‘Why?’ Joshua asked. ‘What could he gain out of it?’
‘I’m right here,’ said Lobsang. ‘He’s not made of wood, you know.’
‘Sorry.’
‘What did I gain? Civil rights. Security. The right to own property.’
‘And switching you off would be murder?’
‘It would. Also physically impossible, incidentally, but let’s not go into that.’
‘So the court’s agreed you’re human?’
‘There’s never actually been a legal definition of human, you know.’
‘And now you work for transEarth.’
‘I part-own it. Douglas Black, the founder, had no hesitation in offering me a partnership. Not only for my notoriety, though he’s drawn to that sort of thing. For my transhuman intellect.’
‘Really.’
Selena said, ‘Let’s get back to business. You took a lot of finding, Mr Valienté.’
Joshua looked at her and made a mental note to make it a lot more finding next time.
‘Your visits to Earth are infrequent these days.’
‘I’m always on Earth.’
‘You know what I mean. This one,’ said Selena. ‘Datum Earth, or even one of the Low Earths.’
‘I’m not for hire,’ Joshua said quickly, trying to keep a trace of anxiety out of his voice. ‘I like to work alone.’
‘Well, that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it?’
Joshua preferred life in his stockades, on Earths far from the Datum, too far away for most to travel. Even then he was wary of company. They said that Daniel Boone would pull up sticks and move on if he could as much as see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Joshua, Boone was pathologically gregarious.
‘But that’s what makes you useful. We know you don’t need people.’ Selena held up a hand. ‘Oh, you’re not antisocial. But consider this. Before the Long Earth, no one in the whole history of mankind had ever been alone; I mean really alone. The hardiest sailor has always known that there’s someone out there somewhere. Even the old moonwalker astronauts could see the Earth. Everyone knew that other people were just a matter of distance away.’
‘Yeah, but with the Steppers they’re only a knight’s-move away.’
‘Our instincts don’t understand that, though. Do you know how many people pioneer solo?’
‘No.’
‘None. Well, hardly any. To be alone on an entire planet, possibly the only mind in a universe? Ninety-nine out of a hundred people can’t take it.’
But Joshua never was alone, he thought. Not with the Silence always there, behind the sky.
‘As Selena said, that’s what makes you useful,’ Lobsang said. ‘That and certain other qualities we can discuss later. Oh, and the fact that we have leverage over you.’
Light dawned, for Joshua. ‘You want me to make some kind of journey. Into the Long Earth.’
‘That’s what you’re uniquely good at,’ Selena said sweetly. ‘We want you to go into the High Meggers, Joshua.’
The High Meggers: the term used by some of the pioneers for the worlds, most of them still little more than legend, more than a million steps from Earth.
‘Why?’
‘For the most innocent of all reasons,’ said Lobsang. ‘To see what’s out there.’
Selena smiled. ‘Information on the Long Earth is the stock in trade of transEarth, Mr Valienté.’
Lobsang was more expansive. ‘Consider, Joshua. Until fifteen years ago mankind had one world and dreamed of a few more, the worlds of the solar system, all barren and horribly expensive to get to. Now we have the key to more worlds than we can count! And we have barely explored even the nearest of them. Now’s our chance to do just that.’
‘Our chance?’ Joshua said. ‘I’m taking you with me? Is that the gig? A computer is paying me to chauffeur it?’
‘Yes, that’s the size of it,’ Selena said.
Joshua frowned. ‘And the reason I’ll do this – you said something about leverage?’
Selena said smoothly, ‘We’ll come to that. We’ve studied you, Joshua. In fact the earliest trace you leave in the files is a report by Madison PD Officer Monica Jansson, filed just after Step Day itself. About the mysterious boy who came back, bringing the other children with him. Quite the little pied piper, weren’t you? Once upon a time you would have been called a celebrity.’
‘And,’ Lobsang put in, ‘once upon another time you’d have been called a witch.’
Joshua sighed. Was he ever going to live that day down? He had never wanted to be a hero; he didn’t like people looking at him in that funny way. Or, indeed, in any way. ‘It was a mess, that’s all,’ he said. ‘How did you find out?’
‘The police reports, like Jansson’s,’ said the drinks machine. ‘The thing about the police is that they keep everything on file. And I just love files. Files tell me things. They tell me who your mother was, for instance, Joshua. Maria was her name, was it not?’
‘My mother’s none of your business.’
‘Joshua, everybody is my business, and everybody is on file. And the files have told me all about you. That you may be very special. That you were there on Step Day.’
‘Everybody was there on Step Day.’
‘Yes, but you felt at home, didn’t you, Joshua? You felt as if you’d come home. For once in your life you knew you were in the right place …’
3
STEP DAY. FIFTEEN years ago. Joshua had been just thirteen. Later, everybody remembered where they were on Step Day. Mostly they were in the shit.
At the time, nobody knew who had uploaded the circuit diagram for the Stepper on to the web. But as evening swept like a scythe around the world, kids everywhere started putting Steppers together, dozens in the neighbourhood of the Home in Madison alone. There had been a real run on Radio Shack. The electronics seemed laughably simple. The potato you were supposed to install at the heart of it seemed laughable too, but it was important, because it was your power supply. And then there was the switch. The switch was vital. Some kids thought you didn’t need a switch. Just twist wires together. And they were the ones who ended up screaming.
