The Long Earth (10 page)

An airship!

As he stared, yet another worker hurried towards him flourishing a phone. ‘You are Joshua?’ This man’s accent was European, Belgian perhaps. ‘Pleased to meet you, very pleased! Follow me. Can I help you with your bag?’

Joshua pulled his pack away so quickly that it would have burned the man’s hand.

The worker stepped back. ‘Sorry, sorry. By all means keep your bag; security is not an issue, not for you. Come with me.’

Joshua followed him across the soaking ground and under the formless envelope. The gondola, fashioned like a wooden ship’s hull, appeared to be anchored to a metal gantry, presumably constructed of locally manufactured steel, at the bottom of which was a skeleton elevator cage. Cautiously, his guide climbed into the open cage and, when Joshua had joined him, pressed a button.

It was a short ride up to the underside of the gondola, and
through
a hatch and out of the rain. Joshua found himself in a small compartment, suffused by a rich smell of polished wood. There were windows, or possibly portholes, but right now they showed nothing but the weather.

‘Wish I was leaving with you, young man,’ said the worker cheerfully. ‘Going wherever this thing is going – none of
us
need to know, of course. If you get a chance, look around the engineering. Non-ferrous, of course, aluminium airframe … Well. We’re all proud of her. Bon voyage, enjoy the journey!’ He stepped back into the elevator, and as it descended out of sight a plate slid across to seal the polished floor.

The voice of Lobsang sounded in the air. ‘Once again, welcome aboard, Joshua. Such dreadful weather, isn’t it? Never mind, I will soon have us above it or, should I say, away from it.’

There was a jolt and the floor rocked. ‘We’ve detached from the gantry. Are we airborne already?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have been brought here if we weren’t ready to go. Below us they will be breaking camp already, and then this site will suffer a minor version of the Tunguska event.’

‘Security, I take it.’

‘Of course. As for the workers, they are a mixed lot: Russians, Americans, Europeans, Chinese. None of them the kind of people who like to talk to the authorities. Clever folk who have worked for many masters, so very useful, and so commendably forgetful.’

‘Who supplied the plane?’

‘Ah. Did you enjoy your ride in the Lear? It is the property of a holding company who rent it out occasionally to a certain rock star, who tonight is fretting that the jet is unavailable because of an overhaul. But she will soon be distracted by learning that her latest album is two places higher in the charts than it was last night. The reach of Lobsang is great. Now that we are under way …’

An inner door opened smoothly, revealing a corridor of panelled wood and subtle lamps, leading to a blue door at the end.

‘Welcome to the
Mark Twain
. Please make yourself at home. You
will
find on this corridor six staterooms, all identical; choose whichever one you like. You can shed your cold-weather gear. Notice also the blue door. That leads to a laboratory, workshop and fabrication plant, among other things. You will find a similar door on each deck. I would prefer if you do not go beyond unless invited. Any questions?’

Joshua changed in the room he’d chosen at random, and then explored the
Mark Twain
.

The tremendous envelope, rippling under partial pressurization, was evidently coated on the outside with solar-cell film for power, and there were propulsion units, big fragile-looking fans that could swivel and tilt. The gondola was as luxurious within as it had looked from the outside. There were several decks, with staterooms, a wheelhouse, an observation deck, and a saloon deck with a galley as well equipped as the kitchen of a high-class restaurant, and a spacious hall that could serve as a restaurant for fifty – or, incredibly, as a
cinema
. And on every deck there was that blue door, closed and locked.

As he thought it over, Joshua began to see the point of stepping in an airship – as long as you could get the thing to step in the first place, and how you’d do that he didn’t yet understand. One problem with stepping rapidly was obstacles. He’d discovered on his very first night of exploration of the Long Earth that some obstacles simply couldn’t be walked around, such as the ice cap, sometimes miles high, that typically blanketed much of North America during an Ice Age. The airship was an attempt to get around that: it would ride above such inconveniences as glaciers or floods, and a much smoother journey ought to be possible.

He asked the air, ‘But did it have to be quite so grand, Lobsang?’

