The Long Earth

44

SILENCE REIGNED ON the observation deck. Joshua was alone. Once back on board, Lobsang had immediately retreated through the blue door, and Sally to her stateroom.

Suddenly the Mark Twain began stepping like a tap dancer on speed. Joshua peered out. Outside, skies strobed by, landscapes morphed, rivers writhed like snakes, and Joker worlds popped like flashbulbs. On the ship, everything that could creak was creaking like an ancient tea clipper going around Cape Horn, and the stepping itself was a juddering deep inside Joshua, a hailstorm. And outside, Joshua estimated, they were crossing many worlds with every second.

Sally came on deck spitting feathers. ‘What the hell does he think he’s doing?’

Joshua had no answer. But again he fretted about Lobsang’s strange instability and impulsiveness.

Lobsang’s ambulant unit glided through the blue door. ‘My friends, I am distraught if I have alarmed you. I am now eager to progress our mission. I told you I have learned a great deal from the trolls.’

‘You know what’s disturbing them,’ said Sally.

‘I do know more, at least. In short, the trolls, and probably the elves and other humanoid types too, are indeed fleeing from something, but not something physical — it is something that gets into their heads, so to speak. And this confirms what we learned from the Happy Landings trolls.

‘The feeling is like a plague of pain — like migraine attacks — sweeping over the worlds from West to East. There have been suicides. Creatures throwing themselves off cliffs rather than suffer the anguish of it.’

Joshua and Sally looked at one another.

Sally said, ‘A migraine monster? What is this, Star Trek?’

Lobsang looked puzzled. ‘Do you refer to the original series, or—’

‘This really is plain crazy. Joshua, are there any manual controls on this airship?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that Lobsang has very acute hearing.’

‘Joshua is correct in that respect, Sally…’

‘Do the trolls understand what’s coming? Have any of them seen anything?’

‘So far as I can tell, no. But they imagine it as enormous, physically. To them it is a mix of physical and abstract. Like an approaching forest fire, maybe. A wall of pain.’

The complaints from the fabric of the Mark Twain were beginning to bother Joshua. He had no idea what maximum safe stepping speed the ship was capable of. And to plummet at such a rate into entire unknown worlds, and towards an unknown danger, seemed unwise to him to say the least. The earthometers, he saw, were whirling up ever closer to the two million mark.

But Lobsang was talking and talking, apparently oblivious to such concerns. ‘This is not the time to share all of my thinking with the two of you. Suffice it to say that it is clear we are dealing with some kind of genuine psychic phenomenon.

‘Here is the hypothesis. Humans broadcast their humanity in some way. We sense one another. But we have long evolved to live on a planet absolutely drenched with human thoughts. We don’t even notice it.’

‘Not until it’s gone,’ Joshua said.

Sally looked at him, curious.

‘I suggest that once upon a time some of these creatures, elves and trolls and perhaps other variants, did occasionally step into the Datum, and perhaps occasionally hung around for a spell. Thus giving rise to volumes of myth. But this was in the days of comparatively low human population. Now the planet is knee deep in humans, and for creatures that spend most of their time in the mindless calm of woodlands and prairies, it must be as if all the world’s teenage parties are being thrown at once. So these days they stay away from the Datum. However, the stepping species migrating from the West are fleeing from something that is irrevocably pushing them back towards the Datum. They are caught between the hammer and the anvil. And sometimes they panic. Joshua and I have seen what happens when they panic — even trolls may be capable of harm when roused, and remember the Church of the Cosmic Confidence Trick, Joshua?’

Joshua glanced at Sally. He would have expected nothing but scepticism from her. But, amazingly, she looked thoughtful. He prompted, ‘What are you thinking, Sally?’

‘That it’s all far-fetched. And yet… I mean, I’m like you, I’ll go into a city for a purpose, but while I’m in one I’m nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I can’t wait to get out, it pushes me out, back out into the empty worlds. Where I feel more comfortable.’

‘But you don’t run, right? And you don’t notice it the rest of the time. The way fish don’t notice water.’

Surprisingly, Sally smiled. ‘That’s very Zen. Almost Lobsang.’ She looked at him carefully. ‘And what about you?’

She knows, he thought. She knows all about me. And yet still he hesitated before answering.

Then he spoke to them, on this rushing airship, more freely than he ever had to anybody, even to Sister Agnes or Officer Jansson, about his own inner sensations.

He told them about the peculiar pressure in his head he felt every time he went back to the Datum. A reluctance, that eventually turned into a physical revulsion. ‘It’s something in my head. It’s like, you know how as a kid if you have to go to some party where everybody else is going to fit in, except you? Like you physically can’t take another step, like some magnetic field is pushing you away.’

Sally shrugged. ‘I never went to many parties.’

‘And you’re antisocial, Joshua,’ Lobsang said. ‘I think we knew that. What’s your point?’

‘Here’s the thing. Whatever it means, whatever causes this, I’ve been feeling something like it here. On the airship. A pressure, making it harder to go on.’ He closed his eyes. ‘And it’s getting worse, the further West we go. I feel it now. Like a repulsion, deep inside. I can stand it when we stay still, but it’s harder to bear when we travel, and it worsens.’

Lobsang asked, ‘Something out in the far West, pushing you away?’

‘Yes.’

Sally asked angrily, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? You let me blab about the soft places, about my family’s secrets. I opened up to you,’ she said almost with a snarl. ‘And all the time you were hiding this?’

He just looked at her. He hadn’t told her because you kept your weaknesses to yourself, in the Home, and in most places he’d had to survive in since then. ‘I’m telling you now.’

She backed down with an effort. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I believe you. So this is all real. I admit it now. I am officially scared.’

Lobsang sounded excited. ‘Now can you see why I am so eager to bring on this encounter? We are pursuing a mystery, Joshua, Sally! A mystery from the ends of the Long Earth!’

Joshua ignored him and kept his attention on Sally. ‘We’re both scared. But we’re going to face this, right? You won’t run away. Animals flee. The trolls have to flee. We keep on going, trying to find out what scares us, and deal with it. That’s what humans do.’

‘Yeah. Until it kills us.’

‘There is that.’ He stood up. ‘Shall I get some coffee?’

Later, Joshua realized he should have been paying attention, especially in the final few minutes. The last couple of hundred worlds, worlds where the calm green below was broken up by craters punched like great footprints into the ground. Should have stayed alert, despite the gathering pressure in his head. Should have raised the alarm.

Should have halted the journey, long before the airship fell into the Gap.