The Long Earth

with my parents. It’s just that since I met you two, the questions I have always had about it, I guess, have sharpened up. I ought to wear a bracelet. “What would Lobsang think?”’
    Joshua barked laughter.
    ‘You know, this place always seemed a regular garden of Eden – but without the serpent, and I wondered where the serpent was. My family got on well with the people here. But I never wanted to stay. I never had the sense I fitted in. I would never dare to call it home, just in case
I
was somehow the serpent.’
    Joshua tried to read the expression on Sally’s face. ‘I’m sorry.’
    That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. She looked away. ‘I do think this place is important, Joshua. For all of us. All humanity, I mean. It’s unique, after all. But what happens when the colonists start getting here? I mean the regular sort, the wavefront, with their spades and picks and bronze guns, and their wife-beaters and fraudsters? How can this place survive? How many trolls will be shot, slaughtered and enslaved?’
    ‘Maybe whoever, whatever is running the experiment will start fighting back.’
    She shuddered. ‘We
are
starting to think like Lobsang. Joshua, let’s get out of here and go somewhere
normal
. I need a holiday …’

50
    A DAY LATER , on a distant world, in a warm twilight, Helen Green was gathering mushrooms. She wandered across a scrap of high ground, a couple of miles out of the new township of Reboot.
    And there was a kind of sigh, like an exhalation. Helen felt a whisper of breeze on her skin. She turned.
    There was a man, standing on the grass, slim, dark. A woman stood at his side, and she looked as if she belonged there. Visitors stepping in weren’t an unusual occurrence. They rarely looked quite so confused as these two. Or as grubby. Or with
frost
glistening on their jackets.
    And very few appeared with a gigantic airship hovering over their heads. Helen wondered if she should run and fetch somebody.
    The man shielded his eyes against the sun. ‘Who are you?’
    ‘My name is Helen Green.’
    ‘Oh, the blogger from Madison? I hoped we’d meet you.’
    She glared at him. ‘Who are
you
? You aren’t another tax man, are you? We drove the last one out of town.’
    ‘No, no. My name’s Joshua Valienté.’
    ‘
The
Joshua Valienté …’ To her horror she felt herself blush.
    The woman with Joshua said witheringly, ‘Give me strength.’
    To Joshua, Helen Green looked in her late teens. She wore her strawberry-blonde hair tied sensibly back from her face, and had a basket of some kind of fungi on her arm. She was dressed in shirt and slacks of some soft deer-like leather, and moccasins. She wouldn’t have fitted into the crowd on the Datum, but on the other hand she was no colonial-era museum piece. This wasn’t some retro recreation of pioneering days past, Joshua realized. Helen Green was something new in the world, or worlds. Kind of cute, too.
    There was no trouble finding a place to stay in Reboot, once they accepted you weren’t any kind of criminal or bandit, or worse yet a representative of the Datum federal government which had suddenly turned so hostile to the colonists. In their time here Joshua saw the locals welcome even the hobos, as they called them, a drift of rather vague-looking people wandering through the Long Earth, evidently with no intention of
ever
settling down, and therefore with not much to contribute to Reboot. But out here every new face, with a new story to tell, was welcome, however briefly they stayed, so long as they tilled a field or chopped some wood in return for bed and board.
    In the evening, Joshua and Sally sat by the fire, alone together, under the dark hulk of the
Mark Twain
.
    ‘I like these folk,’ Joshua said. ‘They’re good people. Sensible. Doing things right.’ He felt like this because of the way he was, he accepted that; he liked it when people did what they had to do, such as build this community, properly and methodically. I could live here, he thought, somewhat to his own surprise.
    But Sally snorted. ‘No. This is the old way of living, or an imitation of it. We don’t
need
to plough the land to feed vast densities of people. We don’t just have one Earth now, we have an infinite number and they can feed an infinite number of us. Those hobos have it more right. They are the future, not your starstruck little fan Helen Green. Look, I suggest we stay here for a week, help with the harvest, take our pay in