Terry Pratchett - The Long War

He drank water from a plastic bottle. Some of the nearer worlds had been visited by hunters unable to resist the lure of going after the native megafauna, but here, ten steps out, there was no sign of humanity, not so much as a footprint.

And it was a different sort of world, without humans. Naively you’d think that one copy of the Western Desert was going to be much the same as any other. Not so. This country was always going to be arid, but Thomas could see at a glance that it was greener than he was used to, with patches of tough-looking grass, scrubby trees. On the Datum his mother’s people had shaped the land with fire for sixty thousand years; this was a land without Europeans, but without the Martu and their ancestors too.

Thomas wasn’t here for the flora and fauna, however.

When he felt well enough to stand he walked around the bluff to the cave—it was here just as in the Datum—and knelt down, the Stepper box awkward at his waist. He had to shield his eyes against the light of a descending sun to see inside.

And there it was, in the cave. Somehow he had known it would be. Not his Hunting Man, not exactly. Another human figure chasing another crudely sketched animal. Around it, a different array of spirals and starbursts and hatchings and zigzags. And when he touched the drawing, cautiously, he could feel the patina that covered it. It was every bit as ancient as the one in the Datum. Put there by some scrawny guy who had figured out how to step, all by himself, millennia ago.

He sat with his back to the rock. He would have laughed, save he didn’t want to disrespect the silence, or indeed draw the attention of any nearby marsupial lions. Of course there must have been Aboriginal steppers. Where would an ability to step have been of more use than in the arid heart of Australia? If his ancestors had been able to exploit a sheaf of worlds, even just in emergencies, the resources available to them would have been multiplied hugely. And they had had sixty thousand years to discover how.

But even so, surely not in such numbers as today. Maybe this was a new Dreamtime, he thought, a replay of the age when the Ancestors had moved across an empty landscape, and in doing so had brought the land itself into being. It was the turn of his generation to become the new Ancestors, to begin a new Dreamtime that might encompass all of the Long Earth.

And this time they would shape a landscape no white colonist could ever appropriate.

So here was Thomas, with a cellphone in his pocket, sitting by a rock, alone in this world.

He could go back and report his bit of archaeology, at last.

Or maybe it was his own time to go walkabout. He could strip down to his boxers, just dump everything, and wander off…

Living off the endlessly generous land, he became a comber—this was before the word itself, derived from “beachcomber’, had become common currency. In due course he would start to hear legends of Joshua Valienté and other super-steppers, legends that were spreading across the Long Earth, and he would begin to take a more academic view of those who shared his new lifestyle… And then he met Joshua himself, in the silence of a very distant America.

“But all that lay in the future,” he told Helen now. “As I remember it, I just patted the Hunting Man—Hunting Man West 10—and straightened up, and touched my Stepper, and I was gone for good.”

She smiled. “The Long Earth has given us all stories, I guess.”

“Too right. So what about yours. Tell me about this place Reboot. Another coffee?”

They spent three more weeks in Valhalla, trying to get Dan used to the place, and to the idea of coming here to school—even though headmaster Jacques Montecute and the taciturn Roberta had in the meantime left for the Datum, to join the Chinese expedition. Helen had plenty of time to sample the local cuisine, including lots more coffee—enough to establish that, whatever Valhalla was good at, coffee wasn’t it.

But that was remedied once they boarded the Gold Dust . In the first twenty-four hours Helen spent most of her time relaxing, sitting in the family’s saloon, sipping the finest coffee she’d drunk since—well, since the last time her father had taken her to a Datum Madison mom-and-pop local coffee shop aged about twelve, before they left the old world behind for good.

That was the Gold Dust for you. It was like the best hotel in all the worlds, she thought, uprooted and drifting in the sky, an eight-hundred-foot-long envelope from which hung a gondola of polished High-Megger hardwood, like one vast piece of furniture. Helen had felt embarrassed just to climb aboard. Even the gangplank was carpeted, and you could have lost their whole Hell-Knows-Where house in the reception hall.

Of course they were honoured guests, Joshua, Dan, Helen, even Bill Chambers—and Sally Linsay, who Helen noticed wasn’t too high-minded to hitch a ride aboard this flying palace. Honoured because of Joshua, of course, the hero explorer. If he wished, the Joshua Valienté could dine out on his legend, but he hardly ever did. Full of contradictions, her Joshua. But when he got offered such treats as this ride in the Gold Dust , he’d learned not to turn them away—that was how Helen had trained him anyhow.

Dan was in his element, of course. He’d wanted to be a twain driver since he could walk, and would run after even the scrubby little local ships that drifted over Hell-Knows-Where. Helen had thought his eyes would pop out when they walked aboard the Gold Dust .

But there was some concern for him, at the beginning. This was Dan’s first long-distance haul. Helen was not a natural stepper, while Joshua was the world’s model natural stepper. Just as his colouring was mixed—Dan had his father’s dark hair but his mother’s paler complexion—as a stepper Dan was somewhere in between his parents. And in his genetic background he did have a phobic uncle, Helen’s brother Rod, who couldn’t step at all. The medicinal treatments for controlling the symptoms of stepping nausea were advanced now, so that almost everybody could withstand even a high-speed journey like this—almost all, but not quite all. If Dan had shown any distress, it would have been the end of the journey for his parents (well, for Helen anyhow; she had no doubt Joshua would have gone on with Sally)—and the end of a dream for Dan. Joshua and Helen were both privately relieved when the ship’s surgeon, who had been hovering over the passengers as the twain set off, gave them a discreet thumbs-up.

After that the crew made a huge fuss of Dan. At Helen’s insistence he was to be accompanied at all times by either one of his parents or a junior crewman, appointed by the Captain. The crewman told Dan his name was Bosun Higgs, and Helen didn’t believe that for a second . But apart from that the crew gave Dan the run of the ship, from the ladders and gantries inside the envelope itself with its huge sacs of helium, to the gondola’s cargo hold and engine room, and the staterooms and restaurant cum ballroom—even the wheelhouse, a huge transparent-walled blister at the prow, where you could watch the great ships rising from world after world to join the fleet as it ploughed East towards the Datum, with views of the American Sea and its forest-coated fringe shivering by, a new world with every heartbeat. An incredible, thrilling sight, even to a sedentary type like Helen.

On the second evening of the voyage the grown-ups had a treat, when they dined at the Captain’s table. What else would you expect, for the Valienté family? The restaurant was at the prow, just beneath the wheelhouse itself. Helen couldn’t believe how ornate the place was, with white wooden filigree work everywhere, and gilt mammoth tusks and oversized acorns hanging in the corners, and what looked like original oil paintings of various Long Earth scenes hanging on the walls, and armchairs and carpets soft as puppy fur—even a chandelier hanging over the table. All of which was a pleasant distraction from their fellow diners, who were generally the obnoxiously rich: Long Earth traders splashing the profits, or tourists from the Datum on the “cruise of a lifetime’, who mistook Helen and Joshua for staff more than once.