Now, Joshua saw, one of the Traversers had come closer to the shore than the rest. Big glistening flaps on its back opened up, and what looked like standard-issue humans emerged, just walking out. Some of them clambered into crude-looking boats they hauled out of the Traverser’s interior, and paddled to the shore.
The Uncle Arthur crew just watched, open-mouthed.
The woman who walked up the beach was perhaps thirty years old, the boy at her side perhaps ten. All but naked, their feet bare, their legs coated with seawater and sand, they bravely faced the travellers in their high-tech suits. The little boy was clinging to his mother’s hand, staring.
Lobsang said, ‘You know who this is, don’t you?’
Joshua murmured, ‘I think you’re scaring him, Lobsang. Let me handle this.’ Joshua hobbled forward, deliberately smiling. ‘Lucille? Troy?’
The woman nodded curtly.
‘My name is Joshua Valienté. This is Lobsang. Troy, your grandfather, Nelson Azikiwe, asked us to find you. Well, I’m not quite sure how we did it, but here we are.’
‘Huh,’ said the woman, unimpressed. ‘You took your time.’
64
THE UNCLE ARTHUR returned through more star-spanning leaps to Earth West 3,141,592.
For much of the journey Joshua’s time was spent trying to explain to his new guests, Lucille and Troy, what the hell was happening to them – and, yes, how he’d find a way to bring them back home one day, back to their own ocean seven hundred thousand steps from the Datum, back to Sam and the stranded fisher folk.
And when the Uncle arrived back at Little Cincinnati, for once the centre of attention wasn’t a continent-sized computer. The sky over the Navy base was dominated by a twain – and not just any twain, Joshua saw, not some Low Earth tub, not some battered old scow from the Long Mississippi run, not even a state-of-the-art US Navy military vessel – this was an island in the sky, huge, with artificial light gleaming from ports in a hardened underbelly. And its envelope hull was made, not of some fabric, but of wood, Joshua saw, tremendous panels of it. It was like one vast piece of furniture.
As he stumbled out of the Uncle, Jan Roderick’s eyes were wide, his mouth a perfect circle. ‘Oh. My. Gosh.’
Joshua grinned. ‘Not an inappropriate response.’
Lee and Dev, techno-buffs both, gazed up at the ship too. ‘Wow,’ Dev said simply. ‘That thing must be a mile long.’
‘Actually a little longer,’ Maggie said. ‘That, my young explorers, is the USS Samuel L. Clemens. More than five times the length of the Duke. Douglas Black, the builder of this prototype, owes me a few favours . . .’
‘Black,’ Lobsang said. ‘I knew it.’
And Joshua snapped his fingers. ‘Reaching-wood,’ he said. ‘That’s how that damn thing stays up. I knew that would leak out.’
Maggie pursed her lips. ‘I once glimpsed those forests too, Mr Valienté, aboard the Armstrong II. When you came back with your account – well, the opportunity to check it out again seemed too good to miss. Mr Black assures me that all logging will be carried out sustainably. And you’ve never heard that promise before, have you? Anyhow, so I’m informed, it’s come to take you all home. Once again I thought we may as well travel in style.’
Jan walked up, looking worried. ‘I won’t be in trouble, will I?’
Maggie looked at him sternly. ‘For stowing away? If you were, was it worth it?’
Jan thought that over. ‘Hell, yes.’
Joshua cleared his throat. ‘OK, kid, good answer. But just imagine Sister John can hear every word you say. I’m over six times your age, and I still think nuns have super powers.’
‘Nobody’s in trouble,’ Maggie said. ‘But you, young man, do need to go back home. Back to school. And I have to get back to Datum Pearl Harbor to report to Ed Cutler, my own Mother Superior—’
‘But you mustn’t leave quite yet,’ came a cultured voice. Roberta Golding and Stella Welch approached them. Roberta smiled at Maggie. ‘I hope you will all spare us a few hours to discuss your experiences. We have already downloaded the records from the Uncle Arthur, but we believe that your individual responses to the environments you visited will be of value also, however naive.’
‘Thanks,’ Dev said with a grin.
Indra fired a volley of quicktalk at Roberta.
Maggie grunted, impatient at this exclusion. ‘What the hell are you talking about now?’
