‘Have you seen any blind people here, Joshua?’
‘Blind?’
‘There are people here with spectacles, old folk with reading glasses. But nobody blind. Once I looked at the rolls in City Hall. You see records of people missing a toe or a finger, and you find out that it was the result of a bit of carelessness with a wood-chopping axe. But nobody with any major disability seems to be led to Happy Landings in the first place.’
He thought that over. ‘They aren’t perfect here. I’ve seen them get drunk in the bars, for example.’
‘Oh yes, they know how to party, certainly. But the interesting thing is that every single one of them knows when to stop partying, and, believe you me, that talent is somewhat rare. And there’s nothing like a police force here, have you noticed? According to the City Hall records, there has never been a sexually motivated attack on a woman, man or child. Never. Never a dispute over land that hasn’t been calmly resolved by negotiation. Have you watched the kids? All the adults act as if all the kids are their own, and all the kids act as if all the adults are their parents. The whole place is so decent, level-headed and likeable it can make you scream, and then curse yourself for screaming.’ Sally stroked a troll pup, whose purring would have put any cat to shame: pure liquid contentment.
That prompted Joshua to blurt out, ‘It’s the trolls. It’s got to be. We’ve discussed this before. Humans and trolls living side by side. Here, and nowhere else we know of. So it’s like no other human community, anywhere.’
She eyed him. ‘Well, now we know that minds shape minds, don’t we? We’ve learned that much. Too many humans, and trolls will flee. But if there are just the right amount of people the trolls will stick around. And for humans, maybe you can’t get enough trolls. Happy Landings is a warm bath of comfortable, happy feelings.’
‘But nobody disabled. Nobody mixed-up enough to commit a violent crime. Nobody who doesn’t fit.’
‘Maybe they’re kept out, perhaps not even consciously.’ She regarded him. ‘Sieved. That’s a rather sinister thought, isn’t it?’
Joshua thought it was. ‘But how? Nobody’s standing around with clubs to exclude the unworthy.’
‘No.’ Sally leaned back and closed her eyes, thinking. ‘I don’t think it’s a case of people being consciously excluded, not by the locals. So how does it happen? I’ve never seen any signs of anybody behind Happy Landings. No designer, no controller. Does Happy Landings itself somehow choose who comes here? But how can that happen?’
‘And to what end?’
‘You can only have an end if you have a mind, Joshua.’
‘There’s no mind involved in evolution,’ Joshua said, remembering Sister Georgina’s brisk homework classes at the Home. ‘No end, no intention, no destination. And yet that’s a process that shapes living creatures.’
‘So is Happy Landings some analogy of an evolutionary process?’
He studied her. ‘You tell me. You’ve been coming here a long time—’
‘Since I was a kid, with my parents. It’s just that since I met you two, the questions I have always had about it, I guess, have sharpened up. I ought to wear a bracelet. “What would Lobsang think?”’
Joshua barked laughter.
‘You know, this place always seemed a regular garden of Eden – but without the serpent, and I wondered where the serpent was. My family got on well with the people here. But I never wanted to stay. I never had the sense I fitted in. I would never dare to call it home, just in case I was somehow the serpent.’
Joshua tried to read the expression on Sally’s face. ‘I’m sorry.’
That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. She looked away. ‘I do think this place is important, Joshua. For all of us. All humanity, I mean. It’s unique, after all. But what happens when the colonists start getting here? I mean the regular sort, the wavefront, with their spades and picks and bronze guns, and their wife-beaters and fraudsters? How can this place survive? How many trolls will be shot, slaughtered and enslaved?’
‘Maybe whoever, whatever is running the experiment will start fighting back.’
She shuddered. ‘We are starting to think like Lobsang. Joshua, let’s get out of here and go somewhere normal. I need a holiday…’
50
A DAY LATER, ON A distant world, in a warm twilight, Helen Green was gathering mushrooms. She wandered across a scrap of high ground, a couple of miles out of the new township of Reboot.
