The Long Earth

12

A WEEK AFTER HIS interview at transEarth Sister Agnes took Joshua to Dane County Regional Airport on the back of her Harley, a rare honour. He would always remember her saying as they arrived that God must have wanted him to catch that plane, because every stop light they encountered turned to green just before she needed to slow. (In so far as Sister Agnes ever did slow.) Joshua, however, suspected that the subroutines of Lobsang were responsible for this, rather than the hand of God.

Joshua had walked on countless Earths, but he had never actually flown before. Sister Agnes knew the routine, and she marched him to the check-in desk. Once the clerk had entered his booking reference he went very quiet, and picked up the phone, and Joshua began to realize what it meant to have a friend in Lobsang, as he was whisked away from the lines of passengers and led along corridors with the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

He was brought to a room with a bar the length of the burger counter in Disney World. Impressive though this was, Joshua didn’t often drink, and would actually have preferred a burger. When he mentioned this jokily to the young man who was nervously dancing attendance on him, he received, after only minutes, a perfect burger so stuffed with trimmings that the patty could have fallen out and not been missed. Joshua was still digesting this when the young man reappeared and led him to the plane.

His seat was right behind the flight deck, and discreetly hidden from the other travellers by a velvet curtain. No one had asked to see his passport, which he didn’t have in any case. No one bothered to check whether he was carrying explosives in his shoes. And nobody, once he was on the flight, spoke to him. He watched a news summary in peace.

At Chicago O’Hare he was taken to another plane some way from the main terminal, a surprisingly small craft. Within, what wasn’t leather-upholstered was carpeted, and what wasn’t leather-upholstered or carpeted seemed to consist of the dazzling teeth of a young woman who, as he sat down, provided him with a Coke and a telephone. He tucked his small personal pack under the seat before him, where he could see it. Then he turned on the phone.

Lobsang called immediately. ‘Good to have you on board, Joshua! How are you enjoying the journey so far? The plane is all yours today. You will find a master bedroom behind you which I’m told is exceedingly comfortable, and don’t hesitate to take advantage of the shower room.’

‘It’s going to be a long journey, is it?’

‘I’ll be meeting you in Siberia, Joshua. A Black Corporation skunk works. You know what that means?’

‘A facility that’s off the radar.’ Where, he wondered, they were building what?

‘Right. Oh, didn’t I mention Siberia?’

There was a sound of engines starting.

‘You’ve a human pilot, incidentally. People seem to like a warm uniformed body at the controls. But don’t be alarmed. In a real sense I am the controls.’

Joshua sat back in the luxurious seat and put his thoughts in order. It occurred to him that Lobsang was full of himself, as the Sisters would have said. But maybe he had a lot of himself to be full of. Here was Joshua cocooned in Lobsang, in a sense. Joshua wasn’t big on computers, and the marvellously interconnected electronic civilization of which they were part. Out in the stepwise worlds you never got a cellphone signal, after all, so the only thing that counted was you, and what you knew, and what you could do. With his prized knife of hardened glass he could keep himself alive, no matter what was thrown at him. He kind of liked that. Maybe there was going to be some tension with Lobsang over that — or with however much of Lobsang was ported along for the ride.

The plane took off, making about as much noise as would Sister Agnes’s sewing machine in an adjacent room. During the flight Joshua watched the first episode of Star Wars, sipping gin and tonic, wallowing in boyhood nostalgia. Then he took a shower — he didn’t need one but just for the hell of it — and tried the enormous bed, whereupon the young lady followed him in and asked him a couple of times if there was anything else he wanted, and seemed disappointed when he only asked for a glass of warm milk.

Some time later he awoke to find the attendant trying to strap him in. He pushed her away; he hated being restrained. She remonstrated with the sugar-coated steeliness bequeathed by her training, until a phone chimed. Then: ‘I do apologize, sir. It would appear that the safety rules have been temporarily suspended.’

