Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

Turning the box over in his hands, Joshua wondered if Lobsang realized what was the most interesting thing about Stepper-box construction. He’d noticed it on Step Day, and it was obvious when you thought about it; it was a strange little detail nobody seemed to think was important. Joshua always thought that details were important. Officer Jansson noticed details like this. It had to do with following the instructions. A Stepper would only work for you if you built it yourself, or at least finished its assembly.

He drummed his fingers on the box. He could go with Lobsang, or not. Joshua was twenty-eight years old; he didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission. But he did have the damn congressional review hanging over him.

And he always liked the idea of being out of reach.

Despite Jansson’s promises all those years ago, the bad guys had got to him once or twice. There had been that trouble not long after Step Day, when men with badges had pushed their way into the Home and tried to send him to sleep so they could take him away, and Sister Agnes had laid one of them out with a tire iron, and pretty soon the cops were called, and that meant Officer Jansson showed up, and then the mayor had got involved, and it turned out that one of the kids who were helped by Joshua on Step Day had been his son, and that had been that, the three black anonymous cars had hightailed it out of town… That was when the rule was laid down that if anyone wanted to talk to Joshua then they had to talk to Officer Jansson first. Joshua was not the problem, the mayor had said. The problem was crime and escapes from jails and no security left in the world. Joshua, the city council was told, was perhaps a little strange, but also marvellously gifted and, as was testified by Officer Jansson, had already been of great help to the Madison police department. That was the official position.

But that wasn’t always much comfort to Joshua himself, who hated being looked at . Who hated the fact that a growing number of people knew he was different , whether they thought he was a Problem or not.

In recent years Joshua had stepped alone, going further and further into the Long Earth, far beyond the Robinson Crusoe stockades he’d built as a teenager, out to worlds so remote he didn’t have to worry about the crazies, even the crazies with badges and warrants. And when they did come he just stepped away again; by the time they had finished throwing up Joshua could be a hundred worlds away. Though sometimes he stepped back to tie their bootlaces together while they barfed. You had to have something to entertain yourself. Longer and longer jaunts, further and further away. He called these his sabbaticals. A way of getting away from the crowds — and from the odd pressure in his head when he was back on Datum Earth, or even the Low Earths nowadays. A pressure that got in the way of listening to the Silence.

So he was strange. But the Sisters said that the whole world was getting stranger. Sister Georgina had told him as much, in her polite English accent. ‘Joshua, you may be just a little ahead of the rest of the human race. I imagine the first Homo sapiens felt the way you do when you look at the rest of us with our Stepper boxes and our vomiting. Like H. sap . wondering why the other chaps take such a long time to string two syllables together.’ But Joshua wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of being different, even if it was different in a superior sort of way.

Still, he liked Sister Georgina almost as much as Sister Agnes. Sister Georgina read Keats and Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson to him. Sister Georgina had studied at Cambridge or, as she put it, ‘Not-the-one-in-Massachusetts-Cambridge-University-the-real-one-you-know-in-England.’ Sometimes it occurred to Joshua that the nuns who ran the Home were not like the ones that he saw on television. When he asked Sister Georgina about that she laughed and said, ‘Maybe it’s because we are just like you, Joshua. We’re here because we didn’t quite fit anywhere else.’ He was going to miss them all, he realized, when he went travelling with Lobsang.

Somehow the decision had made itself.

A WEEK AFTER HIS interview at transEarth Sister Agnes took Joshua to Dane County Regional Airport on the back of her Harley, a rare honour. He would always remember her saying as they arrived that God must have wanted him to catch that plane, because every stop light they encountered turned to green just before she needed to slow. (In so far as Sister Agnes ever did slow.) Joshua, however, suspected that the subroutines of Lobsang were responsible for this, rather than the hand of God.

Joshua had walked on countless Earths, but he had never actually flown before. Sister Agnes knew the routine, and she marched him to the check-in desk. Once the clerk had entered his booking reference he went very quiet, and picked up the phone, and Joshua began to realize what it meant to have a friend in Lobsang, as he was whisked away from the lines of passengers and led along corridors with the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

He was brought to a room with a bar the length of the burger counter in Disney World. Impressive though this was, Joshua didn’t often drink, and would actually have preferred a burger. When he mentioned this jokily to the young man who was nervously dancing attendance on him, he received, after only minutes, a perfect burger so stuffed with trimmings that the patty could have fallen out and not been missed. Joshua was still digesting this when the young man reappeared and led him to the plane.

His seat was right behind the flight deck, and discreetly hidden from the other travellers by a velvet curtain. No one had asked to see his passport, which he didn’t have in any case. No one bothered to check whether he was carrying explosives in his shoes. And nobody, once he was on the flight, spoke to him. He watched a news summary in peace.

At Chicago O’Hare he was taken to another plane some way from the main terminal, a surprisingly small craft. Within, what wasn’t leather-upholstered was carpeted, and what wasn’t leather-upholstered or carpeted seemed to consist of the dazzling teeth of a young woman who, as he sat down, provided him with a Coke and a telephone. He tucked his small personal pack under the seat before him, where he could see it. Then he turned on the phone.

Lobsang called immediately. ‘Good to have you on board, Joshua! How are you enjoying the journey so far? The plane is all yours today. You will find a master bedroom behind you which I’m told is exceedingly comfortable, and don’t hesitate to take advantage of the shower room.’

‘It’s going to be a long journey, is it?’

‘I’ll be meeting you in Siberia, Joshua. A Black Corporation skunk works. You know what that means?’

‘A facility that’s off the radar.’ Where, he wondered, they were building what ?

‘Right. Oh, didn’t I mention Siberia?’

There was a sound of engines starting.

‘You’ve a human pilot, incidentally. People seem to like a warm uniformed body at the controls. But don’t be alarmed. In a real sense I am the controls.’

Joshua sat back in the luxurious seat and put his thoughts in order. It occurred to him that Lobsang was full of himself, as the Sisters would have said. But maybe he had a lot of himself to be full of. Here was Joshua cocooned in Lobsang, in a sense. Joshua wasn’t big on computers, and the marvellously interconnected electronic civilization of which they were part. Out in the stepwise worlds you never got a cellphone signal, after all, so the only thing that counted was you , and what you knew, and what you could do. With his prized knife of hardened glass he could keep himself alive, no matter what was thrown at him. He kind of liked that. Maybe there was going to be some tension with Lobsang over that — or with however much of Lobsang was ported along for the ride.