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    The Long Earth
    The Long Earth
    The Long Earth
    Ebook408 pages6 hours

    The Long Earth

    By Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

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    About this ebook

    The first novel in a brilliant collaboration between the visionary Discworld® creator Terry Pratchett and acclaimed science fiction novelist Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth transports readers to an infinity of new worlds—a series of parallel “earths" with doorways leading to adventure, intrigue, excitement, and an escape into the furthest reaches of the imagination. All it takes is a single step. . . .

    The possibilities are endless. (Just be careful what you wish for. . . .)

    1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man's-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone?

    2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive—some say mad, others allege dangerous—scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through the wreckage, Jansson finds a curious gadget: a box containing some rudimentary wiring, a three-way switch, and . . . a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way humankind views the world forever.

    The Long Earth is an adventure of the highest order and will captivate science fiction fans of all stripes, readers of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Carl Hiaasen, and anyone who enjoyed the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman collaboration Good Omens.

    Other books in the Long Earth series include:

    • The Long War
    • The Long Mars
    • The Long Utopia
    • The Long Cosmos

    Editor's Note

    Out of this world collaboration…

    The funny fantasy wizard Pratchett and hard science fiction master Baxter team up for a series exploring the repercussions of humans stepping between infinite dimensions thanks to a potato-powered device.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 19, 2012
    ISBN9780062067760
    The Long Earth
    Author

    Terry Pratchett

    Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) was the acclaimed creator of the globally revered Discworld series. In all, he authored more than fifty bestselling books, which have sold more than one hundred million copies worldwide. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal. He was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature in 2009, although he always wryly maintained that his greatest service to literature was to avoid writing any.

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    Reviews for The Long Earth