Roberta said smoothly, ‘I apologize, Admiral. We have already come to some conclusions on the basis of Indra’s reports. The Long worlds, you see, are evidently not consciously designed, but the result of a kind of cooperation between sentience and the structure of the cosmos itself. As intricate as the co-evolution of the bees and the flowering plants. Now you have glimpsed a – Galactic Club – out there, a community of minds in the sky, in the glorious topology of the Skein. Many of those minds will be higher than ours, of course. I mean, higher than those of the Next.’
‘Of course,’ Maggie said, straight-faced.
‘Indra, young as she is, sees her way to the obvious consequence. We have to rethink our relationship with those other sapients with whom we share the Long Earth. With humans, with the trolls and the other humanoids, even the beagles. Indra suggests that we must draw together some kind of Congress, representing all of us, with parity of expression. A Congress of Sapience.’
‘Good,’ Lobsang said evenly. ‘For you have come to the attention of others. And in the future you will be judged on how you behave towards Homo sapiens in the present.’
Joshua grinned. ‘Didn’t your hero Stan Berg come to much the same conclusion, without having to go to all the trouble of conquering the Galaxy? He left your Grange; he wanted to work with people. And you didn’t listen to him, as I recall.’
Roberta held up her hand. ‘Point taken. We are none of us perfect. We can only strive to do better in the future. In fact we are already planning fresh missions to the Skein.’
‘To explore.’ Indra smiled. ‘And to colonize.’
‘Hallelujah,’ Maggie said. ‘In the meantime I’m going up to the twain for a shower and a change and a decent Navy meal. If any of you want to join me, you’re welcome.’
‘That is kind,’ Indra said solemnly. ‘I would indeed like to experience a decent Navy meal.’
There was an awkward silence. Indra Newton had made a joke.
Joshua was the first to laugh.
But when the group broke up he pulled Lobsang aside.
‘Lobsang – all that stuff about the Long Earth nurturing sapience. Like a Long Gaia.’
‘Yes?’
‘I remember The Journey. You figured all this out forty years ago.’
‘Well, that’s true, Joshua. But nobody likes a smart ass.’ And he winked slowly.
The next morning there was a surprisingly touching goodbye with Indra. She was after all the first of the crew of the Uncle Arthur to be left behind. There were tears, and promises to keep in touch.
Then Joshua and Lobsang boarded the Clemens and sat side by side in an observation lounge like a reaching-tree root cavern. Sancho was here too, sitting on a straw bale, wrapped in his tattered spacesuit-silver blanket and with Joshua’s bent sunglasses on his face.
The Clemens weighed anchor and sailed high in the sky. Little Cincinnati receded beneath them, an island of dirt and canvas in an ocean of computronium that stretched to the horizon, translucent, glistening, flowing over the contours of the landscape.
Maggie Kauffman pushed through the door, a stack of coffees in plastic cartons in her hands. ‘So we’re underway. Three million worlds to cover back to West 5. Here we go, full fat for Joshua, skinny latte for Lobsang, decaff for the troll.’
‘Hoo.’
Joshua grinned. ‘If you drop Jan from this behemoth in front of his buddies at the Home, you’ll have a friend for life.’
Maggie grunted. ‘If I was promised him as a Navy recruit, I’d salute him when he farted. I don’t particularly want to r
eward him for stowing away, but that kid’s got brains, initiative and competence. And he’s got nerve; I don’t think I could have coped with the centre of the Galaxy at ten years old.’
‘Eleven.’
She sipped her coffee and pulled a face. ‘Which by the way is quite a contrast to the scratch crew of trainees and has-beens we got aboard this ship. This is supposed to be a shakedown cruise for the Clemens. The hell with that. We’ll cross three million worlds in three days, stepping for twelve hours on, twelve hours off. We’re not stepping at night, mind you; I don’t think Jane Sheridan trusts her navigators to find their own butts in the dark, let alone the way back to the Low Earths. By the end of this first day we should be at the Gap, where we’ll disembark Dev Bilaniuk and Lee Malone. Off to build their own future in space, and good for them.’
‘Where are Dev and the rest now?’
