Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

It all worked fine. They had all bitched, squabbled and complained their way through two thousand Earths, and after every step Joshua faked nausea with splashes of ersatz vomit. And then the murderous attack had come.

They were apes, something like baboons, but smarter, more vicious. ‘Superboons’, some of the scientists had called them. ‘Assholes’, Joshua had decided, watching their pink butts go bobbing into the distance after he’d driven them off.

Or anyhow, that was his story of what had become of the party. The trouble was there had been no witnesses to back him up, and it had all happened too far out for an expedition to be sent to investigate, so far.

‘The damn things could plan an attack! They never bothered me after I killed two of them, but the troops were overwhelmed, and the science guys never knew how to defend themselves worth a damn.’

‘And you left the bodies for the baboons?’

‘You know, it’s hard to dig a grave with a wooden shovel in one hand while holding a plastic gun in the other. I burned the camp and got the hell out of there.’

‘I thought the board of inquiry’s tentative verdict was rather unfair on you. It left doubt. Now I want you to know that I can prove that what you said was true. I can prove that there is an outcrop of black rock about a kilometre from the campsite by the waterhole, just as you said, behind which still lies the remains of the corpse of the alpha animal, which you shot. Incidentally the rock was low-grade coal.’

‘How can you know all this?’

‘I retraced your steps. The records you returned were quite accurate. I went back, Joshua.’

‘ You went back ? When?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘You got back yesterday?’

Lobsang said patiently, ‘I went and returned yesterday.’

‘You couldn’t have done! It’s impossible to step that fast.’

‘So you say, Joshua. You’ll find out in due course. You did make an attempt to cover the corpses with stones, and you left grave markers, just as you mentioned at the inquiry. I brought back photographic records. Proof of what you said, you see?

‘In fact I reconstructed the whole thing. I used pheromone trails, checked angles of fire, the lie of the bodies. I found every bullet. And, of course, I took DNA samples. I even brought back the alpha’s skull — and the bullet that killed it. It all fits with your testimony. None of the soldiers put up an effective defence when your asshole-baboons attacked, did they? The superboons are maniacs by the standards of the animal world. Appallingly aggressive. But I don’t think they would have attacked if one of the grunts hadn’t got nervy and fired first.’

Joshua squirmed with embarrassment. ‘If you checked all this out, you know I crapped my pants in the course of the engagement.’

‘Should I think less of you for that? Throughout the animal kingdom, it has always made good sense to jettison the cargo in a threatening situation. All battlefields attest to that, as does every soaring songbird. But then you came back , and stabbed one of the superboons in the brain, and drove off the rest, stopping only when you’d shot the leader dead. You came back, and that excuses a lot.’

Joshua thought for a moment. ‘OK. That’s leverage, all right. You can clear me. But why do you want to recruit me in the first place?’

‘Well, we discussed that. It’s the same reason Jansson suggested you for Congressman Popper’s party in the first place. You have Daniel Boone syndrome, Joshua. Very rare. You don’t need people. You quite like people, at least some people, but the absence of people does not worry you. That’s going to be very useful where we’re going. I don’t expect to meet too many other human beings once the expedition is under way. Your assistance would be of great help to me because of that quality: you are able to focus, you’re not distracted by the extraordinary isolation of the Long Earth. And, as Officer Jansson saw from the beginning, your unique stepping talent, your ability to step unaided and, more important, to recover quickly from each step, will be useful if trouble strikes — as it surely will.

‘The rewards to you, should you agree to accompany me, will be excessively generous, and tailored to your particular preferences. Among them will be an authoritative account of the massacre of the congressional investigators, totally exonerating you, which will be received by the authorities on the day we depart.’

‘Am I worth that much?’

Lobsang laughed again. ‘Joshua, what is worth? What is value now, when gold is valued simply for its lustre, because every man can have a gold mine for himself? Property? The physics of the Long Earth means that every one of us can have a world entirely to himself, if he so wishes. This is the new age, Joshua, and there will be new values, new ideas of worth, including love, cooperation, truth — and above all, yes indeed, above all, the friendship of Lobsang. You should listen to me, Joshua Valienté. I intend to travel to the ends of the Earth — no, to the ends of the Long Earth. And I want you with me. Will you come?’

Joshua sat there, staring at nothing. ‘Do you know, the crackling of your fire now sounds absolutely random?’

‘Yes. Easy enough to fix. I thought it might put you a little more at your ease.’

‘So if I come with you, you’ll get that congressional review off my back?’

‘Yes, certainly, I promise.’

‘And if I don’t choose to go with you, what then?’

‘I’ll deal with the review nonetheless. You did everything you could have done, I believe, and the loss of those people was definitely not your fault. Evidence of this will be presented to the panel.’

Joshua stood up. ‘Right answer.’

That night Joshua sat in front of a screen in the Home and read up about Lobsang.

Apparently, so it was believed, Lobsang resided in extremely high-density, fast-access computer storage at MIT, and therefore not in the premises of transEarth at all. When Joshua read that, he felt a warm certainty that whatever was in a super-cooled box in MIT, it wasn’t Lobsang, not the whole of Lobsang. If Lobsang were smart, and he was most surely smart, he would have got himself distributed everywhere . A hedge against an off switch. And he’d be in a position where nobody could command him, not even his super-powerful partner Douglas Black. There was somebody who knew the rules, Joshua thought.

Joshua switched off the screen. Another rule: Sister Agnes held it as a matter of faith that all left-on computer screens exploded sooner or later. He sat back in the silence, and thought.

Was Lobsang human, or an AI aping humanity? A smiley, he thought: one curve and two dots, and you see a human face. What was the minimum you needed to see a human being? What has to be said, what has to be laughed? After all, people are made of nothing but clay — well, metaphorically, although Joshua was not too good at metaphors, seeing them as a kind of trick. And you had to admit that Lobsang was pretty good at knowing what Joshua was thinking, just as a perceptive human would be. Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.

But… the ends of the Long Earth?

Was there an end? People were saying there must be a whole circle of Earths, because the Stepper box took you either East or West, and everybody believed that East must meet West! But nobody knew . Nobody knew what all the other Earths were doing out there in the first place. Perhaps it was time somebody tried to find out.

Joshua looked down at the latest Stepper box he had just finished, using a double-pole, double-throw switch he had bought over the internet. Sitting on the desk beside him it was red and silver and looked very professional, unlike his first box, which had utilized a switch taken off Sister Regina’s elderly stairlift. He had carried a Stepper ever since it had dawned on him that since he did not know how he stepped, the sensible thing would be to carry a Stepper box anyway ; a talent that had come suddenly and inexplicably might just as easily disappear the same way. And besides, a box was cover. He didn’t want to stand out from the stepping crowd.