The Long Mars

1

The High Meggers:

Remote worlds, most still unpopulated, even in the year 2045, thirty years after Step Day. Up there you could be utterly alone. One soul in an entire world.

It did funny things to the mind, thought Joshua Valienté. After a few months alone you got so sensitive that you thought you could tell if another human, even just a single person, arrived to share your world. One other human, maybe on the other side of the planet. The Princess and the Pea wasn’t in it. And the nights were cold and big and the starlight was all aimed at you.

And yet, Joshua thought, even on an empty world, under an empty sky, other people always crowded into your head. People like his estranged wife and his son, and his sometime travelling companion Sally Linsay, and all the people of the suffering Datum Earth in the aftermath of Yellowstone, five years after the eruption.

And Lobsang. Always Lobsang…

Given his unusual origins, Lobsang had necessarily become something of an authority on the work known in the west as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Perhaps its most familiar title to Tibetans was the Bardo Thodol, roughly translated as Liberation Through Hearing. This funerary text, intended to guide the consciousness through the interval between death and rebirth, had no single agreed edition. With origins in the eighth century, with time it had passed through many hands, a process that had bequeathed many different versions and interpretations.

Sometimes, as Lobsang had surveyed the state of Datum Earth, first home of mankind, in the days, months and years after the Yellowstone super-eruption of 2040, he found comfort in the sonorous language of the ancient text.

Comfort, compared with the news that had come out of Bozeman, Montana, Earth West 1, for example, only days after the eruption. News to which his closest friends had responded…

On any ordinary day, the community growing up in this one-step-West footprint of Bozeman must be a typical stepwise colony, Joshua thought, as he pulled on his protective coveralls one more time. A bunch of Abe Lincoln log cabins cut into a forest whose lumber was steadily being worked for export to the Datum. A corral, a small chapel. If anything this copy of Bozeman lacked facilities you’d find further out in the Long Earth, such as a hotel, bars, a town hall, a school, a clinic; this close to the Datum it was just too easy to step back home for all of that.

But this day, September 15 2040, was no ordinary day in any of the stepwise Americas. For, seven days after the big caldera had first gone up, back on Datum Earth the eruption of Yellowstone was still continuing. Bozeman, Montana, was only fifty miles or so from the ongoing blast.

And, one step from the disaster, Bozeman West 1 was transformed. Though the day was bright, the sky blue, the grass a vivid green—no volcano skies here—the town was crowded with people, jammed into the cabins and housed in hastily erected tents or just sitting on tarpaulins on the ground. People so coated with volcano ash that they were uniformly grey, their skin, hair and clothes, like they were characters from some ancient black-and-white TV show, I Love Lucy, cut-and-pasted digitally into the bright sunlit green of this fine fall day. Men, women and children, all coughing and retching like they had 1950s smoking habits too.

The landscape around the town, meanwhile, had been appropriated by the official types from FEMA and the National Guard, who had marked out the ground with laser beams, police crime-scene tape, even just chalk marks, to match the layouts of blocks and buildings in Datum Bozeman. Some of the outlines extended into the woods and scrubland, land as yet untamed here. The officials had numbered and labelled these blocks, and were sending stepping volunteers back to the Datum systematically, marking off computerized maps on their tablets, to ensure the whole community was cleared of people.

In a way the whole thing was a display of the basic mystery of the Long Earth, Joshua thought. It was already a quarter-century since Step Day, when he and other kids all around the world had downloaded the spec for a simple electronic gadget called a Stepper box, and turned the knob as per instructions—and stepped, not left or right, forward or back, but in another direction entirely. Stepped into a world of forest and swamp, at least if you started in Madison, Wisconsin, as Joshua had. A world all but identical to Earth—old Earth, Datum Earth—save there had been no people in it. Not until kids like Joshua appeared, popping out of thin air. And, Joshua had quickly found, you could take another step, and another, until you found yourself striding along a whole chain of parallel worlds, with differences from the Datum gradually increasing—but not a human in sight. The worlds of the Long Earth.

And here was the basic, harsh reality of it. Datum America was now covered by a searing blanket of volcanic ash and dust—yet here, a single step away, it was as if Yellowstone didn’t exist at all.

Sally Linsay showed up, finishing a coffee from a polystyrene cup that she carefully placed in a bin for cleaning and reuse: good pioneer-type habits, Joshua thought absently. She was in a clean one-piece coverall, but the ash had got into her hair, the skin of her neck and face, even her ears, anywhere the FEMA facemasks and straps hadn’t covered.

She was accompanied by a National Guardsman, just a kid, with a tablet computer. He checked their identities, the numbers on the chests of their suits, the town block they were going into this time. “You two ready again?”

Sally began to fix her mask over her face once more, a breathing filter, steampunk goggles. “Seven days of this already.”

Joshua reached for his own mask. “It won’t be finishing any time soon, I’m guessing.”

“So where’s Helen now?”

“Back at Hell-Knows-Where.” The National Guard kid raised his eyebrows, but Joshua was talking about his home off in the High Meggers, a community more than a million steps from the Datum, where he lived with his family: Helen, his son Dan. “Or on the way there. Safer for Dan, she says.”

