The Long Earth

going lower if the sensors find anything interesting. In many of the local worlds this morning it’s a sunny day with a bit of dew on the grasses below, so I suggest you finish your breakfast and come down to the observation deck and enjoy the view. By the way, there are sacks of muesli in the larder; Sister Agnes would, I’m sure, want you to keep your bowel movements regular.’
    Joshua glared at the empty air, given the lack of anyone to glare at , and said, ‘Sister Agnes isn’t here.’ Even so, guiltily, bearing in mind that nuns somehow knew what you were up to wherever you were, he rummaged in the larder and munched his way through dried fruit and nuts, with a side order of watermelon.
    Before he went back to his bacon.
    And made himself a fried slice to mop up the bacon fat. After all, it was chilly up here; he needed the fuel.
    Prompted by that thought, he went back to his stateroom. In its roomy closet, alongside the cold-weather gear he’d worn on arrival, he found a range of intermediate clothing, some of it in various camouflage patterns. Lobsang was thinking of everything, that was clear enough. He selected a parka and went down to the observation deck, and sat alone, watching Earths go by like a slideshow of the gods.
    Without warning, the ship crossed a sheaf of ice worlds.
    The light hit Joshua: dazzling, blinding sunlight reflecting from the ice and filling the air, as if the whole deck had suddenly turned into a flashbulb, with Joshua an insect trapped inside. The worlds below were plains of ice, gently folded, with only an occasional ridge of high ground showing as a dark bony stripe through the ice cover. And then into cloud, then hail, then sunlight again, depending on the local climate in each passing world. The flickering light was painful on the eye. From Earth to Earth the level of the ice cover rose and fell, he saw, like some tremendous tide. In each world the great ice sheet covering Eurasia must be pulsing, ice domes shifting, the southern edge rippling back and forth century by century; he was passing over snapshots of that tremendous continental flux.
    And when the ice band had passed and they were sailing over interglacial worlds, mostly he saw tree tops. The Long Earth was big on tree tops, Earth after Earth, tree after tree.
    Joshua seldom got bored. But as the morning wore on he was surprised to find himself growing bored now, so quickly. After all he was looking over thousands of landscapes no one, probably, had ever seen before. He remembered Sister Georgina, who liked her Keats:
    Then felt I …
    … like stout Cortés when with eagle eyes
    He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
    Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien
.
    At the time he’d thought a wild surmise was some kind of exotic bird. Well, he was now looking out over the new worlds with somewhat of a tame surmise.
    There were footsteps behind him. Lobsang’s ambulant unit appeared. He was dressed for the occasion in safari shirt and trousers. And how quickly, Joshua reflected, Lobsang had become a
he
and not an
it
.
    ‘It can be disorienting, can’t it? I recall my reactions to my own pioneer flight. The Long Earth goes on and on, Joshua. A surfeit of wonders will dull the mind.’
    At random they paused at a world somewhere around twenty thousand. The sky here was overcast, threatening rain. Without the sunlight the rolling grassland below was a dull grey-green, with scattered clumps of darker forest. On this particular world Joshua could see no sign of mankind, not so much as a thread of smoke. Yet there was movement. To the north he saw a huge herd drifting over the landscape. Horses? Bison? Camels, even? Or something more exotic? And by the shore of a lake below he made out more groups of animals, a black fringe by the water.
    Now they had stopped, the
Mark Twain
’s systems went to work. Hatches on the gondola and on top of the envelope opened to release balloons, and buoys which fluttered to the ground under parachutes, each marked with the transEarth logo and the Stars and Stripes. There were even small sounding-rockets that flew up with a hiss, creating streaky smoke columns in the air.
    ‘This will be our regular routine when we stop to sample an Earth,’ Lobsang said. ‘A way for me to extend my study of any particular world beyond this single viewpoint. I will gather some data now, and data from ongoing observations will be downloaded from the probes