The Long Earth

unnoticed as family dogs at a picnic. The air was full of their distinctive, faintly unpleasant musk.
    In City Hall there was indeed chowder to be had, boiling up in huge pots, a thoroughly incongruous treat given their remoteness from the Datum.
    The mayor greeted them. He was a small, sleek man who had an accent like a middle European with good English. Of course Sally knew him. She handed him a small package as soon as they met, and he led them to a central table.
    Sally saw Joshua’s glance at this exchange. ‘Pepper.’
    ‘You do a lot of bartering, do you?’
    ‘I guess. Don’t you? And I stay over. