The Long Earth

19

THAT FIRST AFTERNOON of flight, the Mark Twain stepped again and again, each transition causing a thrill to travel down Joshua’s spine. The stepping rate was increasing, slowly, as Lobsang explored the capabilities of his ship. Joshua could count the passing worlds using little monitors Lobsang called earthometers, embedded in the walls of every cabin. They had enough digits, he saw, to allow them to count up to the millions.

And as it stepped, the airship was travelling laterally too, heading west across Eurasia. The monitors had a little map display so Joshua could follow its course; their position was derived from star sightings, but the layout of the landscapes they crossed on these unexplored worlds was based on guesswork.

On the observation deck, sitting opposite Joshua, Lobsang smiled his plastic smile. They both cradled coffees — Lobsang sipped his too, and Joshua imagined some tank in his belly filling up.

‘How’s the ride?’ Lobsang asked.

‘Fine so far.’ In fact it was better than fine. As always when Joshua left the Datum behind, the oppressive sense of enclosure he invariably experienced there dissipated quickly: a pressure he’d not really been aware of when he was growing up, not until it wasn’t there any more. The pressure of a world too full of other minds, he suspected, other human consciousnesses. It seemed to be a fine sensitivity; even on remote stepwise worlds he always registered it if somebody else showed up, anywhere near by, even a small party. But he’d discussed this strange quasi-telepathic facility, or disability, with nobody — bar Sister Agnes — not even Officer Jansson, and he didn’t choose to talk it over with Lobsang now. Still, the sensation of freedom, of release, was there. That, and his peculiar awareness of the Silence, as of a mind far away, dimly sensed, like the toll of a huge and ancient bell in a far-off mountain range… Or rather he did sense this when Lobsang wasn’t talking, as he was now.

‘We will follow the line of latitude west, roughly. We can manage thirty miles an hour easily. A nice leisurely pace; we are out here to explore. That should bring us over the footprint of the continental US in a few weeks…’

Lobsang’s face was not quite real, Joshua thought, like a slightly off CGI simulation. But here in this fantastic vessel, in this realization of Lobsang’s astonishing dreams, Joshua was oddly warming to him.

‘You know, Lobsang, I caught up with your story when I went back to the Home, after my interview at transEarth. People were saying that the smartest thing that any supercomputer could do the moment it was switched on would be to make certain that it couldn’t be switched off again. And that the story about the reincarnated Tibetan was a front, precisely so you couldn’t be switched off. We all talked about that, and Sister Agnes said, well, if a computer has a desire not to be switched off then it has to have a sense of self, and that means a soul. I know the Pope decreed otherwise later on, but I back Sister Agnes against the Vatican any time.’

Lobsang thought that over. ‘I look forward to meeting Sister Agnes someday. I hear what you are saying. Thank you, Joshua.’

Joshua hesitated. ‘While you’re thanking me, maybe you could answer a question. Is this you, Lobsang? Or are you back on the Datum, in some store at MIT? Is that a meaningful question?’

‘Oh, certainly it is meaningful. Joshua, back on the Datum I am distributed across many memory stores and processor banks. That’s partly for security, and partly for efficiency and effectiveness of data retrieval and processing. If I wished I could consider my self to be distributed among a number of centres, of foci of consciousness.

‘But I am human, I am Lobsang. I remember how it was to look out of a cave of bone, from a single apparent locus of consciousness. And that is how I have maintained it. There is only one me, Joshua, only one Lobsang, though I have backup memory stores scattered over several worlds. And that “me” is with you on this journey. I am fully dedicated to the mission. And by the way, when I inhabit the ambulant unit, that too, for the duration, is “me”, though there remains enough of “me” outside that shell to enable the airship to fly. If I were to fail or were lost then a backup copy on Datum Earth would be initiated, and synched with whatever you were able to retrieve of my memory stores on the ship. But that would be another Lobsang; he would remember me, but he would not be me… I hope that’s clear.’

Joshua thought that over. ‘I’m glad I’m just a standard-issue human.’

‘Well, more or less, in your case,’ Lobsang said dryly. ‘Incidentally, now that we’re under way, be sure that my report on the congressional expedition slaughter is already with the authorities. And, to be on the safe side, with such newspapers as I find trustworthy. Including the Fortean Times, a boon to all researchers of the Long Earth phenomenon. You can access back issues on the screen in your stateroom… It’s done. A deal’s a deal.’

