The Long Earth

30

FURTHER WEST YET, the Long Earth gradually became greener, arid worlds rarer. The forested worlds were blanketed thicker, with oak-like trees spreading out of the river valleys and lapping at the higher ground, like a rising tide of green. Out on the rarely glimpsed plains the animals still mostly looked familiar to Joshua — kinds of horses, kinds of deer, kinds of camels. Yet sometimes he glimpsed stranger beasts, blocky, low-slung predators that were neither cats nor dogs, herds of huge long-necked herbivores that looked like elephants crossed with rhinos.

On the nineteenth day, around Earth West 460,000, Lobsang somewhat arbitrarily declared they had reached the limit of the Corn Belt. The worlds here were surely too warm, the forests too thick, to make farming worthwhile.

And about the same time they crossed the Atlantic coast of Europe, somewhere around the latitude of Britain. A journey that had become a dull jaunt across a largely unbroken green blanket of forest became duller yet as they sailed out over the breast of the sea.

Joshua sat in the observation deck for hour upon hour. Lobsang rarely spoke, which was a mercy for Joshua. The gondola was almost soundless, save for the whisper of the air pumps, the whirring of suspended instrument pallets as they turned this way and that. Cooped up in this drifting sensory deprivation tank, Joshua fretted about the loss of muscle tone and fitness. Sometimes he performed stretching exercises, yoga postures, or jogged on the spot. One thing the airship lacked was a gym, and Joshua didn’t feel like asking Lobsang to fabricate any equipment; he’d only end up in rowing-machine challenges with the ambulant unit.

Lobsang had increased their lateral speed over the ocean. On the twenty-fifth day they crossed the eastern coast of America, somewhere around the latitude of New York, and found themselves coasting over another forest-blanketed landscape.

There was no more talk of stopping, or turning back. They both recognized the need to go on as long as they could, until they had made some inroads into the mystery of whatever was driving the humanoid migration. Joshua found himself shuddering when he imagined the panicky carnage he had witnessed in the town of the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims unleashed in Madison, Wisconsin.

But, once over land again, they reached an arrangement. Lobsang travelled on during the night. This didn’t trouble Joshua’s sleep, and Lobsang’s senses were infinitely finer even in the dark than Joshua’s were by daylight. By day, however, Joshua negotiated a stay of at least a few hours each day in which he could stand on the good Earth, whichever good Earth it happened to be. Sometimes Lobsang, in the ambulant unit, came down in the elevator with him. To Joshua’s surprise he handled even rugged terrain with ease, strolling, occasionally taking a swim in a lake, very realistically.

Generally speaking the lapping forest endured, in these remote worlds. During his daily descents Joshua observed differences of detail, different suites of herbivores and carnivores, and a gradual change of character in the grander frame: fewer flowering plants, more ferns, a drabber feel to the worlds. Joshua was covering twenty or thirty thousand new worlds in every day-night cycle. But, truth to tell, as thousands more worlds clicked by it was a case of see one and you’ve seen them all. In between stops, while Lobsang catalogued his observations and drafted his technical papers, Joshua sat in his couch and slept, or let his mind float in green, teeth-filled dreams so vivid he wasn’t always sure if he was awake or asleep.

There were occasional novelties. Once, somewhere near where Tombstone would have been had anyone been there to name it, Joshua dutifully took samples from enormous man-high fungi that would have proved something of an obstacle to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday had they come riding down the street. The fungi had a creamy look, and not to put too fine a point on it smelled wonderful, a thought which had also occurred to the little mice-like creatures that had honeycombed them like Emmental cheese.

In the earpiece Lobsang said, ‘Try some if you wish. And in any case, bring me back a reasonably large piece for testing.’

‘You want me to eat some before you know if it’s poisonous?’

‘I think that is very unlikely. In fact, I intend to try it myself.’

‘I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve seen you drink coffee. So you eat too?’

‘Why, yes! A certain input of organic matter is essential. But as I digest the fungus I will break it down and analyse it. A mildly tedious process. Many humans with special dietary requirements must go through the same routine, but without using a mass spectrometer, which instrument is part of my anatomy. You would be surprised how many foodstuffs actually do contain nuts…’

Lobsang’s verdict that evening was that a few pounds of the flesh of the giant mushrooms contained enough proteins, vitamins and minerals to keep a human alive for weeks, although in culinary terms totally bored. ‘However,’ he added, ‘something that grows so quickly, contains all the nutrients a human being needs, and can flourish more or less anywhere, is undoubtedly something for the fast food industry to take an interest in.’

