The Long Earth

41

‘NATURAL STEPPERS. Such a nice phrase, ain’t it? I mean, we all step. We all learn to do it when we’re weaned off our mammy’s milk. “Oh, look, it’s baby’s first steps.”’ Brian Cowley, who was nothing if not a showman, took mincing baby paces back and forth across the stage, mike in hand, picked out by the spotlights in the cavernous conference room. The simple stunt won him a few whoops.

Monica Jansson, in plain clothes, glanced around the crowd in this basement room to see who was doing the whooping.

‘It’s natural. Walking is. But what they call stepping?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing natural about that. You need a gadget to do it, don’t you? You don’t need no gadget to walk. Stepping. That’s not what I call it. That’s not what my granddaddy would have called it. We plain folk, who don’t have the education to know any better, have other words for practices like that. Words like unnatural. Words like abomination. Words like unholy.’

Each term brought louder choruses of whoops. There would come a point, Jansson knew, where she’d have to join in with the whooping to keep her cover.

The room was overcrowded, and dimly lit aside from the stage, the air hot, steamy. Cowley always made a point of appearing in public only underground, in basements, cellars, subterranean venues like this hotel’s below-ground-level conference room. Places the stepping folk couldn’t get at him, not without digging a hole in the ground first. Jansson was here undercover, along with colleagues from the MPD and Homelands Security (the ‘s’ had been adopted ten years after Step Day) and the FBI and a number of other agencies, who had become alarmed at the wilder noises coming out of fringe elements of Cowley’s Humanity First movement.

Jansson had already spotted some familiar faces in the crowd. There was even one on stage, in the row of Cowley’s well-heeled backers: Jim Russo, whose grandly named Long Earth Trading Company was still alive, still trading, but who had lost various fortunes as the world had changed beyond his imagination. Since she’d interviewed Russo a few years back over complaints about workforce exploitation, Jansson had made a mental note to keep an eye on him, and how he would react to the next, and inevitable, downturn in his fortunes. Not well, it seemed. Now here he was, aged fifty, bitter after yet another disappointment and perceived betrayal, handing a portion of his remaining wealth to this man, to Brian Cowley, self-appointed voice of the anti-steppers. And Russo wasn’t alone in carrying financial bruises from the opening up of the Long Earth; Cowley wasn’t short of backers.

Cowley was moving on to the economic arguments that had gained him most traction in the press.

‘I pay my taxes. You pay your taxes. It’s part of our contract with our government — and it is our government, no matter what they might tell you once they get themselves safely installed for life inside the Beltway. But the other side of the contract is this: that they should use your tax money to benefit you. You and yours, your children and your old folk, to keep you safe in your homes. That’s the deal, as I always understood it. But then I’m not inside the Beltway. I’m just an ordinary Joe, like you, like you,’ he said, pointing at the crowd. ‘And you know what this ordinary Joe has found out they’re doing with your taxes? I’ll tell you. They pay for colonists. They pay for those folk playing at being pioneers, out on some unnatural world where they don’t even have regular horses and buzzards and cattle like God made them here. They give them mail services. They send up census takers. They send up fancy medicines. They send cops, for when those deranged fools take a fancy to killing their own mothers, or fathering children by their own daughters…’

Jansson knew this much, at least, was a pack of lies. In the roomy stepwise worlds, without the pressures of crowding and deprivation, such crimes were comparatively rare.

‘And they have a whole system, propped up by your taxes, to ensure that the money those brave pioneers leave here, back on the real world, the only true world, is all tied up to keep ’em supplied with all the toys they need — I’m talking about this here Pioneer Support. Some of ’em even have homes, standing empty. You know how many people are homeless in America today?

‘And it’s all for what? What do you get out of the deal? And you, and you? There’s no trade with these other worlds — not beyond Earths 1 and 2 and 3 where you can haul back lumber and stuff. You can’t run an oil pipeline from Earth Gazillion to Houston, Texas. You can’t even drive a herd of cattle over.