He had expected Siberia to be flat, windy, cold. But this was summer, and the plane descended towards a landscape where gentle hills were coated with dark shoots of grass, and wildflowers and butterflies were splashes of colour, red, yellow and blue. Siberia was unexpectedly beautiful.

The jet did not so much touch down as kiss the tarmac.

The phone rang. ‘Welcome to No Such Place, Joshua. I do hope you’ll fly with No Such Airlines in the future. You will find thermal underwear and appropriate outdoor clothing in the wardrobe just inside the door.’

Joshua refused, with a red face, the attendant’s suggestion that she should help him on with the thermal underwear. However, he did accept the offer of her assistance with the bulky outer clothing, which he thought made him look like the Pillsbury Doughboy, but was surprisingly light.

He climbed down from the plane to join a group of men dressed as he was. Joshua immediately began to sweat in the mild air. One man grinned, called ‘West!’ to Joshua in a distinctly Bostonian accent, pressed a switch on the box strapped to his belt, and vanished. A moment later his companions began to follow.

Joshua stepped West, and arrived in an almost identical landscape — save that he emerged into a blizzard and realized why he needed the winter gear. There was a small shack nearby, with the Bostonian beckoning to him from a half-open door. It looked like a halfway house, a travellers’ rest stop of the kind becoming common in the stepwise worlds. But it was utilitarian, just a place out of the wind where a man could upchuck in something like comfort before stepping on.

The Bostonian, looking queasy, shut the door behind Joshua. ‘You really are him, aren’t you? Feeling fine, are you? I don’t suffer from it too bad myself, but …’ He waved a hand.

Joshua looked towards the back of the shack where two men were lying face down over the edge of narrow beds, each with a bucket under his face; the smell told it all.

‘Look, if you really feel OK, go on ahead. You’re the VIP here. You don’t have to wait for us. You need to take three more steps West. There are rest stations in each one — but I guess you won’t need them… Are you for real? I mean, how do you do it?’

Joshua shrugged again. ‘Don’t know. Kind of a knack, I guess.’

The Bostonian opened the door. ‘Hey, before you go, we like to say here: you’re stepping, wait for it, on the steppe!’ When Joshua tried but failed to summon up a laugh the Bostonian said apologetically, ‘You can imagine we don’t get too many visitors here. Best of luck, fella.’

The three further steps brought him out into rain. There was another shack near by, and another pair of workers, one of them a woman, who shook him by the hand. ‘Good to see you, sir.’ Her accent was richly Russian. ‘Do you like our weather? Siberia’s two degrees warmer in this world, and nobody knows why. I must wait a while for the rest of the gang, but you can just follow the yellow brick road.’ She pointed to a line of orange markers on sticks. ‘It’s a short walk to the construction site.’

‘Construction? Construction of what?’

‘Believe me, you won’t miss it.’

He didn’t, because he couldn’t. Acres of pine woodland had been cleared, and hovering over a circle of denuded land was what looked at first glance like a floating building. Floating, yes; through the rain he made out tethering wires. It was vast, an aerial whale. The partially inflated body was a bag of some toughened fibre plastered with transEarth logos, over a gondola like an Art Deco fantasy, several decks deep, all polished wood and portholes and plate glass.

An airship!

As he stared, yet another worker hurried towards him flourishing a phone. ‘You are Joshua?’ This man’s accent was European, Belgian perhaps. ‘Pleased to meet you, very pleased! Follow me. Can I help you with your bag?’

Joshua pulled his pack away so quickly that it would have burned the man’s hand.

The worker stepped back. ‘Sorry, sorry. By all means keep your bag; security is not an issue, not for you. Come with me.’

Joshua followed him across the soaking ground and under the formless envelope. The gondola, fashioned like a wooden ship’s hull, appeared to be anchored to a metal gantry, presumably constructed of locally manufactured steel, at the bottom of which was a skeleton elevator cage. Cautiously, his guide climbed into the open cage and, when Joshua had joined him, pressed a button.