‘Why not be grand? We can’t hide, after all. I want my exploratory vessel to be like the Chinese treasure ships which struck awe into the natives of India and Arabia in the fifteenth century.’

‘You’ll strike awe, all right. And no iron in this thing, I take it?’

‘I’m afraid not. The impermeability of the reality barrier to iron remains a mystery even to Black Corporation scientists. I get plenty of theorizing, but few practical results.’

‘You know, when you talked about the journey, I thought I’d be carrying
you
, somehow.’

‘Oh, no.
I
am wired into the airship’s systems. The whole ship will be my body, in a sense. Joshua,
I
will be carrying
you
.’

‘Only sentient creatures can step—’

‘Yes. And I, like you, am sentient!’

And Joshua understood. The airship
was
Lobsang, or at least his body; when Lobsang stepped, the airship carcass came with him, just as Joshua ‘carried’ over his body, his clothes, whenever he stepped. And that was how an airship could step.

Lobsang was smug and boastful. ‘Of course this would not work were I
not
sentient. This is further proof of my claims of personhood, isn’t it? I’ve already trialled the technology – well, you know that, I traced your earlier expedition as I told you. All rather thrilling, isn’t it?’

Joshua reached the base of the gondola and entered the observation deck he’d spotted before, a blister of reinforced glass giving spectacular views of this Low Earth’s Siberia. The construction site sprawled below, with ancillary workings cut into the forest, supply dumps, dormitories, an airstrip.

Joshua, thinking it over, began to realize just what an achievement Lobsang had pulled off here –
if
the airship stepped as advertised. Nobody before had found a way to make a
vehicle
capable of stepping between the worlds the way a human could, and that was throttling the expansion of any kind of trade across the Long Earth. In parts of the Near East, and even in Texas, they had human chains carrying over oil by the bucket-load. If Lobsang really had cracked this, essentially by becoming the vessel himself – well, he was like a modern rail pioneer; he was going to change the world, all the worlds. No wonder security was so tight.
If
it
worked
. This was all experimental, evidently. And Joshua would be swimming across Long Earth in the belly of a silvery whale. ‘You seriously expect me to risk my life in this thing?’

‘More than that. If “this thing” fails I expect you to bring me home.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘Quite possibly. But we have a contract.’

A blue door slid open, and, to Joshua’s blank astonishment, Lobsang showed himself in person – or rather, in ambulatory unit. ‘Welcome again! I thought I would dress for the occasion of our maiden voyage.’ The automaton was male, slim and athletic, with movie star looks and a wig of thick black hair, and it wore a black lounge suit. It looked like a waxwork of James Bond, and when it moved, and worse when it smiled, it did nothing to dispel the artifice.

Joshua stared, struggling not to laugh.

‘Joshua?’

‘Sorry! Pleased to meet you in person …’

The deck vibrated as engines bit. Joshua felt oddly thrilled at the prospect of the voyage in a small-boy kind of way. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Lobsang? I guess anything is possible if you go far enough. What about dragons?’

‘I would suggest we might expect to find anything that
could
possibly exist in the conditions found on this planet, within the constraints of the laws of physics, and bearing in mind that the planet has not always been so peaceful as it is now. All creatures on Earth have been hammered on the anvil of its gravity, for example, which influences size and morphology. So I am sceptical about finding armoured reptiles who can fly and spout flames.’

‘Sounds a little drab.’

‘However, I would not be human if I did not acknowledge one important factor, which is that I might be totally wrong. And
that
would be very exciting.’

‘Well, we’ll find out – if this thing actually steps.’

Lobsang’s synthetic face folded into a smile. ‘Actually we’ve been stepping for the last minute or so.’

Joshua turned to a window and saw that it was true. The construction site had cleared away; they must have passed out of the sheaf of known worlds in the first few steps – although that word ‘known’ was something of a joke. Even the stepwise worlds right next to the Datum had barely been explored; humans were colonizing the Long Earth in thin lines stretched across the worlds. Anything could be living out back in the woods … And he, evidently, was going deeper into those woods than anybody before him.

‘How fast will this thing go?’

‘You’ll be pleasantly surprised, Joshua.’

