlds that anybody’s found.

At the shop they made a fuss of us kids. They had beer and lemonade, homemade stuff with pips in that was the most delicious drink I ever had. They asked us questions about what’s going on back East on the Datum and the Low Earths. We yapped and bragged, and we told our own story, of our trek. Every year it’s a little bit different, apparently.

An English woman who introduced herself as Hermione Dawes wrote down our story in a sort of big ledger, in a little library place full of records like that. Ms Dawes told Mom her place in life was writing things down, and she was happy to be out here, to have some real history to record. She’ll probably be there for ever, writing stuff down as folk pass her by. People are strange, but if she’s happy that’s fine by me. Apparently she’s married to a cowgirl.

We shopped! What a luxury.

And meanwhile the adults had to go register their claims. There is a US government official, rotated out once every few years, here to check and validate the land grants we bought back on the Datum before we set off. We all compared claim forms to work out where to go. In the event the adults picked a world at random: number West 101,753. A week’s easy stroll. We formed up, the Doaks and Harry Bergreen and his fiddle, yay, and Melissa Harris, well, OK, and Reese Henry, the less said the better. A hundred in all.

And we set off. We stepped and camped with a discipline that would have made Captain Batson proud. Though Mrs Harris still didn’t take her turns with the laundry.

A week later, when we got to 101,753, it was raining. So we all looked at each other, and held hands in our groups, and took another step into the sunshine.

And that was how we chose one whole world over another. Because it happened to be sunny when we got there! There might have been diamond mountains in Australia back in 753 and we’d never know. It didn’t matter. Earth West 101,754: our Earth. We’re there!