Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

It took four steps in all. But at last there was Happy Landings, with the Mark Twain overhead.

People were pleased to see them back, if surprised. Everyone was friendly. Genuinely friendly. Because this was Happy Landings, wasn’t it? Of course they were friendly. The tracks were still clean, spotlessly swept. The drying salmon still hung from rows of neat racks. Men, women, children and trolls mixed happily.

And Joshua felt oddly uncomfortable, once more. A slight feeling you get when everything is so right that it might have gone all the way around the universe and come back metamorphosed into wrong . He’d forgotten, in fact, how persistent this feeling was from his last visit. And that was without mentioning the ubiquitous stink of troll.

As a matter of course, the pair of them were offered lodgings in one of the cottages at the heart of the township. But after a shared glance they decided to bunk down on the Mark Twain . Inevitably a few troll pups followed them up the cables. Joshua made supper up there, with delicious fresh food; as before, people had been amazingly generous with gifts of food and drink.

Afterwards, poisoning herself with instant coffee once again — all that was available now on the injured Mark Twain — and with trolls lounging around the observation deck, Sally said, ‘Come on, out with it, Joshua. I watch people too. I see the look on your face. What’s on your mind?’

‘The same as on yours, I suspect. That there’s something wrong here.’

‘No,’ Sally said. ‘Not wrong. There’s something off , for sure… I’ve been here many times, but I’m more aware of it with you sulking around the place. Of course what we perceive as wrong might be an expression of the significance of the place. But—’

‘Go on. There’s something you want to tell me, right?’

‘Have you seen any blind people here, Joshua?’

‘Blind?’

‘There are people here with spectacles, old folk with reading glasses. But nobody blind . Once I looked at the rolls in City Hall. You see records of people missing a toe or a finger, and you find out that it was the result of a bit of carelessness with a wood-chopping axe. But nobody with any major disability seems to be led to Happy Landings in the first place.’

He thought that over. ‘They aren’t perfect here. I’ve seen them get drunk in the bars, for example.’

‘Oh yes, they know how to party, certainly. But the interesting thing is that every single one of them knows when to stop partying, and, believe you me, that talent is somewhat rare. And there’s nothing like a police force here, have you noticed? According to the City Hall records, there has never been a sexually motivated attack on a woman, man or child. Never . Never a dispute over land that hasn’t been calmly resolved by negotiation. Have you watched the kids? All the adults act as if all the kids are their own, and all the kids act as if all the adults are their parents. The whole place is so decent, level-headed and likeable it can make you scream, and then curse yourself for screaming.’ Sally stroked a troll pup, whose purring would have put any cat to shame: pure liquid contentment.

That prompted Joshua to blurt out, ‘It’s the trolls. It’s got to be. We’ve discussed this before. Humans and trolls living side by side. Here, and nowhere else we know of. So it’s like no other human community, anywhere.’

She eyed him. ‘Well, now we know that minds shape minds, don’t we? We’ve learned that much. Too many humans, and trolls will flee. But if there are just the right amount of people the trolls will stick around. And for humans, maybe you can’t get enough trolls. Happy Landings is a warm bath of comfortable, happy feelings.’

‘But nobody disabled. Nobody mixed-up enough to commit a violent crime. Nobody who doesn’t fit.’

‘Maybe they’re kept out, perhaps not even consciously.’ She regarded him. ‘ Sieved . That’s a rather sinister thought, isn’t it?’

Joshua thought it was. ‘But how? Nobody’s standing around with clubs to exclude the unworthy.’

‘No.’ Sally leaned back and closed her eyes, thinking. ‘I don’t think it’s a case of people being consciously excluded, not by the locals. So how does it happen? I’ve never seen any signs of anybody behind Happy Landings. No designer, no controller. Does Happy Landings itself somehow choose who comes here? But how can that happen?’

‘And to what end?’

‘You can only have an end if you have a mind , Joshua.’

‘There’s no mind involved in evolution,’ Joshua said, remembering Sister Georgina’s brisk homework classes at the Home. ‘No end, no intention, no destination. And yet that’s a process that shapes living creatures.’

‘So is Happy Landings some analogy of an evolutionary process?’

He studied her. ‘You tell me. You’ve been coming here a long time—’

‘Since I was a kid, with my parents. It’s just that since I met you two, the questions I have always had about it, I guess, have sharpened up. I ought to wear a bracelet. «What would Lobsang think?»’

Joshua barked laughter.

‘You know, this place always seemed a regular garden of Eden — but without the serpent, and I wondered where the serpent was. My family got on well with the people here. But I never wanted to stay. I never had the sense I fitted in. I would never dare to call it home, just in case I was somehow the serpent.’

Joshua tried to read the expression on Sally’s face. ‘I’m sorry.’

That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. She looked away. ‘I do think this place is important, Joshua. For all of us. All humanity, I mean. It’s unique, after all. But what happens when the colonists start getting here? I mean the regular sort, the wavefront, with their spades and picks and bronze guns, and their wife-beaters and fraudsters? How can this place survive? How many trolls will be shot, slaughtered and enslaved?’

‘Maybe whoever, whatever is running the experiment will start fighting back.’

She shuddered. ‘We are starting to think like Lobsang. Joshua, let’s get out of here and go somewhere normal . I need a holiday…’

A DAY LATER, ON A distant world, in a warm twilight, Helen Green was gathering mushrooms. She wandered across a scrap of high ground, a couple of miles out of the new township of Reboot.

And there was a kind of sigh, like an exhalation. Helen felt a whisper of breeze on her skin. She turned.

There was a man, standing on the grass, slim, dark. A woman stood at his side, and she looked as if she belonged there. Visitors stepping in weren’t an unusual occurrence. They rarely looked quite so confused as these two. Or as grubby. Or with frost glistening on their jackets.

And very few appeared with a gigantic airship hovering over their heads. Helen wondered if she should run and fetch somebody.

The man shielded his eyes against the sun. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Helen Green.’

‘Oh, the blogger from Madison? I hoped we’d meet you.’

She glared at him. ‘Who are you ? You aren’t another tax man, are you? We drove the last one out of town.’

‘No, no. My name’s Joshua Valienté.’

‘ The Joshua Valienté…’ To her horror she felt herself blush.

The woman with Joshua said witheringly, ‘Give me strength.’

To Joshua, Helen Green looked in her late teens. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair tied sensibly back from her face, and had a basket of some kind of fungi on her arm. She was dressed in shirt and slacks of some soft deer-like leather, and moccasins. She wouldn’t have fitted into the crowd on the Datum, but on the other hand she was no colonial-era museum piece. This wasn’t some retro re-creation of pioneering days past, Joshua realized. Helen Green was something new in the world, or worlds. Kind of cute, too.