‘You’re going to change the world with this technology, Lobsang.’

‘Oh, I know that. Up to now the Long Earth has been opened up on foot. It’s been medieval. No, worse than that, we haven’t even been able to use horses. Stone Age! But of course, even on foot humans have been moving out since Step Day. Dreaming of a new frontier, of the riches of the new worlds …’

13

MONICA JANSSON HAD
always understood very well that it was the promise of the riches of the new worlds that drew the likes of Jim Russo out into the Long Earth to try their luck, over and over, with the law seeming at times no more than a minor obstacle in the face of their ambition.

On her first visit to Portage East 3, ten years after Step Day, it had taken Jansson a minute or two, even after she’d gotten over the step sickness, to figure out what was familiar about the place. This new Portage had big steam-driven sawmills with chimney stacks belching smoke, and foundries with a burned-metal smell. She heard the cries of the workers, the steam hooters, the steady clank of the smiths’ hammers. It was like something out of a certain kind of fantasy novel that she’d read as a kid. Oh, in no novel she’d ever read would there have been teams of labourers hauling twelve-yard lengths of timber up on to their shoulders, and then vanishing. But she could testify that on this particular world, the modestly named Long Earth Trading Company was turning a corner of a stepwise Wisconsin into a steampunk theme park.

And here came the man who was driving it all.

‘Sergeant Jansson? Thank you for stepping over to see my little enterprise.’

Jim Russo was shorter than she was. He wore a crumpled grey suit, and had well-tended hair of a suspiciously vivid brown hue, and a broad grin between cheeks that might or might not have had a little help to stay perky. She knew Russo was forty-five years old,
had
been declared bankrupt three times before but had always bounced back, and had now mortgaged his own home for seed-corn money for this new inter-world enterprise.

‘No need to thank me, sir,’ she said. ‘You know we have a duty to investigate complaints.’

‘Ah, yes, more anonymous whining from the hired hands. Well, it’s par for the course.’ He led her over the muddy ground, evidently hoping to impress her with the scale of his operation here. ‘Although I think I would have expected a visit from the Portage PD. That’s the local department.’

‘Your registered office is in Madison.’ And besides, ‘Spooky’ Jansson was often called into the more high-profile cases involving Long Earth issues around wider Wisconsin.

They paused to watch another team of handlers pick a tremendously long-looking log off a heap; a foreman called out a countdown – ‘three, two, one’ – and away they stepped, with a soft implosion.

‘You can see this is a busy place, Sergeant Jansson,’ Russo said. ‘We started with nothing, of course. Nothing more than we could carry over, and no iron tools. In the early days the foundries were a high priority, after the sawmills. Now we have a flow of high-quality iron and steel, and soon we’ll be building steam-driven harvesters and collectors, and then you’ll see us rip through these forests like a hot knife through butter. And all this timber is stepped back to the Datum, to waiting fleets of flatbed trucks.’ He brought her to an open-front log cabin that served as a kind of showroom. ‘We’re expanding into a lot of areas other than just raw materials. Look at this.’ It was a kind of shotgun that gleamed like brass. ‘No iron parts at all, meant for the new pioneer market.

‘I know the opening up of the Long Earth has knocked us into an economic dip, but that’s short term. The loss of a percentage of the low-grade workforce, a glut of some precious metals – that will pass. Back on Datum Earth the US went from colonial days to the moon in a few centuries. There’s no reason we can’t do the same
again
, on any number of other Earths. Personally I’m very excited. It’s a new age, Sergeant Jansson, and with products and commodities like these I mean to be in on the ground floor …’

As did hundreds, thousands of other needy entrepreneur types, Jansson knew. And most of them were younger than Russo, smarter, not yet weighed down by previous failures, in Russo’s case beginning with a comically naive attempt to go mine a stepwise copy of Sutter’s Mill for gold, almost a cliché of a misunderstanding of the economic realities of the new age.

‘It’s a problem, isn’t it, Mr Russo, to balance the profit you make against the pressure on your labour force?’

He smiled easily, prepared for the question. ‘I’m not building pyramids here, Sergeant Jansson. I’m not whipping slaves.’