Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

Lieutenant Clichy’s priority, of course, was the way the new worlds were being used against Datum Earth.

‘Look at the log,’ he said. ‘After a few days people start to figure out this shit, and we get more calculated crimes. Elaborate burglaries. A rash of suicide bombers in the big cities. And the Brewer assassination, or the attempt. Which is where your name started to get flagged up, Officer Jansson.’

Jansson remembered. Mel Brewer was the estranged wife of a drug baron, who had cut a deal with the DA to testify against her husband, and was headed for witness protection. She barely escaped the first attempt on her life by a stepping assassin. It had been Jansson who had come up with the idea of stashing her in a cellar. On the stepwise worlds West 1 and East 1, the space the cellar occupied was solid ground, so you couldn’t step straight in. You’d either have to dig a parallel hole, or else come in at ground level and fight your way down. Either way, the element of surprise was lost. By the following morning the belowground facilities in all the police stations, even in the Capitol building, were being fitted out as refuges.

‘You weren’t the only one to figure that out, Jansson. But you were among the first, even nationally. I hear the President herself sleeps in some bunker under the White House now.’

‘Glad to hear it, sir.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Then it started getting more exotic.’

‘Odd to hear you using that term without the word «dancer» attached to it, sir.’

‘Don’t push it, Jansson.’ He showed her reports of various religious nuts. Apocalypse-minded types had gone flooding into the ‘new Edens’, believing their sudden ‘appearance’ was a sign of the End of Days. One Christian sect believed Christ must have survived the crucifixion and stepped out of the tomb by the time His disciples came looking for His body — and, it wasn’t much of a leap to conclude, He was probably still out there in the Long Earth somewhere. All this presented public order challenges for the police.

Clichy pushed away the laptop and massaged the top of his fleshy nose. ‘Who am I, Stephen Hawking? My brain is boiling. Whereas you, on the other hand, Officer Jansson, have taken to all this like a pig to shit.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, sir—’

‘Just tell it to me the way you understand it. The most basic problem — I mean for Madison’s finest — is that we can’t carry through our pieces intact. Right?’

‘Not even a Glock, no, because of the steel parts. No metallic iron can be carried over, sir. Or steel. You can take through whatever you can carry, save for that. I mean, there’s iron ore in the other worlds, and you can dig it up and process it and manufacture iron over there , but you can’t carry that stepwise either.’

‘So you need to build a forge on every world you settle.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’ll tell you what puzzles even a doofus like me, Jansson. I thought we all got iron in our blood, or something. How come that doesn’t get left behind?’

‘In your blood, the iron’s chemically bound up in organic molecules. Inside your hemoglobin, one molecule at a time. Iron molecules can go over if they are in chemical compounds like that, just not in the form of metal. Why, rust can be carried over, because that’s a compound of iron with water and oxygen. You can’t take your piece over, sir, except for all the rust on the shaft.’

He eyed her. ‘That isn’t some kind of lewd remark, is it, Jansson?’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’

‘Anybody know why things are this way?’

‘No, sir.’ She had been following the discussions, as best she could. Some physicists had pointed out that iron nuclei were the most stable in nature; iron was the end result of the complicated fusion processes that went on at the heart of the sun. Maybe its reluctance to travel between the worlds was something to do with that. Maybe stepping between the worlds was something like quantum tunnelling, a low-probability passage between energy states. As iron had the most stable atomic nucleus, maybe it lacked the energy to escape from its energy well on Datum Earth… Or maybe it was magnetism. Or something. Nobody knew .

Clichy, a practical man, just nodded. ‘At least we know the rules. Kind of a gut-wrench for most Americans to have gun control suddenly imposed on ’em, however. What else? There are no people in these other worlds, right? I mean, except for the ones who leaked over from ours.’

‘That’s right, sir. Well, as far as anybody knows. There has been no systematic exploration even of the nearby worlds, not yet. You can’t know what’s hiding over the next ridge. But they have sent up a few spy balloons and such, aerial cameras. No sign of people, anywhere we can see.’

‘OK. So there’s a whole chain of these worlds, right? In two directions, East and West.’

‘Yes, sir. You just step from one into another, like passing down a corridor. You can go one way or another, East or West — though those are just arbitrary labels. They don’t correspond to real directions, in our world.’

‘No short cuts? I can’t just beam over to world two million?’

‘Not that anybody knows, sir.’

‘How many of these worlds? One, two, many? A million, a billion?’

‘Nobody knows that either, sir. We don’t even know how far out people have walked. It’s all —’ She waved a hand. ‘— loose around the edges. Uncontrolled.’

‘And every one of these worlds is a whole separate Earth, right?’

‘As far as we know.’

‘But the sun. Mars and Venus. The fucking moon. Are they the same as ours? I mean—’

‘Every Earth comes with its own universe, sir. And the stars are the same. The date is the same, in all the worlds. Even the time of day. The astronomers have established that with star charts; they could tell if there were a slippage of a century, or whatever.’

‘Star charts. Centuries. Jeez. You know, this afternoon I have to attend a conference chaired by the Governor about jurisdiction. If you commit a crime in Madison West fucking 14, do I even have the authority to arrest you?’

Jansson nodded. Not long after Step Day had come to pass, while some people had just drifted away into the wild, others had started staking claims. You settled down, hammered in your markers, and prepared to plant your crops and raise your kids, in what looked like virgin country. But who, in reality, owned what? You could stake your claim, but would the government endorse it? Were the parallel Americas even United States territory? Well, now the administration had decided to take a position on that.

Clichy said, ‘Word is the President is going to declare that all the stepwise Americas are US sovereign territory, over which US laws apply. The stepwise territories are «under the aegis of the federal government», is the language. That will simplify things, I guess. If you can call having a beat suddenly become infinite «simple». We’re all overstretched, all the agencies. You have the military being brought home from the war zones, Homeland dreaming up endless new ways the terrorists can get through, and meanwhile the corporations are quietly heading on out to see what there is to grab… Ah, shit. My momma told me I should have stayed in Brooklyn.

‘OK, listen, Officer Jansson.’ He leaned forward now, hands folded, intent. ‘I’ll tell you why I brought you in. Whatever the legal viewpoint, we’re still charged with keeping the peace in Madison. And, how lucky for us, Madison is a kind of magnet for the nutjobs over this.’

‘I know, sir …’

Madison had been the source of the Stepper technology in the first place, so it was a natural hub for that reason. And Jansson, studying reports about people coming here to begin long stepwise journeys, was also beginning to wonder if there was something else about the area that attracted them. Some way stepping was easier here. Maybe the Long Earth was about stability. Maybe the oldest, most stable parts of the continents were the easiest places to step — just as iron had the most stable nucleus. And Madison, sitting at the heart of North America, was one of the most stable places on the planet, geologically. If she saw Joshua again, she meant to ask him.