‘Forget it.’
After that, much of the night was spent in not very companionable silence. Long hours of darkness which Joshua spent much of beating himself up for what he’d said, or hadn’t said, not for the first time where his family was concerned.
Maybe Joshua slept a little. He suspected Rod napped too, leaving the flying to the autopilot. Even the flaring of an occasional Joker did not disturb them.
The sun came up on all the worlds of the Long Earth.
Some fifty thousand steps from the Datum they were still deep in the thick band of worlds known as the Mine Belt: cooler and less well forested than the Earths of the Corn Belt, which began around the location of Reboot and stretched away to the stepwise West. The Mine Belt worlds were mostly exploited only as sources of minerals of various kinds, either for local use or for export to the Datum and the Low Earths – though even that kind of trade was dwindling now. But there were herds of animals to be seen, drawn to the water courses and lakes, mostly four-legged mammals but not much like anything that populated the human cultural imagination: things like giant camels, and things like elephants with oddly shaped tusks, stalked by things like huge cats. As they stepped, the herds, dark flowing masses, were there and gone in an eye blink.
They had a silent breakfast of Helen’s cookies and lukewarm coffee from a flask.
Around eight a.m. the character of the worlds below changed again, subtly. This was the Ice Belt, a band of periodically glaciated worlds, of which Datum Earth – at least in its primordial state, before humanity got to work – appeared to have been a typical example. These Earths were cooler, with open prairie and grasslands, the forests shrunk back to patches of evergreen, and tundra in the far north. As Joshua had learned during his own forays into the Long Earth, and on that first journey of exploration with Lobsang two decades ago, when you crossed the Long Earth it was like flying through the branches of some tremendous tree of possibilities and probabilities. The closer you got to the Datum, the more links in the chain of coin-toss cosmic accidents that had led to the peculiar circumstances of the home world locked into place, and the more familiar the landscapes became. So now, on the sparsely populated grasslands below, they saw animals of the kinds alongside which humans had evolved, even if said animals hadn’t necessarily survived to feature in the modern world: mastodons and mammoths, deer and bison. In most of these Earths the epochal collision of the Americas, North and South, must have taken place, for they saw immigrants from the south, such as giant sloths and armadillos the size of small cars.
But, apart from the very occasional pinprick of a campfire, or the even rarer lights of a small township, there was no sign of mankind.
Joshua remarked, ‘Nobody at home. And yet you still meet people, especially back on the Datum, who will tell you we conquered the Long Earth.’
Rod shrugged. ‘So what? Why do you need to conquer, or not conquer, anything? Why not just accept things the way they are? Because even if they do change, you can always just step away …’
And Joshua saw that that really was how Rod thought about the world, or worlds: as a kind of endless now, an endless here, a place where location and time didn’t matter – and endlessly generous, a place you didn’t need to work at, didn’t need to build on, or fix. A place of endless escape. Joshua felt a sudden, intense jumble of emotions. Born in the Long Earth, Rod was of a generation that was forever divided from Joshua’s by the great chasm of Step Day, and never could their world views be reconciled.
He couldn’t help it. He reached over and grabbed Rod’s shoulder, squeezing it hard. But Rod failed to respond.
It was a relief for both of them, Joshua suspected, when noon arrived and the plane banked over an uninhabited footprint of the Madisonian lakes, precisely three thousand steps West of the Datum. A single thread of smoke rose up from a campfire by the shore.
And as the plane began its final approach, a woman by the fire got to her feet and waved.
7
ROD EXCHANGED VERY few words with Sally Linsay. Joshua suspected he had always felt uncomfortable with the tension between his mother and Sally – even though, Joshua supposed, Sally’s transient lifestyle was a lot more like Rod’s own choice than Helen’s sedentary midwifery. Rod said goodbye politely enough, and exchanged a handshake with his father.
Then Sally and Joshua stood side by side as they watched the plane climb into the sky, before it flew stepwise and out of existence. Joshua tried to close the lid on his latest cargo of regret, a feeling of another opportunity missed, somehow.
Sally let Joshua gulp down a lunch of roast rabbit leg and a cup of cold coffee, while she pulled her pack on her back and kicked out her fire.