Joshua had put his first Stepper together carefully. He always did things meticulously. He was the kind of boy who always, but always, paints before assembly, and then assembles the pieces in the right order, with every single component laid out with care before commencing. Joshua always commenced things. It sounded more deliberate than starting. In the Home, when he worked on one of the old and worn and incomplete jigsaw puzzles, he would always sort out the pieces first, separating sky and sea and edge, before putting even two pieces together. Sometimes afterwards, if the puzzle was incomplete, he would go into his little workshop and very carefully shape the missing pieces out of hoarded scrap wood and then paint them to fit. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t believe that the puzzle had ever had holes. And sometimes he would cook, under the supervision of Sister Serendipity. He would collect all the ingredients, prepare them all in advance meticulously, and then work through the recipe. He even cleaned up as he went. He liked cooking, and liked the approval it won him in the Home.
That was Joshua. That was how he did things. And that was why he wasn’t the first kid to step out of the world, because he’d not only varnished his Stepper box, he’d waited for the varnish to dry. And that was why he was certainly the first kid to get back without wetting his pants, or worse.
Step Day. Kids were disappearing. Parents scoured the neighbourhoods. One minute the kids were there, playing with this latest crazy toy, and the next moment they weren’t. When frantic parent meets frantic parent, frantic becomes terrified. The police were called, but to do what? Arrest who? To look where?
And Joshua himself stepped, for the first time.
A heartbeat earlier, he had been in his workshop, in the Home. Now he stood in a wood, heavy, thick, the moonlight hardly managing to reach the ground. He could hear other kids everywhere, throwing up, cryi
ng for their parents, a few screaming as if they were hurt. He wondered why all the distress. He wasn’t throwing up. It was creepy, yes. But it was a warm night. He could hear the whine of mosquitoes. The only question was, a warm night where?
All the crying distracted him. There was one kid close at hand, calling for her mother. It sounded like Sarah, another resident of the Home. He called out her name.
She stopped crying, and he heard her voice, quite close: ‘Joshua?’
He thought it over. It was late evening. Sarah would have been in the girls’ dormitory, which was about twenty yards away from his workshop. He had not moved, but he was clearly in a different place. This wasn’t Madison. Madison had noises, cars, airplanes, lights, while now he was standing in a forest, like something out of a book, with not a trace of a streetlight anywhere he looked. But Sarah was here too, wherever this was. The thought constructed itself a piece at a time, like an incomplete jigsaw. Think, don’t panic. In relation to where you are, or were, she will be where she is, or was. You just have to go down the passage to her room. Even though, here and now, there is no passage, no room. Problem solved.
Except that to get to her would mean walking through the tree right in front of him. An extremely big tree.
He worked his way around the tree, pushing through the tangled undergrowth, the briars, the fallen branches of this very wild wood. ‘Keep talking,’ he said. ‘Don’t move. I’m coming.’
‘Joshua?’
‘Look, I’ll tell you what. Sing. Keep singing. That way I’ll be able to find you in the dark.’ Joshua switched on his flashlight. It was a tiny one that fitted into a pocket. He always carried a flashlight at night. Of course he did. He was Joshua.
She didn’t sing. She started to pray. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’
He wished people would do what he told them, just sometimes.
From around the forest, from the dark, other voices joined in. ‘Hallowed be thy name …’
He clapped his hands and yelled, ‘Everybody shut up! I’ll get you out of here. Trust me.’ He didn’t know why they should trust him, but the tone of authority worked, and the other voices died away. He took a breath and called, ‘Sarah. You first. OK? Everybody else, go towards the prayer. Don’t say anything. Just head towards the prayer.’
Sarah began again: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’
As he worked his way forward, hands outstretched, pushing through briars and climbing over roots, testing every step, he heard the sounds of people moving all around him, more voices calling. Some were complaining about being lost. Others were complaining about a lack of cellphone signal. Sometimes he glimpsed their phones, little screens glowing like fireflies. And then there was the desolate weeping, even moans of pain.
The prayer ended with an amen, which was echoed around the forest, and Sarah said, ‘Joshua? I’ve finished.’
And I thought she was clever, thought Joshua. ‘Then start again.’
It took him minutes to get to her, even though she was only half the length of the Home away. But he could see this forest clump was actually quite small. Beyond, in the moonlight, he saw what looked like prairie flowers, like in the Arboretum. No sign of the Home, though, or Allied Drive.
At last Sarah stumbled towards him and clamped herself on him. ‘Where are we?’
‘Somewhere else, I guess. You know. Like Narnia.’
The moonlight showed him the tears pouring down her face and the snot under her nose, and he could smell the vomit on her nightdress. ‘I never stepped into no wardrobe.’
He burst out laughing. She stared at him. But because he was laughing, she laughed. And the laughter started to fill this little clearing, for other kids were drifting this way, towards the flashlight glow, and for a moment that held back the terror. It was one thing to be lost and alone, quite another to be lost in a crowd, and laughing.
