Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

If there was anyone he could trust, it was Sister Agnes. And with her, if he’d been away too long, his usual taciturn reserve sometimes turned into a flood of words, like a dam breaking, and everything that needed saying got said, all in a rush.

So he’d told her about what it was like to have to keep on saving the lost and the silly and the unpleasant, and the way they stared, and the way they said, ‘You are him, aren’t you? The kid who can step without having to spend fifteen minutes feeling like dog shit.’ He never knew how they knew, but the news got out somehow, for all Officer Jansson’s assurances. And that made him different, and being different made him a Problem. Which was a bad thing, and you couldn’t forget that, even here in Sister Agnes’s study. Because just above those two pictures of the Sacred Heart and Meat Loaf, there was a little statue of a man who’d been nailed to a cross because He’d been a Problem.

She had said that it seemed to her that he might be trapped in a vocation, not unlike her own. She knew how difficult it was to make people understand what they didn’t want to understand, for instance when she insisted that ‘For Crying Out Loud’ was one of the holiest songs that had ever been recorded. She told him to follow his heart, and also to come and go whenever he liked, because the Home was his home.

And she said that he could trust Officer Jansson, a good policewoman and a good Steinman fan (inserting ‘Steinman fan’ into the conversation at the point where another nun might have used the word ‘Catholic’), who had been to see Sister Agnes, and had asked if she could meet Joshua, and ask for his help.

MEANWHILE, SIX MONTHS after Step Day, Monica Jansson’s own career path had taken a decisive knight’s-move sideways.

She had stood outside the Madison PD South District building, braced, slid the switch on her Stepper, and received the usual punch in the gut, as the station vanished to be replaced by tall trees, green shade. In a clearing cut into this scrap of primeval forest was a small wooden shack with the MPD crest on the door, and a low bench outside, and a Stars and Stripes hanging from a stripped sapling. Jansson sat on the bench, folded over, nursing the nausea. The bench was put here precisely to allow you to recover from the stepping before you had to face your fellow officers.

Since Step Day, things had moved on quickly. The techs had come up with a police-issue Stepper, robust components in a sleek black plastic case, resistant even to a close-range gunshot. Of course, as with all Steppers — just as she’d found at the start with Linsay’s prototype — to make it work for you, you had to finish the assembly of the working components yourself. It was a nice piece of kit, although you had to ignore the jokes about the potatoes needed to run it. ‘Do you want fries with that, Officer?’ Ha ha.

But nobody had been able to do anything about the nausea that incapacitated most people for ten or fifteen minutes after a step. There was a drug that was supposed to help, but Jansson always tried to avoid becoming dependent on drugs, and besides it turned your piss blue.

When the dizziness and nausea started to subside, she stood up. The day, in Madison West 1 anyhow, was still and cold, sunless but rainless. This stepwise world was still much as it had been the first time she’d stepped here, from out of the ruin of Willis Linsay’s house: the rustle of leaves, the clean air, the birdsong. But it was changing, bit by bit, as clearings were nibbled into the forest and the prairie flowers were cut back: householders ‘extending’ their properties, entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to exploit a world of high-quality lumber and exotic wildlife, official presences like the MPD establishing a foothold in world-next-door annexes to their principal buildings. Already, it was said, there was smoky smog on very still days. Jansson wondered how long it would be before she would see airplane contrails in that empty sky.

She wondered where Joshua Valienté was, right now. Joshua, her own guilty secret.

She was almost late for her appointment with Clichy.

Inside the shack, the smell of long-brewed coffee was strong.

There were two officers here, Lieutenant Clichy behind his desk staring into a laptop — customized and non-ferrous — and a junior patrol officer called Mike Christopher who was painstakingly handwriting some kind of report in a big ledger of lined yellow paper. Still largely without electronic support, all over the country cops were having to learn to write legibly again, or as legibly as they ever had.

Clichy waved at her, without taking his eyes from the laptop. ‘Coffee, seat.’

She fetched a mug of coffee so thick she thought it would dissolve the bronze spoon she used to stir it, and sat on a rough-hewn handmade chair across the desk. Jack Clichy was a squat, stout man with a face like a piece of worn-out luggage. She had to smile at him. ‘You look right at home, Lieutenant.’

He eyed her. ‘Don’t shit me, Jansson. What am I, Davy Crockett? Listen, I grew up in Brooklyn. To me, downtown Madison is the wild west. This is a freaking theme park.’

‘Why do you want to see me, sir?’

‘Strategy, Jansson. We’re being asked to contribute to a statewide report on how we’re intending to deal with this contingency of the extra Earths. Our plans in the short, medium and long term. A version will go up to federal level too. And the chief is bearing down on me because, as he points out, we don’t have any plans, either short, medium or long term. So far we’ve just been reacting to events.’

‘And that’s why I’m here?’

‘Let me find the files …’ He tapped at the keyboard.

Christopher’s radio crackled, and he murmured in response. Cellphones wouldn’t work over here, of course. Conventional radio transmitters and receivers were OK so long as they were customized to exclude iron components, so they could be carried over intact. There was talk of laying down some kind of network of old-fashioned phone lines, copper wire.

‘Here we go.’ Clichy swivelled the laptop so that Jansson could see the screen. ‘I got case logs here, snippets of video. I’m trying to make sense of it all. Your name kept on coming up, Jansson, which is why I called you in.’

She saw links to her reports on the fire at the Linsay residence, the first-night panic over the missing teenagers.

‘So we had a tough first few days. Those missing kids, and the ones that came back with broken bones from falling through high-rise buildings, or with chunks bitten out of them by some critter or other. Prison escapes. A wave of absenteeism, from the schools, businesses, the public services. The economy took an immediate hit, nationwide, even globally. Did you know that? I’m told it was like an extra Thanksgiving break, before the assholes drifted back to work, or most of them …’

Jansson nodded. Most of those first-day Steppers had come quickly back. Some had not. The poor tended to be more likely to stay away; rich people had more to give up back in Datum. So, out of cities like Mumbai and Lagos, even a few American cities, flocks of street kids had stepped, bewildered, unequipped, into wild worlds, but worlds that didn’t already belong to somebody else, so why shouldn’t they belong to you? The American Red Cross and other agencies had sent care teams after them, to sort out the Lord of the Flies chaos that followed.

That was the main thing about the Long Earth, in Jansson’s mind. Joshua Valienté’s behaviour had shown it right from the beginning. It offered room . It offered you a place to escape — a place to run, endlessly as far as anybody knew. All over the world there was a trickle of people just walking away, with no plan, no preparation, just walking off into the green. And back home there were already reports of problems with the desolate, resentful minority who found they couldn’t step at all, no matter how fancy their Steppers.