The Long Earth

35

SO HERE WAS Officer Monica Jansson, fifteen years after Step Day, her life distorted by the Long Earth phenomenon as much as anybody’s had been, trying to make sense of it all as one way or another the world transformed itself around her own ageing carcass — and through it all the police tried to keep the peace. This evening she stared gloomily at a screen which showed Brian Cowley, increasingly notorious figurehead of a poisonous movement called Humanity First, spewing out his manipulative bile, folksy homespun anecdotes hiding some smart, but very divisive and dangerous, politics. Impulsively she turned the sound off. Still the hatred seeped like sweat out of the guy’s face.

But then the whole phenomenon of the Long Earth had been laced with hatred and violence from the start.

Only two days after Step Day itself, terrorists had hit both the Pentagon and the British Houses of Parliament. It could have been worse. The boy who stepped into the Pentagon hadn’t got his distances and angles right, and his makeshift bomb was triggered in a corridor, the only fatality being its creator. The British terrorist had clearly paid more attention in geometry class, and appeared slap (and instantly) bang in the chamber of the House of Commons — but had failed to finish his homework, so that the last thing he ever saw was five Members of Parliament debating a rather insignificant bill about herring fishing. Had he thought to make his appearance in the Commons bar, he would have reaped a greater harvest of souls.

Nevertheless, both of the explosions echoed around the world, and authority panicked. There was concern among private individuals too; it didn’t take a genius to figure out that, suddenly, anybody could step into your house while you slept. And where there is panic, profit isn’t far behind. Instantly anti-stepper devices were being developed in workshops and private homes everywhere, some of them clever, many of the worst stupid — and quite a few deadly, more often than not to their owner rather than any would-be thief. Attempts to criss-cross the empty spaces of an unoccupied room with anti-stepping hazards ended up trapping children’s fingers and maiming pets. The most effective deterrent, as people soon worked out, was simply to cram a room with furniture, Victorian-style, to leave no room for steppers.

In truth, the threat of wholesale burglaries-by-stepping was more about urban fears than reality. Oh, a lot of people jumped worlds to avoid debts, obligations or revenge, and there were plenty of agents who would follow them — and there would always be a few who stole and raped and killed their way across the worlds, until somebody shot them. But in general crime was low, per capita, out in the Long Earth, when the social pressures that sparked so much crime and disorder on the Datum were largely absent.

Of course governments weren’t too happy with their tax-payers stepping out of reach. But only Iran, Burma and the United Kingdom had ever actually tried to ban stepping. Initially most governments in the free world adopted some equivalent of the US aegis plan, demanding sovereignty of their country’s footprint down all the endless worlds. The French, for example, declared that all the French footprints were available for colonization by anybody who wanted to be French, and was prepared to accept a carefully put together document which outlined what being French meant. It was a brave idea, slightly let down by the fact that despite a nationwide debate it appeared that no two Frenchmen could agree exactly on what being French did mean. Although another school of thought held that arguing about what made you French was part of what made you French. In practice, though, whatever regime was imposed, it didn’t take you long to step out to a place where the government had no say, simply because the government wasn’t there, benevolent or not.

And the people? They just stepped, here, there and everywhere, heading not so much to where they wanted to be, as, quite often, from where they emphatically didn’t want to be any more. Inevitably many went out unprepared and without forethought, and many suffered as a consequence. But gradually people absorbed the lessons learned by folk like the Amish long ago, that what you needed was other people, and preparation.

Fifteen years on, there were successful communities thriving far out across the empty landscapes of the Long Earth. The emigration push was thought to be starting to decline, but it was estimated that fully a fifth of Earth’s population had walked away to find a new world — a demographic dislocation comparable to a world war, it was said, or a massive pandemic.

But it was still early days, in Jansson’s opinion. In a way, mankind was only slowly beginning to adjust to the idea of infinite plenty. For without scarcity, of land or resources, entirely new ways of living became available. On television the other night Jansson had watched a theoretical anthropologist work her way through a thought experiment. ‘Consider this. If the Long Earth really is effectively endless, as it is beginning to look, then all mankind could afford to live for ever in hunter-gatherer societies, fishing, digging clams, and simply moving right along whenever you run out of clams, or if you just feel like it. Without agriculture Earth could support perhaps a million people in such a way. There are ten billion of us, we need ten thousand Earths — but, suddenly, we have them, and more. We have no need of agriculture, to sustain our mighty numbers. Do we have need of cities, then? Of literacy and numeracy, even?’

But as this vast perturbation of the destiny of mankind continued, it was becoming increasingly clear that there were an awful lot of folks for whom the ambiguous treasures of the Long Earth were for ever out of reach, and they were increasingly unhappy about it.

And that, fifteen years after Step Day, as she watched Brian Cowley perform with gathering dismay, was what increasingly concerned Monica Jansson.