Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

In Madison West 1, Monica Jansson watched the results unfold. There were TV cameras all around the area, and eye-in-the-sky images relayed down from drone aircraft. For Jansson, it felt very odd to be safe in such a crisis, but the medics had taken away her Stepper, and there was nothing more she could do. So she watched. Somebody even brought her a cup of coffee.

From the air, here in West 1, you could clearly see the lakes, the isthmus, the distinctive geography of the area laid out like a map, a twin of the region on the Datum, a twin that had been entirely uninhabited two decades ago. Madison West 1 had started to make its own mark in this world, with swathes of forest cleared and marsh drained, and some tracks wide and metalled well enough to be called roads, and clusters of buildings, and steam and smoke rising from the mills and forges. But today the inhabitants of West 1 were scrambling to accommodate and help the incoming, fleeing from the Datum.

Here they came. Jansson saw them emerge, one by one or in little groups. There were even some in the lakes, steppers coming over from their boats or their surfboards. Rowboats cut across the bright blue waters to each waving speck.

And, on land, as the steppers crossed, Jansson saw a kind of map of the Datum city emerge on the green carpet of West 1. There were the university students, a multicoloured blur that marked the location of their campus, stretching south from the shore of Mendota. There were the hospitals, St Mary’s and Meriter and the UW Hospitals and Clinics, little rectangular huddles of doctors and nurses and patients. There were the schools, teachers with their charges where their classrooms should have been. On the Monona shore the contents of the convention centre appeared, business types, in flocks, like penguins. The area around Capitol Square itself started to fill in, the diamond shape of the square, with the shoppers and diners from State and King lining up along the tracks of the streets leading off to west and east, and the office workers and residents of East and West Washington. It was indeed a map of Madison, she realized, a map made up of the people, with the buildings stripped away. She looked for Allied Drive, where a group of nuns stepped across realities from the Home, with the vulnerable children in their charge.

And in the very last second, she saw, in a view from ground level, that where the high-rise buildings of downtown stood, people started appearing in mid-air. Many were in business suits. They just stepped over from the upper floors because there was no time left to get to the elevator or the stairs, or do anything else. Three-dimensional ghosts of the doomed buildings coalesced, ghosts composed of people who seemed to hang in the air, just for an instant, before falling to the ground.

Somewhere near Jansson, a Geiger counter started clicking.

JOSHUA AND SALLY hurried through the last few Madisons, West 10, 9, 8… Joshua wasn’t interested in these crowded worlds; all he wanted now was to get home. 6, 5, 4… In one Low Earth they had taken the time to cross geographically, from Humptulips to Madison, flying the airship on the one engine Franklin Tallyman, boy genius of Reboot, had managed to fix up for them. 3, 2, 1… There were barriers in the last few worlds, some kind of system of warning signs; they hurried on—

Zero.

Madison was gone.

Joshua stood in shock, gasping. Sally clutched his arm. They stood in a plain of rubble. Gaunt shapes, fragments of wall sticking out of the ground. A few twisted tangles that must be the remains of reinforced-concrete structures. Dust, dry as hell, choked him immediately. The battered airship hung blindly over these ruins.

Somebody was standing before them. Some guy in a coverall suit, no, a woman, Joshua realized, seeing her face through a dusty visor.

‘We’re here to meet steppers,’ she said, her voice a relay from a speaker. ‘Get out of here. Go straight back.’

Alarmed, shocked, Joshua and Sally stepped hand in hand back to West 1, taking the airship with them. Here, in the bright sunlight, another young woman in a FEMA uniform approached them with a clipboard and data pad. She looked up at the airship, shook her head in disbelief, and said reproachfully, ‘You’re going to have to go through decon. We do post warnings in the neighbouring worlds. Hey, you can’t catch everybody. Don’t worry, you’ve broken no law. I’ll need your names and social security numbers…’ She started to peck at her pad.

Joshua began to take in the surroundings. This parallel Madison was crowded, compared with the last time he was here. Tent cities, feeding hospitals, feeding stations. A refugee camp.

Sally said bitterly, ‘Here we are in the land of plenty, with everything anybody could ever want, multiplied a million times over. Nevertheless somebody wants to start a war. What a piece of work is a man.’

‘But,’ Joshua said, ‘you can’t start a war if nobody turns up. Listen, I need to get to the Home. Or where the Home would be…’

The FEMA official’s phone rang, at her waist. She looked at the screen, seemed puzzled, and glanced at Joshua. ‘Are you Joshua Valienté?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s for you.’ She handed him the phone. ‘Go ahead, Mr Lobsang.’

We chose to use Madison, Wisconsin, as a location in this novel partly because as we were developing the book it occurred to us that in July 2011 the second North American Discworld convention was to be held there, and we could get a hell of a lot of research done, as we authors like to say, on the cheap. That convention became in part a kind of mass workshop on the Long Earth. We’re grateful to all the contributors to that discussion, who really are far too numerous to list here, but particularly to Dr Christopher Pagel, owner of the Companion Animal Hospital in Madison, and his wife, Juliet Pagel, who gave up an unreasonable amount of their time to show your authors Madison both primeval and modern, from the Arboretum to Willy Street, and on top of that made an incredibly helpful read-through of a draft of this book. Thank you, Madisonians, and we hereby apologize for what we have done to your lovely city. All errors and inaccuracies are of course our sole responsibility. Our thanks also to Charles Manson, the Tibetan Subject Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for helping us build Lobsang’s world.

T. P.

S.B.

December 2011, Datum Earth

TERRY PRATCHETT is one of the world’s most popular authors. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide and have been translated into nearly forty languages. In 2009 Queen Elizabeth II knighted Pratchett in recognition of his «services to literature.» Sir Terry lives in England.

STEPHEN BAXTER is an acclaimed, multiple award-winning author whose many books include the Xeelee sequence, the Time Odyssey trilogy (written with Arthur C. Clarke), and The Time Ships , a sequel to H. G. Wells’s classic The Time Machine . He lives in England.

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