The Long Earth

23

WHEN THEY WERE done the sun was setting on all the worlds. Joshua took a shower, musing on all the meanings and usages of the word ‘strange’. Boxing like a nineteenth-century steamboat captain with an artificial man, while multiple worlds flickered by beneath. Could his life get any odder? Probably, he thought, resigned.

He was coming to like Lobsang, although he was not entirely certain why. Nor was he certain, even now, what exactly Lobsang was. Strange, that was for sure. But then of course plenty of people called him strange, and worse.

He dried himself off, got into a new pair of shorts, put on a fresh T-shirt which bore the slogan ‘Don’t worry! On another Earth it already happened’, and headed back to the saloon deck. The empty staterooms he passed bothered him; it made the Mark Twain feel like a ghost ship, with himself as the first, and possibly the last, ghost.

He walked into the galley, and there was Lobsang, dressed in a bland coverall, standing patient as a statue. ‘Dinner time, Joshua? According to a preliminary cladistic analysis your salmon is not, strictly speaking, salmon, but salmon enough for the grill. We have all the relevant condiments. We also have tracklements, and I bet you have never heard of them before.’

‘Tracklements are those things which complement the main ingredient of a meal and, traditionally, at least, may be found in the vicinity of the said ingredient — for example, horseradish root in good beef country. I am impressed, Lobsang.’

Lobsang looked pleasantly shocked. ‘Well, if it comes to that, so am I, given that I am a certifiable genius with access to every dictionary ever published. May I ask how you came across such an archaic word?’

‘Sister Serendipity is a world expert on cookery through the ages. In particular she has a book by somebody called Dorothy Hartley, called Food in England. Serendipity knows all that stuff; she can make a good meal out of anything. You should see her roadkill hot pot, always a favourite. She taught me a lot about living off the land.’

‘It is remarkable for a woman with such skills to devote her time to unfortunate young people. Such dedication.’

Joshua nodded. ‘Well, yes. And maybe also because she is wanted by the FBI, which is why she doesn’t go out much and sleeps in the basement. Sister Agnes said that it was all a big misunderstanding, and in any case the bullet missed the senator by a mile. They don’t talk about it much.’

Lobsang began walking backwards and forwards along the deck, turning smartly when he reached a bulkhead and striding back again, like a sentry.

Joshua set about dressing the salmon, but the endless striding and the creaking of the floorboards began to get on his nerves. When Lobsang came past for the twelfth time he said, ‘You know Captain Ahab used to do that? And look what happened to him, right? What’s on your mind now, Lobsang?’

‘On my mind! Practically everything. Although I have to say that gentle physical exercise, such as our sparring, does indeed do wonders for the cognitive processes. A very human observation, don’t you think?’ The pacing continued.

Finally the quasi-salmon was cooking, although Joshua had to keep an eye on it.

Lobsang stopped pacing at last. ‘You are good at concentrating, aren’t you, Joshua? You can ignore distractions, a very useful skill, and it makes for a certain tranquillity.’

Joshua didn’t respond. Through the window, light flared: a distant volcano blossoming against the endless Eurasian green, to be snatched out of existence in a heartbeat, as they stepped on, and on.

Lobsang said, ‘Listen, Joshua. Let’s talk about natural steppers. Like you.’

‘And Private Percy?’

‘You asked me about my researches. Since Step Day I have endeavoured to explore all aspects of this remarkable new phenomenon. As one example I sent researchers off around the world, to study cave systems used by early man. They were tasked to inspect similar caves in the adjoining worlds, to investigate parallel habitations, if any. It was an expensive endeavour but it yielded fruit, because my researchers quickly found in a cave near Chauvet in a stepwise France, among other things, a painting. More accurately it was the badge of a certain Kent regiment at the time of the First World War, and rendered with great accuracy.’

‘Private Percy?’

‘Quite. Well, I already knew about him and his stepping exploits. But then, in a stepwise version of the caves at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England, my indefatigable investigators found the complete skeleton of a middle-aged man, in possession of a corked flagon of cider, a few coins, and one gold watch of mid-eighteenth-century manufacture with only the gold and brass remaining of the metal parts. This was a wet cave, but his boots had survived, slightly glistening like the poor man himself, thanks to a sheen of calcium carbonate deposited by drips from the roof. Interestingly, the hobnails and the aglets on his laces were not there.’

