A DAY LATER, ON A distant world, in a warm twilight, Helen Green was gathering mushrooms. She wandered across a scrap of high ground, a couple of miles out of the new township of Reboot.
And there was a kind of sigh, like an exhalation. Helen felt a whisper of breeze on her skin. She turned.
There was a man, standing on the grass, slim, dark. A woman stood at his side, and she looked as if she belonged there. Visitors stepping in weren’t an unusual occurrence. They rarely looked quite so confused as these two. Or as grubby. Or with frost glistening on their jackets.
And very few appeared with a gigantic airship hovering over their heads. Helen wondered if she should run and fetch somebody.
The man shielded his eyes against the sun. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Helen Green.’
‘Oh, the blogger from Madison? I hoped we’d meet you.’
She glared at him. ‘Who are you? You aren’t another tax man, are you? We drove the last one out of town.’
‘No, no. My name’s Joshua Valienté.’
‘The Joshua Valienté…’ To her horror she felt herself blush.
The woman with Joshua said witheringly, ‘Give me strength.’
To Joshua, Helen Green looked in her late teens. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair tied sensibly back from her face, and had a basket of some kind of fungi on her arm. She was dressed in shirt and slacks of some soft deer-like leather, and moccasins. She wouldn’t have fitted into the crowd on the Datum, but on the other hand she was no colonial-era museum piece. This wasn’t some retro re-creation of pioneering days past, Joshua realized. Helen Green was something new in the world, or worlds. Kind of cute, too.
There was no trouble finding a place to stay in Reboot, once they accepted you weren’t any kind of criminal or bandit, or worse yet a representative of the Datum federal government which had suddenly turned so hostile to the colonists. In their time here Joshua saw the locals welcome even the hobos, as they called them, a drift of rather vague-looking people wandering through the Long Earth, evidently with no intention of ever settling down, and therefore with not much to contribute to Reboot. But out here every new face, with a new story to tell, was welcome, however briefly they stayed, so long as they tilled a field or chopped some wood in return for bed and board.
In the evening, Joshua and Sally sat by the fire, alone together, under the dark hulk of the Mark Twain.
‘I like these folk,’ Joshua said. ‘They’re good people. Sensible. Doing things right.’ He felt like this because of the way he was, he accepted that; he liked it when people did what they had to do, such as build this community, properly and methodically. I could live here, he thought, somewhat to his own surprise.
But Sally snorted. ‘No. This is the old way of living, or an imitation of it. We don’t need to plough the land to feed vast densities of people. We don’t just have one Earth now, we have an infinite number and they can feed an infinite number of us. Those hobos have it more right. They are the future, not your starstruck little fan Helen Green. Look, I suggest we stay here for a week, help with the harvest, take our pay in supplies. What do you say? Then we’ll head for home.’
Joshua was embarrassed, but he said, ‘And then what? We can deliver Lobsang, or what’s left of him in the Mark Twain, to transEarth. Not to mention his cat. But then — I’m going to want to go back out, Sally. With Lobsang or without. I mean, it’s all out there. All these years since Step Day we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the Long Earth. I thought I knew it all, but I’d never seen a troll before this trip, never heard of Happy Landings… Who knows what might be left to find?’
She gave him her sideways look. ‘Are you suggesting, young man, that the two of us might travel together again?’
He’d never suggested such a thing to any other human being in his life. Not unless he was trying to save them. He evaded the question. ‘Well, there is the Gap. The Long Mars! Who knows? I’ve been thinking about that. Step far enough there and we might find a Mars that’s habitable.’
‘You’re beginning to dribble.’
‘Well, I did use to read a lot of science fiction. But, yeah, let’s go home first. It feels like it’s time. Check out Madison. See how people are. Sally, I would very much like to introduce you to Sister Agnes.’
She smiled. ‘And Sister Georgina. We can talk about Keats…’
‘And then, when Lobsang two point zero launches the Mark Trine, I intend to be on board. Even if I have to stow away with the damn cat.’
Sally looked thoughtful. ‘You know, my mother had a saying when us kids used to run around like wild things: “It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.” I can’t help thinking that if we keep pushing our luck with this wonderful new toy of a multiverse, sooner or later a big foot will come down on us hard. Though I guess you could look up and see whose foot it was.’
‘Even that would be interesting,’ said Joshua.
As they prepared to leave they sought out Helen Green, who had been the first to greet them here, more or less civilly, and now they wanted to say goodbye to her.
Helen was in the middle of her working day, a bundle of much-read books under her arm: calm, competent, cheerful, getting on with her life, a hundred thousand Earths from where she had been born. She seemed a little flustered, as always around Joshua. But she pushed her hair away from her brow, and smiled. ‘Sorry to see you go so soon. So where are you heading, back on the Datum?’
‘Madison,’ Joshua said. ‘Where you came from too, right? I remember that from your blog. We still have friends there, family…’
But Helen was frowning. ‘Madison? Haven’t you heard?’