The Long War

54

UNDER THE PROW of the airship Shillelagh as it ploughed West, the worlds ticked by, one every second, with hypnotic regularity. Bill paused the journey at recognized Jokers: at the anomalous worlds, flaws in the fabric of the Long Earth, where on a conventional journey travellers would hurry past, unseeing, eyes averted.

Even in the relatively generous, relatively settled worlds of the Corn Belt, in which could be found Reboot, Helen’s family’s home, there were Jokers. Early in the journey Bill stopped briefly at Earth West 141,759, where the multi-channel radio receiver he kept running constantly blared out warnings in a multitude of languages and code formats. Quarantine, Joshua gathered through blistered eardrums: because it was the source of some particularly virulent pathogen, this whole world was under a quarantine administered by the UN, along with staff from the US’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center. Any travellers should keep away from designated areas; otherwise they would be arrested, any materials impounded and destroyed, and they would be kept in confinement until decontamination procedures had been completed . . . It was a relief to move on and leave it behind.

‘Are they serious, Bill? Can you really quarantine a whole Earth?’

‘You can try. But how serious they are is another question. We have come across a few nasty viruses out in the Long Earth. Populations of birds and pigs, or birdy creatures and piggy creatures, are always reservoirs of bugs likely to be able to cross over and infect humanity, just as it’s always been on the Datum. And you’d expect humans to have no immunity to such a disease coming from a stepwise world. The greatest threat is to the Datum and the Low Earths, of course, with their dense populations and travel networks. But Cowley and his gang of eejits use fears like this to whip up hostility to combers and trolls, like each one of us is a Typhoid Mary. You know, on worlds like this, they get doctors to volunteer to go in there and support trapped travellers, only to have their Stepper boxes confiscated, and they find they’re not allowed out again . . .’

On they swept, with regular stuttering pauses.

Jokers weren’t a lot of fun. Many were scenes of devastation one way or another: usually a lifeless ground under a sky that might be either obscured by ash or dust, or else glaring and empty, ozone-free, cloudless, a fierce blue. Bill had Just-So back-stories for many of these shattered worlds, pieced together from travellers’ tales, comber legends, and occasionally some actual science field work.

The most common cause of such collapses, Joshua started to learn, was an asteroid impact. On long enough timescales, it was as if Earth drifted around inside a cosmic pinball machine. Bill lingered briefly at one heavily damaged world, West 191,248. The impact, only a couple of years back in this case, in central Asia, had been far from here; life close to ground zero was devastated, but the world as a whole was suffering under an asteroid winter.

But there were other types of calamity waiting to pounce. Earth West 485,671: a world locked in an Ice Age that had turned into a runaway glaciation, perhaps caused by the solar system drifting through a dense interstellar cloud that blocked the sun’s light. Here the oceans were frozen down to the equator; the ice-shrouded landscapes glared brilliant white in sunlight that poured down from a blue sky empty of clouds, save for wisps that Bill said were probably carbon dioxide snow crystals. But the depths of the ocean, warmed by the Earth’s inner heat, would stay liquid, and life would survive in dark underwater refuges until the volcanoes warmed the world again.

Earth West 831,264: here Joshua looked down on a rust-coloured, Mars-like landscape evidently bare of life, save for occasional streaks of purple slime. The air itself was stained red by the dust raised by incessant windstorms.

‘What the hell happened here?’

‘A gamma-ray burster. Well, that’s our best guess. Probably caused by a kind of massive supernova, the collapse of a supermassive star into a black hole. Could have happened anywhere within thousands of light years. A storm of gamma rays would have stripped away the ozone layers and then fried the surface life.’

‘Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

‘What’s that, Josh?’

‘Just a stray memory of Sister Georgina.’

‘In the long term life always bounces back one way or another. But there’s always the chance,’ Bill said with gruesome relish, ‘that we might step over on to some world just at the moment the big rock falls, or whatever. What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird, is it a plane – d’oh!’

Joshua, oppressed by these charnel-house worlds, didn’t feel much like laughing. ‘We’re still searching for Sally, right?’

‘We’re doing our best,’ Bill said. ‘That kobold did say he believed the trolls were hiding out in some Joker or other. The bad news is there are a lot of Jokers. The good news is there are a lot of combers out in those Jokers already.’

‘Hiding from the man. Just like Sally.’

‘That’s the idea. Before we set off I sent word on ahead. I’m still hoping that if she’s spotted, somebody will put the word out. There are a lot of radio hams out here; it’s a good way to keep in touch across an undeveloped world. We’d hear them as we pass through. Of course some worlds are so badly beat up there is no ionosphere, and that theory breaks down.

‘You really can’t plan too definitely when it comes to combers. It’s the nature of the beast. Combers! Some call them ridge runners or jackpine savages or mountain men, or hoboes or okies. In Oz they call ’em bushwhackers, the Brits say travellers. Once, in some parts, they were called wanderers. And you were the Wanderer, back then. Though not any more, buddy, you betrayed your own legend when you settled down to bake bread with the missus.’

That irritated Joshua. He had never wanted a legend of any kind. All he had ever wanted was to live his own life, on his own terms. Was he supposed to pander to some fan base? He felt like poking back at Bill, but he resisted the temptation. ‘I get the idea. I appreciate you’re doing your best.’

‘I’m doing all there is to do. Unless you can figure out where she’s gone after all . . . Anyhow, enough gabbing, I’m out of me head with the thirst up here. You want to crack a tube? Bring up another six-pack and I’ll tell you the stories of a few more Jokers. Unless you want to watch a fillum. Just like back in the day with yer man Lobsang! Ah, go on, let’s see a fillum . . .’

Joshua was mostly sceptical about Bill’s Joker stories.

Such as what Bill told him of a Joker he called the Cueball. Joshua had actually glimpsed this one; they’d discovered it on his first journey out with Lobsang, nestling in the relatively domesticated Corn Belt. A world like a pool ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep blue sky.

‘I know a fella who knew a fella—’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Who camped out on the Cueball for a bet. Just for a night. All alone. As you would. In the nip too, that was part of the bet.’

‘Sure.’

‘In the morning he woke up with a hangover from hell. Drinking alone, never wise. Now this fella was a natural stepper. So he got his stuff together in a blind daze, and stepped, but he says he sort of stumbled as he stepped.’

‘Stumbled?’

‘He didn’t feel as if he’d stepped the right way.’

‘What? How’s that possible? What do you mean?’

‘Well, we step East, or we step West, don’t we? You have the soft places, the short cuts, if you can find them, but that’s pretty much it. Anyhow this fella felt like he’d stepped a different way. Perpendicular. Like he’d stepped North.’

‘And?’

‘And he emerged on to some kind of other world. It was night, not day. No stars in the clear sky. No stars, sort of. Instead . . .’

‘Your storytelling style really grates sometimes, Bill.’

Bill grinned. ‘But I’ve got ye hooked, haven’t I?’

‘Get on with it. What did he see?’

‘He saw all the stars. All of them. He saw the whole fecking Galaxy, man, the Milky Way. From outside . . . Still in the nip he was, too.’

That was the trouble with combers, Joshua was concluding. They were just expert bullshitters. Maybe they spent too much time alone.

And the search for the trolls, Jansson and Sally went on and on . . .

Sally. Once, when they were tethered for the night at some equable world, he thought he smelled her. As if she had come and gone while he slept. In the light he searched the gondola, and the area on the ground around the twain, but found no sign of her presence. Just a dream, he thought. He resolved never to tell Helen about it.