‘Aglets?’

‘The small steel caps once fitted to the end of a lace… I’m painting a picture for you here, Joshua.’

‘It’s kind of a dull picture, Lobsang.’

‘Patience. The intriguing thing about this particular find is that the corpse was discovered only because he was lying with the fingers of one hand jammed into a very small space at the bottom of the cave. My operatives found the gentleman in fact as they were exploring a lower cave. They saw the bones protruding through the roof, as if the man had been trying fruitlessly to widen the little gap. All very Edgar Allan Poe, don’t you think? Of course they broke their way through from the cave below, and you can work out the rest. The man was a notorious thief and ne’er-do-well known locally as Passover.’

‘He was a stepper, wasn’t he?’ said Joshua, flatly. ‘And I just bet that there was no other entrance to the cave.’ For a moment he imagined the drip of icy water oozing over bleeding fingers in the darkness, a man trying to scrabble his way out of a cave like a coffin… ‘So maybe he’d had a few drinks. Sister Serendipity once told me that Somerset cider was made of lead, apples and handsaws. He lost his bearings, stepped, ended up in his small cave without even knowing that he’d stepped at all, which would of course make him even more disorientated. He tried to feel his way out, banged his head, knocked himself out. How am I doing?’

‘Superbly. And the skull itself was, indeed, slightly damaged,’ said Lobsang. ‘Not a good death, and I wonder how many other individuals get themselves trapped in some corner before they know what is happening to them.

‘Natural steppers, Joshua. The history of Datum Earth is full of them, if you know how to interrogate the record. Mysterious disappearances. Mysterious arrivals! Locked-room mysteries of all kinds. Thomas the Rhymer is a favourite example of mine, the Scots prophet who, it is said, kissed the queen of the elves and left this world… In more modern times there are plenty of cases documented in the black scientific and intelligence literature, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘You are unusual, you see, Joshua, but not unique.’

‘Why are you telling me all this now?’

‘Because I don’t want there to be secrets between us. And because now I am going to tread on dangerous ground. And tell you about your mother.’

The Mark Twain stepped Westward, with little sound other than the pop of the air getting out of the way.

Carefully, Joshua turned down the heat on the cooking fish. He said, as casually as he could, ‘What about my mother? Sister Agnes told me everything there is to know.’

‘I don’t think so, because she didn’t know all of it. I do. And let me say that the whole truth is, on the whole, a good truth, and a truth that explains many things. I think it would be good for you to know. But I will put it out of my mind if you tell me to. That is, I will actually delete the subject from my memory for good. The choice is yours.’

Calmly, Joshua kept his attention on the fish. ‘In what world can I say anything other than “Tell me about her”?’

‘Very well. You know, surely, or at least you must have worked out, that Sister Agnes took over the Home in the first place as a result of the affair. I mean the scandalous business that surrounded your birth. It was a coup that made the throwing of the moneylenders out of the Temple look like a bachelor party. I’ve seen the files, believe me; I doubt whether a convocation of cardinals would try to take Agnes’s office away from her now. She knows all the dirt. Moreover, she knows what’s under the dirt…

‘Your mother was young when she became pregnant with you, far too young. The Home failed her in that, clearly. And your father, by the way, is unknown, even to me.’

‘I know that. Maria would say nothing about him.’

‘Under the old regime, her world was one of daily penance. Relevant affidavits to demonstrate how this penance was administered exist in Sister Agnes’s personal safe, as well, of course, as in my own files, awaiting the right time to be revealed. The regime was utterly inappropriate in the modern age — and would have been in any age, though it might once have been tolerated.’

Joshua faced Lobsang and said in a flat voice, ‘I know that somebody took her monkey bracelet off her. It was a silly thing, but it was given to her by her own mother. It was sort of all she had. Sister Agnes told me. I suppose it was considered superstitious or something.’

‘They did think that way, yes. Although there was a strong streak of petty cruelty in the mix. Maria was in the late stages of pregnancy at the time. Yes, it seems a trivial incident, but it tipped her over the edge, at the worst of times. And so that evening, when the labour pains first started, Maria tried to flee the home, and panicked, and stepped. At which point you entered the situation.

