Joshua stood. ‘No thanks, I lost my taste for soda years ago.’ And if I hadn’t, he thought to himself, I would have done just now, having seen you excrete it.
As they headed towards the stairs Selena said, ‘Good of you to shave, by the way. Seriously, chins are going out of style in these pioneering times. People are so faddy.’ She smiled. ‘I think we were expecting some kind of mountain man.’
‘I used to be like that, I guess.’
This bland deflection evidently annoyed her; she seemed to want more from him.
They reached a landing that consisted of nothing but unmarked metal doors. One of these slid open as she approached, and slid noiselessly shut seconds after he had followed her through and on to another stairway, heading down.
‘Joshua, I have to tell you,’ she said with a kind of brittle humour, ‘I would like to push you down these stairs! And you know why? Because you just walk in and suddenly you have a security rating of zero, a great big oh, which means technically you can be told everything that’s going on here. I on the other hand have a security clearance of five. You outrank me and I have been working for transEarth and its affiliates since the start! Who exactly are you, who can just walk in and be told every secret?’
‘Well, sorry about that. I am just Joshua, I guess. Anyway, what do you mean “since the start”? I was the start! That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Of course. But I suppose every person’s first step is the start, for them …’
6
JIM RUSSO HAD taken his own first step out into what the excited online chatterers were soon calling the Long Earth for ambition. And because, at thirty-eight years old, after a lifetime of bad breaks and betrayals, he figured he was ahead of the pack.
Very soon after Step Day he’d come up with his plan, and worked out what he had to do. He headed straight for this corner of California. He brought maps and photographs and such, to locate the exact spot where Marshall had made his find, all those years ago. He was well aware that GPS didn’t work in the stepwise worlds, so everything had to be on paper. But of course you didn’t need a map to find Sutter’s Mill, here on the bank of the South Fork American River, not in Datum Earth anyhow. It was in a State Historic Park. The place was a California Historical Landmark. They’d built a monument to show the site of the original mill, and you could see where James Marshall had first seen gold flakes glittering in the mill’s tailrace. You could stand there, right on the very spot. Jim Russo did so now, the cogs whirring in his head.
And then he stepped, into West 1, and the reconstruction was gone. The landscape was just as wild as Marshall and Sutter and his buddies had found it when they came to build their sawmill. Or maybe wilder, because there hadn’t even been Indians here before the stepping started. Of course there were other people here today, tourists from Datum Earth looking around the site. There were even a couple of little information plaques. Sutter West and East 1 had already been co-opted into the landmark, as an adjunct to what they had in Datum Earth. Jim smiled at the goggle-eyed foolishness of the few tourists here, their lack of imagination.
As soon as he felt able, when the nausea faded after ten or fifteen minutes, he stepped on further. And again. And again.
He paused in West 5, which he figured was far enough away. Nobody around. He laughed out loud, and whooped. No reply. There was an echo, and a bird called somewhere. He was alone.
He didn’t wait for the nausea to pass. He crouched down by the stream, and dug out his sieve from his pack, breathing deep to settle his stomach. Right here, on January 24, 1848, James Marshall had noticed odd rock formations in the water. Within a day Marshall had been washing gold flakes out of the stream, and the California Gold Rush was on. Jim had dreams of finding the exact same first flake as Marshall had found, which was held by the Smithsonian Institution. What a stunt that would be! But there was no mill here, of course, and so no tailrace, and the river bed hadn’t been disturbed as it had been in Marshall’s day back in Datum Earth, and it seemed unlikely he’d find the identical flake. Well, he’d settle for getting rich.
This was his grand plan. He knew exactly where the Sutter’s Mill gold was, for it had all been discovered and extracted by the miners who had followed Marshall. He had maps of the seams that still lay undisturbed, right here! For in this world, there had been no Sutter, no Marshall, no mill – and no Gold Rush. All that wealth, or a copy of it, still slept in the ground. Just waiting for Jim to take it for himself.
And there was laughter, from right behind him.
He whirled around, tried to stand, and stumbled and splashed back into the stream, getting his feet wet.
A man faced him, wearing rough denim clothes and a broad-brimmed hat. He carried a heavy orange backpack, and some kind of pick. He was laughing at Jim, showing white teeth in a grimy face. Others popped into existence around him: men and women, similarly dressed, grubby and tired-looking. They grinned when they saw Jim, despite the stepping nausea.
‘Not another one?’ said one woman.
She looked attractive under the dirt. An attractive woman, mocking him. Jim looked away, his face hot.