And there was a kind of sigh, like an exhalation. Helen felt a whisper of breeze on her skin. She turned.
There was a man, standing on the grass, slim, dark. A woman stood at his side, and she looked as if she belonged there. Visitors stepping in weren’t an unusual occurrence. They rarely looked quite so confused as these two. Or as grubby. Or with frost glistening on their jackets.
And very few appeared with a gigantic airship hovering over their heads. Helen wondered if she should run and fetch somebody.
The man shielded his eyes against the sun. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Helen Green.’
‘Oh, the blogger from Madison? I hoped we’d meet you.’
She glared at him. ‘Who are you? You aren’t another tax man, are you? We drove the last one out of town.’
‘No, no. My name’s Joshua Valienté.’
‘The Joshua Valienté…’ To her horror she felt herself blush.
The woman with Joshua said witheringly, ‘Give me strength.’
To Joshua, Helen Green looked in her late teens. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair tied sensibly back from her face, and had a basket of some kind of fungi on her arm. She was dressed in shirt and slacks of some soft deer-like leather, and moccasins. She wouldn’t have fitted into the crowd on the Datum, but on the other hand she was no colonial-era museum piece. This wasn’t some retro re-creation of pioneering days past, Joshua realized. Helen Green was something new in the world, or worlds. Kind of cute, too.
There was no trouble finding a place to stay in Reboot, once they accepted you weren’t any kind of criminal or bandit, or worse yet a representative of the Datum federal government which had suddenly turned so hostile to the colonists. In their time here Joshua saw the locals welcome even the hobos, as they called them, a drift of rather vague-looking people wandering through the Long Earth, evidently with no intention of ever settling down, and therefore with not much to contribute to Reboot. But out here every new face, with a new story to tell, was welcome, however briefly they stayed, so long as they tilled a field or chopped some wood in return for bed and board.
In the evening, Joshua and Sally sat by the fire, alone together, under the dark hulk of the Mark Twain.
‘I like these folk,’ Joshua said. ‘They’re good people. Sensible. Doing things right.’ He felt like this because of the way he was, he accepted that; he liked it when people did what they had to do, such as build this community, properly and methodically. I could live here, he thought, somewhat to his own surprise.
But Sally snorted. ‘No. This is the old way of living, or an imitation of it. We don’t need to plough the land to feed vast densities of people. We don’t just have one Earth now, we have an infinite number and they can feed an infinite number of us. Those hobos have it more right. They are the future, not your starstruck little fan Helen Green. Look, I suggest we stay here for a week, help with the harvest, take our pay in supplies. What do you say? Then we’ll head for home.’
Joshua was embarrassed, but he said, ‘And then what? We can deliver Lobsang, or what’s left of him in the Mark Twain, to transEarth. Not to mention his cat. But then – I’m going to want to go back out, Sally. With Lobsang or without. I mean, it’s all out there. All these years since Step Day we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the Long Earth. I thought I knew it all, but I’d never seen a troll before this trip, never heard of Happy Landings… Who knows what might be left to find?’
She gave him her sideways look. ‘Are you suggesting, young man, that the two o
f us might travel together again?’
He’d never suggested such a thing to any other human being in his life. Not unless he was trying to save them. He evaded the question. ‘Well, there is the Gap. The Long Mars! Who knows? I’ve been thinking about that. Step far enough there and we might find a Mars that’s habitable.’
‘You’re beginning to dribble.’
‘Well, I did use to read a lot of science fiction. But, yeah, let’s go home first. It feels like it’s time. Check out Madison. See how people are. Sally, I would very much like to introduce you to Sister Agnes.’
She smiled. ‘And Sister Georgina. We can talk about Keats…’
‘And then, when Lobsang two point zero launches the Mark Trine, I intend to be on board. Even if I have to stow away with the damn cat.’
Sally looked thoughtful. ‘You know, my mother had a saying when us kids used to run around like wild things: “It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.” I can’t help thinking that if we keep pushing our luck with this wonderful new toy of a multiverse, sooner or later a big foot will come down on us hard. Though I guess you could look up and see whose foot it was.’