    4/5

    143 ratings104 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Loved the premise - that all most humans need to cross into alternate worlds is the equivalent of Dumbo's magic feather, powered by a potato battery. Had enough long before the end, but still found amusement and delight in the imagininings of Pratchett and Baxter.
    • 3/5
      Rather disappointing. The plot, what there is of it, took an enormously long time to develop. There are some interesting characters, but many of them never meet and it's not clear what all of them contribute to the story. Also, the main plot lines (the troll migration and First Person Singular) are introduced with very little supporting evidence. Given that Lobsang can only be on one Earth at once, how does he know the trolls are migrating, and how does he know which direction they are taking?What is the evidence that First Person Singluar is a threat?I wonder if the two writers developed the plot line in advance and then both assumed that the other was providing the supporting evidence?There's also the age thing - I get pretty much all the cultural references to old movies, poetry and the like, but the protagonists are much younger than I am. Their tastes reflect those of the book's writers, rather than the interests more likely for their deomgraphic.
    • 5/5
      I'll be honest, this is not the Pratchett I expected. There's an unexpected appearance of a potato, but it's mostly just a really good scifi novel.  
    • 3/5
      I'd call this a "quiet read." I enjoyed picking up all the connections to Pratchett's Discworld. I'd buy pretty much anything Pratchett written...novels...short stories...grocery lists...phone numbers on the back of an envelope...) The book was a nice introduction to the multiverse concept, and certainly showed the societal upheavals that would occur if we could really walk into a million other Earths. However, the book was ALL prelude. Hardly anything happens until the last few chapters. The characters just drift (literally, in a dirigible / airship thingy) along from world to world, with very little to disturb them.
    • 2/5
      Disappointed in what would have made a unique combination of Baxter and Pratchett. However, the story lacked the humor and fun of Pratchett and the hard science fiction of Baxter. What remained was a story without focus, humor, or character depth.
    • 3/5
      It feels strange to give as many as three stars to a book I struggled with and didn't bother to finish, but giving any less would be wrong. Fine writing goes a long way, and the idea behind the book is very intresting. It's the plot and the characters that failed to intrigue me. I got as far as halfway and then some, and nothing really happened, so I gave up. It's not a bad book, it just wasn't for me.
    • 3/5
      This is only half of a book. :/
    • 2/5
      In this first collaboration between Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, they have concocted an earth which has an infinite number of duplicates, but with some differences. Humans can travel to the next earth by using a little gadget to help them "step" from one to another. Much of the novel is devoted to the journey of our hero Joshua and his sentient but not-still-human mentor, Lobsang, as they glide above the worlds in a huge dirigible, observing the different societies. The characters are fine, and the world-building okay (but did they have to build so much of it?) However, there seemed to be little actual plot. There just wasn't much to keep the reader turning the pages wondering what on earth (haha!) would happen next. When Joshua and Lobsang were making their circuit, at one time we learned they had been on their journey for 17 days. Seventeen days? To me it felt like 380 days, at least!This may be a personal thing with me--I've reacted similarly to other Pratchett titles I've read (blasphemy, I know!) They just put me to sleep!
    • 3/5
      When a scientist discovers how people can "step" into parallel worlds, he puts the schematic diagram on the internet to prevent any government from monopolizing the technology. Soon, a slew of new problems arise that governments around the world must deal with. Some people, like Joshua Valiente, find they can step without the stepper box. Joshua and Lobsang, a Buddhist computer program that was ruled by a court of law to be human, set out on a journey to see just how many iterations there are on the long earth. The story was humorous in places, but at times I found I had to force myself to continue reading. I read other books by Terry Pratchett that I thought were very good, but I would have to rate 'The Long Earth' as just average.
    • 3/5
      A strange one. As a long-time Pratchett fan, I felt quite ambivalent about the idea of Pterry using what precious time he has left writing anything but Discworld. I got the book as soon as it came out, but it has sat for quite a few months on my bookcase, waiting for me to take the plunge, whereas I would normally have devoured a new Pratchett and been on to the second read-through before sunrise next morning.This isn't a Discworld-esque book. For those who have read Pratchett's "Strata" and "Dark Side of the Sun", there are certainly plenty of echoes. There is humour in this book, but less sophisticated than Discworld books, and more ... general. Nothing especially black or satirical (although there's certainly plenty of reason to despair. Or at least roll your eyes at the inevitable folly of humanity.) Not having read Stephen Baxter's work before I can't really comment on how this fits into his ouvre.I got frustrated by the movement through the book. Pratchett is normally a master of pacing, but I felt that it lagged and then sped up oddly, without seeming to match what was going on in the text. Too much time spent on bits of mild interest, and not enough exploration of the bits that seemed to deserve a deeper contemplation. And the book does have a definite "stay tuned for the next installment!!!" feel to it, which irked. Yes, it does stand alone in the sense that you have all the information you need to be able to follow the plot. It's just so obviously set up for more books in the series, and that makes me feel a bit cheated. The last few chapters are a good example of this -- rather than tying up loose threads, they pulled a whole lot more out of the story and dangled them just out of reach the way you might tease a kitten with a ball of wool. Yes, ok, you want me to buy the next one. Can I actually have something from this one first please?Plotwise there's the makings of some very interesting storytelling. But the characters are less developed than I had expected from two writers of this calibre, and anyone who's read Tad Williams's "Otherland" series will have a strong feeling of deja vu when they hit the denoument.I imagine lots of people will enjoy this, because it's not badly written, and has scope for a lot of future exploration. But if you were hoping for a synergy between the two writers (which Pratchett and Neil Gaiman managed in "Good Omens") and some sort of glorious imaginative romp, will probably be dissatisfied. Verdict? Well, hmm, good, but ...
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this book - fun, easy to read, interesting concept. Other reviewers have commented on the slow pace of the book - but I did not find it slow at all.
    • 3/5
      Unlike Good Omens where the work was equally shared and blended, this is definitely more Baxter than pTerry - almost I'd think predominately Baxter, with Pratchett perhaps contributing little more than the character of Lobsang. It is a slow story - again far more in the mould of Baxter, exploring a philosophical idea rather than any hard science concept, nor even having pTerry's touch at sociology.The basic principle is that suddenly the theorised multi-verse earth is accessible to humanity. It is possible, either natively or with he aid of a gadget to cross from Earth to neighbouring earths, geographically the same but having experience a different solar history. For no explained reason iron cannot make this transition. "Obviously" there are no humans in these other worlds, or often any kind of life at all, but enough life does exist for a settler mentality to develop, and society of Earth changes drastically as a result. We follow one Joshua a naturally gifted 'Stepper' (one of a few) who teams up with a corporate AI to explore the distant worlds millions of Steps away. They don't quite find what they are expecting.I think it was the no-iron rule that bugged me the most. The lack of internal consistency over this was shocking. I understand that they were looking to keep the pioneer societies primitive, but then to have "laser cut" timber, and an entire AI within the stepped worlds is beyond belief. The other annoying issue is that very little actually happens as such. Joshua Steps across a lot of worlds and eventually meets some creatures that were fortunate enough to survive evolution long enough to exist. Then he goes home. Although there are plenty of opportunities he doesn't have a relationship with anyone, barely speaks a lot of the time, an is happy just studying the Silence. Although believable as a character this is very boring tor read about. The worlds themselves are remarkably earth-like, consisting mostly of forest. Again probably true, but boring to read about. I'd happily take a little less verisimilitude and a bit more imagination.Different - slow - Although pTerry's name will help it sell a lot of copies, I'd only advise reading this if you're fan of Baxter's writing. I'm not.
    • 2/5
      Meh. I adore Terry Pratchett, and this book definitely has his signature humor, but I really couldn't get into it. This book imagines a world where it is suddenly possible to "step" between multiverses. None of the other multiverses are inhabited by humans, so suddenly there are vast frontiers available to anyone who wants to explore and exploit them. There are lots of interesting ideas in here, which is part of the problem: there are too many ideas and implications to explore thoroughly, which leads to too many ideas and not enough plot to sustain them.Pratchett's characters are normally really likeable, but all the characters in this book felt really flat to me and I just didn't care about any of them. The one character I might have cared about - Sally - suffers from the "Trinity problem": like Trinity in The Matrix, she stands by and watches some mediocre dude save the universe because the circumstances of his birth made him the savior of the universe. To add insult to injury, the ending is not an ending at all, but a cliffhanger that won't get resolved until the next book, which I have no intention of reading.
    • 4/5
      The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is the first book in a new science fiction (speculative fiction) that explores (quite literally) the multiverse — one Earth at a time.In 2015, the plans for a stepper are posted to the internet. It's basically a box, some wires, a switch (don't forget that!) and a potato (a Portal 2 reference?). As people (mostly teenagers) build the steppers and hit the switch (if they have one, most don't), they blip out of this Earth and go one step either East or West to another (but unpopulated) Earth.In trying to save the other kids from the orphanage who stepped with shoddily built steppers, Joshua (who built his to spec because that's what he does), learns that he prefers the near silence of these other Earths and more importantly, he's a natural stepper (no box needed).Like the disaster books of the 1970s, this novel has an ensemble cast, though the main ones are an orphan and natural stepper, Joshua, a former Tibetan motorcycle repairman (now computer consciousness) — Lobsang, a Madison police officer, and the daughter of the man who invented the stepper.Roughly two-thirds of the novel cover Joshua and Lobsang's journey west. The other third is divided up between the mechanics of stepping, the ramifications back on the Datum (original Earth), and some other accounts of people stepping (presented as blog entries, for example).Joshua, in his late twenties, is hired to go in search of the end the Long Earth. He will be traveling with Lobsang in a carefully built airship set up record anything unusual that is found along the way. It also serves as a back-up drive (one of many) for Lobsang (just in case). Should something happen (which means something invariably will), Joshua is in charge of brining Lobsang (meaning the airship's datacenter) home to the Datum.I listened to the book on audio CDs (ten discs), performed by Michael Fenton-Stevens. My favorite character (due in large part to Fenton-Stevens's work), was Lobsang. If I ever have a self-driven car — I'm naming it Lobsang. Realistically, I should name computer part Lobsang, and the vehicle the Mark Twain — but you get the idea.While I can clearly say I enjoyed the book. And while I can easily recommend the book, I do have some quibbles with it. The first is the authors' choice of Madison Wisconsin (and other parts of the United States) for their setting. The problem is that these American characters were so clearly being strained through a British filter twice (one in the text, and again in the audio performance). Most of the time it didn't matter but sometimes an American character would say something that no American would say ("disorientated" instead of "disoriented"). Or the narrator would mispronounce something and I'd be once again taken out of the moment ("fehma" instead of "f-ee-mah" for FEMA).My second quibble is the big threat which comes down to what Joshua calls a "migraine monster." Frankly, with Terry Pratchett as one of the co-authors, I wasn't all that surprised that there was a huge ecosystem bearing creature lurking on the Long Earth. So while I was half expecting a giant terrapin / pachyderm combo, I got instead, something that brought to mind one of the water monsters from Pikmin 2 (though large enough to carry an elephant).But it was still a fun read and I'm planning to revisit the Long Earth when The Long War is released later in 2013.
