The Long Earth

lines of passengers and led along corridors with the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.
    He was brought to a room with a bar the length of the burger counter in Disney World. Impressive though this was, Joshua didn’t often drink, and would actually have preferred a burger. When he mentioned this jokily to the young man who was nervously dancing attendance on him, he received, after only minutes, a perfect burger so stuffed with trimmings that the patty could have fallen out and not been missed. Joshua was still digesting this when the young man reappeared and led him to the plane.
    His seat was right behind the flight deck, and discreetly hidden from the other travellers by a velvet curtain. No one had asked to see his passport, which he didn’t have in any case. No one bothered to check whether he was carrying explosives in his shoes. And nobody, once he was on the flight, spoke to him. He watched a news summary in peace.
    At Chicago O’Hare he was taken to another plane some way from the main terminal, a surprisingly small craft. Within, what wasn’t leather-upholstered was carpeted, and what wasn’t leather-upholstered or carpeted seemed to consist of the dazzling teeth of a young woman who, as he sat down, provided him with a Coke and a telephone. He tucked his small personal pack under the seat before him, where he could see it. Then he turned on the phone.
    Lobsang called immediately. ‘Good to have you on board, Joshua! How are you enjoying the journey so far? The plane is all yours today. You will find a master bedroom behind you which I’m told is exceedingly comfortable, and don’t hesitate to take advantage of the shower room.’
    ‘It’s going to be a long journey, is it?’
    ‘I’ll be meeting you in Siberia, Joshua. A Black Corporation skunk works. You know what that means?’
    ‘A facility that’s off the radar.’ Where, he wondered, they were building
what
?
    ‘Right. Oh, didn’t I mention Siberia?’
    There was a sound of engines starting.
    ‘You’ve a human pilot, incidentally. People seem to like a warm uniformed body at the controls. But don’t be alarmed. In a real sense
I
am the controls.’
    Joshua sat back in the luxurious seat and put his thoughts in order. It occurred to him that Lobsang was full of himself, as the Sisters would have said. But maybe he had a lot of himself to be full of. Here was Joshua cocooned
in
Lobsang, in a sense. Joshua wasn’t big on computers, and the marvellously interconnected electronic civilization of which they were part. Out in the stepwise worlds you never got a cellphone signal, after all, so the only thing that counted was
you
, and what you knew, and what you could do. With his prized knife of hardened glass he could keep himself alive, no matter what was thrown at him. He kind of liked that. Maybe there was going to be some tension with Lobsang over that – or with however much of Lobsang was ported along for the ride.
    The plane took off, making about as much noise as would Sister Agnes’s sewing machine in an adjacent room. During the flight Joshua watched the first episode of
Star Wars
, sipping gin and tonic, wallowing in boyhood nostalgia. Then he took a shower – he didn’t need one but just for the hell of it – and tried the enormous bed, whereupon the young lady followed him in and asked him a couple of times if there was anything else he wanted, and seemed disappointed when he only asked for a glass of warm milk.
    Some time later he awoke to find the attendant trying to strap him in. He pushed her away; he hated being restrained. She remonstrated with the sugar-coated steeliness bequeathed by her training, until a phone chimed. Then: ‘I do apologize, sir. It would appear that the safety rules have been temporarily suspended.’
    He had expected Siberia to be flat, windy, cold. But this was summer, and the plane descended towards a landscape where gentle hills were coated with dark shoots of grass, and wildflowers and butterflies were splashes of colour, red, yellow and blue. Siberia was unexpectedly beautiful.
    The jet did not so much touch down as kiss the tarmac.
    The phone rang. ‘Welcome to No Such Place, Joshua. I do hope you’ll fly with No Such Airlines in the future. You will find thermal underwear and appropriate outdoor clothing in the wardrobe just inside the door.’
    Joshua refused, with