He decided to travel to America by plane; his generation wasn’t used to the slow-boat nature of twain travel. But there weren’t as many aeroplanes around these days, Nelson discovered, not since the Long Earth had begun to be serviced by the twains. It was the new worlds, of course, for which the twains were so well suited: airships didn’t need airports, they could set you down easily almost anywhere. But even for lateral, cross-Earth travel, even on the Datum, airships had come back into vogue. For one thing helium, a safely non-flammable lift gas, was a whole lot easier to obtain now, the Datum’s natural stock having been badly depleted before the resources of the stepwise worlds had been opened up. And the stately pace of airships certainly worked for cargo: sacks of corn and mineral ore didn’t mind how long it took to get there, and rarely complained about the in-flight movie.
But an industry like the traditional airlines would take some time to die, and for now, on the Datum, the planes still flew – even though for this trip Nelson had to put up with delays, as many US flights were grounded because of ash clouds arising from an event at Yellowstone, some kind of minor eruption there.
The plane Nelson finally caught swung out from England, crossed the north Atlantic, flew down over the Canadian Shield, and at last reached the endless farmland of Datum America, which spread beneath his window like a glowing carpet. If you had the eye for it, he realized, there were occasional gaps to be seen in that grand panorama of cultivation, scraps of recovering wildness in the summer green where a homestead or a farm had been abandoned, almost certainly because the owners had decided to step Westward. (And it was West for most Americans, despite the assurances of the experts that the stepping labels ‘West’ and ‘East’ were purely arbitrary.) Off they stepped, in search of more land, a better life. Or, he mused, possibly they went simply because, well, the new worlds were out there, and there was something in the genes of an American, and perhaps even a Canadian, that impelled you always to move on. It was a frontier with apparently no end, and while there wasn’t exactly a stepwise stampede these days the Long Earth still drew in the pioneers.
His own destination was more modest: O’Hare. He’d stop in Chicago a while. Then he had plans to visit a new university being built in Madison, Wisconsin, West 5, as part of the city’s post-nuke recovery. He had friends there, and interests. Madison was where Willis Linsay had first posted the plans for a prototype Stepper box on the internet, a glorious, destructive gesture that had changed the world for ever – indeed, the worlds. And Madison had been the boyhood home of Joshua Valienté himself. Nelson, on the track of the Lobsang Project, had an inkling that Madison was a place where he might find some things out, get some questions answered.
As it turned out, this tentative plan didn’t even survive his leaving the airport.
Nelson was always glad to get out of the cramped enclosure of a plane. He was a large man, the kind of man who had trouble fitting into an airline seat, but who could walk through any neighbourhood anywhere without having to worry overmuch about his security. Sometimes the deference accorded to him simply because of his size bothered him. But by and large, he reflected as he patiently queued his way through the landing process, he had to admit it was useful to get your way without even asking.
His size had certainly saved him from all but a few scuffles in the South African townships of his boyhood. All such troubles had however evaporated when he found the local library and discovered a universe of ideas into which his young consciousness rose faster than a Saturn V into the Florida sky. That wasn’t to say he had simply soaked up the lessons of authority; almost from the beginning he was identifying problems to solve, and indeed solving them. One teacher remarked that he had a genius for connectivity.
His life had changed utterly, for better or worse, the day he had first applied his analytical skills to the concept of the Almighty. Even if you dismissed the traditional notion of God, it had always seemed to him that without a First Cause of some kind there was a philosophical void, a space to let. His buddies in the nerdosphere populated that void with the Illuminati, maybe, or the staring eye in the dollar-bill triangle . . . After Step Day, after the opening-up of a universe vast, fecund and accessible to mankind, it seemed to him that the need to fill that void had only deepened. Which was essentially why he had decided to devote the next phase of his life to an exploration of that void, and related mysteries.
Anyhow, this morning at O’Hare, Nelson’s intimidating size, backed up by his problem-solving ability, certainly helped him thread his way through the maze of US immigration.