    • 4/5
      A fantastic marriage of Science Fiction and Fantasy .. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter wove a wonderful fiction worth remembering .. this could be the seed for a full series :-)
    • 4/5
      I have more questions than answers...but I guess they will be answered in the next book. Love the concept...live the book.
    • 4/5
      A solid science fiction story. A bit slow and cerebral, but not too much. You can see Terry Pratchett's humor in it, but the overall feel of the book is much different from his other works. This is a good thing. The Pratchett world is fine and all, but sometimes his wry, world weary perspective gets a bit old. I assume the book's different feel is due to co-author Stephen Baxter's contributions to the work. I like the way they handle the concepts of infinite Earths. The idea of multiple universes has been around for a while. What's different in this book is that the different Earth's are accessed sequentially. So if our Earth is #1, you must pass through Earths 2 through 11 to get to Earth 12. This makes for more interesting limits on how one accesses Earths. For instance, it takes months to travel from Earth 1 to Earth 100k. Even communication between such a distance Earths is difficult and spotty. This plot device allows pioneers to be pioneers again, even in the modern age. I'm glad the Mr. Pratchett is branching out from his Discworld series and working with other authors. The Long Earth, and his very fictional historical fiction novel, Dodger, are fine books.
    • 4/5
      What do an orphanage and a drinks vending machine have in common? They are both sentient and are embarking (although not in its vending machine body) onto a journey into the depths of alternate dimensions. Just how many dimensions are there and is there sentient life on any of them? Those are the questions they hope to answer and will have many adventures along the way.
    • 5/5
      In my youth I was a big scifi fan, but I have not been a big follower of the genre for the last 30 years or so. Recently, I have become more interested in returning to the 'roots' of my reading and the Long Earth series is one place I intent to visit. I did not know much about Stephen Baxter's writing when I started this book, and I have never been a big fan of 'humour' in scifi, especially the eccentric English sort associated with Terry Pratchett (Alan Dean Foster knows how to do it, but not many others).A set of seemingly infinite parallel worlds are discovered, each just a 'step' way if you have the natural talent or the simple-to-home-build technology. Each parallel Earth is in the same physical location and time (so 'stepping' from a particular place on a summer's day takes you to the same place on the same summer's day), but each has a different evolutionary and geological history to our world. The one common factor to all these parallel Earths is that humankind, or anything approaching it, has only appeared once, on our Earth. The impact on humanity is profound with many people moving to start new lives in new worlds and reflects the opening of the American West in the 18th and 19th centuries. We follow a motley crew of explorers, scientists and settlers across these worlds.This is a magnificent book. The science is strong; that is, the similarities and differences between our Earth and the parallel worlds are imaginative, sometimes wild, but always within the bounds of believability. The human response to these discoveries is real and never sugar-coated or exaggerated for effect; we understand why people do what they do and wonder if we would act any different. The main characters are drawn well enough that we want to follow them and are concerned with what happens to them.The Long Earth series was planned as a 5-book marathon, so this does have the feel of scene-setting and exposition over action, but I liked that expansive approach to the story-telling. The characters and action are firmly based in the trope of the American West, the opening up of frontier lands and the resistance to centralised government. Perhaps the response from other cultures may have been different?
    • 4/5
      with all due respect to Sir Pratchet and good bard Baxter, this book has a certain creative genius that is brillant and amazing in its simplicity. The reason I enjoyed this book was not due to flashy prose or vibrant symbolisim--it was due to the idea of the amazing thing they were describing and the story thereof. A rich and vibrant play ground of the mind that only the most hardened hearts might not enjoy. So, a few minor spoilers: this is a tale of earth, or rather many earths. a multi-verse of earths. humans have discovered the ability to step from world to world, and not just a few, but many people, as the design is released online. so new frontiers have been opened up. for you see, these worlds are empty of humanity. the probabilities that create the alternate universes are big things, not little things. and human life is but one minor possiblity in the malestorm of wonder that is the multiverse, the worlds of the long earth. so i urge you, if you have a spirit of adventure, to go forth and explore the long earths. i really hope they have a sequel. there is definetly more fertile ground for a sequel than i can imagine. so, bravo to Pratchet and Baxter. p.s. please make a sequel! p.p.s. i wasn't sure about lobsang at first, but he grew on me.
    • 4/5
      Mind = blown.
    • 3/5
      This was a fun read & there was a lot more humor & with than I'd expected going in. This was my first reading of Pratchett & I enjoyed it. The world building was well done & what I enjoyed the most. The long earths farther & farther away from Datum were exciting and seemed to have an undertone of menacing. The unknown of a known. Joshua was rootable but I didn't feel particularly connected to him or any other character. They were all interesting to watch though (Lobsang, especially). The last 25% of the book pretty well guaranteed that I'll read the next in the series because with a cliffhanger ending like that (mouth agape!), I must know what's going to happen on that phone call!
    • 4/5
      Great authors can flex their style and this is a fine example. Initially there is more of the Pratchett humour, however it quickly drops off as the novel becomes more concerned with it's science fiction potential. This lack of traditional Pratchett wit is no failing, after all this is not a Discworld novel. Both authors styles can be noted and the multiple storyline threads appease (to some extent) their own strengths, however the only issue The Long Earth presents is a lack of plot direction. There is a lack of drive here, often seen in exploratory science fiction and more frequent in the high brow end of the genre. Pratchett fans will be expecting a strong beginning. middle and end, which is absent here.The characterisation could be stronger, presenting no real emotional draw, however it is a the central idea of The Long Earth which compels the pages to be turned. There are some really strong insightful moments captured between the authors. Ultimately this is a good story and this particular future of Earth and it's dominant species (us) offers so much hope, yet reminds us of our own flawed nature.
    • 4/5
      It was enjoyable but I will admit it was slow to develop. I was left feeling like the first book was one long setup for the series. Thus isn't a terrible thing but it did leave me wishing the story was a little stronger. Reads a lot like a Jules Verne adventure novel ( Around the World in 80 Days for instance). Nothing that would stop me from reading the next one.
    • 1/5
      Excellent concept; dreary execution.
    • 3/5
      This book is full of brilliant ideas. The world is amazing, and it is full of interesting people...but I just didn't fall in love with any of them. I really really wanted to, and I read all 5 books in the series which were full of amazing worlds and wonderful ideas...but in the end I still really didn't care about any of the characters which made reading this a bit of a slog. There were lots of parts that should have been big reveals, which fell flat. Super cool stuff that could have been explored further and then just wasn't. Really, I think there were just too many cool things going on for any of them to actually be explored in the kind of depth they needed to be.
    • 3/5
      A random selection for me, because I don't usually read Terry Pratchett (I know!), but half price is half price. Also, the blurb begins with this line - '1916: the Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up' - so this former Scarlet Pimpernel leaguette couldn't resist. However, I wuz robbed - the character is a reference to Baroness Orczy's hero, but doesn't feature above twice.Cute literary nods aside, the story itself was intriguing but rather a one-trick pony, until the final 'What is this, Star Trek?' chapters (and bonus points for mentioning my other fictional love). On 'Step Day', the population of Earth - and Madison, Wisconsin in particular - discover that there are millions of parallel worlds out there which people can 'step' into. Most need a gadget called a stepper to move into a different plane, but a few, like the book's hero Joshua, are born with this ability. Joshua takes off in an AI-powered airship to investigate these new 'worlds', and meets Sally, the daughter of the man who invented the stepper. That's about the long and short of the plot. I don't mind Terry Pratchett, though I'm not sure how much he and co-author Stephen Baxter contributed to the novel, but his whimsical, slightly surreal style of humour has never really tickled me (like Lobsang, the artificial intelligence with the soul of a Tibetan motorcycle mechanic, hoho). The concept of 'stepping' is clever, but the new worlds are all prehistoric wastelands of one kind or another, and the pioneer metaphor, with families like the Greens abandoning old Earth for a new start, was sort of abandoned for Joshua and Lobsang's jaunt through evolution, via Flight of the Navigator and the original Star Trek. Entertaining and thoughtful, but hardly earth-shattering, pardon the pun.
    • 2/5
      Perhaps more Baxter than Pratchett in this. I enjoyed it, but! it ends on a cliffhanger.
    • 3/5
      Pretty interesting read, once you get past the "British-ness" of it. ^_^
    • 3/5
      A somewhat unusual take on the popular parallel timelines theme. First, the number of timelines is, if not infinite, at least very large. Second, the book spends very little time in most of them, except for Datum Earth (our timeline, maybe) and a chapter or so at some stops along the way that covers 100s of 1000s of Earths. Third, whereas as most parallel timeline stories use the trope to set up alternate human histories, human civilization only seems to exist on Datum Earth. Our travelers find only one other trace of humanity on the many Earths they visit, though they do find a few other timeline-hopping species. Fourth, the mechanism for travel, at least initially, for most people, involves an odd box that a traveler has to build for herself, powered by a potato. But this is the sole silly bit, presumably contributed by Pratchett. As with most travelogue novels, this is a readable journey, with one (of many) mysteries to be solved, but low-key and more for sightseeing than anything else.Recommended for a pleasant time, but not a must-read.