‘Going crazy on the training deck. Which is a kind of giant playroom a hundred feet long. Let them blow off steam and be young again. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to kick more butt . . .’ She picked up her own coffee and left.
After a time Joshua said, ‘I can feel the first step coming.’
‘You would,’ said Lobsang.
‘Hoo,’ said the troll.
Joshua raised his artificial hand. ‘Three, two, one—’
The Thinker disappeared, a tablecloth whipped away by some cosmic magician.
Revealed was the landscape of Earth West 3,141,591. Joshua saw a river, hills mantled with forests dominated by some kind of fern, and swathes of green where grew something that wasn’t quite grass. Down by the river was a slow-moving herd of some big browsing animal. This was the world next door, a typical member of this nameless sheaf of worlds. But, looking down directly beneath the twain, Joshua saw a few heaps of equipment, a couple of rows of tents. He guessed this stepwise world was used as a store for the Little Cincinnati base, just as the Low Earths around the Datum had first been used after Step Day.
But now there was another step, and the store heap vanished, and the land was draped with a subtly different array of vegetation, of forest and open meadows. Again the ship stepped, and again. The green began to blur, and the river flickered in alternate courses, like a wriggling snake. Faster and faster the steps came. Joshua felt momentarily dizzy as the worlds flashed past, and they snapped from sunlight to cloud to rain and back to sunlight again. But then the stepping rate passed a certain threshold, he lost the sense of individual jumps, and, beyond the reassuring solidity of the twain itself, the world smeared out. The basic shape of the landscape endured – the hills, the river valley – but now any life was only a grey-green mist, the river was a blurred band, and around the sun, a constant on all the worlds of the Long Earth, the sky became a washed-out silver-grey dome.
Joshua Valienté, drifting across countless worlds, felt at home.
After the Gap, the twain made one more surprising stop, before reaching the Low Earths: at West 3,141. The supernova wreck.
Where Sancho, the big troll, wanted off the twain.
He still had his troll-call, and he told Joshua mournfully, ‘Song bad here bad. Trolls dead, cubs dead. Forget forget.’
‘Ah. The trolls here are in trouble, and your job is to help them remember who they are . . .’
The troll looked Joshua square in the eye. Peering across an evolutionary gulf a million years deep, Joshua felt he was staring into a distorting mirror.
Sancho said, ‘Matt. Rod.’ He tapped his head. ‘Not forget. Not ever.’
And then he grabbed his troll-call, rolled like an orang-utan over to the open door, and he was gone.
Lobsang stood with Joshua at the twain’s observation window, drinking more Navy coffee. The troll’s silver survival blanket was heaped on a table.
‘Won’t be the same without him,’ Joshua said.
‘No.’
‘Air’s fresher, though.’
‘There is that. Quite a vision, that sky,’ Lobsang murmured. ‘Evil. Thunder . . .’
‘Steinman.’ Joshua stared at him, rummaging in his memory for the lyric, the name of the track. Once he’d had the whole of the man’s oeuvre at his fingertips.
Lobsang just looked at him.
Joshua knew Lobsang of old. Nothing he said was without significance. ‘Are you trying to tell me something, you animatronic asshole? Something about Agnes? Rod told me Agnes had died, just as she chose to . . . What have you done, Lobsang?’
‘I’m sorry, Joshua. I could not let her go. Not all of her. I need her too much. I took it upon myself to recreate in myself her essence and beliefs—’
‘You’re not talking about another incarnation, another robot body?’
‘Not at all. She is most definitely dead. But all of what she was I have built into myself. She’s not in any kind of – bottle – somewhere. But she is in the centre of my mind, unchangeable, always cherished.’
Joshua thought that over. ‘Well, so she is in me. But I didn’t need some kind of artificial download to achieve that.’
Lobsang looked at him poignantly. ‘Then I envy you.’
They sat in silence once more, cradling coffee.
‘So what’s next for you, Lobsang?’
Lobsang shrugged. ‘Perhaps I will move out from this string of worlds. I have ambitions to see what becomes of this “Galactic Club”. Ambitions or dreams. Maybe the longevity of an artificial being such as myself is better suited to galactic scales of space and time than the human. But I don’t intend to abandon my humanity.’