‘Looks like it,’ said the first man. ‘What’s the deal, buddy? You here to make your fortune with the Sutter gold?’
‘What’s it to you?’
The man shook his head. ‘What is it with people like you? You kind of think one move ahead, but not the next, or the next.’ He sounded like a college boy to Jim, smug, sneering. ‘You figured out there’s unmined gold on this spot. Sure there is, you’re right. But what about the same site on West 6 and 7 and 8, and as far out as you can go? What about all the other guys just like you, out there panning the streams on all those stepwise worlds? You didn’t think of that, did you?’ He dug a nugget of gold the size of a pigeon’s egg from his pocket. ‘My friend, everybody else has had the same idea!’
The woman said, ‘Oh, don’t be too hard on him, Mac. He’ll make some money, if he moves fast. Gold hasn’t been totally devalued yet; there hasn’t been much brought back. And he can always sell it as a commodity. It’s just, well, gold isn’t worth its weight in gold any more!’
More laughter.
Mac nodded. ‘Another example of the surprisingly low economic value of all these stepwise worlds. A real paradox.’
That college-boy smugness maddened Jim. ‘If it’s worth nothing, smart ass, what are you guys doing here?’
‘Oh, we’ve been mining too,’ Mac said. ‘We’ve been retracing the steps of Marshall and the rest, just like you. We went further out. We even built a copy of the mill, and a forge to make iron tools, so we could find the gold and extract it the way the pioneers did. It’s history, a reconstruction. It’ll be on Discovery next year; check it out. But we were not there for the gold itself. Here.’ And he threw the egg of gold at Jim. It landed at his feet, and lay in the damp gravel.
‘You assholes.’
Mac’s smile faded, as if in disappointment at his manners. ‘I don’t think our new friend is a very good sport, gents and ladies. Oh, well—’
Jim lumbered at the group, swinging his fists. They kept laughing at him as they disappeared, one by one. He didn’t land a single punch.
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, sh
e 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.
8
PEOPLE HAD GONE OFF every which way in those early days, with a purpose or just for the hell of it. But nobody had gone further than Joshua.
In those first months, still aged only thirteen, fourteen, he’d built himself refuges in the higher Earths. Stockades, he called them. And the best of them were stockades, like Robinson Crusoe’s. People had the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a determined, cheerful man heavily into goatskin underwear. But at the Home had been an old, battered copy of the book itself, and Joshua, being Joshua, had read it from cover to cover. Robinson Crusoe had been on his island for over twenty-six years, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Joshua approved of this; the man obviously had his head screwed on right.
It had been harder when he’d first started. In Madison, Wisconsin, what you found on the other side of the reality walls, to East and West, was mostly prairie. Joshua knew now that the first time he’d stepped through he’d been lucky it hadn’t been winter, which could have plunged him unprepared into temperatures of forty below. And that he hadn’t landed in some marsh, in some place that on Datum Earth had been drained by people and turned into farmland long before he’d been born.
The first time he’d gone out alone into the wild worlds and tried to spend a night had been kind of rough. Blackberries had been the only food he’d recognized, but he got water from rainfall in cup plants. He’d taken a blanket, and it had been too warm for that, but he’d needed it as a mosquito net. He’d slept up a tree for security. It was only later that he’d learned that cougars could climb trees…
After that he’d taken over a few books from the Home and the city library to help him recognize stuff, and he asked Sister Serendipity, who knew about cookery through the ages, and he’d begun to see you’d have to be pretty stupid to starve out there. There were berries, mushrooms, acorns, walnuts, and cat-tails, big green reeds with roots rich in carbs. There were plants to use if you were ill – even wild quinine. The lakes were rich in fish, and traps were easy to make. He’d tried his hand at hunting, once or twice. Rabbits were OK, but the bigger game, the white-tailed deer and elk and moose, would have to wait until he was older. Even turkeys took some running down. But why bother, when there were passenger pigeons that were so dumb that they’d sit and wait for you to walk up to them and knock them over? The animals, even the fish, seemed so innocent. Trusting. Joshua had developed a habit of thanking his catch for its gift of its life, only to learn later that that was how Indian hunters treated their prey.
You had to prepare. You took over matches or a Fresnel lens for fire; he’d taught himself how to make a fire bow in an emergency, but the effort sucked for everyday use. He’d got mosquito repellent free from Clean Sweep, a government exchange for household chemicals on Badger Road. And household bleach, for purifying the water.
