Terry Pratchett - The Long Utopia

‘Joshua, you sleep lightly if a silent flash in the sky was enough to wake you.’

‘I spend a lot of my time alone in the deep Long Earth, Lobsang. I’ve been living like that for decades now. Believe me, you sleep lightly, because sooner or later along will come an oddity that won’t trouble to wake you before it eats you. Anomalies on the moon: you can’t get much bigger than that, can you? But Agnes says she’s been noticing these things since you arrived here – what, three years ago? And you took no notice.’

‘I told you. I wasn’t here for that, for astronomical-scale anomalies.’

‘Even so, don’t you think you took your eye off the ball? Lobsang, the day here is too short . There’s something wrong with the moon … How much more obvious could it be?’

‘What do you want me to say? I came here for Ben and Agnes. Anyhow we’re here now, seeking answers.’

‘OK. So we’re looking for something big. Might take us a while to find it at this pace, even so.’

Lobsang dug into his pocket and held up a memory stick. ‘Fear not. We have movies.’

‘What you got?’

‘The classics. Blues Brothers. Contact. Galaxy Quest— ’

‘Nothing with Julie Andrews?’

‘Let it lie, Joshua.’

The forest rolled under the prow of the Shillelagh , apparently infinite, without interruption.

‘So how about brunch?’

‘Will you do the honours, Joshua? I took the liberty of loading aboard all the ingredients for clam chowder – we trade with a couple of communities at the coast, a few worlds over. I’ve no idea what the galley is like aboard this tub of yours.’

‘I can play it like a fiddle. Happily not the way I’ve heard you play a fiddle …’

By late afternoon they were approaching the Atlantic coast. From high altitude they could already see the ocean, in the distance.

Joshua checked their latitude. All their instruments were inertial, based on dead-reckoning, and kept in heavily insulated cases; Lobsang had told Joshua that the many magnetic storms on this world screwed up most electronics. They were going to cross the coast, Joshua figured, somewhere over the footprint of Portland, Maine.

And beneath the ship’s prow, Joshua thought the forest stock was changing. Perhaps there were tree species better adapted to the fresher air here, the salt breezes off the sea, a subtly different climate. It would be interesting to go down there, he thought, and sample the local wildlife, see if the populations of furball tree-dwellers and ground-burrowers, and the big birds and crocs that preyed on them, were any different from those around Lobsang’s home in the denser forest. But it wasn’t that kind of trip; they weren’t looking on that kind of scale.

And as they neared the coast, the forest started to show extensive damage. From the air Joshua saw swathes of trees laid out flat, their great trunks lying parallel on the ground, as if combed. Elsewhere there were huge blackened scars, the relics of fires presumably sparked by lightning. The mark of strong winds, of storms.

Then, at the coast itself, Joshua saw a denuded coastal strip, like a beach, marked with black parallel lines: he thought the lines were sea wrack, driftwood, seaweed maybe. But as they descended for a closer look he realized that he had entirely misjudged the scale of what he was seeing. That ‘beach’ was maybe a mile deep, and the ‘driftwood’ was made up of whole trunks, complete root systems: thousands of mature trees uprooted as a child would pluck daisies, and flung down in rows.

Joshua, using binoculars, inspected fish-like forms, long dead: a shark, and what looked something like a fat seal, with stubby back legs. It was only when he saw that the shark was lying across a smashed tree trunk that he got an idea of its size.

‘That thing’s enormous.’

Lobsang grinned ruefully. ‘This band of worlds has the largest sharks yet observed, anywhere in the Long Earth. No whales here; the sea mammals never grew so big.’

‘Lobsang, you said you were looking for large-scale events. You got ’em. It’s like the aftermath of a tsunami.’

‘The coast was uninhabited; nobody to be harmed, nobody to witness it. But you understand that all this is a side-effect, Joshua. A by-product of the spin-up, the injection of all that rotational energy. The oceans slosh and so does the air. You get freak waves, storms. Far inland we’ve had some of the storms, but we weren’t aware directly of the big waves.’

‘Directly?’

‘I have noticed earth tremors, coming more and more frequently. Others may have too, Agnes perhaps; we haven’t discussed it. Well, you’d expect that. If this Earth is spinning faster its very crust must be distorting, the equatorial bulge increasing as the planet flattens out.’

‘Do you measure the tremors? Since Yellowstone, everybody’s a geologist, right?’

‘Joshua,’ Lobsang said patiently, ‘we don’t have any seismometers. Why would we bring a seismometer? As I keep telling you, I didn’t come here to be a scientist. I came to live .’

‘We’ll need to get the scientists out here eventually, though. From the government, the Low Earth colleges.’

‘If we can.’

‘So which way now, Lobsang?’

‘Let’s stick to the coast. That’s where the visible damage will be. For now the interior is sheltered, relatively, the continental forest protecting itself.’

‘Fine. North? South?’

‘South. If you were spinning up a world, you’d work at the equator, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I never thought about it. South it is.’

The controls of this airship were simple: a steering handle, a joystick; it was the work of a couple of minutes to set the course. Then Joshua yawned and stretched.

‘Why don’t you hit the sack for a few hours, Joshua? I don’t need sleep, if I adjust my settings. You get some shut-eye; I’ll play Robert the robot.’

‘Who? Never mind. OK, Lobsang. Though I think I’ll fix some supper first …’

Joshua slept well, waking long after dawn.

At a glance out of his window, all he saw at first was ocean and forested land, bathed in morning sunlight. Then he realized that the airship appeared to be circling, running in wide, gentle sweeps; he could see its shadow shift across the ground.

There must be something down there. Presumably nothing urgent, or Lobsang would have woken him.

He showered, shaved and dressed. He collapsed his bed back to a sofa, and folded away the partition that divided his cabin from the rest of the gondola. Passing through the small galley area he turned on the coffee perc and drank a slug of orange juice – except that it wasn’t orange, not quite, but a compress from one of the many unfamiliar citrus types native to this band of worlds. Then, glass in hand, he joined Lobsang at the forward windows.

Still the Shillelagh banked and turned, and land and sea wheeled beneath.

‘So,’ Joshua said.

‘I wanted you to see what’s down there. But I wanted you to get your beauty sleep too, so I kept the ship running. I figured that shutting down the engines would alert your famous hair-trigger Daniel Boone senses—’

‘All right, all right. You wanted me to see what?’

‘Take a look. We’re at the coast of New York State, or its footprint. Below us is Long Island. It’s taken a battering from the storms and waves; its vegetation cover has been pretty much flattened.’

Joshua looked down at the island. A strip of silver, running east to west, lay across the scarred landscape.

At first glance it looked like a road to Joshua, or perhaps a rail track. It arced away to the west, running inland as far as he could see until it became a fine line, still dead straight, lost in the misty morning air. To the east, towards the sun, it strode across Long Island on slim pillars, and then on across the sea.