“That’s true enough. The Datum and the Low Earths are going to be a mess for years.”

He knew she was right. There had been minor geological events in the Low Earths, mirroring the big Datum eruption, but the “mess” in the young worlds had been made by the vast spilling of refugees from the Datum.

Sally eyed Joshua. “I bet Helen wasn’t happy that you refused to go back with her.”

“Look, it was tough on us. But Datum America is where I grew up. I can’t just abandon it.”

“So you decided to stick around and use your stepping superpowers to help the afflicted.”

“Don’t give me that, Sally. You’re here too. Why, you grew up in Wyoming itself—”

She was grinning. “Yeah, but I don’t have a little wife trying to draw me away. Big argument, was it? Or just one of her long sulks?”

He turned away, fixing his mask with an angry tug on the straps at the back of his head, pulling up his hood. She laughed at him, her voice muffled by her own mask. He’d known Sally for ten years now, since his own first exploratory jaunt into the deep Long Earth—only to find Sally Linsay was already out there. Nothing much about her had changed.

The National Guard kid positioned them by a strip of police tape. “The property you’ll be going into is right ahead of you. A couple of kids came out already, but we’re missing three adults. Record of one phobic. Family name Brewer.”

“Gotcha,” Joshua said.

“The United States government appreciates all you’re doing.”

Joshua glanced at Sally’s eyes, behind her mask. This boy was no more than nineteen. Joshua was thirty-eight, Sally forty-three. Joshua resisted the temptation to ruffle the kid’s blond hair. “Sure, son.” Then he snapped on his head torch and reached for Sally’s gloved hand. “You ready?”

“Always.” She glanced down at the hand holding hers. “You sure that fake paw of yours is up to this?”

His prosthetic left hand was a legacy of their last long journey together. “More than the rest of me, probably.” They hunched over, knowing what was to come. “Three, two, one—”

They stepped into hell.

Ash and pumice pounded their shoulders, their heads, the ash like diabolic snow, grey, heavy and hot, the pumice coming in frothy pebble-sized chunks. The falling rocks hammered on a car in front of them, a mound already heaped up with ash. The background noise was a steady dull roar that drowned out their speech. The sky, under Yellowstone ash and gas and smoke from a plume that by now climbed twenty miles into the air, was virtually black.

And it was hot, hot as a pioneer town’s forge. It was hard to believe the caldera itself was all of fifty miles away. Even out as far as this, some said, the falling ash could melt again and flow as lava.

But the property they’d come to check out was right before them, as in the Guard’s plan, a one-storey house with a porch that had collapsed under the weight of the ash.

Sally led the way forward, around the buried car. They had to wade through an ash fall that was feet deep in places, like a heavy, hot, hard snowfall. Its sheer weight was only the beginning of the problems the ash caused. If it got the chance the stuff would abrade your skin, turn your eyes into itching pockets of pain, and scrape your lungs to mincemeat. Give it a few months and it could kill you, even if it didn’t just crush you first.

The front door seemed to be locked. Sally didn’t waste time; she raised a booted leg and kicked in the door.

Wreckage clogged the room within. Joshua saw in the light of his lamp that the load of pumice and ash had long overwhelmed this wooden-framed structure, and the roof and loft space had fallen in through the ceiling. This living room was cluttered with debris, as well as with grey drifts of ash. At first glance it seemed impossible that anybody could be left alive in here. But Sally, always quick to assess a new and confusing situation, pointed at one corner where a dining table stood, square and stout and resistant, despite a thick layer of ash on its own upper surface.

They pushed their way through. Where their booted feet scraped away the debris, Joshua glimpsed a crimson carpet.

The table was shrouded with curtains. When they pulled these aside they found three adults. They were just mounds of ash-grey clothing, their heads and faces swathed with towels. But Joshua soon identified a man and a woman, middle-aged, maybe fifties, and one woman who looked much older, frailer, maybe eighty years old; slumped in a corner, she seemed to be asleep. From the toilet stink that came out of this little shelter, Joshua guessed they’d been here some time, days perhaps.

Startled by Joshua and Sally in their nuclear-alert-type masks, the middle-aged couple quailed back. But then the man pulled away a towel to reveal an ash-stained mouth, red-rimmed eyes. “Thank God.”

“Mr Brewer? My name’s Joshua. This is Sally. We’ve come to get you out of here.”

Brewer smiled. “Nobody gets left behind, eh? Just like President Cowley promised.”

Joshua glanced around. “You look like you did pretty well here. Supplies, stuff to keep the ash out of your mouths and eyes.”

The man, Brewer, forced a smile. “Well, we did what the sensible young lady said.”

“What ‘sensible young lady’?”

“Came around a couple of days before the ash fall really kicked in. Wore kind of pioneer gear—never gave us her name, thought she must be from some government agency. Gave us smart advice about survival, very clear.” He glanced at the older woman. “She also told us very clearly that the planetary alignment was nothing to do with it, and this wasn’t a punishment by God, and my mother-in-law seemed to find that a comfort. Didn’t take much notice of her advice at the time, but we remembered come the day. Yeah, we did OK. Although we’re running out of stuff now.”

The middle-aged woman shook her head. “But we can’t leave.”