‘Always glad to help transEarth make a quick buck, Lobsang.’

To break up the routine, that night Joshua sat up to witness the journey in the dark. Sometimes there were fires, scattered across the darkened landscapes. But there are always fires, wherever you’ve got trees and lightning and dry grass. Move on, folks, nothing to see here.

He complained about the drabness of the view.

‘What did you expect?’ said Lobsang. ‘Generally speaking, I would expect many Earths to be, at least at a first glance — and remember, Joshua, a first glance is mostly all we get — rather dull. Remember when you were young, all those pictures of dinosaurs in the Jurassic? All those different species gathered in one snappy frame, with a tyrannosaur wrestling with a stegosaur in the foreground? Nature generally isn’t like that, and nor were dinosaurs. Nature, by and large, is either reasonably silent, or earth-shakingly noisy. Predators and their prey spread out sparsely. Which is why I have maintained my habit of stopping in relatively drought-stricken worlds, where many specimens collect at waterholes, albeit in rather artificial conditions.’

‘But how much are we missing, Lobsang? Even when we stop at a world we barely take a look at it before going on, despite your probes and rockets. If all we are getting is one first glance after another…’ From his own experience on his sabbaticals, Joshua had a visceral feeling that you needed to live in a world to understand it, rather than scan it as you riffled the Long Earth pack. This was the thirty-third day of the journey. ‘So where are we now?’

‘I assume you mean in terms of Earth geography? Approximately around Northern California. Why?’

‘Let’s take a halt. I’ve been more than a month in this flying hotel. Let’s spend at least one whole day in one place just, well, chilling out, OK? And experiencing. One whole day, and a night. You could fill up your water tanks. And frankly I am getting stir crazy.’

‘Very well. I can hardly object. I will find a suitably intriguing world and cease stepping. As we are over California, would you like me to fabricate a surfboard for you?’

‘Ha ha.’

‘You have changed, Joshua, do you know that?’

‘You mean because I’m arguing with you?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes. I am intrigued; you are quicker, less hesitant, less like a person walking around in his own head. Of course, you’re still you. Indeed I’m wondering if possibly you are more you than you have been for a very long time, now that you know how you were born.’

Joshua shrugged this off. ‘Don’t push it, Lobsang. Thanks for the bracelet. But you’re no therapist. Maybe travel broadens the mind—’

‘Joshua, if your mind was any broader it would start pouring out of your ears.’

Though it was midnight Joshua wasn’t sleepy, and he began to fix a meal.

‘How about a movie, Joshua?’

‘I’d prefer to read. Any suggestions?’

The book screen lit up. ‘I know of no more apposite a title!’

Joshua stared. ‘Roughing It?’

‘In many respects, Twain’s best work, I always think, although I will always have a soft spot for Life on the Mississippi. Read it. It is what it says, a journey into new territory, and often very funny in an acerbic way. Enjoy!’

And Joshua enjoyed it. He read, and dozed, and this time dreamed of Indian attacks.

The next day, around noon, the stepping stopped with that familiar lurch. Joshua found himself looking down at a lake, a shield of grey-blue that broke up the forest.

Lobsang announced, ‘Surf’s up, dude.’

‘Oh, good grief.’

On the ground, the forest was a pleasant place to be. Squadrons of bats hurtled after flies in the green-lit air above, air that smelled of damp wood and leaf mould. The soft sounds around Joshua were, oddly, much quieter than mere silence would have been. Joshua had learned that absolute silence in nature was such an unusual state that it was not only noticeable but positively menacing. But the murmur of this deep forest was a natural white noise.

Lobsang said, ‘Joshua, look to your left. Quietly now.’

They were like horses, shy-looking, furtive creatures, with oddly curving necks and padded feet, the size of puppies. And there was something like an elephant with a stubby trunk, but only a couple of feet tall at the shoulder.

‘Cute,’ said Joshua.

‘The lake is straight ahead,’ Lobsang said.