    Book preview

    The Long Earth - Terry Pratchett

    1

    IN A FOREST GLADE:

    Private Percy woke up to birdsong. It was a long time since he had heard birdsong, the guns saw to that. For a while he was content to lie there in the blissful quiet.

    Although he was slightly worried, in a concussed kind of way, why he was lying in damp though fragrant grass and not on his bedroll. Ah yes, fragrant grass, there hadn’t been much fragrance where he’d just been! Cordite, hot oil, burned flesh and the stink of unwashed men, that was what he was used to.

    He wondered if he was dead. After all, it had been a fearsome bombardment.

    Well, if he was dead then this would do for a heaven, after the hell of noise and screams and mud. And if it wasn’t heaven, then his sergeant would be giving him a kicking, pulling him up, looking him over and sending him down to the mess for a cup of tea and a wad. But there was no sergeant, and no noise except the birdsong in the trees.

    And, as dawn light seeped into the sky, he wondered, ‘What trees?’

    When had he last seen a tree that was even vaguely in the shape of a tree, let alone a tree with all its leaves, a tree not smashed to splinters by the shelling? And yet here were trees, lots of trees, a forest of trees.

    Private Percy was a practical and methodical young man, and therefore decided, in this dream, not to worry about trees, trees had never tried to kill him. He lay back, and must’ve dozed off for a while. Because when he opened his eyes again it was full daylight, and he was thirsty.

    Daylight, but where? Well, France. It had to be France. Percy couldn’t have been blown very far by the shell that had knocked him out; this must still be France, but here he was in woods where woods shouldn’t be. And without the traditional sounds of France, such as the thunder of the guns and the screams of the men.

    It was all a conundrum. And Percy was dying for a drink of water.

