The Long Earth

endlessly since she was a little girl playing outside her father’s shed in a stepwise Wyoming, to figure out what it was all
for
.
    She’d never been indecisive. She made a random choice of direction, grinned, and stepped. Around her, the lake, the clumps of trees persisted. But the footpath, the rowboats, the idiot on the windsurfer had gone.

8
    PEOPLE HAD GONE off every which way in those early days, with a purpose or just for the hell of it. But nobody had gone further than Joshua.
    In those first months, still aged only thirteen, fourteen, he’d built himself refuges in the higher Earths. Stockades, he called them. And the best of them
were
stockades, like Robinson Crusoe’s. People had the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a determined, cheerful man heavily into goatskin underwear. But at the Home had been an old, battered copy of the book itself, and Joshua, being Joshua, had read it from cover to cover. Robinson Crusoe had been on his island for over twenty-six years, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Joshua approved of this; the man obviously had his head screwed on right.
    It had been harder when he’d first started. In Madison, Wisconsin, what you found on the other side of the reality walls, to East and West, was mostly prairie. Joshua knew now that the first time he’d stepped through he’d been lucky it hadn’t been winter, which could have plunged him unprepared into temperatures of forty below. And that he hadn’t landed in some marsh, in some place that on Datum Earth had been drained by people and turned into farmland long before he’d been born.
    The first time he’d gone out alone into the wild worlds and tried to spend a night had been kind of rough. Blackberries had been the only food he’d recognized, but he got water from rainfall in cup plants . He’d taken a blanket, and it had been too warm for that, but he’d needed it as a mosquito net. He’d slept up a tree for security. It was only later that he’d learned that cougars could climb trees …
    After that he’d taken over a few books from the Home and the city library to help him recognize stuff, and he asked Sister Serendipity, who knew about cookery through the ages, and he’d begun to see you’d have to be pretty stupid to starve out there. There were berries, mushrooms, acorns, walnuts, and cat-tails, big green reeds with roots rich in carbs. There were plants to use if you were ill – even wild quinine. The lakes were rich in fish, and traps were easy to make. He’d tried his hand at hunting, once or twice. Rabbits were OK, but the bigger game, the white-tailed deer and elk and moose, would have to wait until he was older. Even turkeys took some running down. But why bother, when there were passenger pigeons that were so dumb that they’d sit and wait for you to walk up to them and knock them over? The animals, even the fish, seemed so innocent. Trusting. Joshua had developed a habit of thanking his catch for its gift of its life, only to learn later that that was how Indian hunters treated their prey.
    You had to prepare. You took over matches or a Fresnel lens for fire; he’d taught himself how to make a fire bow in an emergency, but the effort sucked for everyday use. He’d got mosquito repellent free from Clean Sweep, a government exchange for household chemicals on Badger Road. And household bleach, for purifying the water.
    Of course you didn’t want to become prey of anything yourself – but prey of what? There were animals that could take you down, certainly. Lynxes, dog-sized cats that stared at you and ran off in search of easier targets. Cougars, animals the size of German shepherds with faces that were the essence of cat. Once he saw a cougar bring down a deer, jumping on its back and biting into the carotid. Further out he’d glimpsed wolves, and more exotic animals – a thing like a huge beaver, and a sloth, heavy and stupid, that made him laugh. All these animals, he supposed, had existed in Datum Madison before humans came along, and now were mostly extinct. None of these creatures of the stepwise worlds had ever seen a human before, and even ferocious hunters tended to be wary of the unknown. Mosquitoes were more trouble than wolves, in fact.
    In those early days Joshua had never stayed long, only a few nights at a time. Sometimes he perversely wished his stepping ability would switch off, so he’d be stuck out there, and see how he survived. When