The Long Earth

he came home Sister Agnes would ask him, ‘Don’t you find it lonely and frightening out there?’ But it hadn’t been lonely enough. And what was there to be frightened of? You might as well have said somebody who had stuck their toe into the water on a Pacific beach should be frightened of all that ocean.
    Besides, pretty soon, in the Low Earths you couldn’t move for trippers, coming to see what it was all about. Steely-eyed folk, some of them, with serious shorts and determined knees, striding across this new territory, or at least getting tangled in the underbrush. Folk with questions like, ‘Whose land is this? Are we still in Wisconsin? Is this even the United States?’
    Worst of all were the ones fleeing from the wrath of God, or maybe looking for it. There was an awful lot of that. Was the Long Earth a sign of the End of Days? Of the destruction of the old world, and a new world made ready for the chosen people? Too many people wanted to be among the chosen, and too many people thought that God would provide, in these paradisiacal worlds. God provided in abundance, it was true, vast amounts of food that you could see running around. But God also helped those who helped themselves, and presumably expected the chosen to bring warm clothing, water purification tablets, basic medication, a weapon such as the bronze knives that were selling so well these days, possibly a tent – in short, to bring some common sense to the party. And if you didn’t, and if you were lucky, it would only be the mosquitoes that got you.
Only
. In Joshua’s opinion, if you wanted to extend the biblical metaphor, then this apocalypse had four horsemen of its own, their names being Greed, Failing to Follow the Rules, Confusion and Miscellaneous Abrasions. Joshua had got sick of having to save the Saved.
    He was soon sick of them all, actually. How did these people have the right to trample all over
his
secret places?
    Worse yet, they got in the way of the Silence. He was already calling it that. They drowned out the calmness. Drowned out that distant, deep presence behind the clutter of the worlds, a presence he seemed to have been aware of all his life, and had recognized as soon as he was far enough away from the Datum to be able to hear it. He started resenting every tanned hiker, every nosy kid, and the racket they made.
    Yet he felt compelled to help all these people he despised, and he got confused about that. He also got confused about having to spend so much time alone, and the fact that he
liked
it. Which was why he broached the subject with Sister Agnes.
    Sister Agnes was definitely religious, in a weird kind of way. At the Home, Sister Agnes had two pictures on the walls of her cramped room: one of them was of the Sacred Heart, the other was of Meat Loaf. And she played old Jim Steinman records far too loudly for the other Sisters. Joshua didn’t know much about bikes, but Sister Agnes’s Harley looked so old that St Paul had probably once ridden in the sidecar. Sometimes extremely hairy bikers made interstate pilgrimages to her garage at the Home on Allied Drive. She gave them coffee, and made sure they kept their hands
off
the paintwork.
    All the kids liked her, and she liked them, but especially Joshua, and especially after he had done a dream of a paint job on her Harley, including the slogan ‘Bat Into Heaven’ painstakingly delineated on the gas tank in a wonderful italic script that he had found in a book from the library. After that, in her eyes, Joshua could do no wrong, and she allowed him to use her tools any time he liked.
    If there was anyone he could trust, it was Sister Agnes. And with her, if he’d been away too long, his usual taciturn reserve sometimes turned into a flood of words, like a dam breaking, and everything that needed saying got said, all in a rush.
    So he’d told her about what it was like to have to keep on saving the lost and the silly and the unpleasant, and the way they stared, and the way they said, ‘You are him, aren’t you? The kid who can step without having to spend fifteen minutes feeling like dog shit.’ He never knew
how
they knew, but the news got out somehow, for all Officer Jansson’s assurances. And that made him different, and being different made him a Problem. Which was a bad thing, and you couldn’t forget that, even here in Sister Agnes’s study. Because just above those two pictures of the Sacred Heart and Meat Loaf, there was a little statue of a man