    So he packed up his troubles in what remained of his old kit bag, in this ethereal bird-haunted silence, and reflected that there was some truth in the song: what was the use of worrying? It was really not worthwhile, not when you have just seen men evaporate like the dew of the morning.

    But as he stood up he felt that familiar ache in his left leg, deep in the bone, the relic of a wound that hadn’t been enough to send him home but had got him a cushier posting with the camouflage boys, and a battered paint box in his kit bag. No dream this if his leg still hurt! But he wasn’t where he had been, that was for sure.

    And as he picked his way between the trees in the direction that appeared to have fewer trees in it than any other, a shimmering steely thought filled his mind: Why did we sing? Were we mad? What the hell did we think we were doing? Arms and legs all over the place, men just turning into a mist of flesh and bone! And we sang!

    What bloody, bloody fools we were!

    Half an hour later Private Percy walked down a slope, to a stream in a shallow valley. The water was somewhat brackish, but right now he would have been ready to drink out of a horse trough, right alongside the horse.

    He followed the stream until it joined a river, not a very wide river as yet, but Private Percy was a country boy and knew there would be crayfish under the river bank. And in half an hour said crayfish were cooking merrily, and never had he seen such big ones! And so many! And so juicy! He ate until it hurt, twirling his catch on a green stick over his hastily built fire and tearing them apart with his hands. He thought now: Perhaps I really am dead and have gone to heaven. And that is good enough for me, because, O Lord, I believe I have seen enough of hell.

    That night he lay in a glade by the river, with his kit bag for a pillow. And as the stars came out in the sky, more brilliant than he had ever seen, Percy began to sing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. He fell silent before finishing the song, and slept the sleep of the just.

    When the sunshine touched his face again, Percy woke, refreshed, sat up – and froze, motionless as a statue, before the calm gazes that inspected him. There were a dozen of the fellows in a row, watching him.

    Who were they? What were they? They looked a bit like bears, but not with bear faces, or a bit like monkeys, only fatter. And they were just watching him placidly. Surely they couldn’t be French?

    He tried French anyway. ‘Parley buffon say?’

    They stared at him blankly.

    In the silence, and feeling that something more was expected of him, Percy cleared his throat and plunged into ‘Pack Up Your Troubles.’

    The fellows listened with rapt attention until he had finished. Then they looked at one another. Eventually, as if some agreement had been reached, one of them stepped forward and sang the song back at Percy, pitch perfect.

    Private Percy listened with blank astonishment.

    And, a century later:

    The prairie was flat, green, rich, with scattered stands of oaks. The sky above was blue as generally advertised. On the horizon there was movement, like the shadow of a cloud: a vast herd of animals on the move.

    There was a kind of sigh, a breathing-out. An observer standing close enough might have felt a whisper of breeze on the skin.

    And a woman was lying on the grass.

    Her name was Maria Valienté. She wore her favourite pink angora sweater. She was only fifteen, but she was pregnant, and the baby was coming. The pain of the contractions pulsed through her skinny body. A moment ago she hadn’t known if she was more afraid of the birth, or the anger of Sister Stephanie who had taken away her monkey bracelet, all that Maria had from her mother, saying it was a sinful token.

    And now, this. Open sky where there should have been a nicotine-stained plaster ceiling. Grass and trees, where there should have been worn carpet. Everything was wrong. Where was here? Was this even Madison? How could she be here?

    But that didn’t matter. The pain washed through her again, and she felt the baby coming. There was nobody to help, not even Sister Stephanie. She closed her eyes, and screamed, and pushed.

    The baby spilled on to the grass. Maria knew enough to wait for the afterbirth. When it was done there was a warm mess between her legs, and a baby, covered in sticky, bloody stuff. It, he, opened his mouth, and let out a thin wail.

    There was a sound like thunder, from far away. A roar like you’d hear in a zoo. Like a lion.

    A lion? Maria screamed again, this time in fear—

    The scream was cut off, as if by a switch. Maria was gone. The baby was alone.

    Alone, except for the universe. Which poured in, and spoke to him with an infinity of voices. And behind it all, a vast Silence.

    His crying settled to a gurgle. The Silence was comforting.

    There was a kind of sigh, a breathing-out. Maria was back in the green, under the blue sky. She sat up, and looked around in panic. Her face was grey; she was losing a lot of blood. But her baby was here.

    She scooped up the baby and the afterbirth – she hadn’t even tied off the cord – wrapped him up in her angora sweater, and cradled him in her arms. His little face was oddly calm. She thought she’d lost him. ‘Joshua,’ she said. ‘Your name is Joshua Valienté.’

    A soft pop, and they were gone.

    On the plain, nothing remained but a drying mess of blood and bodily fluids, and the grass, and the sky. Soon, though, the scent of blood would attract attention.

    And, long ago, on a world as close as a shadow:

    A very different version of North America cradled a huge, landlocked, saline sea. This sea teemed with microbial life. All this life served a single tremendous organism.

    And on this world, under a cloudy sky, the entirety of the turbid sea crackled with a single thought.

    I…

    This thought was followed by another.

    To what purpose?

    2

    THE BENCH, BESIDE a modern-looking drinks machine, was exceedingly comfortable. Joshua Valienté was not used to softness these days. Not used to the fluffy feeling of being inside a building, where the furnishings and the carpets impose a kind of quiet on the world. Beside the luxurious bench was a pile of glossy magazines, but Joshua was not particularly good at shiny paper either. Books? Books were fine. Joshua liked books, particularly paperback books: light and easy to carry, and if you didn’t want to read them again, well, there was always a use for reasonably thin soft paper.

    Normally, when there was nothing to do, he listened to the Silence.

