The Long Earth

whether to make a longitudinal incision or a lower uterine section …’
    Joshua hastily shaved the beast’s lower stomach. Then, trying to keep a steady hand, he held a bronze scalpel over the abdomen wall. And just as he was about to cut into the flesh, the baby vanished. He felt its absence, as the womb imploded.
    He sat back in shock. ‘It stepped! Damn it – the baby stepped!’
    Then the adults came. Two females: a mother, a sister? They moved in a blur of sprint paces and steps, flickering in and out of existence all around him. Joshua wouldn’t have believed stepping at that speed was possible.
    Lobsang murmured, ‘Just stay still.’
    The adults glared at Joshua, scooped up the mother and disappeared with soft pops.
    Joshua slumped. ‘I don’t believe it. What just happened?’
    Lobsang sounded exhilarated. ‘Evolution, Joshua. Evolution just happened. All upright humanoids have trouble giving birth. You know that, and your mother learned it the hard way. As we evolved, the female pelvis shrank to allow for bipedalism, but at the same time the baby’s brain grew bigger – which is why we’re born so helpless. We emerge with a lot of growing to do before we’re independent.
    ‘But it appears that in this species the problem of the pelvis has been sidestepped. Literally.’ He laughed gently. ‘Here, the baby isn’t born through the birth canal. It
steps
out of the womb, Joshua. Placenta, umbilical and all, I imagine. It makes sense. An ability to step must shape all aspects of a creature’s life ways, if you give evolution time to exploit it. And if you don’t have to go to all the trouble of being born, your brain can get as big as you like.’
    Joshua felt empty. ‘They care for their ill. If I’d have opened her up, the mother wouldn’t have survived the wound I’d have inflicted.’
    Lobsang murmured in his ear, ‘You weren’t to know. You tried your best. Now come home. You need a shower.’

30
    FURTHER WEST YET , the Long Earth gradually became greener, arid worlds rarer. The forested worlds were blanketed thicker, with oak-like trees spreading out of the river valleys and lapping at the higher ground, like a rising tide of green. Out on the rarely glimpsed plains the animals still mostly looked familiar to Joshua – kinds of horses, kinds of deer, kinds of camels. Yet sometimes he glimpsed stranger beasts, blocky, low-slung predators that were neither cats nor dogs, herds of huge long-necked herbivores that looked like elephants crossed with rhinos.
    On the nineteenth day, around Earth West 460,000, Lobsang somewhat arbitrarily declared they had reached the limit of the Corn Belt. The worlds here were surely too warm, the forests too thick, to make farming worthwhile.
    And about the same time they crossed the Atlantic coast of Europe, somewhere around the latitude of Britain. A journey that had become a dull jaunt across a largely unbroken green blanket of forest became duller yet as they sailed out over the breast of the sea.
    Joshua sat in the observation deck for hour upon hour. Lobsang rarely spoke, which was a mercy for Joshua. The gondola was almost soundless, save for the whisper of the air pumps, the whirring of suspended instrument pallets as they turned this way and that. Cooped up in this drifting sensory deprivation tank, Joshua fretted about the loss of muscle tone and fitness. Sometimes he performed stretching exercises, yoga postures, or jogged on the spot. One thing the airship lacked was a gym, and Joshua didn’t feel like asking Lobsang to fabricate any equipment; he’d only end up in rowing-machine challenges with the ambulant unit.
    Lobsang had increased their lateral speed over the ocean. On the twenty-fifth day they crossed the eastern coast of America, somewhere around the latitude of New York, and found themselves coasting over another forest-blanketed landscape.
    There was no more talk of stopping, or turning back. They both recognized the need to go on as long as they could, until they had made some inroads into the mystery of whatever was driving the humanoid migration. Joshua found himself shuddering when he imagined the panicky carnage he had witnessed in the town of the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims unleashed in Madison, Wisconsin.
    But, once over land again, they reached an arrangement. Lobsang travelled on during the night. This didn’t trouble Joshua’s sleep, and Lobsang’s senses were infinitely finer even in the dark than Joshua’s