“You can’t stay,” Sally said harshly. “You’re out of food and water, right? You’ll starve to death if the ash doesn’t kill you. Look, if you don’t have Stepper boxes we can just pick you up and go—”

“You don’t understand,” Brewer said. “We sent away the kids, the dog. But Meryl—my mother-in-law—”

“Extreme phobic,” the woman said. “You know what that means.”

That stepping between the worlds, even if Meryl was carried over, would invoke such a reaction in her that it could kill her, unless a cocktail of appropriate medications was quickly administered.

Brewer said, “I’m betting you’re out of phobic drugs already over there, where you’re taking us.”

“And even if not,” said his wife, “the young, the healthy will be prioritized. I won’t leave my mother behind.” She glared at Sally. “Would you?”

“My father, maybe.” Sally started to back out of the crowded space. “Come on, Joshua, we’re wasting our time.”

“No. Wait.” Joshua touched the old woman’s arm. Her breath was a rattle. “What we need to do is take her someplace where they do still have drugs. Somewhere away from the ash cloud zone.”

“And how the hell do we do that?”

“Through the soft places. Come on, Sally, if there was ever a time to use your superpower it’s now. Can you do it?”

Sally expressed her irritation with a glare through her obscuring facemask. Joshua stuck it out.

Then she closed her eyes, as if sensing something, listening. Feeling out the soft places, the Long Earth short cuts only she and a few other adepts could use… Joshua’s idea was that Meryl could be carried, via the soft places, to someplace other than a stepwise Bozeman, to someplace where the medications would be more freely available.

“Yes. All right. There’s a place a couple of blocks from here. In two steps I can get her to New York, East 3. But, Joshua, the soft places are no easy ride, even if you aren’t old and frail.”

“No choice. Let’s do it.” He turned back to the Brewers to explain.

And the whole house seemed to lift.

Joshua, crouching under the table, was thrown on his back. He heard timbers crack and fail, and the hiss of the ash making still more inroads into the house.

When it settled, Brewer’s eyes were wide. “What the hell was that?”

Sally said, “I’m guessing the caldera’s collapsed.”

They all knew what that implied; after seven days everybody was an expert on supervolcanoes. When the eruption finally finished, the magma chamber would collapse inward, a chunk of Earth’s crust the size of Rhode Island falling down through half a mile—a shock that would make the whole planet ring like a bell.

“Let’s get out of here,” Joshua said. “I’ll lead you.”

It took only seconds for Joshua to step the Brewers out of the house, and safely over into the impossible sunshine of West 1.

And, just as Joshua stepped back into the Datum ash to help Sally with the mother, the sound from the caldera collapse arrived, following the ground waves. It was a sky-filling noise, as if all the artillery batteries in the world had opened up just beyond the horizon. A sound that would, eventually, wash around the whole planet. The old lady, propped up by Sally, her dressing gown stained grey, her head obscured by towels, whimpered and clapped her hands to her ears.

Joshua, in the middle of all this, wondered who the “sensible young lady” in the pioneer gear had been.

The Bardo Thodol described the interval between death and rebirth in terms of bardos: intermediate states of consciousness. Some authorities identified three bardos, some six. Of these Lobsang found most intriguing the sidpa bardo, or the bardo of rebirth, which featured karmically impelled visions. Perhaps these were hallucinations, derived from the flaws of one’s own soul. Or perhaps they were authentic visions of a suffering Datum Earth, and its innocent companion worlds.

Such as an image of dreamlike vessels hanging in a Kansas sky…

The US Navy airship USS Benjamin Franklin met the Zheng He, a ship of the Navy of the new Chinese federal government, over the West 1 footprint of Wichita, Kansas. Chen Zhong, Captain of the Chinese ship, claimed to have concerns about the role he was expected to undertake in the ongoing relief effort in Datum America, and an exasperated Admiral Hiram Davidson, representing an overstretched chain of command—well, everybody was overstretched, as the fall of this disastrous year of 2040 turned into winter—had mandated Maggie Kauffman, Captain of the Franklin, to take time out of her own relief efforts to meet with the man and discuss his concerns.

“As if I have the time to salve the ego of some old Communist apparatchik,” Maggie grumbled in the solitude of her sea cabin.

“But that’s what he is,” said Shi-mi, curled up in her basket by Maggie’s desk. “You evidently checked him out. I could have done that for you—”

“I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you,” Maggie murmured to the cat, without malice.

“Which is probably pretty far.” Shi-mi stood and stretched with a small, quite convincing purr.

She was a quite convincing cat, actually. Save for the green LED sparks of her eyes. And the prissy human-type personality she embodied. And the fact that she could talk. Shi-mi had been an ambiguous gift to Maggie, from one of the equally ambiguous figures who seemed to be watching her career with an unwelcome interest.

Shi-mi said now, “Captain Chen is on his way…”

Maggie checked her status board. The cat was right; Chen was in the air. Chen had insisted that the two twains needn’t land to exchange personnel; he was crossing in a two-person light copter which could easily be set down inside the Franklin, he bragged, if the US ship opened up one of its big cargo bays. These new Chinese liked nothing more than to demonstrate their technical capabilities, especially over an America still prostrate two months after the eruption. Show-offs.