And at the final customs barrier, after Nelson had cleared through, a clerk chased him and produced a leaflet. ‘Oh – this was left for you, Mr. Azikiwe.’
The leaflet was an ad for a Winnebago. Nelson was planning to fly to Madison; he didn’t need a Winnebago. But when he looked up again, the clerk was gone.
Nelson felt a thrill of connectivity, like solving a Quizmasters puzzle. ‘I get it, Lobsang,’ he said. And he pocketed the leaflet.
By an hour later he had rented a top-of-the-line Winnebago, with plenty of generator capacity for his tech, and a bed, a big one, just the size for him.
He drove out of the airport parking area in this home on wheels and, having no further instructions he could discern, picked a direction at random and hit the freeway. Just the experience of driving on such roads was glorious. He wondered if this, in the end, was the ultimate expression of the American dream: to be in transit, all problems left behind like discarded trash, nothing in life but follow-the-horizon movement, motion for the sake of it.
He drove west for the rest of the morning.
Then he parked up in a small town, shopped for fresh food, and logged on for a quick inspection of the latest sweepings of the online world, including the findings of his buddies in the Quizmasters. He’d had them working twenty-four/seven on his problem since he’d tantalized them with the barest hint: ‘Say, we have all seen that clip of the Mark Twain being towed into Madison and the girl talking about a cat that spoke Tibetan, haven’t we? Is there a clue there? But a clue about what? Looks like someone is playing with our heads . . .’
Given Nelson’s starting hint, the Quizmasters had been going crazy, speculating, inferring and pattern-matching. Standing in the Winnebago, making an elegant curry from fresh-bought ingredients, Nelson watched messages and tangled hypotheses flicker across his screens, and thought it all over.
When the curry was ready he largely ignored the screens. Nelson had learned to love the manners of the English past, as he’d known them in St. John on the Water, when people used to address their food; there was something about the phraseology that made the boy from the townships smile. But while he ate, he saw from the corner of his eye how the Quizmasters were beating themselves up, putting out theories at the rate of one a minute, some of them completely outlandish.
And then up came one trace that drew his attention: thanks to an oddity of TV scheduling, by hopping among various channels, starting just about now it would be possible to watch the classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind continuously for the next twenty-four hours.
He murmured, ‘So: Devil’s Tower, Lobsang? It’s been done before, a bit unoriginal. But I’ve never been there, I’ve always wanted to see it. I won’t ask how to find you; I rather believe you will find me . . .’
Nelson finished his curry and cleaned up. His sat-nav told him it was around a thousand miles north-west from Chicago to Wyoming. A dream ride in a vehicle like this. He’d take his time, he decided, and see the sights; he was nobody’s puppet.
Maybe he’d even catch one of those iterations of Close Encounters.
31
THEIR FINAL FALL through the soft places, the longest of all, brought Sally and Jansson to a world only a dozen steps or so from the Gap itself. Soft places transported you geographically as well as stepwise. They landed in England, the north-west, near the Irish Sea coast – a location Sally knew was close to the footprint of
GapSpace, home of the new space cadets.
Monica Jansson arrived exhausted, bewildered. Sally had to help her lie down on the soft grass of this latest hillside, wrapped in a cocoon of silvery emergency blankets.
It had taken a week for them to traverse the two million worlds to the Gap through the soft places – a lot faster than any twain, but a gruelling journey even so. Sally had to scry out the soft places, using motions like a kind of tai chi. They seemed to cluster in the continental heartlands, away from the coasts. They were easier to find at dawn or sunset. Sometimes Jansson could even see them, a kind of shimmer. Weird stuff. But they would take you wherever you wanted to go, in four or five steps.