‘Thank you, Lobsang.’

‘So here we are — on our way! By the way, don’t be alarmed if the coffee percolator talks to you; it’s a beta-test AI from one of our associates. Oh, and do you have a thing about cats?’

‘They make me sneeze.’

‘Shi-mi won’t.’

‘Shi-mi?’

‘Another first for transEarth. You’ve seen the size of this gondola; it is lousy with hard-to-get-to spaces, and vermin may be a problem for us. It wouldn’t be hard for them to scramble up our anchor cables when we land. The last thing we want is a rat nibbling on a wire. So, meet Shi-mi. Come, kitty kitty…’

A cat walked on to the deck. It was supple, silent, almost convincing. But there was an LED spark in each green eye.

‘I can tell you that she—’

‘She, Lobsang?’

‘She can, on demand, make a pleasant purring noise designed to be optimally soothing to the human ear. She can track mice via infra red, and has excellent hearing. She will stun her prey with a low current, swallow it into a designated stomach with a small food and water dispenser, and then will carefully transfer the catch to a small holding vivarium, where the mouse can live happily until it can be relocated somewhere safe.’

‘That’s going to a lot of trouble for a mouse.’

‘That is the Buddhist way. This prototype is clean and hygienic, will not harm her prey and, in general, will do most of the things you would expect of a domestic cat, except for shitting in your stereo headphones — a common complaint I’m told. Oh, in the default setting she will sleep on your bed.’

‘A robot cat, on a robot ship?’

‘There are advantages. She has a gel brain, just like my own ambulant, and is a whole lot smarter than the average cat. And synthetic hair. No sneezes, I promise—’

Suddenly the stepping stopped, and Joshua felt an odd lurch, like being thrown forward. The deck was flooded with light. Joshua glanced through the windows. They were evidently in a world that happened to be sunny. Sunny, but cloaked in ice.

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Look down. There are binoculars in the lockers.’

A tiny multicoloured dot in the whiteness resolved into a Day Glo orange domed tent, and a couple of people moving stiffly around, made Doughboy-sexless by the thick Arctic gear they wore. A portable drilling rig had been set up on the ice, and a Stars and Stripes hung limply on a pole.

‘Scientists?’

‘A university party, from Rhode Island. Studying the biota, taking ice cores and such. I’m recording all traces of human presence I find, naturally. I was expecting these gentlemen, though they have travelled a few worlds further than the nominal target they logged.’

‘But you found them even so.’

‘My view is godlike, Joshua.’

Joshua, peering down, wasn’t sure if the college guys had even noticed the airship, a whale suddenly hovering in the air above them. ‘Are we going down?’

‘That would serve no purpose. Though we could talk to them without landing. We carry a range of communications gear, from medium- and short-wave radios that ought to let us transmit to and receive from anywhere on an individual world, to — well, simpler means. A heliograph, Navy issue. Even a loudspeaker.’

‘A loudspeaker! Lobsang, booming from above like Yahweh.’

‘The equipment is merely practical, Joshua. Not every action carries symbolic freight.’

‘Every human action does. And you are human, aren’t you, Lobsang?’

Lobsang resumed the stepping without warning, another gentle lurch. The science camp winked into non-existence, and more worlds strobed past.

After his first night on the airship Joshua awoke feeling full of diamonds. The ship stepped steadily, the sound of its various mechanisms like the purring of a cat. In fact, he found the purring was the cat, curled up on his legs; when he stirred she elegantly rose, stretched, and loped away.

Prompted by the rumbling of his stomach, Joshua investigated the galley.

These days a decent meal out in the stepwise worlds was pretty easy to obtain, for him; the pioneering steppers kind of liked to see him around, they knew his name and reputation, and treated him as if he were a lucky mascot. And a meal was always his for the asking from any of the halfway houses, the travellers’ lodges that were springing up across the nearer Earths. But it didn’t pay to be a scrounger, Sister Agnes had always said, and so he always took a fresh-killed deer along, or some wild fowl. The greener pioneers liked their meat fresh but had as yet not come to terms with the idea of chopping up Bambi, so Joshua would spend a little time field-dressing his catch. He’d generally come away with maybe a couple of bags of flour and a basket of eggs, as long as he had a basket to carry them away in.

