The Long Earth

box. He could go with Lobsang, or not. Joshua was twenty-eight years old; he didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission. But he did have the damn congressional review hanging over him.
    And he always liked the idea of being out of reach.
    Despite Jansson’s promises all those years ago, the bad guys had got to him once or twice. There had been that trouble not long after Step Day, when men with badges had pushed their way into the Home and tried to send him to sleep so they could take him away, and Sister Agnes had laid one of them out with a tyre iron, and pretty soon the cops were called, and that meant Officer Jansson showed up, and then the mayor had got involved, and it turned out that one of the kids who were helped by Joshua on Step Day had been his son, and that had been that, the three black anonymous cars had hightailed it out of town … That was when the rule was laid down that if anyone wanted to talk to Joshua then they had to talk to Officer Jansson first. Joshua was not the problem, the mayor had said. The problem was crime and escapes from jails and no security left in the world. Joshua, the city council was told, was perhaps a little strange, but also marvellously gifted and, as was testified by Officer Jansson, had already been of great help to the Madison police department. That was the official position.
    But that wasn’t always much comfort to Joshua himself, who hated being
looked at
. Who hated the fact that a growing number of people
knew he was different
, whether they thought he was a Problem or not.
    In recent years Joshua had stepped alone, going further and further into the Long Earth, far beyond the Robinson Crusoe stockades he’d built as a teenager, out to worlds so remote he didn’t have to worry about the crazies, even the crazies with badges and warrants. And when they did come he just stepped away again; by the time they had finished throwing up Joshua could be a hundred worlds away. Though sometimes he stepped back to tie their bootlaces together while they barfed. You had to have something to entertain yourself. Longer and longer jaunts, further and further away. He called these his sabbaticals. A way of getting away from the crowds – and from the odd pressure in his head when he was back on Datum Earth, or even the Low Earths nowadays. A pressure that got in the way of listening to the Silence.
    So he was strange. But the Sisters said that the whole world was getting stranger. Sister Georgina had told him as much, in her polite English accent. ‘Joshua, you may be just a little ahead of the rest of the human race. I imagine the first
Homo sapiens
felt the way you do when you look at the rest of us with our Stepper boxes and our vomiting. Like
H. sap
. wondering why the other chaps take such a long time to string two syllables together.’ But Joshua wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of being different, even if it was different in a superior sort of way.
    Still, he liked Sister Georgina almost as much as Sister Agnes. Sister Georgina read Keats and Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson to him. Sister Georgina had studied at Cambridge or, as she put it, ‘Not-the-one-in-Massachusetts-Cambridge-Universitythe-real-one-you-know-in-England.’ Sometimes it occurred to Joshua that the nuns who ran the Home were not like the ones that he saw on television. When he asked Sister Georgina about that she laughed and said, ‘Maybe it’s because we are just like you, Joshua. We’re here because we didn’t quite fit anywhere else.’ He was going to miss them all, he realized, when he went travelling with Lobsang.
    Somehow the decision had made itself.

12
    A WEEK AFTER his interview at transEarth Sister Agnes took Joshua to Dane County Regional Airport on the back of her Harley, a rare honour. He would always remember her saying as they arrived that God must have wanted him to catch that plane, because every stop light they encountered turned to green just before she needed to slow. (In so far as Sister Agnes ever did slow.) Joshua, however, suspected that the subroutines of Lobsang were responsible for this, rather than the hand of God.
    Joshua had walked on countless Earths, but he had never actually flown before. Sister Agnes knew the routine, and she marched him to the check-in desk. Once the clerk had entered his booking reference he went very quiet, and picked up the phone, and Joshua began to realize what it meant to have a friend in Lobsang, as he was whisked away from the