Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

And when the ice band had passed and they were sailing over interglacial worlds, mostly he saw tree tops. The Long Earth was big on tree tops, Earth after Earth, tree after tree.

Joshua seldom got bored. But as the morning wore on he was surprised to find himself growing bored now, so quickly. After all he was looking over thousands of landscapes no one, probably, had ever seen before. He remembered Sister Georgina, who liked her Keats:

At the time he’d thought a wild surmise was some kind of exotic bird. Well, he was now looking out over the new worlds with somewhat of a tame surmise.

There were footsteps behind him. Lobsang’s ambulant unit appeared. He was dressed for the occasion in safari shirt and trousers. And how quickly, Joshua reflected, Lobsang had become a he and not an it .

‘It can be disorienting, can’t it? I recall my reactions to my own pioneer flight. The Long Earth goes on and on, Joshua. A surfeit of wonders will dull the mind.’

At random they paused at a world somewhere around twenty thousand. The sky here was overcast, threatening rain. Without the sunlight the rolling grassland below was a dull grey-green, with scattered clumps of darker forest. On this particular world Joshua could see no sign of mankind, not so much as a thread of smoke. Yet there was movement. To the north he saw a huge herd drifting over the landscape. Horses? Bison? Camels, even? Or something more exotic? And by the shore of a lake below he made out more groups of animals, a black fringe by the water.

Now they had stopped, the Mark Twain ’s systems went to work. Hatches on the gondola and on top of the envelope opened to release balloons, and buoys which fluttered to the ground under parachutes, each marked with the transEarth logo and the Stars and Stripes. There were even small sounding-rockets that flew up with a hiss, creating streaky smoke columns in the air.

‘This will be our regular routine when we stop to sample an Earth,’ Lobsang said. ‘A way for me to extend my study of any particular world beyond this single viewpoint. I will gather some data now, and data from ongoing observations will be downloaded from the probes when we return through this world, or when another craft passes this way in the future.’

Among the creatures by the lake below were some kind of rhino, giant beasts with oddly slender legs. They clustered at the water’s edge, shoving each other aside as they tried to get a drink.

Lobsang said, ‘You’ll find binoculars and cameras throughout the observation deck. Those animals look something like an elasmotherium, perhaps. Or a much-evolved descendant.’

‘That means nothing to me, Lobsang.’

‘Of course not. You want a species of your own? Name them if you like; I’m recording everything we see, hear, say and do, and will lodge the claims when we get home.’

Joshua sat back. ‘Let’s go on. We’re wasting time.’

‘Time? We’ve all the time in the worlds. However—’

The stepping began again, and the rhino-like herd disappeared. Joshua felt the ride now as a gentle jolting, like a car with good suspension travelling over a rutted road.

He figured they were now crossing an Earth every couple of seconds, over forty thousand new worlds a day, if they kept this up around the clock (which they wouldn’t). Joshua was impressed, but he wasn’t about to say so. Landscapes swept beneath the prow of the ship, only their broadest features possible for him to discern, whole worlds passing to the beat of his own pulse. Animal herds and lone beasts were no sooner glimpsed than they were gone, whisked into the unreality of stepwise otherness. Even the tree clumps shifted in shape and size from world to world, shift, shift, shift. And there were flickers — plunges into brief darkness, occasional flares of light, washes of odd colours across the landscape. Exceptional worlds of some kind, pulled from his sight before they could be comprehended. Otherwise there was only the chain of worlds, Earth after Earth smoothed to uniformity by the ship’s motion.

‘Joshua, do you ever wonder where you are?’

‘I know where I am. I’m here.’

‘Yes, but where is here ? Every few seconds you enter a different stepwise world. So where is this world in relation to the Datum? And the next, and the next? How can there be room for them all?’

Actually Joshua had wondered about that. It was impossible to be a stepper without asking such questions. ‘I know Willis Linsay left a note: «The next world is the thickness of a thought away.»’

‘Unfortunately that was about the only comprehensible thing he did write down. Apart from that we’re floundering. So where is this world, this particular Earth? It’s in exactly the same space and time as Datum Earth. It’s like another mode of vibration of a single guitar string. The only difference is that now we can visit it; we couldn’t even detect it before. That’s pretty much the best answer transEarth’s tame physicists can supply.’

‘Is all this science stuff in Linsay’s notes?’

‘We don’t know. He seems to have invented his own mathematics. We have Warwick University working on that. But he also compressed everything he wrote into a fantastically arcane code. IBM won’t even quote on untangling that . Also his handwriting’s appalling.’

He kept talking, but Joshua managed to tune him out. It was a skill, he suspected, he was going to have to develop.

Music filled the deck, the cold notes of a harpsichord.

‘Would you mind shutting that off?’

‘It’s Bach,’ Lobsang said. ‘A fugue. A clichéd choice for an entity of mathematics such as myself, I know.’

‘I prefer silence.’

‘Of course you do.’ The music died. ‘It will not offend you if I continue to listen, in my head, as it were?’

‘Do what you like.’ Joshua stared at the latest landscape blankly.

And the next, and the next.

He rolled off his couch and tried out the deck’s can. It was a chemical toilet with a narrow bay for a shower, inside a plastic-walled compartment. Joshua wondered if Lobsang had eyes in here too. Well, of course he did.

Thus the day wore away. At last it grew dark on all the Earths, the myriad suns sinking to their respective horizons.

‘Do I have to go up to my stateroom to sleep?’

‘Your couch will fold out. Pull the lever to your right. There are blankets and pillows in the trunk.’

Joshua tried it out. The couch was like a first-class airliner seat. ‘Wake me if anything interesting happens.’

‘It’s all interesting, Joshua. Sleep now.’

As he settled under a comfortingly heavy throw, Joshua listened to the thrum of the engines, and felt the slight, vertiginous tug of the stepping. For Joshua Valienté, to rock between worlds was almost soothing. He slept easily.

When he woke, the airship had stopped again.

THE SHIP HAD descended near a clump of heaped-up rock, into which Lobsang had thrown out an anchor. It was early in the day, the sky a deep blue littered with scattered cloud. But this was a typical Ice Belt world, and snowfields dazzled, though a little way away was a scrap of open water.

Joshua refused to even look out of the window until he had used the coffee spigot.

‘Welcome to West 33157, Joshua. We’ve been stationary since before dawn. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.’

‘I take it you found something interesting.’