It was a short ride up to the underside of the gondola, and through a hatch and out of the rain. Joshua found himself in a small compartment, suffused by a rich smell of polished wood. There were windows, or possibly portholes, but right now they showed nothing but the weather.

‘Wish I was leaving with you, young man,’ said the worker cheerfully. ‘Going wherever this thing is going — none of us need to know, of course. If you get a chance, look around the engineering. Non-ferrous, of course, aluminium airframe… Well. We’re all proud of her. Bon voyage, enjoy the journey!’ He stepped back into the elevator, and as it descended out of sight a plate slid across to seal the polished floor.

The voice of Lobsang sounded in the air. ‘Once again, welcome aboard, Joshua. Such dreadful weather, isn’t it? Never mind, I will soon have us above it or, should I say, away from it.’

There was a jolt and the floor rocked. ‘We’ve detached from the gantry. Are we airborne already?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have been brought here if we weren’t ready to go. Below us they will be breaking camp already, and then this site will suffer a minor version of the Tunguska event.’

‘Security, I take it.’

‘Of course. As for the workers, they are a mixed lot: Russians, Americans, Europeans, Chinese. None of them the kind of people who like to talk to the authorities. Clever folk who have worked for many masters, so very useful, and so commendably forgetful.’

‘Who supplied the plane?’

‘Ah. Did you enjoy your ride in the Lear? It is the property of a holding company who rent it out occasionally to a certain rock star, who tonight is fretting that the jet is unavailable because of an overhaul. But she will soon be distracted by learning that her latest album is two places higher in the charts than it was last night. The reach of Lobsang is great. Now that we are under way …’

An inner door opened smoothly, revealing a corridor of panelled wood and subtle lamps, leading to a blue door at the end.

‘Welcome to the Mark Twain. Please make yourself at home. You will find on this corridor six staterooms, all identical; choose whichever one you like. You can shed your cold-weather gear. Notice also the blue door. That leads to a laboratory, workshop and fabrication plant, among other things. You will find a similar door on each deck. I would prefer if you do not go beyond unless invited. Any questions?’

Joshua changed in the room he’d chosen at random, and then explored the Mark Twain.

The tremendous envelope, rippling under partial pressurization, was evidently coated on the outside with solar-cell film for power, and there were propulsion units, big fragile-looking fans that could swivel and tilt. The gondola was as luxurious within as it had looked from the outside. There were several decks, with staterooms, a wheelhouse, an observation deck, and a saloon deck with a galley as well equipped as the kitchen of a high-class restaurant, and a spacious hall that could serve as a restaurant for fifty — or, incredibly, as a cinema. And on every deck there was that blue door, closed and locked.

As he thought it over, Joshua began to see the point of stepping in an airship — as long as you could get the thing to step in the first place, and how you’d do that he didn’t yet understand. One problem with stepping rapidly was obstacles. He’d discovered on his very first night of exploration of the Long Earth that some obstacles simply couldn’t be walked around, such as the ice cap, sometimes miles high, that typically blanketed much of North America during an Ice Age. The airship was an attempt to get around that: it would ride above such inconveniences as glaciers or floods, and a much smoother journey ought to be possible.

He asked the air, ‘But did it have to be quite so grand, Lobsang?’

‘Why not be grand? We can’t hide, after all. I want my exploratory vessel to be like the Chinese treasure ships which struck awe into the natives of India and Arabia in the fifteenth century.’

‘You’ll strike awe, all right. And no iron in this thing, I take it?’

‘I’m afraid not. The impermeability of the reality barrier to iron remains a mystery even to Black Corporation scientists. I get plenty of theorizing, but few practical results.’

‘You know, when you talked about the journey, I thought I’d be carrying you, somehow.’

