‘Yes. Into a world which, we think, crystallizes from a Platonic potential into the realm of the actual. It is just as in quantum mechanics – if two objects have a quantum description sufficiently precise, if their states are identical, they are the same object. To go further than simple Linsay stepping is essentially an application of higher mathematics … Oh, if only you could quicktalk! English is utterly inadequate, and slow. Like shouting poetry down a drainpipe. Stan, you may be able to learn.’ But she glanced at Rocky, and her message was clear. Not you. ‘Are you ready? We will make some stops – call them educational opportunities – before we reach our destination. Hold my hands, both of you …’
And Rocky, helpless, was hurled through another plummeting seven-league-boot leap.
26
THE AIRSHIP SHILLELAGH hovered over Manning Hill, over the Abrahams farmstead, tethered to the remains of the gondola which had delivered Lobsang, Agnes, a little boy and a cat to this world three years before. As Agnes strode up the hill, bearing a box of eggs – a souvenir of a coffee morning at the Irwins’ – she realized that the twain had already been there a week. Agnes had become a lot more aware of the passage of time thanks to her clocks and calendars.
The battered old airship was a novelty, of course, in the sedate green world of New Springfield, and even after a week the children, and some adults too, still came to stare. Joshua Valienté had been introduced as a visitor, an old family friend, and nobody had questioned that simple cover story – even those few who had heard of this hero of the early days of stepping. And Joshua was generous with his time, as ever. After arriving in the airship he had given the local kids rides across the forest-choked landscape of Earth West 1,217,756. These kids thought nothing of stepping, nothing of the existence of the multiple worlds of the Long Earth – but few of them had ever got to see their home from the air.
Six-year-old Ben, of course, loved his Uncle Joshua. And Joshua made time too for Shi-mi, who had come hesitantly out to meet him when the airship first landed.
Well, Joshua had finally made it here. But he had taken some finding, after Agnes had sent the word out through Bill Chambers and the Sisters at the Home and other old friends. Since the final breakdown of his marriage Joshua had become more reclusive still, it seemed, spending even more of his time on his solitary ‘sabbaticals’, huddled in his Robinson Crusoe one-man stockades on remote worlds.
Agnes had been afraid of Joshua’s reaction when he discovered Lobsang was still alive. In the event he just laughed. ‘I knew it.’
Meanwhile the situation was becoming urgent.
For a world that had been sold to them as lacking pronounced seasons, there seemed to be a heck of a lot of weather. As the months they’d waited for Joshua had passed, there were more and more freak events: storms, droughts, howling winds – and, strangest of all, bizarre ‘magnetic storms’, as Lobsang called them, when auroras would flap in the sky like tremendous curtains, streaming north to south. Agnes had never heard of auroras at latitudes as low as this, not that she was any kind of expert. These storms had consequences. The furballs and their predators blundered about even more randomly than before. Maybe these creatures, like navigating birds, relied on a stable magnetic field for their sense of direction.
As for the people, the storms played hell with the few electronic gadgets they had that still worked. Agnes herself, of course, was a thing of clockwork and gears – that was how she thought of herself anyhow. When the storms came she fretted about how she, Lobsang and indeed Shi-mi might be affected. Lobsang told her not to worry; her innards were well shielded, and her substrates were biochemical rather than metal. Lobsang said that in fact they should be affected less than the standard-issue people around them, whose minds were also linked to their bodies through electromagnetic fields in their brains and nervous systems. That just made her more afraid for Ben, and his growing young body.
Well, Joshua was here now. And, a week after the arrival of the Shillelagh, he and Lobsang were ready to get to work.
Inside the house, Agnes found the two of them sitting at the kitchen table picking over beetle artefacts: silver bangles and pendants, what looked like a small Swiss army knife also wrought in silver, and a shard of smooth black material, curved, broken, like a piece of a smashed Easter egg.
Lobsang looked up. ‘Ben’s playing out back.’
‘Good.’ Agnes bustled around the kitchen, storing the eggs, preparing a fresh pot of coffee. ‘I’ll call him for lunch if he doesn’t come in.’
Joshua said, ‘Well, I guess we’re about ready to go.’
‘Go?’
‘Go tour this world in the Shillelagh,’ Lobsang said. ‘Take a proper look at it, outside of this pinprick we inhabit.’ He shook his greying head. ‘It’s amazing that we’ve done this, in retrospect. You and I, Agnes. Stepped into this one place, in a whole new world, with no real idea what’s over the horizon.’
Joshua said, ‘Well, that’s how most people do it, Lobsang. First light tomorrow, as agreed?’
‘Suits me,’ Lobsang said. ‘It won’t take long to get ready. I’ve packed everything I’ll need from our old gondola into the twain already.’