The Long Earth

7

FOR SALLY LINSAY, her departure from Datum Earth, a year after Step Day, hadn’t been first step at all. She left the world because her father had gone before her. And before him, most of her family. She was nineteen years old.

She had taken her time about it. Time to get her kit together, to resolve her affairs. After all, she wasn’t planning to come back.

Then, early one morning, she slipped on her sleeveless fisherman’s jacket with all the pockets, and picked up her pack, and left her room in her aunt’s home for the last time. Aunt Tiffany was away, and that suited Sally; she didn’t like goodbyes. She worked her way over to Park Street and strolled through the campus. Nobody around, not even a cleaner; UW was asleep. At that, the early morning was quieter than it used to be, she was sure. Maybe more people had stepped away than she’d thought. At the lake shore she cut past the library, headed west along the Lakeshore Path, and kept walking towards Picnic Point. There were a couple of sailboats out on Lake Mendota, and a hardy windsurfer in a lurid orange wetsuit, and a couple of boats of the UW Rowing Club, their coaches’ bullhorn barks carrying across the water. The horizon was bounded by green.

To some all this was idyllic, the leafy university by the lake. Not to her. Sally liked nature, the real thing. To her the Long Earth wasn’t some new-fangled novelty, a theme park that had opened up on Step Day. She had grown up out there. Now, looking at the rowboats and the surfer, all she could see was disturbance, idiots scaring away the birds. Just as was starting to happen in the other worlds as more idiots stumbled stepwise, slack-jawed. Even this limpid lakewater was just dilute waste to her. At least she had picked a fine day to say goodbye to this place, this city by the lake, where she hadn’t always been entirely unhappy, and the air was fresh. But where she was going it would be fresher.

She found a quiet spot, and walked off the path into the shade of the trees. She checked over her kit, one last time. She carried weapons, up to and including a lightweight crossbow. Her Stepper was in a plastic box of the kind her father had used. As well as the basic apparatus itself it was crowded with spares, fine optician’s tools, a length of solder, printouts of the circuit diagrams. There was the potato, of course, in the middle of the tangle of beat-up electronics. What a smart idea that was, a battery you could eat, if lunch became the priority. It was a professional traveller’s piece of kit. She was nostalgic enough to have plastered the box with a UW sticker.

But the box was a cover. Sally didn’t need a Stepper to step.

She knew the Long Earth, and how to travel across it. Now she was going out there to find her father. And, something that had puzzled her endlessly since she was a little girl playing outside her father’s shed in a stepwise Wyoming, to figure out what it was all for.

She’d never been indecisive. She made a random choice of direction, grinned, and stepped. Around her, the lake, the clumps of trees persisted. But the footpath, the rowboats, the idiot on the windsurfer had gone.