‘She actually stepped twice. She gave birth to you, and stepped back to the Datum, emerging near the road outside the Home where Sister Agnes caught up with her. Agnes tried to calm her down; Maria was clearly in a dreadful state. But she realized what she had done, and stepped yet again. And when she returned she brought you back with her, wrapped in her pink angora sweater, and handed you over to an astonished Sister Agnes, who understood nothing of what had happened. It was not until Step Day, when stepping became common, that she began to grasp the truth.

‘And Maria died, Joshua, of post-partum hemorrhaging. I’m very sorry. Sister Agnes, quick to react though she was, could not help her.

‘All of which leaves you, my friend, as most unique, being, at the moment of birth, if only for a matter of a minute or two, the only person, almost certainly, in a universe. Totally solitary, utterly alone! I wonder what that must have done to your infant consciousness?’

And Joshua, aware all his life of the far-off, solemn presence of the Silence, wondered about that too. My miraculous birth, he thought.

Lobsang went on, ‘Now — you weren’t aware of any of these details, were you? Does that help you understand yourself a little better?’

Joshua stared blankly at Lobsang. ‘I should serve the fish before it spoils.’

Silently, Lobsang watched Joshua eat a respectable part of the fish, cooked with finely chopped onions (there being no shallots on board), and green beans, and a dill sauce the composition of which even Lobsang’s forensic nose could not entirely work out although undoubtedly there was a lot of fennel in it. He watched as Joshua methodically washed and dried every utensil until it sparkled, and stacked everything away in an order that could only be called shipshape.

And then he watched Joshua wake up, it seemed to Lobsang, as if reality flowed over him like a spring tide.

Lobsang said gently, ‘I have something for you. Which I suspect your mother would have liked you to have.’ He produced a small item wrapped in soft paper and laid it gently on the bench, downloading as he did so a number of recommended works on dealing with grief and the aftermath of loss, and all the while making background system checks of the ship.

Joshua opened the packet cautiously. It contained his mother’s cheap, precious plastic bracelet.

Then Lobsang left Joshua alone.

Lobsang walked back along the length of the ship, surprised once more at how the process of walking helped thinking, just as Benjamin Franklin had once remarked. An aspect of embodiment, he supposed, embodied cognition, a phenomenon he must explore — or remember. Behind him, as he walked, lights dimmed as the ship went into night-running mode.

When he got to the wheelhouse he opened the screen, enjoying the freezing fresh air of world after world washing against the nanosensors embedded in his artificial skin, and he stared out at the Long Earth, as revealed by the light of many moons. The landscape itself seldom changed significantly: the basic shapes of the hills, the paths of the rivers — although occasionally there was sufficient volcanism to light up the sky, or a lightning-struck forest blazing in the dark. The moon, the sun, the basic geometry of the Earth itself, made a static stage for the shifting, swarming biologies on the fleeting worlds. But even the moonlight was not a constant across the worlds. Lobsang paid a lot of attention to the moons, and he saw how that familiar, ancient face shifted and flowed, subtly, as he crossed the worlds. While the ancient lava seas endured, in each reality a different selection of random cosmic rocks had battered the lunar surface, leaving a different pattern of craters and rays. Sooner or later, he knew, they were bound to come across a world with a missing moon, a negative moon. After all the moon was itself a contingency, an outcome of accidental collisions during the creation of the solar system. An absence of moon was an inevitability if you travelled far enough across the Long Earth; Lobsang only had to wait, as for many other contingencies he had anticipated.

He understood a great deal. But the further they travelled, the more the very mystery of the Long Earth worried Lobsang. Back home he employed tame professors who spoke of the Long Earth as some kind of quantum-physical construct, because that kind of scientific language seemed at least to paint the right picture. But he was coming to believe that on the contrary, his boffins might not just have the wrong picture, they might be in the wrong art gallery entirely. That the Long Earth might be something much stranger altogether. He didn’t know, and he hated not knowing things. This evening, he knew he would worry and watch until the moons set, and then he would worry until it was daylight and it was time for the chores of the day, which in his case would include … worrying.