The Long Earth

She prided herself on the skill; it was an art to sift what people meant from what they said, and she had been practising this art quite sat-is factorily for almost thirty years, for political masters of all hues. She had never married, and appeared to be quite comfortable with that fact, laughingly telling her fellow secretaries that her gold ring, which she wore all the time, was intended as a chastity belt. She was trustworthy, and trusted, and the only tiny flaw that her bosses had detected was that she owned every single track that Bob Dylan had ever cut.
    Nobody she worked with knew her, she felt. Not even the gentlemen who, periodically, when she was known to be working, broke into her flat and searched it, always very carefully, no doubt sharing a little smile as they carefully replaced the tiny sliver of wood she pushed between the front door and its frame every day. Very similar to her own little smile when she noted that their big flat feet had once again crushed the scrap of meringue that she always dropped on the carpet just inside the living room door, a scrap they never ever noticed.
    Since she never took off her gold ring, no one but she and God knew that inscribed, quite expensively, around the inner surface of the ring was a line from a Dylan song called ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. She wondered, these days, if any of the busy little bodies she worked with, including most of the ministers, would even recognize where the quote came from.
    And now, a few years after Step Day, as the latest panicky discussion went on in the Cabinet Office, she wondered if she was too old to get a job with the masters, as opposed to the fools.
    ‘Then they should be licensed. Stepper boxes. The Long Earth is a sink as far as the blessed economy is concerned, but penalizing the use of the boxes you need to access it would yield some tax revenue, at least!’
    ‘Oh, don’t be absurd, man.’ The Prime Minister sat back in his chair. ‘Come on. We can’t just ban a thing because we can’t control it.’
    The minister responsible for health and safety looked startled. ‘I don’t see why not. It’s never stopped us before.’
    The Prime Minister tapped his pen on the table. ‘The inner cities are emptying. The economy’s imploding. Of course there is a bright side. Immigration is no longer a problem …’ He laughed, but he seemed to crumple, and when he spoke again he sounded, to Hermione, almost in despair. ‘God help us, gentlemen, the science chaps tell me that there might be more iterations of the planet Earth out there than there are people. What policy options can we possibly conceive in the face of
that
?’
    Enough was enough: quite suddenly, that was how Hermione felt about all this.
    As the picky, preposterous, pointless conversation continued, with a faint smile on her lips Hermione wrote a couple of lines of her immaculate Pitman shorthand, laid her pad on the desk in front of her, and after a nod of permission from the Prime Minister she stood and left the room. Probably nobody else even noticed she was gone. She walked out into Downing Street, and stepped into the London next door, which swarmed with security guards, but she was such a familiar sight after all these years that they accepted her identity card and let her pass.
    And then she stepped again. And again, and again …
    Much later, when she was missed, one of the other secretaries was called in to translate the little note that she had written, the delicate strokes and swirling curves.
    ‘It looks like a poem to me, sir. Or a song lyric. Something about people criticizing what they can’t understand.’ She looked up at the Prime Minister. ‘Mean anything to you, sir? Sir? Are you all right, sir?’
    ‘Have you got a husband, miss—sorry, I don’t know your name?’
    ‘It’s Caroline, sir. I’ve got a boyfriend, a steady boy, good with his hands. I can get you a doctor if you want.’
    ‘No, no. It’s just we’re all so bloody inadequate, Caroline. What a farce it is, this business of government. To imagine we were ever in control of our destinies. If I were you, Caroline, I would marry your steady boy right now, if you think he’s any good, and
go
, go to another world. Anywhere but here.’ He slumped in the chair and shut his eyes. ‘And God help England, and God help us all.’
    She wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake. At length she slipped out, taking Hermione’s abandoned pad with