Jansson had, for her part, never complained as they travelled, and it had taken a few transitions for Sally to work out just how hard it was for her. A soft place was a flaw in the Long Earth’s quasi-linear pan-dimensional geometry. Finding soft places was the unique skill Sally’s genetic inheritance had given her. And it was a hell of a lot easier than plodding all the way out, step by step, the way that dull little mouse Helen Valienté had once walked through a hundred thousand worlds with her family to set up their pioneer-type log cabin. But nothing came for free, and the soft places did take something out of you. It wasn’t an instantaneous transition, like a regular step; there was a sense of falling, of deep sucking cold, of a passage that lasted a finite time – that was how you remembered it, even if your watch showed that no time had passed at all. It was gruelling, energy-sapping. Plus Jansson was already ill, even before they set off. Jansson wasn’t the type who would complain, whatever you did.
Sally bustled around, collecting wood for a fire, unpacking their food and drink. Then, in this late afternoon, a warm enough late May day in this particular stepwise England, she sat quietly beside her fire, letting Jansson sleep off the journey.
And Sally watched the moon rise.
It wasn’t the moon she was used to. In this world, only a few steps from the Gap itself, Luna was liberally spattered with recent craters. The Mare Imbrium, the man in the moon’s right eye, was almost obliterated, and Copernicus was outdone by a massive new scar, a brilliant splash whose rays stretched across half the visible disc. It must have been something to see, she thought, on this world and its neighbours, when Bellos and its stepwise brothers had made their shuddering close approach – missing this particular Earth, but passing near by – and the ground below would have convulsed from bombardment by random fragments, while the face of the moon above lit up like a battlefield in the sky . . .
Jansson stirred now, and sat up. Sally had set a pot of coffee on the little stand over the fire. Jansson took a tin mug gratefully in gloved hands, and looked up at the sky, in a vague way. ‘What’s wrong with the moon?’
‘We’re too close to the Gap, is what’s wrong with it.’
Jansson nodded, sipping the coffee. ‘Listen. Before we get there. Just imagine I’m a dumb cop who knows more about bloodstains and drunks than about cosmology and spaceships. What exactly is the Gap? And what’s it got to do with space cadets?’
‘The Gap is a hole in the Long Earth. Look, the alternate Earths go on for ever, as far as we know, all broadly similar though differing in detail. But the Gap is the only place so far found where the Earth is missing altogether. If you were to step over you’d find yourself floating in vacuum. There was an impact. A big rock – maybe an asteroid, or comet, or something like a rogue moon – came calling. The space cadets call this hypothetical object Bellos.’
‘Why Bellos?’
Sally shrugged. ‘Some dumb old movie reference, I think. Joshua might know. And Lobsang’s probably got the movie . . . Everything that can happen must happen somewhere, right? Bellos, or copies of it, came swimming out of the dark, and completely missed uncounted billions of Earths. A few, like this one, were close enough to its path to be sideswiped by fragments, and suffered varying amounts of damage.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like splattering new craters over the moon. Like stripping away lots of atmosphere from the Earth. Or changing the pole positions. Or messing with continental shift. Generally making the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a street fight. But not wiping out the planet altogether.’
Jansson nodded. ‘I can see where the story is going. And one Earth—’
‘One Earth was taken out entirely.’
Jansson whistled. The idea seemed to frighten her. ‘It could have hit us,’ she said.
‘Datum Earth was way up the other end of the probability curve.’
‘Yes, but if it hadn’t been – even if we’d been living on one of these nearby worlds—’
‘Earthquakes, tidal waves, that kind of fun. Oh, the dust winter would probably have killed us off. Us, or our primate ancestors, more likely, it was that long ago.’
‘Nasty.’
‘No, it’s just statistics. It happened, that’s all.’ Sally poured more coffee. ‘It couldn’t happen now, at least. Not that way. The extinction of mankind, I mean. We’ve spread out. The Long Earth is an insurance policy. Even a Bellos couldn’t take out all of us.’
‘OK. And this Gap is useful because—’
‘Because you can just step into space. You see, on world Gap Minus One, you put on a spacesuit, step over – and there you are, gently orbiting the sun. No need to ride a rocket the size of a skyscraper to fight Earth’s gravity, because there ain’t no Earth there. And once you’re out there, you can go anywhere. That’s the dream, anyhow. Access to space.’