Well, the airship’s galley was rather more luxuriously appointed than any halfway house. There was a freezer with a sufficiency of bacon and eggs, and a dry cabinet stacked with sacks of salt and pepper. Joshua was impressed with this: on many worlds a handful of salt would buy you dinner and a night’s shelter, and the pepper was even more valuable. Joshua got to work on the bacon.

The voice of Lobsang startled him. ‘Good morning, Joshua. I trust you slept well?’

Joshua flipped his bacon and said, ‘I don’t even remember dreaming. It’s as if we weren’t moving. Where are we now?’

‘We are more than fifteen thousand steps from home. I have slowed the stepping for your comfort while you eat, and have steadied us at three thousand feet, occasionally going lower if the sensors find anything interesting. In many of the local worlds this morning it’s a sunny day with a bit of dew on the grasses below, so I suggest you finish your breakfast and come down to the observation deck and enjoy the view. By the way, there are sacks of muesli in the larder; Sister Agnes would, I’m sure, want you to keep your bowel movements regular.’

Joshua glared at the empty air, given the lack of anyone to glare at, and said, ‘Sister Agnes isn’t here.’ Even so, guiltily, bearing in mind that nuns somehow knew what you were up to wherever you were, he rummaged in the larder and munched his way through dried fruit and nuts, with a side order of watermelon.

Before he went back to his bacon.

And made himself a fried slice to mop up the bacon fat. After all, it was chilly up here; he needed the fuel.

Prompted by that thought, he went back to his stateroom. In its roomy closet, alongside the cold-weather gear he’d worn on arrival, he found a range of intermediate clothing, some of it in various camouflage patterns. Lobsang was thinking of everything, that was clear enough. He selected a parka and went down to the observation deck, and sat alone, watching Earths go by like a slideshow of the gods.

Without warning, the ship crossed a sheaf of ice worlds.

The light hit Joshua: dazzling, blinding sunlight reflecting from the ice and filling the air, as if the whole deck had suddenly turned into a flashbulb, with Joshua an insect trapped inside. The worlds below were plains of ice, gently folded, with only an occasional ridge of high ground showing as a dark bony stripe through the ice cover. And then into cloud, then hail, then sunlight again, depending on the local climate in each passing world. The flickering light was painful on the eye. From Earth to Earth the level of the ice cover rose and fell, he saw, like some tremendous tide. In each world the great ice sheet covering Eurasia must be pulsing, ice domes shifting, the southern edge rippling back and forth century by century; he was passing over snapshots of that tremendous continental flux.

And when the ice band had passed and they were sailing over interglacial worlds, mostly he saw tree tops. The Long Earth was big on tree tops, Earth after Earth, tree after tree.

Joshua seldom got bored. But as the morning wore on he was surprised to find himself growing bored now, so quickly. After all he was looking over thousands of landscapes no one, probably, had ever seen before. He remembered Sister Georgina, who liked her Keats:

At the time he’d thought a wild surmise was some kind of exotic bird. Well, he was now looking out over the new worlds with somewhat of a tame surmise.

There were footsteps behind him. Lobsang’s ambulant unit appeared. He was dressed for the occasion in safari shirt and trousers. And how quickly, Joshua reflected, Lobsang had become a he and not an it.

‘It can be disorienting, can’t it? I recall my reactions to my own pioneer flight. The Long Earth goes on and on, Joshua. A surfeit of wonders will dull the mind.’

At random they paused at a world somewhere around twenty thousand. The sky here was overcast, threatening rain. Without the sunlight the rolling grassland below was a dull grey-green, with scattered clumps of darker forest. On this particular world Joshua could see no sign of mankind, not so much as a thread of smoke. Yet there was movement. To the north he saw a huge herd drifting over the landscape. Horses? Bison? Camels, even? Or something more exotic? And by the shore of a lake below he made out more groups of animals, a black fringe by the water.

Now they had stopped, the Mark Twain’s systems went to work. Hatches on the gondola and on top of the envelope opened to release balloons, and buoys which fluttered to the ground under parachutes, each marked with the transEarth logo and the Stars and Stripes. There were even small sounding-rockets that flew up with a hiss, creating streaky smoke columns in the air.