Distracted, Maggie glanced out of her cabin’s big picture window at this world, a Midwest sky big and blue and scattered with light clouds, the green carpet of a stepwise Kansas semi-infinite and flat beneath her—and all but unspoiled still, even on this Earth a single step away from the Datum. But more spoiled than it used to be. Before September, before Yellowstone, Wichita West 1 had been little more than a shadow of its Datum parent, scattered buildings of logs and blown concrete set out in a grid that roughly aped the Datum town plan. It had been typical of its type. Communities like this started out serving their Datum parents as sources of raw materials, sites for new industrial developments, and room for extra living space, sports and recreation, and so they necessarily followed their parents’ maps.

Now, though, a couple of months after the eruption, this version of Wichita was surrounded by a refugee camp: rows of hastily erected canvas tents full of bewildered survivors, the ground littered with heaped-up drops of food and medical supplies and clothes. Twains like the Franklin, stepwise-capable airships, both military and commercial, hung in the sky like blimps over wartime London. It was a grim third-world scene, in the heart of a stepwise America.

Of course it could have been a lot worse. Thanks to the almost universal ability that people had to step away into a parallel world from anywhere on the Datum, the immediate casualties of the Yellowstone eruption had been comparatively light. The refugees below had in fact been transferred from Datum camps they’d reached by conventional means, fleeing along Datum roads away from the central disaster zone, before being stepped away to cleaner parallel worlds. Datum Kansas was a relatively safe distance from the eruption site itself, which was over in Wyoming. But even this far out the ash was taking its toll, on eyes, on lungs. It induced conditions with names like “Marie’s disease’, a kind of ghastly slow suffocation—horrors that were becoming too familiar to everybody, and the medical tents on the ground were surrounded by lines of exhausted people.

Lost in reflection, with worries about her own responsibilities nagging at her—as well as her own ever-present doubts about how well she could fulfil those responsibilities—Maggie was startled by a soft knock on her door. Chen, no doubt. She snapped at the cat, “Standing orders.” Which meant: Shut up.

The cat calmly curled up and mimicked sleep.

Captain Chen turned out to be a short, bustling man, pompous and self-important, Maggie thought on first impression, but evidently a survivor. He’d been a party official who’d kept his position through the fall of the Communist regime, and in the Zheng He had in fact gone on to command a prestigious voyage of exploration into the Long Earth. She referred to this as she made him welcome.

“A voyage which you yourself, Captain Kauffman, might have emulated by now, if not for the unfortunate circumstance of the eruption,” he said as he sat down, and accepted an offer of coffee from Midshipman Santorini, who’d shown him in.

“You know about the Armstrong II? Well, I’m not the only one whose personal plans have been disrupted by this.”

“Quite so. And we are the fortunate ones, are we not?”

After some preliminary chatter—he said his pilot for the crossing, a Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, was being looked after in the Franklin’s galley—he got down to business. Which turned out, it seemed to Maggie, to be irritatingly ideological.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re refusing to carry ballot slips for our presidential election?”

He spread his chubby hands and smiled. He was a man who enjoyed bringing complications into the lives of others, she thought.

“What can I say? I represent the Chinese government. Who am I to intervene in US politics, even in a constructive way? What if, for example, I were to make some error—to fail to deliver the papers to one district or another, or lose a sealed ballot box? Imagine the scandal. Besides, from an outsider’s point of view, to hold an election in such circumstances seems frivolous.”

She felt her temperature rising, and she was aware of the cat’s eyes on her, a silent warning. “Captain, it’s November in a leap year. This is the time we hold a presidential election. It’s what we do in America, supervolcano or not. I—we—do appreciate all the Chinese government is doing to help us out in this situation. But—”

“Ah, but you don’t welcome my comments on your internal affairs, do you? Perhaps you’ll have to get used to that, Captain Kauffman.” He gestured at the tablet on her desk. “I’m sure your latest projections match our own, concerning the future of your country. It seems likely that twenty per cent of the continental Datum USA will eventually be abandoned altogether, a swathe spanning Denver, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne. Eighty per cent of the rest is under ash thick enough to disrupt agriculture. While the evacuation flow to the stepwise worlds has been intense, still many millions remain on the Datum, and stores of food and water are rapidly diminishing—as they are even in stepwise holding areas like this, are they not? And during this winter many will starve without gifts of, for example, Chinese rice, delivered stepwise by twain, or by freighters crossing the Datum seas. You are dependent on the rest of the world now, Captain Kauffman. Dependent. And I doubt that will change any time soon.”

She knew he was right. Her own advisers among her crew on the twain were telling her that the volcano was now having global effects, effects that were going to linger. The ash had washed out fairly quickly—though even lying on the ground it remained a problem, as Chen had said—but sulphur dioxide from the eruption was hanging around in the air as aerosol particles, creating terrific sunsets but deflecting the sun’s heat. As the Datum headed into its first post-volcano winter, temperatures had plummeted fast and early, and spring next year was going to be late, if it showed up at all.