Of course you didn’t want to become prey of anything yourself – but prey of what? There were animals that could take you down, certainly. Lynxes, dog-sized cats that stared at you and ran off in search of easier targets. Cougars, animals the size of German shepherds with faces that were the essence of cat. Once he saw a cougar bring down a deer, jumping on its back and biting into the carotid. Further out he’d glimpsed wolves, and more exotic animals – a thing like a huge beaver, and a sloth, heavy and stupid, that made him laugh. All these animals, he supposed, had existed in Datum Madison before humans came along, and now were mostly extinct. None of these creatures of the stepwise worlds had ever seen a human before, and even ferocious hunters tended to be wary of the unknown. Mosquitoes were more trouble than wolves, in fact.
In those early days Joshua had never stayed long, only a few nights at a time. Sometimes he perversely wished his stepping ability would switch off, so he’d be stuck out there, and see how he survived. When he came home Sister Agnes would ask him, ‘Don’t you find it lonely and frightening out there?’ But it hadn’t been lonely enough. And what was there to be frightened of? You might as well have said somebody who had stuck their toe into the water on a Pacific beach should be frightened of all that ocean.
Besides, pretty soon, in the Low Earths you couldn’t move for trippers, coming to see what it was all about. Steely-eyed folk, some of them, with serious shorts and determined knees, striding across this new territory, or at least getting tangled in the underbrush. Folk with questions like, ‘Whose land is this? Are we still in Wisconsin? Is this even the United States?’
Worst of all were the ones fleeing from the wrath of God, or maybe looking for it. There was an awful lot of that. Was the Long Earth a sign of the End of Days? Of the destruction of the old world, and a new world made ready for the chosen people? Too many people wanted to be among the chosen, and too many people thought that God would provide, in these paradisiacal worlds. God provided in abundance, it was true, vast amounts of food that you could see running around. But God also helped those who helped themselves, and presumably expected the chosen to bring warm clothing, water purification tablets, basic medication, a weapon such as the bronze knives that were selling so well these days, possibly a tent – in short, to bring some common sense to the party. And if you didn’t, and if you were lucky, it would only be the mosquitoes that got you. Only. In Joshua’s opinion, if you wanted to extend the biblical metaphor, then this apocalypse had four horsemen of its own, their names being Greed, Failing to Follow the Rules, Confusion and Miscellaneous Abrasions. Joshua had got sick of having to save the Saved.
He was soon sick of them all, actually. How did these people have the right to trample all over his secret places?
Worse yet, they got in the way of the Silence. He was already calling it that. They drowned out the calmness. Drowned out that distant, deep presence behind the clutter of the worlds, a presence he seemed
to have been aware of all his life, and had recognized as soon as he was far enough away from the Datum to be able to hear it. He started resenting every tanned hiker, every nosy kid, and the racket they made.
Yet he felt compelled to help all these people he despised, and he got confused about that. He also got confused about having to spend so much time alone, and the fact that he liked it. Which was why he broached the subject with Sister Agnes.
Sister Agnes was definitely religious, in a weird kind of way. At the Home, Sister Agnes had two pictures on the walls of her cramped room: one of them was of the Sacred Heart, the other was of Meat Loaf. And she played old Jim Steinman records far too loudly for the other Sisters. Joshua didn’t know much about bikes, but Sister Agnes’s Harley looked so old that St Paul had probably once ridden in the sidecar. Sometimes extremely hairy bikers made interstate pilgrimages to her garage at the Home on Allied Drive. She gave them coffee, and made sure they kept their hands off the paintwork.
All the kids liked her, and she liked them, but especially Joshua, and especially after he had done a dream of a paint job on her Harley, including the slogan ‘Bat Into Heaven’ painstakingly delineated on the gas tank in a wonderful italic script that he had found in a book from the library. After that, in her eyes, Joshua could do no wrong, and she allowed him to use her tools any time he liked.
If there was anyone he could trust, it was Sister Agnes. And with her, if he’d been away too long, his usual taciturn reserve sometimes turned into a flood of words, like a dam breaking, and everything that needed saying got said, all in a rush.
So he’d told her about what it was like to have to keep on saving the lost and the silly and the unpleasant, and the way they stared, and the way they said, ‘You are him, aren’t you? The kid who can step without having to spend fifteen minutes feeling like dog shit.’ He never knew how they knew, but the news got out somehow, for all Officer Jansson’s assurances. And that made him different, and being different made him a Problem. Which was a bad thing, and you couldn’t forget that, even here in Sister Agnes’s study. Because just above those two pictures of the Sacred Heart and Meat Loaf, there was a little statue of a man who’d been nailed to a cross because He’d been a Problem.
The Long Earth Page 4