‘This will be our regular routine when we stop to sample an Earth,’ Lobsang said. ‘A way for me to extend my study of any particular world beyond this single viewpoint. I will gather some data now, and data from ongoing observations will be downloaded from the probes when we return through this world, or when another craft passes this way in the future.’

Among the creatures by the lake below were some kind of rhino, giant beasts with oddly slender legs. They clustered at the water’s edge, shoving each other aside as they tried to get a drink.

Lobsang said, ‘You’ll find binoculars and cameras throughout the observation deck. Those animals look something like an elasmotherium, perhaps. Or a much-evolved descendant.’

‘That means nothing to me, Lobsang.’

‘Of course not. You want a species of your own? Name them if you like; I’m recording everything we see, hear, say and do, and will lodge the claims when we get home.’

Joshua sat back. ‘Let’s go on. We’re wasting time.’

‘Time? We’ve all the time in the worlds. However—’

The stepping began again, and the rhino-like herd disappeared. Joshua felt the ride now as a gentle jolting, like a car with good suspension travelling over a rutted road.

He figured they were now crossing an Earth every couple of seconds, over forty thousand new worlds a day, if they kept this up around the clock (which they wouldn’t). Joshua was impressed, but he wasn’t about to say so. Landscapes swept beneath the prow of the ship, only their broadest features possible for him to discern, whole worlds passing to the beat of his own pulse. Animal herds and lone beasts were no sooner glimpsed than they were gone, whisked into the unreality of stepwise otherness. Even the tree clumps shifted in shape and size from world to world, shift, shift, shift. And there were flickers — plunges into brief darkness, occasional flares of light, washes of odd colours across the landscape. Exceptional worlds of some kind, pulled from his sight before they could be comprehended. Otherwise there was only the chain of worlds, Earth after Earth smoothed to uniformity by the ship’s motion.

‘Joshua, do you ever wonder where you are?’

‘I know where I am. I’m here.’

‘Yes, but where is here? Every few seconds you enter a different stepwise world. So where is this world in relation to the Datum? And the next, and the next? How can there be room for them all?’

Actually Joshua had wondered about that. It was impossible to be a stepper without asking such questions. ‘I know Willis Linsay left a note: “The next world is the thickness of a thought away.”’

‘Unfortunately that was about the only comprehensible thing he did write down. Apart from that we’re floundering. So where is this world, this particular Earth? It’s in exactly the same space and time as Datum Earth. It’s like another mode of vibration of a single guitar string. The only difference is that now we can visit it; we couldn’t even detect it before. That’s pretty much the best answer transEarth’s tame physicists can supply.’

‘Is all this science stuff in Linsay’s notes?’

‘We don’t know. He seems to have invented his own mathematics. We have Warwick University working on that. But he also compressed everything he wrote into a fantastically arcane code. IBM won’t even quote on untangling that. Also his handwriting’s appalling.’

He kept talking, but Joshua managed to tune him out. It was a skill, he suspected, he was going to have to develop.

Music filled the deck, the cold notes of a harpsichord.

‘Would you mind shutting that off?’

‘It’s Bach,’ Lobsang said. ‘A fugue. A clichéd choice for an entity of mathematics such as myself, I know.’

‘I prefer silence.’

‘Of course you do.’ The music died. ‘It will not offend you if I continue to listen, in my head, as it were?’

‘Do what you like.’ Joshua stared at the latest landscape blankly.

And the next, and the next.

He rolled off his couch and tried out the deck’s can. It was a chemical toilet with a narrow bay for a shower, inside a plastic-walled compartment. Joshua wondered if Lobsang had eyes in here too. Well, of course he did.

Thus the day wore away. At last it grew dark on all the Earths, the myriad suns sinking to their respective horizons.

‘Do I have to go up to my stateroom to sleep?’

‘Your couch will fold out. Pull the lever to your right. There are blankets and pillows in the trunk.’

Joshua tried it out. The couch was like a first-class airliner seat. ‘Wake me if anything interesting happens.’

‘It’s all interesting, Joshua. Sleep now.’

As he settled under a comfortingly heavy throw, Joshua listened to the thrum of the engines, and felt the slight, vertiginous tug of the stepping. For Joshua Valienté, to rock between worlds was almost soothing. He slept easily.

When he woke, the airship had stopped again.