    The Silence was very faint here. Almost drowned out by the sounds of the mundane world. Did people in this polished building understand how noisy it was? The roar of air conditioners and computer fans, the susurration of many voices heard but not decipherable, the muffled sound of telephones followed by the sounds of people explaining that they were not in fact there but would like you to leave your name after the beep, this being subsequently followed by the beep. This was the office of the transEarth Institute, an arm of the Black Corporation. The faceless office, all plasterboard and chrome, was dominated by a huge logo, a chesspiece knight. This wasn’t Joshua’s world. None of it was his world. In fact, when you got right down to it, he didn’t have a world; he had all of them.

    All of the Long Earth.

    Earths, untold Earths. More Earths than could be counted, some said. And all you had to do was walk sideways into them, one after the next, an unending chain.

    This was a source of immense irritation for experts such as Professor Wotan Ulm of Oxford University. ‘All these parallel Earths,’ he told the BBC, ‘are identical on all but the detailed level. Oh, save that they are empty. Well, actually they are full, mainly of forests and swamps. Big, dark, silent forests, deep, clinging, lethal swamps. But empty of people. The Earth is crowded, but the Long Earth is empty. This is tough luck on Adolf Hitler, who hasn’t been allowed to win his war anywhere!

    ‘It is hard for scientists even to talk about the Long Earth without babbling about m-brane manifolds and quantum multiverses. Look: perhaps the universe bifurcates every time a leaf falls, a billion new branches every instant. That’s what quantum physics seems to tell us. Oh, it is not a question of a billion realities to be experienced; the quantum states superpose, like harmonics on a single violin string. But perhaps there are times – when a volcano stirs, a comet kisses, a true love is betrayed – when you can get a separate experiential reality, a braid of quantum threads. And perhaps these braids are then drawn together through some higher dimension by similarity, and a chain of worlds self-organizes. Or something! Maybe it is all a dream, a collective imagining of mankind.

    ‘The truth is that we are as baffled by the phenomenon as Dante would have been if he’d suddenly been given a glimpse of Hubble’s expanding universe. Even the language we use to describe it is probably no more correct than the pack-of-cards analogy that most people feel at home with: the Long Earth as a large pack of three-dimensional sheets, stacked up in a higher-dimensional space, each card an Earth entire unto itself.

    ‘And, most significantly, to most people, the Long Earth is open. Almost anybody can travel up and down the pack, drilling, as it were, through the cards themselves. People are expanding into all that room. Of course they are! This is a primal instinct. We plains apes still fear the leopard in the dark; if we spread out he cannot take all of us.

    ‘It is all profoundly annoying. None of it fits! And why has this tremendous pack of cards been dealt to mankind just now, when we have never been more in need of room? But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn’t be much of a career path, would it? Well – whatever the answers to such questions, believe you me, everything is changing for mankind… Is that enough, Jocasta? Some idiot clicked a pen while I was doing the bit about Dante.’

    Of course, Joshua understood, transEarth existed to profit from all these changes. Which, presumably, was why Joshua had been brought here, more or less against his will, from a world a long way away.

    At last the door opened. A young woman came in, nursing a laptop as thin as a sheet of gold leaf. Joshua kept such a machine in the Home, a fatter, antiquated model, mostly to look up wild-food recipes. ‘Mr Valienté? It’s so kind of you to come. My name is Selena Jones. Welcome to the transEarth Institute.’

    She was certainly attractive, he thought. Joshua liked women; he remembered his few, brief relationships with pleasure. But he hadn’t spent much time with women, and was awkward with them. ‘Welcome? You didn’t give me a choice. You found my mailbox. That means you’re government.’

    ‘As a matter of fact, you’re wrong. We sometimes work for the government, but we’re certainly not the government.’

    ‘Legal?’

    She smiled deprecatingly. ‘Lobsang found your mailbox code.’

    ‘And who is Lobsang?’

    ‘Me,’ said the drinks machine.

    ‘You’re a drinks machine,’ said Joshua.

    ‘You are wrong in your surmise, although I could produce the drink of your choice within seconds.’

    ‘But you’ve got Coca-Cola written on you!’

    ‘Do forgive me my sense of humour. Incidentally, if you had hazarded a dollar in the hope of soda-based refreshment I would definitely have returned it. Or provided the soda.’

    Joshua struggled to make sense of this encounter. ‘Lobsang who?’

    ‘I have no surname. In old Tibet, only aristocrats and Living Buddhas had surnames, Joshua. I have no such pretensions.’

    ‘Are you a computer?’

    ‘Why do you ask?’

    ‘Because I’m damn sure there isn’t a human being in there, and besides, you talk funny.’

    ‘Mr Valienté, I am more articulate and better spoken than anybody you know, and indeed I am not inside the drinks machine. Well, not wholly, that is.’

    ‘Stop teasing the man, Lobsang,’ said Selena, turning to Joshua. ‘Mr Valienté, I know you were … elsewhere, when the world first heard about Lobsang. He is unique. He is a computer, physically, but he used to be – how can I put this? – a Tibetan motorcycle repairman.’

    ‘So how did he get from Tibet to the inside of a drinks machine?’

    ‘That is a long story, Mr Valienté…’

    If Joshua hadn’t been away so long he’d have known all about Lobsang. He was the first machine to successfully convince a court that he was a human being.

    ‘Of course,’ Selena said, ‘other sixth-generation machines had tried it before. Provided they stay in the next room and talk to you via a speaker they can sound at least as human as some of the lunkheads you see around, but that proves nothing in the eyes of the law. But Lobsang doesn’t claim to be a thinking machine. He didn’t claim rights on that basis. He said he was a dead Tibetan.

    ‘Well, Joshua, he had them by the shorts. Reincarnation is still a cornerstone of world faith; and Lobsang simply said that he had reincarnated as a computer program. As was deposited in evidence in court – I’ll show you the transcripts if you like – the relevant software initiated at precisely the microsecond a Lhasan motorcycle repairman with a frankly unpronounceable name died. To a discarnate soul, twenty thousand teraflops-worth of technological wizardry on a gel substrate apparently looks identical to a few pounds of soggy brain tissue. A number of expert witnesses testified to the astonishing accuracy of Lobsang’s flashes of recall of his previous life. And I myself witnessed a small, wiry old man with a face like a dried peach, a distant cousin of the repairman, conversing with Lobsang happily for several hours, reminiscing about the good old days in Lhasa. A charming afternoon!’