‘Oh, no. I am wired into the airship’s systems. The whole ship will be my body, in a sense. Joshua, I will be carrying you.’

‘Only sentient creatures can step—’

‘Yes. And I, like you, am sentient!’

And Joshua understood. The airship was Lobsang, or at least his body; when Lobsang stepped, the airship carcass came with him, just as Joshua ‘carried’ over his body, his clothes, whenever he stepped. And that was how an airship could step.

Lobsang was smug and boastful. ‘Of course this would not work were I not sentient. This is further proof of my claims of personhood, isn’t it? I’ve already trialled the technology — well, you know that, I traced your earlier expedition as I told you. All rather thrilling, isn’t it?’

Joshua reached the base of the gondola and entered the observation deck he’d spotted before, a blister of reinforced glass giving spectacular views of this Low Earth’s Siberia. The construction site sprawled below, with ancillary workings cut into the forest, supply dumps, dormitories, an airstrip.

Joshua, thinking it over, began to realize just what an achievement Lobsang had pulled off here — if the airship stepped as advertised. Nobody before had found a way to make a vehicle capable of stepping between the worlds the way a human could, and that was throttling the expansion of any kind of trade across the Long Earth. In parts of the Near East, and even in Texas, they had human chains carrying over oil by the bucket-load. If Lobsang really had cracked this, essentially by becoming the vessel himself — well, he was like a modern rail pioneer; he was going to change the world, all the worlds. No wonder security was so tight. If it worked. This was all experimental, evidently. And Joshua would be swimming across Long Earth in the belly of a silvery whale. ‘You seriously expect me to risk my life in this thing?’

‘More than that. If “this thing” fails I expect you to bring me home.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘Quite possibly. But we have a contract.’

A blue door slid open, and, to Joshua’s blank astonishment, Lobsang showed himself in person — or rather, in ambulatory unit. ‘Welcome again! I thought I would dress for the occasion of our maiden voyage.’ The automaton was male, slim and athletic, with movie star looks and a wig of thick black hair, and it wore a black lounge suit. It looked like a waxwork of James Bond, and when it moved, and worse when it smiled, it did nothing to dispel the artifice.

Joshua stared, struggling not to laugh.

‘Joshua?’

‘Sorry! Pleased to meet you in person …’

The deck vibrated as engines bit. Joshua felt oddly thrilled at the prospect of the voyage in a small-boy kind of way. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Lobsang? I guess anything is possible if you go far enough. What about dragons?’

‘I would suggest we might expect to find anything that could possibly exist in the conditions found on this planet, within the constraints of the laws of physics, and bearing in mind that the planet has not always been so peaceful as it is now. All creatures on Earth have been hammered on the anvil of its gravity, for example, which influences size and morphology. So I am sceptical about finding armoured reptiles who can fly and spout flames.’

‘Sounds a little drab.’

‘However, I would not be human if I did not acknowledge one important factor, which is that I might be totally wrong. And that would be very exciting.’

‘Well, we’ll find out — if this thing actually steps.’

Lobsang’s synthetic face folded into a smile. ‘Actually we’ve been stepping for the last minute or so.’

Joshua turned to a window and saw that it was true. The construction site had cleared away; they must have passed out of the sheaf of known worlds in the first few steps — although that word ‘known’ was something of a joke. Even the stepwise worlds right next to the Datum had barely been explored; humans were colonizing the Long Earth in thin lines stretched across the worlds. Anything could be living out back in the woods… And he, evidently, was going deeper into those woods than anybody before him.

‘How fast will this thing go?’

‘You’ll be pleasantly surprised, Joshua.’

‘You’re going to change the world with this technology, Lobsang.’

‘Oh, I know that. Up to now the Long Earth has been opened up on foot. It’s been medieval. No, worse than that, we haven’t even been able to use horses. Stone Age! But of course, even on foot humans have been moving out since Step Day. Dreaming of a new frontier, of the riches of the new worlds …’