Jansson’s head was drooping. ‘Can’t wait to see it. In the morning, yes?’
‘In the morning. You sleep. I’ll put the tent up before it gets dark. Are you hungry?’
‘No, thanks. And I took my meds.’ She lay down again, pulling the blankets over her.
‘Goodnight, then.’
‘Goodnight, Sally.’
As Jansson slipped back into sleep Sally sat silently, perhaps the only awake, sapient mind on this planet.
And as the light dimmed, and the battered moon brightened, she felt as if someone had knocked out the walls of her mind. The landscape, a grassy hillside stretching away before her, seemed to acquire depth, otherness in a direction she could almost see. It was bottomless, multi-dimensional, endless. She had once dreamed that she had found out how to fly; it was absurdly easy, all you had to do was jump into the air and jump again when you were up there. Now she chased the tantalizing feeling that all she needed was the trick of it and she could step away, not into one world at a time, but spread across the Long Earth, a whole thick band of worlds, all at once. The very air around her felt prickly, the land as insubstantial as smoke.
But then Jansson coughed, and moaned softly in her sleep. Sally’s infinity high evaporated as quickly as it had come.
32
SLOWLY THE CREW of the Franklin got used to their troll crewmates.
That didn’t apply to all the colonies they visited, though.
New Melfield was a grubby and unprepossessing farming community in the Corn Belt. The whole township turned out when the Franklin descended – and seemed uniformly astonished when a family of trolls followed the human crew down the lowered gangway.
The trolls and the rest strolled around while Maggie chatted to the local mayor, passed over Datum documentation, and generally engaged the man and put him at his ease. Indeed he evidently needed his ease putting at, for her briefing had pegged this place as yet another nasty little locus of spite towards trolls, not to mention humans and other dumb animals. Well, change had to start by degrees.
So by mid-morning this mayor had three trolls in his office, actually sitting on chairs; trolls just loved chairs, especially if they swivelled. And when Maggie had finished the coffee she’d been offered, she said clearly, ‘Wash up, please, Carl.’
The young troll, holding the mug like an heirloom, looked around the room, spotted the open door to the little coffee station and sink area in the room next door, carefully washed the mug in the
sink, and placed it just as carefully in a rack. Then he walked back to Maggie, who gave him a peppermint.
The mayor watched this in blank astonishment.
That was the start of a couple more days at this township, days devoted to seducing hearts and minds, with younger kids being given rides in the Franklin to see their homes from the air for the first time in their lives, and older kids – heavily supervised – playing with the trolls.
But on the second day the crew went on the alert, when a second twain showed up in the sky above New Melfield.
The ship was a merchant vessel. That evening the captain himself, with an aide, crossed to the Franklin and met Maggie in her sea cabin. And they came bearing a package.
Maggie glanced quickly at Nathan Boss, who’d accompanied them aboard. ‘We scanned the parcel,’ Boss said. ‘It’s clean.’
The merchant’s captain, young, overweight, grinned at Maggie. ‘You must be very important, Captain Kauffman, we were detoured a hell of a way to bring you this. You have the assurance of Douglas Black himself—’
‘Douglas Black? Of the Black Corporation? The . . .’ Wow, she thought. Sally Linsay has contacts.
‘Yes, Captain. The Mr. Black assures you that nothing in this package is to the detriment of either you or the Benjamin Franklin. Instructions can be found inside. I know nothing more . . .’
Maggie felt ridiculously like a kid at Christmas, eager to unwrap the gift.
As soon as the guy was gone, at Nathan’s cautious suggestion she took the package outside the ship to open it, just for extra security. And inside she found, carefully wrapped, a curious instrument faintly resembling an ocarina. A troll-call – Sally Linsay had come through. She toyed with the controls; it looked more complex than the gadget Sally had shown her, maybe some kind of upgrade. And there was a brief page of instructions, signed by hand: ‘G. Abrahams’. The name wasn’t familiar.
The Long War Page 17