Somebody else grabbed his arm. ‘Josh?’
‘Freddie?’
‘It was terrible. I was in the dark and I fell down, down to the ground.’
Freddie had a tummy bug, Josh remembered. He’d been in the sanatorium, on the Home’s first floor. He must have just fallen, through the vanished building. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No… Josh? How do we get home?’
Joshua took Sarah’s hand. ‘Sarah, you made a Stepper?’
‘Yes.’
He glanced at the mess of components in her hand. It wasn’t even in a box, not even a shoebox or something, let alone a box that had been carefully made for the purpose, like his. ‘What did you use for a switch?’
‘What switch? I just twisted the wires together.’
‘Look. It definitely said to put in a centre-off switch.’ He very carefully took her Stepper in his hands. You always had to be very careful around Sarah. She wasn’t a Problem, but problems had happened to her.
At least there were three wires. He traced back the circuitry by touch. He’d spent hours staring at the circuit diagram; he knew it by heart. He separated the wires and put the ragged tangle back in her hands. ‘Listen. When I say go, press that wire and that one together. If you find yourself back in your room, drop the whole thing on the floor and go to bed. OK?’
Sniffing, she asked, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
‘Well, you’ll still be here, and so will I. And that won’t be so bad, will it? Are you ready? Come on. Let’s do a countdown from ten. Nine, eight …’
On zero she disappeared, and there was a pop, like a soap bubble bursting.
The other kids stared at where she’d been, and then at Joshua. Some were strangers: as much as he could see any faces at all, there were plenty he couldn’t recognize. He’d no idea how far they’d walked in the dark.
Right now he was king of the world. These helpless kids would do anything he told them. It wasn’t a feeling he liked. It was a chore.
He turned to Freddie. ‘OK, Freddie. You next. You know Sarah. Tell her not to worry. Tell her a lot of kids are coming home via her bedroom. Tell her Joshua says it’s the only way to get them home, and please don’t get angry. Now show me your Stepper.’
One by one, pop after pop, the lost boys and girls disappeared.
When the last of those near by had gone, there were still voices further away in the forest, maybe beyond. There was nothing Joshua could do for them. He wasn’t even sure he’d done the right thing now. He stood alone in the stillness, and listened. Aside from the distant voices there was no sound but the skinny drone of mosquitoes. People told you that mosquitoes could kill a horse, in time.
He held his own carefully constructed Stepper, and moved the switch.
He was instantly back in the Home, by Sarah’s bed, in her tiny cluttered room, just in time to see the back of the last girl he’d led home, still quite hysterical, disappearing into the hallway. And he heard the shrill sound of the Sisters’ voices calling his name.
He hastily moved the switch again, to stand alone in the solitude of the forest. His forest.
There were more voices now, closer by. Sobbing. Screaming. One kid saying very politely, ‘Excuse me. Can anybody help me?’ And then a retch. Vomiting.
More new arrivals. He thought, why are they all sick? That was the smell of Step Day, when he remembered it later. Everyone had thrown up. He hadn’t.
He set off into the dark, looking for the latest calling kid.
And after that kid there was another. And another, who had broken her arm, it looked like, falling from some upper storey. And then another. There was always another kid.
The first hint of dawn filled the forest clump with birdsong and light. Was it dawn back home too?
There were absolutely no sounds of humanity now, except for the sobbing of the latest lost boy, who had speared his leg on a jagged length of wood. There was no way the kid would be able to operate his own Stepper, which was a shame, because in the sallow light Joshua admired the craftsmanship. The kid had evidently spent some time in Radio Shack. A sensible kid,
but not sensible enough to bring a flashlight, or mosquito repellent.
Carefully, Joshua bent, picked up the kid in his arms, and stood straight. The boy moaned. One-handed, Joshua groped for the switch on his own Stepper, glad once more he’d followed the instructions exactly.
This time, when they stepped over, there were lights glaring in his face, and within seconds a City of Madison police car screeched to a halt before him. He stood stock still.
Two cops got out of the car. One, a younger man in a fluorescent jacket, gently took the injured boy from Joshua, and laid him on the grass. The other officer stood before him. A woman, smiling, hands open. This made him nervous. It was the way a Sister smiled at a Problem. Arms outstretched in welcome could quickly become arms that grabbed. Behind the officers, there were lights everywhere, like a movie set.
‘Hello, Joshua,’ the woman officer said. ‘My name is Monica Jansson.’
4
FOR MPD OFFICER JANSSON it had all started even earlier, the day before: the third time in the last few months she’d come out to the burned-out Linsay house, just off Mifflin Street.
She wasn’t sure why she had come back here. There hadn’t been a call-out this time. Yet here she was poking once more through the heaps of ash and charcoal that used to be furniture. Crouching over the smashed remains of an elderly flatscreen TV. Stepping gingerly over a carpet scorched and soaked and stained with foam, marked by the heavy footprints of firemen and cops. Leafing again through the charred relics of what must once have been an extensive set of notes, handwritten mathematical equations, an indecipherable scrawl.
The Long Earth Page 2