Yes, America would need Chinese rice for the foreseeable future. But Maggie could see that the challenge was going to be to stop “friends” like China using the disaster to gain a permanent foothold in American society. Already there had been rumours that the Chinese were running tobacco into a nicotine-starved Datum America—like the Opium Wars in reverse, she thought.

Maggie Kauffman, however, worked on the principle of dealing with the practical problems before her, and letting the wider world take care of itself.

“About your ballot boxes, Captain Chen. Suppose I assign a small team of my own crew to travel with you until the election is over. They can take authority for the operation—as well as responsibility for any errors.”

He smiled broadly. “A wise solution.” He stood up. “And I wonder if I could send over a detachment of my own crew, in the spirit of cultural exchange. After all, our governments are already discussing sharing twain technology, for example.” He glanced around dismissively. “Our own ships being somewhat more advanced than your own. Thank you for your time, Captain.”

When he’d gone, Maggie murmured, “Glad that’s over.”

“Quite,” said Shi-mi.

“Listen. Remind me to tell the XO to sweep this ‘exchange crew’ from toenails to eyebrows for bugs and weapons.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“And smuggled cigarettes.”

“Yes, Captain.”

In the sidpa bardo, said some versions of the Bardo Thodol, the spirit was given a body superficially like the former physical shell, but endowed with miraculous powers, with all sense faculties complete, and the capability of unimpeded motion. Karmic miraculous powers.

Thus the vision of Lobsang embraced the world—all the worlds. Sister Agnes would probably ask if his soul was flying high above the ground.

And, thinking of Agnes, Lobsang looked down on an unprepossessing children’s home in a stepwise copy of Madison, Wisconsin, in May 2041, half a year after the eruption…

As that bad first winter gave way to a desolate spring, and America entered a long period of post-Yellowstone recovery, newly re-elected President Cowley announced that the nation’s capital was to be, pro tem, Madison West 5, replacing an abandoned Datum DC. And he was going to deliver a big speech to inaugurate the city into its new role from the steps of this world’s version of the Capitol building, a big barn of timber and blown concrete that was a brave imitation of its long-destroyed Datum parent.

Joshua Valienté was sitting in the parlour of the Home, staring at TV images of an empty presidential podium. He was here ostensibly to visit with fifteen-year-old Paul Spencer Wagoner, an extremely bright and extremely troubled kid who Joshua had first encountered in a place called Happy Landings, many years ago. Joshua had been instrumental in getting Paul into the Home after his family broke up. But Paul was out right now, and Joshua couldn’t resist tuning in to the sight of a President, in Madison.

Cowley bounced up on to the stage, all teeth and hair, under a rippling Stars and Stripes—the new holographic version of the flag, enhanced to reflect the reality of the nation’s stepwise extension into the Long Earth.

“I’m amazed he’s actually here,” Joshua said to Sister John.

Sister John, born Sarah Ann Coates and once, like Joshua, a resident of the Home on Allied Drive in Datum Madison, now ran this relocated institution. Her habit was as always clean and pressed. Now she smiled and said, “Amazed at what? That the President chose Madison for the new capital? It is about the most mature city in the Low Americas.”

“Not just that. Look who’s up there on the stage with him. Jim Starling, the Senator. Douglas Black.”

“Hmmph,” said Sister John. “They should have invited you. As a local celebrity. As cheeseheads go, you’re famous: Joshua Valienté, hero of Step Day.”

Step Day, when every kid in the world had built a Stepper box and immediately got lost in the forests of wild parallel worlds. In the vicinity of Madison it had been Joshua who had brought the lost children home—including Sarah, now Sister John.

Joshua said ruefully, “I always kind of hope people have for gotten. Anyway they’d probably kick me off the podium because I’m so grimy. Damn ash, no matter how hard I scrub I can never get it out of my pores.”

“Still going back to the Datum on rescue missions?”

“We are going back, but there’s nobody left to rescue. Now we’re reclaiming stuff from the abandoned zone close to the caldera, across Wyoming, Montana, the Rocky Mountain states. It’s surprising what’s survived: clothing, gasoline, canned food, even animal feed. And we bring out anything technical that looks usable. Cellphone masts, for instance. Stuff we’ll need for the recovery efforts in the Low Earths. Most of the workers are impressed labour from the refugee camps.” He grinned. “They fill up their pockets with any money they find. Dollar bills.”

Sister John snorted. “Given the way the economy’s tanked and the markets have crashed, those bills would be more useful burned to keep warm.”

He made to reply, but she shushed him as Cowley began his speech.

After a routine opening, all welcome and wisecracks, Cowley summed up the situation of America and the Datum world, eight months after the eruption. As winter turned to spring, things weren’t getting any better. The global climatic effects had locked in. The monsoon rains in the Far East had failed last fall. Since then, pretty much everywhere across the world north of the latitude of Chicago—Canada, Europe, Russia, Siberia—had endured the most savage winter anybody could remember. Now a matching calamity was already unfolding below the equator as the southern-hemisphere winter arrived.

All of which meant that a new world had to be planned for.

“Well, now, we got through this first winter living off the fat of the past—of the pre-volcano days. We can’t afford to do that no longer, because it’s all—used—up.” Cowley emphasized that with hand-chops on his podium. “And nor can we rely on food imports from our neighbours and allies, who have been more than generous so far, but who have their own problems, this cold summer. And hey, Uncle Sam feeds himself. Uncle Sam looks after his own!”

