The Long Earth

2

THE BENCH, BESIDE a modern-looking drinks machine, was exceedingly comfortable. Joshua Valienté was not used to softness these days. Not used to the fluffy feeling of being inside a building, where the furnishings and the carpets impose a kind of quiet on the world. Beside the luxurious bench was a pile of glossy magazines, but Joshua was not particularly good at shiny paper either. Books? Books were fine. Joshua liked books, particularly paperback books: light and easy to carry, and if you didn’t want to read them again, well, there was always a use for reasonably thin soft paper.

Normally, when there was nothing to do, he listened to the Silence.

The Silence was very faint here. Almost drowned out by the sounds of the mundane world. Did people in this polished building understand how noisy it was? The roar of air conditioners and computer fans, the susurration of many voices heard but not decipherable, the muffled sound of telephones followed by the sounds of people explaining that they were not in fact there but would like you to leave your name after the beep, this being subsequently followed by the beep. This was the office of the transEarth Institute, an arm of the Black Corporation. The faceless office, all plasterboard and chrome, was dominated by a huge logo, a chesspiece knight. This wasn’t Joshua’s world. None of it was his world. In fact, when you got right down to it, he didn’t have a world; he had all of them.

All of the Long Earth.

Earths, untold Earths. More Earths than could be counted, some said. And all you had to do was walk sideways into them, one after the next, an unending chain.

This was a source of immense irritation for experts such as Professor Wotan Ulm of Oxford University. ‘All these parallel Earths,’ he told the BBC, ‘are identical on all but the detailed level. Oh, save that they are empty. Well, actually they are full, mainly of forests and swamps. Big, dark, silent forests, deep, clinging, lethal swamps. But empty of people. The Earth is crowded, but the Long Earth is empty. This is tough luck on Adolf Hitler, who hasn’t been allowed to win his war anywhere!

‘It is hard for scientists even to talk about the Long Earth without babbling about m-brane manifolds and quantum multiverses. Look: perhaps the universe bifurcates every time a leaf falls, a billion new branches every instant. That’s what quantum physics seems to tell us. Oh, it is not a question of a billion realities to be experienced; the quantum states superpose, like harmonics on a single violin string. But perhaps there are times — when a volcano stirs, a comet kisses, a true love is betrayed — when you can get a separate experiential reality, a braid of quantum threads. And perhaps these braids are then drawn together through some higher dimension by similarity, and a chain of worlds self-organizes. Or something! Maybe it is all a dream, a collective imagining of mankind.

‘The truth is that we are as baffled by the phenomenon as Dante would have been if he’d suddenly been given a glimpse of Hubble’s expanding universe. Even the language we use to describe it is probably no more correct than the pack-of-cards analogy that most people feel at home with: the Long Earth as a large pack of three-dimensional sheets, stacked up in a higher-dimensional space, each card an Earth entire unto itself.

‘And, most significantly, to most people, the Long Earth is open. Almost anybody can travel up and down the pack, drilling, as it were, through the cards themselves. People are expanding into all that room. Of course they are! This is a primal instinct. We plains apes still fear the leopard in the dark; if we spread out he cannot take all of us.

‘It is all profoundly annoying. None of it fits! And why has this tremendous pack of cards been dealt to mankind just now, when we have never been more in need of room? But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn’t be much of a career path, would it? Well — whatever the answers to such questions, believe you me, everything is changing for mankind… Is that enough, Jocasta? Some idiot clicked a pen while I was doing the bit about Dante.’

Of course, Joshua understood, transEarth existed to profit from all these changes. Which, presumably, was why Joshua had been brought here, more or less against his will, from a world a long way away.

At last the door opened. A young woman came in, nursing a laptop as thin as a sheet of gold leaf. Joshua kept such a machine in the Home, a fatter, antiquated model, mostly to look up wild-food recipes. ‘Mr Valienté? It’s so kind of you to come. My name is Selena Jones. Welcome to the transEarth Institute.’

She was certainly attractive, he thought. Joshua liked women; he remembered his few, brief relationships with pleasure. But he hadn’t spent much time with women, and was awkward with them. ‘Welcome? You didn’t give me a choice. You found my mailbox. That means you’re government.’

‘As a matter of fact, you’re wrong. We sometimes work for the government, but we’re certainly not the government.’

‘Legal?’

She smiled deprecatingly. ‘Lobsang found your mailbox code.’

‘And who is Lobsang?’

‘Me,’ said the drinks machine.

‘You’re a drinks machine,’ said Joshua.

‘You are wrong in your surmise, although I could produce the drink of your choice within seconds.’

‘But you’ve got Coca-Cola written on you!’

‘Do forgive me my sense of humour. Incidentally, if you had hazarded a dollar in the hope of soda-based refreshment I would definitely have returned it. Or provided the soda.’

Joshua struggled to make sense of this encounter. ‘Lobsang who?’

‘I have no surname. In old Tibet, only aristocrats and Living Buddhas had surnames, Joshua. I have no such pretensions.’

‘Are you a computer?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because I’m damn sure there isn’t a human being in there, and besides, you talk funny.’

‘Mr Valienté, I am more articulate and better spoken than anybody you know, and indeed I am not inside the drinks machine. Well, not wholly, that is.’

‘Stop teasing the man, Lobsang,’ said Selena, turning to Joshua. ‘Mr Valienté, I know you were … elsewhere, when the world first heard about Lobsang. He is unique. He is a computer, physically, but he used to be — how can I put this? — a Tibetan motorcycle repairman.’

‘So how did he get from Tibet to the inside of a drinks machine?’

‘That is a long story, Mr Valienté…’

If Joshua hadn’t been away so long he’d have known all about Lobsang. He was the first machine to successfully convince a court that he was a human being.

