Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

Especially Mr Henry.

Day Two Hundred and Eighty-One .

Is it November? Dad will know.

We made it!

We made it to Earth West 100,000! — or, Good Old Hundred K, as us hardened pioneer types call it. The start of the Corn Belt.

Good Old Hundred K has a gift shop . You can buy T-shirts and mugs. ‘I Stepped All The Way to Good Old Hundred K.’ But the labels say Made in China!

The worlds had been changing for a bit. Greener. Damper. A different set of animals. And, most important, trees . Trees, wood, that’s what you need above all else to build a colony and a town and all the rest of it. Which is why we’ve had to walk so far. Not enough trees in the Mine Belt. Here there is prairie and rainfall and trees: good farming country. Nobody knows how deep the Corn Belt is. Plenty of room out here, and it’s hard to see how it could be filled up any time soon.

Anyhow, now we’re here. And to prove the point they have a couple of fields out back of the shop where there’s corn stubble and sheep grazing, just like home. Sheep! Dad said they were descended from little lambs that had to be carried out here from the Datum in the arms of stepping people, because there’s no native sheep in North America, on any of the worlds that anybody’s found.

At the shop they made a fuss of us kids. They had beer and lemonade, homemade stuff with pips in that was the most delicious drink I ever had. They asked us questions about what’s going on back East on the Datum and the Low Earths. We yapped and bragged, and we told our own story, of our trek. Every year it’s a little bit different, apparently.

An English woman who introduced herself as Hermione Dawes wrote down our story in a sort of big ledger, in a little library place full of records like that. Ms Dawes told Mom her place in life was writing things down, and she was happy to be out here, to have some real history to record. She’ll probably be there for ever, writing stuff down as folk pass her by. People are strange, but if she’s happy that’s fine by me. Apparently she’s married to a cowgirl.

We shopped! What a luxury.

And meanwhile the adults had to go register their claims. There is a US government official, rotated out once every few years, here to check and validate the land grants we bought back on the Datum before we set off. We all compared claim forms to work out where to go. In the event the adults picked a world at random: number West 101,753. A week’s easy stroll. We formed up, the Doaks and Harry Bergreen and his fiddle, yay, and Melissa Harris, well, OK, and Reese Henry, the less said the better. A hundred in all.

And we set off. We stepped and camped with a discipline that would have made Captain Batson proud. Though Mrs Harris still didn’t take her turns with the laundry.

A week later, when we got to 101,753, it was raining. So we all looked at each other, and held hands in our groups, and took another step into the sunshine.

And that was how we chose one whole world over another. Because it happened to be sunny when we got there! There might have been diamond mountains in Australia back in 753 and we’d never know. It didn’t matter. Earth West 101,754: our Earth. We’re there!

THAT FIRST AFTERNOON of flight, the Mark Twain stepped again and again, each transition causing a thrill to travel down Joshua’s spine. The stepping rate was increasing, slowly, as Lobsang explored the capabilities of his ship. Joshua could count the passing worlds using little monitors Lobsang called earthometers, embedded in the walls of every cabin. They had enough digits, he saw, to allow them to count up to the millions.

And as it stepped, the airship was travelling laterally too, heading west across Eurasia. The monitors had a little map display so Joshua could follow its course; their position was derived from star sightings, but the layout of the landscapes they crossed on these unexplored worlds was based on guesswork.

On the observation deck, sitting opposite Joshua, Lobsang smiled his plastic smile. They both cradled coffees — Lobsang sipped his too, and Joshua imagined some tank in his belly filling up.

‘How’s the ride?’ Lobsang asked.

‘Fine so far.’ In fact it was better than fine. As always when Joshua left the Datum behind, the oppressive sense of enclosure he invariably experienced there dissipated quickly: a pressure he’d not really been aware of when he was growing up, not until it wasn’t there any more. The pressure of a world too full of other minds, he suspected, other human consciousnesses. It seemed to be a fine sensitivity; even on remote stepwise worlds he always registered it if somebody else showed up, anywhere near by, even a small party. But he’d discussed this strange quasi-telepathic facility, or disability, with nobody — bar Sister Agnes — not even Officer Jansson, and he didn’t choose to talk it over with Lobsang now. Still, the sensation of freedom, of release, was there. That, and his peculiar awareness of the Silence, as of a mind far away, dimly sensed, like the toll of a huge and ancient bell in a far-off mountain range… Or rather he did sense this when Lobsang wasn’t talking, as he was now.

‘We will follow the line of latitude west, roughly. We can manage thirty miles an hour easily. A nice leisurely pace; we are out here to explore. That should bring us over the footprint of the continental US in a few weeks…’

Lobsang’s face was not quite real, Joshua thought, like a slightly off CGI simulation. But here in this fantastic vessel, in this realization of Lobsang’s astonishing dreams, Joshua was oddly warming to him.

‘You know, Lobsang, I caught up with your story when I went back to the Home, after my interview at transEarth. People were saying that the smartest thing that any supercomputer could do the moment it was switched on would be to make certain that it couldn’t be switched off again. And that the story about the reincarnated Tibetan was a front, precisely so you couldn’t be switched off. We all talked about that, and Sister Agnes said, well, if a computer has a desire not to be switched off then it has to have a sense of self, and that means a soul. I know the Pope decreed otherwise later on, but I back Sister Agnes against the Vatican any time.’

Lobsang thought that over. ‘I look forward to meeting Sister Agnes someday. I hear what you are saying. Thank you, Joshua.’

Joshua hesitated. ‘While you’re thanking me, maybe you could answer a question. Is this you , Lobsang? Or are you back on the Datum, in some store at MIT? Is that a meaningful question?’

‘Oh, certainly it is meaningful. Joshua, back on the Datum I am distributed across many memory stores and processor banks. That’s partly for security, and partly for efficiency and effectiveness of data retrieval and processing. If I wished I could consider my self to be distributed among a number of centres, of foci of consciousness.

‘But I am human, I am Lobsang. I remember how it was to look out of a cave of bone, from a single apparent locus of consciousness. And that is how I have maintained it. There is only one me, Joshua, only one Lobsang, though I have backup memory stores scattered over several worlds. And that «me» is with you on this journey. I am fully dedicated to the mission. And by the way, when I inhabit the ambulant unit, that too, for the duration, is «me», though there remains enough of «me» outside that shell to enable the airship to fly. If I were to fail or were lost then a backup copy on Datum Earth would be initiated, and synched with whatever you were able to retrieve of my memory stores on the ship. But that would be another Lobsang; he would remember me, but he would not be me… I hope that’s clear.’