Cheers from the polite crowd gathered before the podium, and applause from the group of dignitaries behind Cowley on stage. As the camera panned across their faces Joshua noticed among Cowley’s aides a very young woman—no older than late teenage—slim, dark, sober, smart enough but dressed in what Datum folk tended to call “pioneer gear’: leather skirt, jacket over what looked like a hand-me-down blouse. He recognized her; she was called Roberta Golding, from Happy Landings. He’d met her last year at a school in Valhalla, the greatest city of the High Meggers, where, in now-remote pre-Yellowstone days, he and Helen had taken their son Dan as a prospective student. She’d seemed ferociously intelligent then, and if she was working in Cowley’s administration in some kind of position as senior as it appeared at such a young age then she was proving her potential.

Oddly Joshua was reminded of that family he’d helped out of Bozeman not long after the eruption had begun, and how they’d mentioned a “sensible young lady” in “pioneer gear” who’d come around with good advice. Could that have been Roberta herself? The description fitted. Well, as far as he was concerned, the more sensible advice humanity got at a time like this the better…

Joshua tuned back into the President.

With the pre-Yellowstone stores exhausted, Cowley said, now was the time to plant the crops and grow the food that would feed them all in the coming winter, and beyond. The problem with that was that the Datum growing season this year was predicted to be brutally short, thanks to the volcanic cloud. And meanwhile the infant agricultural economies on the stepwise Low Earths, none of them established longer than a quarter of a century, didn’t have anything like the capacity yet to take up the challenge. Why, barely a fraction of all that stepwise land had even been cleared of virgin forest yet, on any of the new Earths.

So there would be a “Relocation’, a new programme of mass migration, organized by the National Guard, FEMA, Homelands Security, and facilitated by the Navy with their twains. Before the eruption the Datum had hosted more than three hundred million Americans. Now the target would be that no stepwise world would try to support, this first year, more than thirty million—which was about the population of the US in the middle of the nineteenth century. And that meant spreading millions of people further out stepwise, out across a band of worlds at least ten wide, East and West. And, meanwhile, on all the settled worlds they would be ferociously clearing land for agriculture. All of this would have to happen this summer. For sure, Joshua thought, they were going to need whatever tools and hand-me-down clothes and whatnot he and the rest of the reclamation effort could retrieve from the shattered Datum.

“It will be a movement of people to dwarf the biblical Exodus,” Cowley said. “It will be an opening up of a new frontier that will make the expansion into the Old West look like clearing my grandmother’s front yard. But we are Americans. We can do this. We can and will build a new America, fit for purpose. And I can tell you this. Just as I promised you that nobody would be left behind under the shadow of that infernal ash, so I promise you now: in the difficult seasons ahead, nobody will go hungry…” The remainder of his words were drowned out by whoops and cheers.

“Have to admit he does this well,” Joshua said.

“Yes. Even Sister Agnes says he’s grown into the role. Even Lobsang.”

Joshua grunted. “I remember Lobsang predicting a super-eruption, more than once. Blow-ups like that accounted for some of the Jokers we found out in the Long Earth, the disaster-blighted worlds. But he didn’t see Yellowstone coming.”

Sister John shook her head. “In the end he had no more insight than the geologists on whose faulty data he had to rely. And he couldn’t have stopped it anyhow.”

“True.” Just as Lobsang had claimed to have been unable to avert a terrorist nuclear strike on Datum Madison itself, a decade earlier. Lobsang was evidently not omnipotent. “But I bet that doesn’t make him feel any better…”

In the sidpa bardo, the spirit body was not a thing of gross matter. It could pass through rock, hills, earth, houses. By the mere act of focusing his attention, the locus that was Lobsang was here, there and everywhere. But increasingly he wished to be at the side of his friends.

Friends like Nelson Azikiwe, who sat in the rectory lounge in his old parish of St John on the Water…

Nelson’s host, the Reverend David Blessed, handed him another brimming mug of tea. Nelson was grateful for the warmth of the drink. This was August of 2042, in southern England—less than two years after the Yellowstone eruption—and outside it was snowing. Once again, autumn had come horribly early.

The two of them studied the third person in the room, a local woman called Eileen Connolly, as she sat before the big TV screen, watching the news report as it was repeated over and over. Three days after the assassination attempt at the Vatican, the key audio and visual clips were dully familiar. The deranged scream: “Not those feet! Not those feet!” The horror of the brandished weapon, a crucifix with a sharpened base. The Pope’s frail white-clad figure being dragged away from the balcony. The assassin vomiting helplessly as stepping nausea belatedly cut in.

The would-be assassin was English. His name was Walter Nicholas Boyd. He’d been a staunch Catholic all his life. And what he’d done, single-handed, was to build a scaffolding in Rome East 1 to match precisely the position and height of the balcony of St Peter’s, where the Pope stood to bless the crowds in the Square below. It was an obvious location for a troublemaker, but astonishingly, and unforgivably in these times of step-related acts of terror, the Vatican security people hadn’t blocked it. And Walter Nicholas Boyd had climbed his scaffolding, stepped over with his sharpened wooden crucifix, and had tried to murder the Pope. The pontiff had been badly wounded, but would live.

