The Long Earth

mother would have liked you to have.’ He produced a small item wrapped in soft paper and laid it gently on the bench, downloading as he did so a number of recommended works on dealing with grief and the aftermath of loss, and all the while making background system checks of the ship.
    Joshua opened the packet cautiously. It contained his mother’s cheap, precious plastic bracelet.
    Then Lobsang left Joshua alone.
    Lobsang walked back along the length of the ship, surprised once more at how the process of walking helped thinking, just as Benjamin Franklin had once remarked. An aspect of embodiment, he supposed, embodied cognition, a phenomenon he must explore – or remember. Behind him, as he walked, lights dimmed as the ship went into night-running mode.
    When he got to the wheelhouse he opened the screen, enjoying the freezing fresh air of world after world washing against the nano sensors embedded in his artificial skin, and he stared out at the Long Earth, as revealed by the light of many moons. The landscape itself seldom changed significantly: the basic shapes of the hills, the paths of the rivers – although occasionally there was sufficient volcanism to light up the sky, or a lightning-struck forest blazing in the dark. The moon, the sun, the basic geometry of the Earth itself, made a static stage for the shifting, swarming biologies on the fleeting worlds. But even the moonlight was not a constant across the worlds. Lobsang paid a lot of attention to the moons, and he saw how that familiar, ancient face shifted and flowed, subtly, as he crossed the worlds. While the ancient lava seas endured, in each reality a different selection of random cosmic rocks had battered the lunar surface, leaving a different pattern of craters and rays. Sooner or later, he knew, they were bound to come across a world with a
missing
moon, a negative moon. After all the moon was itself a contingency, an outcome of accidental collisions during the creation of the solar system. An absence of moon was an in evitability if you travelled far enough across the Long Earth; Lobsang only had to wait, as for many other contingencies he had anticipated.
    He understood a great deal. But the further they travelled, the more the very mystery of the Long Earth worried Lobsang. Back home he employed tame professors who spoke of the Long Earth as some kind of quantum-physical construct, because that kind of scientific language seemed at least to paint the right picture. But he was coming to believe that on the contrary, his boffins might not just have the wrong picture, they might be in the wrong art gallery entirely. That the Long Earth might be something much stranger altogether. He didn’t know, and he
hated
not knowing things. This evening, he knew he would worry and watch until the moons set, and then he would worry until it was daylight and it was time for the chores of the day, which in his case would include … worrying.

24
    THE NEXT DAY Joshua, almost shyly, asked Lobsang for more information about natural steppers. Others like himself, and his mother. ‘Not legends from history: modern-day examples. I imagine you have plenty of material.’
    So Lobsang told Joshua the story of Jared Orgill, one of the first natural steppers to come to the attention of the authorities.
    It had been just another game of Jack in the Box: that was what they called it in Austin, Texas, although kids had independently invented variants of the game across the planet, with lots of different names. And this particular day it was the turn of Jared Orgill, ten years old, to be Jack.
    They’d found an old fridge on the illegal tip, Jared and his friends. A big slab of stainless steel, lying on its back amid the garbage. ‘It looks like a robot’s coffin,’ remarked Debbie Bates. Once they’d pulled out the shelves and plastic boxes and stuff it was more than big enough to take one of them.
    Jared wasn’t bullied into going into the box, though his parents would later protest otherwise. In fact he would have fought the others for his turn. He handed his cellphone to Debbie – you never took in a phone, of course – climbed in and lay down. It wasn’t comfortable, with the bumps and ridges of the fridge’s inner fittings poking into him, and there was a stink of some chemical or other. The big heavy lid slammed down, shutting out the sky, the grinning faces. It didn’t bother him, it would only be for a few minutes . For a while he heard bumps and