‘Even that would be interesting,’ said Joshua.
As they prepared to leave they sought out Helen Green, who had been the first to greet them here, more or less civilly, and now they wanted to say goodbye to her.
Helen was in the middle of her working day, a bundle of much-read books under her arm: calm, competent, cheerful, getting on with her life, a hundred thousand Earths from where she had been born. She seemed a little flustered, as always around Joshua. But she pushed her hair away from her brow, and smiled. ‘Sorry to see you go so soon. So where are you heading, back on the Datum?’
‘Madison,’ Joshua said. ‘Where you came from too, right? I remember that from your blog. We still have friends there, family…’
But Helen was frowning. ‘Madison? Haven’t you heard?’
51
FOR MONICA JANSSON, Madison’s bad day had started when Clichy called, and she had to leave her UW seminar on demographic impacts of the Long Earth. She got glares from her fellow delegates, save for those who knew she was a cop.
‘Jack? What is it? This better be good—’
‘Shut up and listen, Spooky. There’s a bomb.’
‘A bomb?’
‘A nuke. In central Madison. Believed to be stashed in Capitol Square somewhere.’
This convention centre was a long way north-east of downtown. She was already running, out of the building, heading for her car, and already panting; there were times when she felt every one of her forty-plus years.
An outdoor siren started to wail.
‘A nuke? How the hell—’
‘Some kind of suitcase thing. The warnings are going out. Listen to me. Here’s what you have to do. Get people indoors. Understand? Underground if you can. Tell them it’s a tornado if you have to convince them. If that thing goes off, outside ground zero itself you can cut your immediate casualties from radiation to a fraction if—damn it, Jansson, was that your car door slamming?’
‘You got me, Chief.’
‘Tell me you’re heading out of town.’
‘Can’t tell you that, sir.’ Already people were coming out of office buildings, shops, homes, into the sunlight of a bright fall day, looking bewildered. On the other hand others were going indoors, reflexively; Wisconsin did get its share of tornado touchdowns, and people knew to listen to warnings. Another couple of minutes and the roads would be jammed by people trying to get out of town, no matter what the official advice was.
She put her foot down while the road was still relatively clear, started up her siren, and roared south-west towards the Capitol.
‘Damn it, Lieutenant!’
‘Look, sir, you know as well as I do that it’s going to be some fringe Humanity First–type group responsible for this. And that’s my business. If I can be on the spot, maybe I’ll see something. Eyeball one of the usual suspects. Kill this thing.’
‘Or get your sorry lesbian ass fried!’
‘No, sir.’ She patted her waist. ‘I got my Stepper…’
She heard more sirens wail, over the noise of the car. Inside the vehicle emergency messages started popping up, coming via multiple systems: a reverse-911 call on her civilian phone, emails to her tablet, grave Emergency Alert System messages on the radio. None of it was enough, she realized.
‘Listen, Chief. You have to change course on this.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Sounds like everybody’s following the standard plays. We have to get people to step, sir. Anywhere, East or West, just away from Madison Zero.’
‘You know as well as I do that not everybody can step. Aside from the phobics there are the old, kids, bedridden, hospital patients—’
‘So people help each other. If you can step, do it. But take someone with you, someone who can’t step. Carry them in your arms, on your back. Then go back and step again. And again and again…’
He was silent a moment. ‘You’ve thought about this, haven’t you, Spooky?’
‘It’s why you gave me the job all those years ago, Jack.’
‘You’re insane.’ A pause. ‘I’ll do it if you turn your damn car around.’
‘Not a chance, sir.’
‘You’re fired, Spooky.’
‘Noted, sir. But I’ll stay on the line even so.’