Now, watching the reports, Eileen began to hum a tune.

David Blessed smiled, looking tired. “That’s the hymn they all sing. And did those feet in ancient times / Walk upon England’s mountains green? / And was the holy Lamb of God / On England’s pleasant pastures seen?…” He half-sang it himself. “Blake’s Jerusalem. Mr Boyd was protesting against what they are calling the Vatican’s ‘land-grab’, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” Nelson said. “In fact there’s a global protest movement called ‘Not Those Feet’. To which Eileen belongs, does she?”

Eileen, forty-four years old, a mother of two, was once one of Nelson’s parishioners—and was now once more under the care of David Blessed, Nelson’s predecessor, who, in his eighties now, had come out of retirement to care for the parish in these dark post-volcano days.

“She does. Which is why she’s got herself into such a tangle of doubt.”

“They are difficult times for all of us, David. Do you think I could speak to her now?”

“Of course. Come. Let me refresh your tea.”

So Nelson gently questioned Eileen Connolly, taking her through her very ordinary story, her roles as a shop worker and mother—and then the divorce, but life had carried on, she had raised her children well. A very English life, more or less un troubled even by the opening up of the Long Earth. Untroubled, until the aftermath of the American volcano.

“You have to move, Eileen,” David said gently now. “Out into the Long Earth, I mean. And you have to take your children with you. You know how it is. We all have to go. England is bust. You’ve seen the local farmers struggling…”

Nelson knew the score. In this second year without a summer, the growing season even in southern England had been ferociously short. As late as June farmers had been struggling to plant fast-growing crops, potatoes, beets, turnips, in half-frozen ground, and there had barely been time to collect a withered harvest before the frosts returned again. In the cities there was hardly any activity save a desperate effort to save cultural treasures by stepping them away—although there would be a globally distributed, internationally supported “Museum of the Datum” in the stepwise worlds, the governments promised; nothing would be lost…

David said, “And it’s only going to get worse, for years and years. There’s no doubt about it. Dear old England can’t support us any more. We must go out to these brave new worlds.”

But Eileen would not respond.

Nelson wasn’t sure he understood. “It’s not that she can’t step, is it, David? She’s no kind of phobic?”

“Oh, no. I’m afraid it’s theological doubts that afflict her.”

Nelson had to smile. “Theology? David, this is the Church of England. We don’t do theology.”

“Ah, but the Pope does, and that’s what’s got everybody stirred up, you see…”

Eileen looked calm, if faintly baffled, and she spoke at last. “The trouble is, you get so confused. The priests say one thing about the Long Earth, then the other. At first we were told it was a holy thing to go out there, because you have to leave all your worldly goods behind when you step. Well, almost all. It was like taking a vow of poverty. So for instance the New Pilgrimage Order of the Long Earth was set up to go out and administer to the needs of the new congregations that would form out there. I read about that, and gave them some money. That was fine. But then those archbishops in France started saying the crosswise worlds were all fallen places, the devil’s work, because Jesus never walked there…”

Nelson had read up on this in preparation for meeting Eileen. In a way it had been an extension of old arguments about whether inhabitants of other planets could be regarded as “saved” or not, if Christ had been born only on Earth. Out in the Long Earth, as far as anybody knew, no humans had evolved anywhere beyond Datum Earth. So Christ’s incarnation had surely been unique to Datum Earth. In fact the body of Christ Himself had been uniquely composed of atoms and molecules from the Datum. So what was the theological status of all those other Earths? What of the children already being born on worlds of the Long Earth, their very bodies composed of atoms that had nothing to do with the world of Christ? Were they saved by His incarnation, or not?

To Nelson it had all been a hideous mish-mash of misunderstood science and medieval theology. But he knew that many Catholics, all the way up to the Vatican itself, had been confused by such arguments. And, it seemed, members of other Christian denominations.

Eileen said now, “All of a sudden you started reading about these hucksters selling Holy Communion wafers from Datum Earth, which they said were the only valid ones to use because they came from the same world as Lord Jesus.”

“They were just hucksters,” Nelson said gently.

“Yes, but then suddenly the Pope says that the Long Earth was all part of God’s dominion after all…”

Nelson had a healthy cynicism about the sudden change in the Vatican’s stance towards the Long Earth. It was all about demographics. With the continuing mass exodus from much of the planet, colonies on the nearby worlds were suddenly filling up with lots of little potential Catholics. And so, just as suddenly, all those new worlds were holy after all. The Pope had taken his theological justification from Genesis 1:28: “And God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it.” The fact that God didn’t explicitly say the Long Earth was no problem, any more than it had been in 1492 that the Bible hadn’t mentioned the Americas. But you did still need to have your priests’ source of blessing deriving from the Pope, so that the Datum Vatican remained the source of all authority. Oh, and contraception was still a sin.