Joshua grinned. ‘And you’ll take a backup. You always have backup.’
‘You’re right, of course. And I’ll take her with me, wherever I go. We’ll be together, both of us now, in with the Oort cloud.’
Joshua could almost hear Agnes groan at that old joke.
‘I often take Agnes for a ride on her Harley, you know. I care for it as well as I can. It is in a garage – on the Datum, of course, in fact in New Mexico. You can’t step over all that iron. Stored properly as you would yourself, Joshua: off the ground, tyres over-inflated, fuel drained from the tank, everything greased up. And out there . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Out there, they are doing things properly too. Fixing things together. Empathy and cooperation – good Buddhist principles, by the way. Fixing a flawed creation so that it can nurture life and mind, for ever – even beyond the end of time, perhaps. I can sympathize with that. Once, you know, when I lived in Lhasa, I was a motorcycle repairman. In a sense that’s what I always was, what I still am. I fix things.’
‘There’s no higher vocation, Lobsang.’
‘Yes. Though I do have one more pleasant duty to fulfil before I go . . .’
Lobsang smiled – and Joshua had a sudden, sharp, warm sense of Agnes, smiling too behind that artificial face.
65
NELSON AZIKIWE WATCHED as Ken the shepherd grabbed a pregnant ewe and slung it over his shoulder.
To Nelson this was an astounding display of strength; Ken’s ewes were no lightweights. But, he remembered, Old Ken had been just as strong. Old Ken, who had first built up this pioneering farm in England West 1, just a step away from Nelson’s ancient parish of St John on the Water, on Datum Earth. Old Ken, who had been Ken until he died, had bequeathed it all to Young Ken, who became Ken on his father’s death. So it went.
Now Ken – Young Ken – walked forwards towards a hedgerow. And took another step and completely vanished.
Nelson hesitated. For him, every step was a penance, he thought with a sigh. But it had been a long time since breakfast. He fingered the Stepper switch in his pocket, clapped his handkerchief over his mouth . . .
When he’d recovered somewhat, the first thing he noticed, in this England two steps away from home, were the trees of the remnant forest beyond the dry-stone wall around Ken’s newly cleared field. Big trees, old trees, giants.
‘I remember,’ Nelson said, wheezing a little.
‘Umm,’ said Ken.
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‘Your father told me all about it, when they first started coming over after Step Day. The work of clearing the forest. Cutting down the big trees, and setting loose the animals to chomp any optimistic saplings, and so forth.’
‘Kind of stuff my dad would know, that, Rev.’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose he would. You know, Ken, I always loved my time here in the parish.’
‘Umm,’ said Ken.
‘But there was always a tension in me, you see. Between the scientist and the cleric. Darwin would have understood, I think.’
‘What, Robert and Ann Darwin as runs the Star?’
‘No, no . . . A distant ancestor of Robert’s, perhaps. A tension that drew me away from here. So far away, for such a long time. And yet now—’
‘And yet now you’ve come home,’ said a new voice.
Nelson turned stiffly. A man stood by the dry-stone wall, tall, slim, very still, head shaven. He’d evidently stepped in; Nelson hadn’t heard his approach. But Nelson recognized him immediately.
‘Lobsang!’
It was Ken who responded first. ‘I read about you.’ He walked briskly over to Lobsang and shook his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Lobsang said.
‘Good firm handshake,’ Ken said approvingly. He turned to Nelson with a grin. ‘Is he alive, would you say, Rev?’
Nelson considered. ‘He thinks he’s alive, and that’s good enough for me.’
Lobsang nodded. ‘Wait here.’
He vanished.
And returned, holding the hand of a rather bewildered-looking little boy, heavily bundled up for warmth, even though the late autumn day was mild. Then the boy grinned, pulled away from Lobsang and ran forward. ‘Granddad!’
Nelson bent stiffly, holding out his arms. ‘Troy! Oh, my word . . .’
Lobsang said, ‘I told you I’d bring him home.’
‘I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.’
Lobsang smiled. ‘Just a walk in the park.’
66
THE PRAIRIE WAS flat, green, rich, with scattered stands of oaks. The sky above was blue as generally advertised. On the horizon there was movement, like the shadow of a cloud: a vast herd of animals on the move.
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