The lake was surrounded by a wall of tree trunks and a fringe of open ground. The still water was choked with reeds and rushes, and in the rare open sunlight, under a blue sky, exotic-looking birds descended in clouds of pink-white flapping. On the far shore Joshua glimpsed a dog-like animal, tremendously large — it had to be four, five yards long, with a massive head and enormous jaws that must themselves have protruded for another yard. Before he could raise his binoculars it had slipped into the forest shadows.

He said, ‘That was surely a mammal. But it had jaws like a crocodile.’

‘A mammal, yes. In fact I suspect it’s a distant relative of the whale — our whale, I mean. And there are real crocodiles in the water, Joshua, as usual. A universal.’

‘It’s as if parts of animals have been jumbled up — as if somebody’s been playing at evolution.’

‘We are now many hundreds of thousands of steps from the Datum, Joshua. In this remote world we’re seeing representatives of many of the animal orders we have on our branch of the probability tree, but as if reimagined. Evolution is evidently chaotic, like the weather—’

He heard a kind of grunting, like a pig, a big heavy-chested pig, coming from behind him.

‘Joshua. Don’t run. Behind you. Turn very slowly.’

He obeyed. He visualized the weapons he carried, the knife at his belt, the air gun in his chest pack. And up above was the airship, Lobsang with a flying arsenal at his command. He tried to feel reassured.

Huge hogs. That was his first impression. Half a dozen of them, each as tall as a man at the shoulder, with powerful-looking legs, and backs that rose in bristling humps, and tiny coal-black eyes, and jaws long and strong. And each of them carried a humanoid — not a troll, a skinny upright figure with a chimp face and rust-brown hair, sitting astride his hog as if riding a huge ugly horse.

Joshua was a long way from the cover of the trees.

‘More elves,’ Lobsang whispered.

‘The same breed that wiped out the Victims?’

‘Or their first cousins. The Long Earth is a big arena, Joshua; there must be many speciation events.’

‘You sent me down here to encounter these creatures, didn’t you? This is what you call a restful break?’

‘You can’t deny it’s interesting, Joshua.’

One elf called out, a pant-hoot cry like a chimp’s, and kicked his mount in the ribs. The six beasts trotted forward at Joshua, with guttural grunts.

‘Lobsang, your advice?’

The hogs were speeding up.

‘Lobsang—’

‘Run!’

Joshua ran, but the pigs ran faster. He had barely closed any ground on the descending airship, or the forest, when a huge body came plummeting past him. Joshua smelled dirt and blood and shit and a kind of greasy musk, and a small fist slammed into his back and sent him sprawling.

The pigs capered around him, oddly playful despite their size and bulk. Their huge random violence was terrifying. He expected to be crushed, or gored on the canine teeth embedded in the tips of their snouts. But instead the pigs kept running by him, and the humanoids, the elves, whooping and hooting, leaned over to make passes at him. Blades flashed at him — blades of stone! He cowered and rolled.

At last they pulled back, into a loose circle around him. Shaking, he got to his feet, feeling for his own weapons. He wasn’t cut, he realized, save for nicks on his face, and on his shoulder where a swipe had gone through the cloth of his coverall. But they had cut the supply pack from his chest, even pickpocketed the knife at his waist. He had been expertly stripped, leaving only the parrot on his shoulder, the processor pack on his back.

The elves were toying with him.

Now the elves stood up on the backs of their strange mounts. They weren’t like the trolls, they were much skinnier, more graceful, lithe, strong, their hairy upright bodies like those of child gymnasts. They had long tree-climbing arms, very human legs, and small heads with wizened chimp-like faces. They all seemed to be male. Some of them were sporting skinny erections.

Joshua looked for positives. ‘Well, they’re smaller than me. Five feet, maybe?’

‘Don’t underestimate them,’ Lobsang’s whisper in his headset urged. ‘They’re stronger than you. And this is their world, remember.’

The pant-hooting cries began again, and seemed to reach a crescendo. Then one of the elves kicked his animal’s ribs. The beast, its own eyes fixed on Joshua, began to stride steadily forward. The elf bared human-looking teeth and hissed.

This time they weren’t playing.

