The Long Earth

campfire,’ said Lobsang. ‘Or a forest fire. A burning township, perhaps.’
    ‘Human, then.’
    ‘Oh, yes. And I’m picking up a radio signal.’ Lobsang played a scrap of it, a pleasant recorded female voice broadcasting her presence to a silent world, in English, Russian, French. ‘Spindrift colonizers. The signal claims they are the First Heavenly Church of the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims. We are far from home; there can be few substantial settlements much further out … That fire is from burning buildings. Evidently something has gone wrong here.’
    ‘Let’s go see.’
    ‘The danger is unknowable. Unquantifiable.’
    Joshua might be a loner, but there was an unwritten rule out in the reaches of the Long Earth that you helped the other, the wanderer, the community in trouble. ‘We’re going.’
    The airship’s big rotors started up, and they moved off towards the smoke.
    ‘Shall I tell you about the Confidence Trick Victims?’
    Joshua learned that while the mainstream religions remained concentrated on the Low Earths because of access to the holy sites on the Datum – the Vatican, Mecca – many splinter religious communities had gone out deep into the Long Earth, each seeking freedom of expression, as similar communities had done for millennia on Earth. Such pilgrims would often choose places that (in Datum context) were geographically remote too, like this one: on this distant Earth they were still far to the east of the location of Moscow. And yet, even among these maverick groups, the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims stood out as somewhat unusual.
    ‘They consider their religion to reflect the truth about the universe, which is its essential absurdity. True Victims believe that there is one Born Again every minute. And they must be fruitful and multiply, to create more human minds to appreciate the Joke.’
    Joshua murmured, ‘I don’t think this Joke has had a good punchline.’
    They sailed over a few square miles of cleared forest around a central township, built around a hillock, the only high point on the isthmus. A relatively grand building sat atop the hillock. There were fields, marked by rows of stones. Lobsang pointed out a characteristic tint to some of the crops: marijuana plants, acres of them, which told you a lot about the nature of this community.
    There were corpses everywhere.
    Lobsang took the ship up to five hundred feet and hovered. Rooks, disturbed, flapped and rose, to descend again. The Victims of the Cosmic Confidence Trick apparently preferred to wear green robes, and so the central square and the dirt roads radiating away from it were littered with emerald splashes. Who would come all the way up here to wipe out several hundred peaceful souls, whose only eccentricity lay in believing life was a gold brick?
    ‘I’m going down,’ Joshua said.
    Lobsang said, ‘This happened recently. This crime, this attack. Observe that the bodies have not yet been scavenged. Something, or somebody, butchered three hundred people, Joshua. The attackers may still be down there.’
    ‘And maybe the three-hundred-and-first is still alive.’
    ‘The big building in the centre of the village, on that hillock.’ The hill was the only high point on the isthmus. ‘That’s the source of the radio beacon.’
    ‘Put me down a hundred yards away.’ Joshua thought it over. ‘And then jump a few worlds away, shift a little in space, and step back. Maybe if there is somebody still here you can lure them out.’
    ‘ “Lure them out.” Hardly a reassuring idea.’
    ‘Just do it, Lobsang.’
    The airship descended.
    There was a stink of grease, of burning meat.
    Joshua, with parrot on his shoulder, walked down a straight-line dirt street. A few rooks, irritated, climbed into the air. It was a surprisingly well-developed community to find so far out. The buildings were wattle and daub on sturdy timber frames, set out in neat rectilinear rows. He supposed the pioneers who had laid out these plots and street had dreamed of the city to be built one day on this plan. Now many of the buildings were burned out; further away, a whole district smoked fitfully.
    He came to his first body. She was a middle-aged woman who had had her throat ripped out. No human had done this, surely.
    Joshua walked on. He found more people, in a ditch, in the doorways, inside the houses, men, women and children. Some of them looked as if they had been running when they were struck down. None of them seemed