‘Of course,’ Selena said, ‘other sixth-generation machines had tried it before. Provided they stay in the next room and talk to you via a speaker they can sound at least as human as some of the lunkheads you see around, but that proves nothing in the eyes of the law. But Lobsang doesn’t claim to be a thinking machine. He didn’t claim rights on that basis. He said he was a dead Tibetan.

‘Well, Joshua, he had them by the shorts. Reincarnation is still a cornerstone of world faith; and Lobsang simply said that he had reincarnated as a computer program. As was deposited in evidence in court — I’ll show you the transcripts if you like — the relevant software initiated at precisely the microsecond a Lhasan motorcycle repairman with a frankly unpronounceable name died. To a discarnate soul, twenty thousand teraflops-worth of technological wizardry on a gel substrate apparently looks identical to a few pounds of soggy brain tissue. A number of expert witnesses testified to the astonishing accuracy of Lobsang’s flashes of recall of his previous life. And I myself witnessed a small, wiry old man with a face like a dried peach, a distant cousin of the repairman, conversing with Lobsang happily for several hours, reminiscing about the good old days in Lhasa. A charming afternoon!’

‘Why?’ Joshua asked. ‘What could he gain out of it?’

‘I’m right here,’ said Lobsang. ‘He’s not made of wood, you know.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What did I gain? Civil rights. Security. The right to own property.’

‘And switching you off would be murder?’

‘It would. Also physically impossible, incidentally, but let’s not go into that.’

‘So the court’s agreed you’re human?’

‘There’s never actually been a legal definition of human, you know.’

‘And now you work for transEarth.’

‘I part-own it. Douglas Black, the founder, had no hesitation in offering me a partnership. Not only for my notoriety, though he’s drawn to that sort of thing. For my transhuman intellect.’

‘Really.’

Selena said, ‘Let’s get back to business. You took a lot of finding, Mr Valienté.’

Joshua looked at her and made a mental note to make it a lot more finding next time.

‘Your visits to Earth are infrequent these days.’

‘I’m always on Earth.’

‘You know what I mean. This one,’ said Selena. ‘Datum Earth, or even one of the Low Earths.’

‘I’m not for hire,’ Joshua said quickly, trying to keep a trace of anxiety out of his voice. ‘I like to work alone.’

‘Well, that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it?’

Joshua preferred life in his stockades, on Earths far from the Datum, too far away for most to travel. Even then he was wary of company. They said that Daniel Boone would pull up sticks and move on if he could as much as see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Joshua, Boone was pathologically gregarious.

‘But that’s what makes you useful. We know you don’t need people.’ Selena held up a hand. ‘Oh, you’re not antisocial. But consider this. Before the Long Earth, no one in the whole history of mankind had ever been alone; I mean really alone. The hardiest sailor has always known that there’s someone out there somewhere. Even the old moonwalker astronauts could see the Earth. Everyone knew that other people were just a matter of distance away.’

‘Yeah, but with the Steppers they’re only a knight’s-move away.’

‘Our instincts don’t understand that, though. Do you know how many people pioneer solo?’

‘No.’

‘None. Well, hardly any. To be alone on an entire planet, possibly the only mind in a universe? Ninety-nine out of a hundred people can’t take it.’

But Joshua never was alone, he thought. Not with the Silence always there, behind the sky.

‘As Selena said, that’s what makes you useful,’ Lobsang said. ‘That and certain other qualities we can discuss later. Oh, and the fact that we have leverage over you.’

Light dawned, for Joshua. ‘You want me to make some kind of journey. Into the Long Earth.’

‘That’s what you’re uniquely good at,’ Selena said sweetly. ‘We want you to go into the High Meggers, Joshua.’

The High Meggers: the term used by some of the pioneers for the worlds, most of them still little more than legend, more than a million steps from Earth.

‘Why?’

‘For the most innocent of all reasons,’ said Lobsang. ‘To see what’s out there.’

Selena smiled. ‘Information on the Long Earth is the stock in trade of transEarth, Mr Valienté.’

Lobsang was more expansive. ‘Consider, Joshua. Until fifteen years ago mankind had one world and dreamed of a few more, the worlds of the solar system, all barren and horribly expensive to get to. Now we have the key to more worlds than we can count! And we have barely explored even the nearest of them. Now’s our chance to do just that.’

‘Our chance?’ Joshua said. ‘I’m taking you with me? Is that the gig? A computer is paying me to chauffeur it?’

‘Yes, that’s the size of it,’ Selena said.

Joshua frowned. ‘And the reason I’ll do this — you said something about leverage?’

Selena said smoothly, ‘We’ll come to that. We’ve studied you, Joshua. In fact the earliest trace you leave in the files is a report by Madison PD Officer Monica Jansson, filed just after Step Day itself. About the mysterious boy who came back, bringing the other children with him. Quite the little pied piper, weren’t you? Once upon a time you would have been called a celebrity.’

‘And,’ Lobsang put in, ‘once upon another time you’d have been called a witch.’

Joshua sighed. Was he ever going to live that day down? He had never wanted to be a hero; he didn’t like people looking at him in that funny way. Or, indeed, in any way. ‘It was a mess, that’s all,’ he said. ‘How did you find out?’

‘The police reports, like Jansson’s,’ said the drinks machine. ‘The thing about the police is that they keep everything on file. And I just love files. Files tell me things. They tell me who your mother was, for instance, Joshua. Maria was her name, was it not?’

‘My mother’s none of your business.’

‘Joshua, everybody is my business, and everybody is on file. And the files have told me all about you. That you may be very special. That you were there on Step Day.’

‘Everybody was there on Step Day.’

‘Yes, but you felt at home, didn’t you, Joshua? You felt as if you’d come home. For once in your life you knew you were in the right place …’