There are moments when terror is like a treacle that slows down time. Once when Joshua was a kid he had slipped over an edge at a limestone quarry, just a ten-minute bike ride from the Home, and his friends couldn’t haul him back, and he had had to hang on while they ran for help. His arms had hurt like hell. But what he remembered most of all was the tiny detail of the rock right in front of his eyes. There had been flecks of mica in it, and lichen, a miniature forest dried yellow by the sun. That little landscape had become his whole world, until somebody somewhere started yelling, and some other guy’s hands grabbed his wrists, hauled on arms that felt like they were filled with hot lead…

The elf leapt in the air, and flickered out of existence. The hog trotted on, grunting, speeding up. The realization came to Joshua, with all the clarity of a mica fleck on a sun-warmed rock, that the elf was stalking him. And it had stepped.

The hog was still coming. Joshua stood his ground. At the last second it hesitated, stumbled, veered away from him.

And the elf returned, stretching, its feet braced on the hog’s back, its hands clamped around Joshua’s neck — hands in place to throttle Joshua, even as it stepped back into the world. Joshua was astonished at the precision of the manoeuvre.

But now the elf’s strong ape hands were squeezing, and Joshua was driven to the ground, unable to breathe. He reached, but the elf’s arms were longer than his; he flailed, unable to reach the creature’s snarling face, and blackness rimmed his vision. He tried to think. His weapons, his pack, were stolen and scattered, but the parrot still sat on his shoulder. He grabbed the parrot’s frame with both hands, and shoved it in the face of the elf. Bits of glass and plastic erupted, the elf fell back screaming, and mercifully that death grip at his throat was released.

But the other elves on their hogs screamed and closed.

‘Joshua!’ A loudspeaker, booming from the air. The airship was coming down, slowly, ponderously, dangling a rope ladder.

He got to his feet, gasping for breath through a crushed throat, but a bank of elves on hogs stood between him and the ladder, and the injured elf on the ground shrieked its fury. The only gap in the circle surrounding him was the way that lead elf had come.

So he ran that way, away from the airship, but out of the circle of elves. The wrecked parrot was still attached to his coverall by cables; it dragged through the dirt behind him. The yelling elves pursued him. If he could somehow double back, or maybe reach the forest—

‘Joshua! No! Watch out for the—’

The ground suddenly gave way under him.

He fell a yard or so, and found himself in a hollow surrounded by dogs — no, like a mix of dogs and bears, he’d glimpsed this kind before, lithe canine bodies with powerful heads and muzzles like bears. Their black-furred bodies squirmed all around him, females, puppies. This was some kind of den, not a trap. But even the puppies were snapping, snarling packets of aggression. The smallest of them, it was almost cute, closed its bear-like jaws on Joshua’s leg. He kicked, trying to loosen the little creature’s grip. The other dog-bears barked and snarled, and Joshua expected them to fall on him in a moment.

But here came the elves on their swinish mounts. The adult dogs rose up out of their den in a pack, and hurled themselves at the hogs. The fight erupted in a cloud of yelps, barks, grunts, cries, pant-hoots, snapping teeth, screams of pain and sprays of blood, while the elves flashed in and out of existence, as if glimpsed under a strobe lamp.

Joshua climbed out of the den and ran away from the fight, or tried to. But that stubborn pup clung to his leg, and he was still dragging the absurd wreckage of the parrot. He glanced up. The airship was almost overhead. Joshua jumped for the rope ladder, grabbed it, and viciously kicked away the pup. The airship rose immediately.

Below, the dogs had now encircled the huge hogs, which fought back ferociously. Joshua saw one big dog-bear sink its teeth into the neck of a screaming hog, which crashed to the ground. But another hog scooped up a dog in its big tusked jaw and threw it through the air, squealing, its chest ripped open. Meanwhile the elves flickered through the carnage. Joshua saw one elf face a dog that leapt for his throat. The elf flicked away and reappeared beside the dog as it sailed through the air, spun with balletic grace, and swiped at the animal’s torso with a thin stone blade, disembowelling the dog before it hit the ground. The elves were fighting for survival, but Joshua got the impression they were fighting individually, not for each other; it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. It was every man for himself. Or would have been, if they had been men.

And the airship rose up, beyond the reach of the trees, and into the sunlight. The fight was reduced to a dusty, blood-splashed detail in a landscape across which the airship’s shadow drifted serenely. Joshua, still barely able to breathe, climbed the ladder, and spilled into the gondola.

‘You kicked a puppy,’ Lobsang said accusingly.

‘Add it to the charge sheet,’ he gasped. ‘Next time you pick a vacation site, Lobsang, think a bit more Disneyland.’ Then the darkness around his vision that had been there ever since the close encounter with the elf folded over him.