‘The federal government has spent years telling you that the expansion into the Long Earth is some kind of analogy of the days of the pioneer trails and the Old West. Well, I might not know much about the ways of the Beltway, but I do know my own country’s heritage, and I know the value of a dollar, and I can tell you this is a lie. This is a boondoggle. Somebody sure as hell is getting rich off this folly, but it ain’t you, and it ain’t me. Why, we’d be better off going back to the moon. At least it’s God’s own moon! At least you can bring back moon rocks!

‘And I can tell you, when I have my meeting with the President in a few days’ time, my central demand is going to be this: cut your support of the Long Earth colonies. If the steppers left assets here, seize ’em. If they’re productive out there in the godless worlds, tax ’em until their eyes water. Those guys up there want to be pioneers, fine, let ’em. But not propped up by my tax dollars, and yours…’

Growls of approval, disturbingly loud.

Jansson spotted Rod Green, just eighteen years old, his strawberry-blond mane easily distinguished. Rod was one of a class the cops had labelled the ‘homealones’, non-stepper kids who had been more or less abandoned by families seduced by the romance of going off to build a new life in the stepwise reaches. A whole class of people injured by the very presence of the Long Earth in ways much deeper than the mere financial. And now here he was, lapping up Cowley’s poison.

Cowley was getting to the meat of his peroration. The hardcore stuff, the stuff these disadvantaged people had really come to hear. The reason he banned recordings of his speeches.

‘Here’s somethin’ I came across,’ he said, producing a clipping. ‘A pronouncement from one of them pro-fess-ors in the universities. And this man says, now let me quote, “The stepping ability represents a new dawn for humanity, the arrival of a new cognitive skill on a par with the development of language and multi-component tool-making,” and blah, blah, blah.

‘Do you understand what this man is saying, ladies and gentlemen? What he’s talking about? He’s talking about evolution.

‘Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was another sort of human being on this planet. We call them Neanderthals. They were like us, you see, they wore clothes of skin and made tools and built fires, why, they even cared for their sick and buried their dead with respect. But they weren’t quite as smart as us. They were around for hundreds of thousands of years, but in all that time not one of ’em came up with anything as complicated as a bow and arrow, which any seven-year-old American boy could make.

‘But there they were, with their tools and their hunting and their fishing. Until one day, along came a new sort of folk. A new sort with flat faces and slim bodies and clever hands and big, bulging brains. And these folk could make bows and arrows. Why, I bet there was some Neanderthal pro-fess-or who said something like, “The ability to make a bow and arrow represents a new dawn for humanity,” and blah, blah, blah. Maybe that Neanderthal prof urged Ug and Mug to give over a tithe of mammoth meat to fund more bow-and-arrow-making, for the benefit of the new folk. And it was all dandy, and everybody got along fine.

‘But where are Ug and Mug now? Where are the Neanderthals? I’ll tell you. Dead, these thirty thousand years. Extinct. Now there’s a terrible word if you like. A word beyond death, because extinction means your children are dead too, and your grandchildren and their children will never even be born.

‘You know what I would say to those Neanderthals? You know what they should have done when those bow-and-arrow folk showed up?’ He slammed his palm on a table. ‘They should have raised their big fists and their ugly old stone tools, and they should have smashed the bulging skulls of those new folk, every last one of them. Because if they had, their grandchildren would be around now.’ He kept slamming the palm, punctuating his sentences. ‘Now I got federal politicians and university pro-fess-ors telling me there’s a new sort of human being amongst us, a new evolution going on, a superman among us ordinary Joes. A superman, whose only power is the ability to slip into your child’s bedroom at night, without you even knowing it? What kind of superman is that?

‘You think I’m a Neanderthal? You think I’m gonna make the mistake they made? Are you gonna let these mutants take over God’s good Earth? Are you gonna submit to extinction? Are you? Or you? Or you?…’

Everybody was on their feet, on the stage too, hollering and clapping. Jansson clapped too, for cover. Around her she glimpsed FBI guys quietly taking photographs of the crowd.

The world was going to change again. That was the buzz. Once the Black Corporation’s more or less covert airship developments began to deliver the massive transformations in interworld carrying capacity they promised, huge trade flows and massive economic growth could be expected. But it wouldn’t come soon enough for the likes of Russo, or Cowley. Jansson fretted about how much harm might be done while everybody waited for the next miracle.