She hit East Washington, and her view of the Capitol opened up, shining white in the sun. People were milling around, coming out of or going into the offices and shops. Some of them tried to wave her down; they looked annoyed, and probably wanted to complain about the noise of the sirens, wailing on and on apparently without reason. The car ahead of her had a prized old Green Bay Packer licence plate. On the walls she saw posters of Brian Cowley, grave, finger-pointing, like a spreading virus.
It was impossible to believe that in only minutes all this was going to be a cloud of radioactive dust. But now, coming over the car radio, she heard hurried instructions to step, interspersed with the standard announcements. Step and help. Step and help… She smiled. An instant slogan.
Clichy came back with more information. The only warning the police had had was from a kid who had wandered into a district station in Milwaukee, in distress. Fifteen years old. He had run with a crowd of Humanity-Firsters, for the social life, to meet girls. But he was lying to them. He was actually a natural stepper. And when the Firsters found out they had taken him to a doctor, a man on the MPD’s watch list, who had opened up his head and inserted an electrode and burned out brain centres believed to be associated with stepping. It had left the boy blind, whether he could still step or not. So he went to the cops and spilled the beans on what his friends were planning to bring down in Madison.
‘All the kid knows is that the Firsters got hold of what they called a “suitcase nuke”. Now, I’m reading my brief here, the only such device ever to have been acknowledged as manufactured by the US is the W54. A SADM, which stands for Special Atomic Demolition Munition. Yield of around six kilotons, which is about a third of Hiroshima. Alternatively they could have got hold of a Russian device, such as an RA-115 – get this, Spooky, it’s thought the old Soviet Union salted some of these things around the mainland US. Just in case, huh.’
She had reached Capitol Square. Most days this was cluttered with art fairs or farmers’ markets, now expanded to feature the exotic produce of a dozen worlds, or else some protest rally or other. Today there was a concentration of cops and Homelands types and FBI officers, some in nuclear-biological-chemical protection suits, as if that would make a difference, and their vehicles, including helicopters hovering overhead. The bravest of the brave, she thought, running towards the bomb. As she ripped around the square Jansson looked down State Street, that linked the main UW campus with the Square in a straight west–east line. State was still full of bustling restaurants, espresso bars and shops, despite the Long Earth re
cession and the depopulation, still the city’s beating heart. This afternoon it swarmed with students and shoppers. Some were evidently hurrying for shelter, but others sipped their coffees and inspected their phones and laptops. Some were laughing, even though Jansson could clearly hear the echoing voice of a cop loudspeaker urging everybody to get indoors or step away, on top of the sirens’ wail.
‘People aren’t believing it, Chief.’
‘Tell me about it.’
She abandoned the car and, flashing her badge at everyone who got in her way, pushed through the lines to the Capitol mound. The racket of the sirens, echoing from the concrete, was deafening, maddening. Down the four big staircases around the Capitol building itself people were spilling out, members of the State legislature, lobbyists, lawyers, in sharp-pressed business suits. And at the foot of one flight of steps a more ragged group of civilians was sitting, watched over by a loose ring of armed cops and Homelands officers. These folk, it turned out, had been in the Square when the warning came, and had been immediately rounded up, their Steppers confiscated along with their phones and any weapons. Jansson, just outside the perimeter, searched for familiar faces among the resentful, scared crowd of tourists, shoppers, business types. Some of them wore proud-to-be-a-Stepper wrist bands that they brandished at the officers who contained them. I’m no Humanity-Firster! Look at this!
And there was Rod Green, sitting a little way from the rest.
She sat down with Rod. He was eighteen years old, she knew, but looked younger. He wore jeans and a dark jacket, his strawberry-blond hair cut short. He looked like any other student. But there were lines around his mouth, his eyes. Frown lines, lines of resentment and hate.
‘You did this. Didn’t you, Rod?’ She had to yell to make herself heard over the sirens. ‘Come on, kid, you know me. I’ve kept an eye on you for years.’
He eyed her. ‘You’re the one they call Spooky.’
‘You got me. Did you do this?’
‘I helped.’
‘Helped who? Helped how?’
The Long Earth Page 31