The Long Earth

so
like
us, dinosaurs or not. They were sapient. They were tool-users. They created buildings – a city, at least this one. And they had art – adornment …’
    ‘Yes,’ Lobsang said. ‘They were like us in one essential regard, and unlike the trolls, say. These creatures, like us, created an environment of culture around themselves. Our artefacts, our cities, are external stores of the wisdom of past ages. The trolls seem to have nothing like it, though perhaps their songs are a step towards it. These creatures had that faculty, evidently.’
    Joshua said, ‘They even look as if they were upright bipeds, like us. Don’t they?’
    Lobsang said, ‘Perhaps we are seeing universals here – the upright biped is a useful tool-wielding form given a basic four-limbed body plan; and perhaps intelligent incarnate tool-wielding creatures have a natural tendency to aggregate into something like cities. Perhaps even an attraction for bright shiny ornaments is common. Yet it is all gone. They poisoned themselves, and now they are poisoning us.’
    Sally looked at Joshua. ‘I feel like I just found out I had a stillborn twin brother.’
    ‘There’s little point our spending much more time here,’ said Lobsang. ‘This place clearly requires a properly equipped archaeological expedition – with radiation suits. It will keep, after all; we are far from the Datum, and I doubt if there will be tourists any time soon. Come, children. Let’s go home. There is nothing for us here.’
    As they made their way back to the elevator, Joshua said bitterly, ‘It all seems such a waste, doesn’t it? All these worlds. What’s the point, without mind?’
    ‘It is the way of things,’ Lobsang said. ‘You are looking at this the wrong way. How likely is it that we might find sapient life on other planets? The astronomers have detected several thousand planets of other stars, but nothing as yet has given us any reason to believe that there is anybody out there. Perhaps it is difficult to evolve tool-making intelligences. And perhaps we should be grateful we came so
close
to meeting these creatures, so close in probability space.’
    Sally said, ‘But if these creatures were sentient, why did we find them in only one world? We would have picked up evidence of them in the neighbouring worlds, wouldn’t we? At least in this location. Couldn’t they step, despite their sentience?’
    ‘Perhaps not,’ Lobsang said. ‘Or perhaps the natural steppers were driven out by those who could not step at all. As seems to be happening on Datum Earth right now. Perhaps this is a glimpse of our own future.’
    And Sally and Joshua, two secretive natural steppers, exchanged glances of understanding.

41
    ‘
NATURAL STEPPERS
. SUCH a nice phrase, ain’t it? I mean, we all
step
. We all learn to do it when we’re weaned off our mammy’s milk. “Oh, look, it’s baby’s first steps.”’ Brian Cowley, who was nothing if not a showman, took mincing baby paces back and forth across the stage, mike in hand, picked out by the spotlights in the cavernous conference room. The simple stunt won him a few whoops.
    Monica Jansson, in plain clothes, glanced around the crowd in this basement room to see who was doing the whooping.
    ‘It’s natural.
Walking
is. But what
they
call stepping?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing natural about that. You need a gadget to do it, don’t you? You don’t need no gadget to walk.
Stepping
. That’s not what I call it. That’s not what my granddaddy would have called it. We plain folk, who don’t have the education to know any better, have other words for practices like that. Words like
unnatural
. Words like
abomination
. Words like
unholy
.’
    Each term brought louder choruses of whoops. There would come a point, Jansson knew, where she’d have to join in with the whooping to keep her cover.
    The room was overcrowded, and dimly lit aside from the stage, the air hot, steamy. Cowley always made a point of appearing in public only underground, in basements, cellars, subterranean venues like this hotel’s below-ground-level conference room. Places the stepping folk couldn’t get at him, not without digging a hole in the ground first. Jansson was here undercover, along with colleagues from the MPD and Homelands Security (the ‘s’ had been adopted ten years after Step Day) and the FBI and a number of other agencies, who had become alarmed at the wilder noises coming out of fringe elements of Cowley’s