    ‘Why?’ Joshua asked. ‘What could he gain out of it?’

    ‘I’m right here,’ said Lobsang. ‘He’s not made of wood, you know.’

    ‘Sorry.’

    ‘What did I gain? Civil rights. Security. The right to own property.’

    ‘And switching you off would be murder?’

    ‘It would. Also physically impossible, incidentally, but let’s not go into that.’

    ‘So the court’s agreed you’re human?’

    ‘There’s never actually been a legal definition of human, you know.’

    ‘And now you work for transEarth.’

    ‘I part-own it. Douglas Black, the founder, had no hesitation in offering me a partnership. Not only for my notoriety, though he’s drawn to that sort of thing. For my transhuman intellect.’

    ‘Really.’

    Selena said, ‘Let’s get back to business. You took a lot of finding, Mr Valienté.’

    Joshua looked at her and made a mental note to make it a lot more finding next time.

    ‘Your visits to Earth are infrequent these days.’

    ‘I’m always on Earth.’

    ‘You know what I mean. This one,’ said Selena. ‘Datum Earth, or even one of the Low Earths.’

    ‘I’m not for hire,’ Joshua said quickly, trying to keep a trace of anxiety out of his voice. ‘I like to work alone.’

    ‘Well, that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it?’

    Joshua preferred life in his stockades, on Earths far from the Datum, too far away for most to travel. Even then he was wary of company. They said that Daniel Boone would pull up sticks and move on if he could as much as see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Joshua, Boone was pathologically gregarious.

    ‘But that’s what makes you useful. We know you don’t need people.’ Selena held up a hand. ‘Oh, you’re not antisocial. But consider this. Before the Long Earth, no one in the whole history of mankind had ever been alone; I mean really alone. The hardiest sailor has always known that there’s someone out there somewhere. Even the old moonwalker astronauts could see the Earth. Everyone knew that other people were just a matter of distance away.’

    ‘Yeah, but with the Steppers they’re only a knight’s-move away.’

    ‘Our instincts don’t understand that, though. Do you know how many people pioneer solo?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘None. Well, hardly any. To be alone on an entire planet, possibly the only mind in a universe? Ninety-nine out of a hundred people can’t take it.’

    But Joshua never was alone, he thought. Not with the Silence always there, behind the sky.

    ‘As Selena said, that’s what makes you useful,’ Lobsang said. ‘That and certain other qualities we can discuss later. Oh, and the fact that we have leverage over you.’

    Light dawned, for Joshua. ‘You want me to make some kind of journey. Into the Long Earth.’

    ‘That’s what you’re uniquely good at,’ Selena said sweetly. ‘We want you to go into the High Meggers, Joshua.’

    The High Meggers: the term used by some of the pioneers for the worlds, most of them still little more than legend, more than a million steps from Earth.

    ‘Why?’

    ‘For the most innocent of all reasons,’ said Lobsang. ‘To see what’s out there.’

    Selena smiled. ‘Information on the Long Earth is the stock in trade of transEarth, Mr Valienté.’

    Lobsang was more expansive. ‘Consider, Joshua. Until fifteen years ago mankind had one world and dreamed of a few more, the worlds of the solar system, all barren and horribly expensive to get to. Now we have the key to more worlds than we can count! And we have barely explored even the nearest of them. Now’s our chance to do just that.’

    ‘Our chance?’ Joshua said. ‘I’m taking you with me? Is that the gig? A computer is paying me to chauffeur it?’

    ‘Yes, that’s the size of it,’ Selena said.

    Joshua frowned. ‘And the reason I’ll do this – you said something about leverage?’

    Selena said smoothly, ‘We’ll come to that. We’ve studied you, Joshua. In fact the earliest trace you leave in the files is a report by Madison PD Officer Monica Jansson, filed just after Step Day itself. About the mysterious boy who came back, bringing the other children with him. Quite the little pied piper, weren’t you? Once upon a time you would have been called a celebrity.’

    ‘And,’ Lobsang put in, ‘once upon another time you’d have been called a witch.’

    Joshua sighed. Was he ever going to live that day down? He had never wanted to be a hero; he didn’t like people looking at him in that funny way. Or, indeed, in any way. ‘It was a mess, that’s all,’ he said. ‘How did you find out?’

    ‘The police reports, like Jansson’s,’ said the drinks machine. ‘The thing about the police is that they keep everything on file. And I just love files. Files tell me things. They tell me who your mother was, for instance, Joshua. Maria was her name, was it not?’

    ‘My mother’s none of your business.’

    ‘Joshua, everybody is my business, and everybody is on file. And the files have told me all about you. That you may be very special. That you were there on Step Day.’

    ‘Everybody was there on Step Day.’

    ‘Yes, but you felt at home, didn’t you, Joshua? You felt as if you’d come home. For once in your life you knew you were in the right place …’

    3

    STEP DAY. FIFTEEN years ago. Joshua had been just thirteen. Later, everybody remembered where they were on Step Day. Mostly they were in the shit.

    At the time, nobody knew who had uploaded the circuit diagram for the Stepper on to the web. But as evening swept like a scythe around the world, kids everywhere started putting Steppers together, dozens in the neighbourhood of the Home in Madison alone. There had been a real run on Radio Shack. The electronics seemed laughably simple. The potato you were supposed to install at the heart of it seemed laughable too, but it was important, because it was your power supply. And then there was the switch. The switch was vital. Some kids thought you didn’t need a switch. Just twist wires together. And they were the ones who ended up screaming.

