The Long Earth

transfer the catch to a small holding vivarium, where the mouse can live happily until it can be relocated somewhere safe.’
    ‘That’s going to a lot of trouble for a mouse.’
    ‘That is the Buddhist way. This prototype is clean and hygienic, will not harm her prey and, in general, will do most of the things you would expect of a domestic cat, except for shitting in your stereo headphones – a common complaint I’m told. Oh, in the default setting she will sleep on your bed.’
    ‘A robot cat, on a robot ship?’
    ‘There are advantages. She has a gel brain, just like my own ambulant, and is a whole lot smarter than the average cat. And synthetic hair. No sneezes, I promise—’
    Suddenly the stepping stopped, and Joshua felt an odd lurch, like being thrown forward. The deck was flooded with light. Joshua glanced through the windows. They were evidently in a world that happened to be sunny. Sunny, but cloaked in ice.
    ‘Why have we stopped?’
    ‘Look down. There are binoculars in the lockers.’
    A tiny multicoloured dot in the whiteness resolved into a Day Glo orange domed tent, and a couple of people moving stiffly around, made Doughboy-sexless by the thick Arctic gear they wore . A portable drilling rig had been set up on the ice, and a Stars and Stripes hung limply on a pole.
    ‘Scientists?’
    ‘A university party, from Rhode Island. Studying the biota, taking ice cores and such. I’m recording all traces of human presence I find, naturally. I was expecting these gentlemen, though they have travelled a few worlds further than the nominal target they logged.’
    ‘But you found them even so.’
    ‘My view is godlike, Joshua.’
    Joshua, peering down, wasn’t sure if the college guys had even noticed the airship, a whale suddenly hovering in the air above them. ‘Are we going down?’
    ‘That would serve no purpose. Though we could talk to them without landing. We carry a range of communications gear, from medium-and short-wave radios that ought to let us transmit to and receive from anywhere on an individual world, to – well, simpler means. A heliograph, Navy issue. Even a loudspeaker.’
    ‘A loudspeaker! Lobsang, booming from above like Yahweh.’
    ‘The equipment is merely practical, Joshua. Not every action carries symbolic freight.’
    ‘Every human action does. And you are human, aren’t you, Lobsang?’
    Lobsang resumed the stepping without warning, another gentle lurch. The science camp winked into non-existence, and more worlds strobed past.
    After his first night on the airship Joshua awoke feeling full of diamonds. The ship stepped steadily, the sound of its various mechanisms like the purring of a cat. In fact, he found the purring
was
the cat, curled up on his legs; when he stirred she elegantly rose, stretched, and loped away.
    Prompted by the rumbling of his stomach, Joshua investigated the galley.
    These days a decent meal out in the stepwise worlds was pretty easy to obtain, for him; the pioneering steppers kind of liked to see him around, they knew his name and reputation, and treated him as if he were a lucky mascot. And a meal was always his for the asking from any of the halfway houses, the travellers’ lodges that were springing up across the nearer Earths. But it didn’t pay to be a scrounger, Sister Agnes had always said, and so he always took a fresh-killed deer along, or some wild fowl. The greener pioneers liked their meat fresh but had as yet not come to terms with the idea of chopping up Bambi, so Joshua would spend a little time field-dressing his catch. He’d generally come away with maybe a couple of bags of flour and a basket of eggs, as long as he had a basket to carry them away in.
    Well, the airship’s galley was rather more luxuriously appointed than any halfway house. There was a freezer with a sufficiency of bacon and eggs, and a dry cabinet stacked with sacks of salt and pepper. Joshua was impressed with this: on many worlds a handful of salt would buy you dinner and a night’s shelter, and the pepper was even more valuable. Joshua got to work on the bacon.
    The voice of Lobsang startled him. ‘Good morning, Joshua. I trust you slept well?’
    Joshua flipped his bacon and said, ‘I don’t even remember dreaming. It’s as if we weren’t moving. Where are we now?’
    ‘We are more than fifteen thousand steps from home. I have slowed the stepping for your comfort while you eat, and have steadied us at three thousand feet, occasionally