Some commentators marvelled at the way the two-thousand-year-old institution of the Church had survived yet another huge philosophical and economic dislocation, as it had the fall of the Roman empire that had nurtured it, and the science of Galileo, Darwin and the Big Bang cosmologists. But even some Catholics were appalled at what was called the most audacious land-grab since 1493, when Pope Alexander VI had divided the entire New World between Spain and Portugal: here was an antique ideology claiming hegemony over infinity. Hence Walter Nicholas Boyd, and his despairing cry of “Not those feet!”

And hence poor Eileen Connolly with her utter confusion.

“I didn’t like what the Pope said,” Eileen said firmly now. “I’ve been out there, on treks and holidays and that, in the stepwise worlds. You’ve got people building farms and homes from nothing, with their bare hands. And all those animals nobody ever saw before. No, I’d say we have to be humble, not just claim that it’s all ours.”

David said, “That does sound wise, Eileen—”

“I feel angry sometimes,” Eileen said bluntly. “Oh, just as angry as that fellow Boyd on the TV, probably. I sometimes think this place, Datum Earth, is so foul and messed up that it’s the source of all evil. That all the innocent worlds of the Long Earth would be better off if this place could be stoppered up, somehow. Like a big old bottle.”

David said gently, “You can see why I asked for your help, Nelson. People do get superstitious, you know, in apocalyptic times like these.” He lowered his voice. “Over in Much Nadderby, there have been mutterings about a case of witchcraft.”

“Witchcraft!”

“Or possibly a demonic possession. A little boy who was brighter than the rest—eerily so. One tries to calm things down, of course. But now this nonsense from the Vatican!” He shook his head. “Sometimes I feel we’re so foolish we deserve all the suffering we get.”

And Nelson, who had become a close ally of Lobsang—or, as Lobsang had put it, a “valuable long-term investment”—knew that Lobsang, at least some of the time, would agree.

“This is what I’d like you to do. Go with her, Nelson. Go out with Eileen, at least for a while. God knows I’m too old. But you… Go with her. Bless her. Bless the land she and her children settle in. Baptize them anew, if they wish. Whatever it takes to reassure her that God is with her, wherever she takes her children. And whatever the wretched Pope says.”

Nelson smiled. “Of course.”

David stood up. “Thank you. I’ll fetch us another pot of tea.”

Lobsang longed for his friends.

At least, in the aftermath of Yellowstone, they had been drawn back to the Datum, like emergency workers rushing towards the fire. Lobsang had welcomed their company, even when, like Joshua Valienté, they seemed to have little time for him. But as the years had worn away since the eruption, and the situation stabilized, they came back less and less, they resumed their own lives, far away once more.

Sally Linsay, for instance. Who, four years after the eruption, could have been found on a parallel world some one hundred and fifty thousand steps away from Datum Earth. Although Sally Linsay was always very, very hard to find…

You could call it Sally’s mission in life to be hard to find. Although in fact her life was full of missions, especially when it came to the flora and fauna of the Long Earth, about which she was quite passionate.

Which was why, in this late fall of 2044, she had come to an otherwise unremarkable settlement, in the middle of the Corn Belt, in a stepwise Idaho: a place called Four Waters City.

And why she was carefully placing the gagged and bound body of a hunter by the back door of the sheriff’s office.

The guy was awake while she was doing it, his piggy eyes staring at her in alarm. He didn’t know his luck, she thought. He probably didn’t feel all that lucky, but given the kind of bad luck you sometimes got when it came to the ears of Sally Linsay that you had killed a troll—a female, a mother, and about to give birth… At least she hadn’t cut off his trigger finger for him. At least he was still alive. And the itching that was agonizing him now, induced by the venomous spines of a very useful plant she’d discovered up in the High Meggers, was probably going to subside, oh, in a couple of years, no more. Plenty of time for him to reflect on his sins, she thought. Call it tough love.

And it was precisely because she was so hard to find that places she was known to call at—like Four Waters City, even though her visits were not frequent and certainly not regular—were so useful for getting in touch with Sally if you really, really needed to.

That was why the sheriff herself emerged from her office in the dawn chill, glanced down without much interest at the blubbing hunter, and called Sally over. Once back in her office she rummaged in a drawer.

Sally stayed outside the door. There were powerful aromas emanating from the office, a concentrated version of the colony’s general atmosphere, which she was reluctant to breathe in too deeply. This particular community had always been a culture suffused with exotic pharmacology.

At length the sheriff handed Sally an envelope.

The envelope was handwritten. Evidently it had been sitting in that drawer, in the office, for more than a year. The letter within was handwritten too, very badly, but Sally had no trouble recognizing the hand, even if she had some difficulty actually deciphering the note. She read it silently, lips framing the words.

Then she murmured, “You want me to go where? The Gap?… Well. After all these years. Hello, Dad.”

Friends of Lobsang’s like Joshua Valienté. Camping on a hillside on a world more than two million steps West of the Datum. Escaping the ongoing five-years-on disaster zone that was the Datum and the Low Earths, fleeing into the security of one of his long sabbaticals. Utterly alone, missing his family, yet unwilling to return to his unhappy home.

Joshua Valienté, who, having celebrated New Year’s Day of 2045 with nothing stronger than a little of his precious stash of coffee, woke up with a headache. He yelled into an empty sky: “What now?”