    Joshua had put his first Stepper together carefully. He always did things meticulously. He was the kind of boy who always, but always, paints before assembly, and then assembles the pieces in the right order, with every single component laid out with care before commencing. Joshua always commenced things. It sounded more deliberate than starting. In the Home, when he worked on one of the old and worn and incomplete jigsaw puzzles, he would always sort out the pieces first, separating sky and sea and edge, before putting even two pieces together. Sometimes afterwards, if the puzzle was incomplete, he would go into his little workshop and very carefully shape the missing pieces out of hoarded scrap wood and then paint them to fit. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t believe that the puzzle had ever had holes. And sometimes he would cook, under the supervision of Sister Serendipity. He would collect all the ingredients, prepare them all in advance meticulously, and then work through the recipe. He even cleaned up as he went. He liked cooking, and liked the approval it won him in the Home.

    That was Joshua. That was how he did things. And that was why he wasn’t the first kid to step out of the world, because he’d not only varnished his Stepper box, he’d waited for the varnish to dry. And that was why he was certainly the first kid to get back without wetting his pants, or worse.

    Step Day. Kids were disappearing. Parents scoured the neighbourhoods. One minute the kids were there, playing with this latest crazy toy, and the next moment they weren’t. When frantic parent meets frantic parent, frantic becomes terrified. The police were called, but to do what? Arrest who? To look where?

    And Joshua himself stepped, for the first time.

    A heartbeat earlier, he had been in his workshop, in the Home. Now he stood in a wood, heavy, thick, the moonlight hardly managing to reach the ground. He could hear other kids everywhere, throwing up, crying for their parents, a few screaming as if they were hurt. He wondered why all the distress. He wasn’t throwing up. It was creepy, yes. But it was a warm night. He could hear the whine of mosquitoes. The only question was, a warm night where?

    All the crying distracted him. There was one kid close at hand, calling for her mother. It sounded like Sarah, another resident of the Home. He called out her name.

    She stopped crying, and he heard her voice, quite close: ‘Joshua?’

    He thought it over. It was late evening. Sarah would have been in the girls’ dormitory, which was about twenty yards away from his workshop. He had not moved, but he was clearly in a different place. This wasn’t Madison. Madison had noises, cars, airplanes, lights, while now he was standing in a forest, like something out of a book, with not a trace of a streetlight anywhere he looked. But Sarah was here too, wherever this was. The thought constructed itself a piece at a time, like an incomplete jigsaw. Think, don’t panic. In relation to where you are, or were, she will be where she is, or was. You just have to go down the passage to her room. Even though, here and now, there is no passage, no room. Problem solved.

    Except that to get to her would mean walking through the tree right in front of him. An extremely big tree.

    He worked his way around the tree, pushing through the tangled undergrowth, the briars, the fallen branches of this very wild wood. ‘Keep talking,’ he said. ‘Don’t move. I’m coming.’

    ‘Joshua?’

    ‘Look, I’ll tell you what. Sing. Keep singing. That way I’ll be able to find you in the dark.’ Joshua switched on his flashlight. It was a tiny one that fitted into a pocket. He always carried a flashlight at night. Of course he did. He was Joshua.

    She didn’t sing. She started to pray. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’

    He wished people would do what he told them, just sometimes.

    From around the forest, from the dark, other voices joined in. ‘Hallowed be thy name …’

    He clapped his hands and yelled, ‘Everybody shut up! I’ll get you out of here. Trust me.’ He didn’t know why they should trust him, but the tone of authority worked, and the other voices died away. He took a breath and called, ‘Sarah. You first. OK? Everybody else, go towards the prayer. Don’t say anything. Just head towards the prayer.’

    Sarah began again: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’

    As he worked his way forward, hands outstretched, pushing through briars and climbing over roots, testing every step, he heard the sounds of people moving all around him, more voices calling. Some were complaining about being lost. Others were complaining about a lack of cellphone signal. Sometimes he glimpsed their phones, little screens glowing like fireflies. And then there was the desolate weeping, even moans of pain.

    The prayer ended with an amen, which was echoed around the forest, and Sarah said, ‘Joshua? I’ve finished.’

    And I thought she was clever, thought Joshua. ‘Then start again.’

    It took him minutes to get to her, even though she was only half the length of the Home away. But he could see this forest clump was actually quite small. Beyond, in the moonlight, he saw what looked like prairie flowers, like in the Arboretum. No sign of the Home, though, or Allied Drive.

    At last Sarah stumbled towards him and clamped herself on him. ‘Where are we?’

    ‘Somewhere else, I guess. You know. Like Narnia.’

    The moonlight showed him the tears pouring down her face and the snot under her nose, and he could smell the vomit on her nightdress. ‘I never stepped into no wardrobe.’

    He burst out laughing. She stared at him. But because he was laughing, she laughed. And the laughter started to fill this little clearing, for other kids were drifting this way, towards the flashlight glow, and for a moment that held back the terror. It was one thing to be lost and alone, quite another to be lost in a crowd, and laughing.

    Somebody else grabbed his arm. ‘Josh?’

    ‘Freddie?’

    ‘It was terrible. I was in the dark and I fell down, down to the ground.’

    Freddie had a tummy bug, Josh remembered. He’d been in the sanatorium, on the Home’s first floor. He must have just fallen, through the vanished building. ‘Are you hurt?’

    ‘No… Josh? How do we get home?’

    Joshua took Sarah’s hand. ‘Sarah, you made a Stepper?’

    ‘Yes.’

    He glanced at the mess of components in her hand. It wasn’t even in a box, not even a shoebox or something, let alone a box that had been carefully made for the purpose, like his. ‘What did you use for a switch?’

    ‘What switch? I just twisted the wires together.’

    ‘Look. It definitely said to put in a centre-off switch.’ He very carefully took her Stepper in his hands. You always had to be very careful around Sarah. She wasn’t a Problem, but problems had happened to her.

    At least there were three wires. He traced back the circuitry by touch. He’d spent hours staring at the circuit diagram; he knew it by heart. He separated the wires and put the ragged tangle back in her hands. ‘Listen. When I say go, press that wire and that one together. If you find yourself back in your room, drop the whole thing on the floor and go to bed. OK?’

    Sniffing, she asked, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’

    ‘Well, you’ll

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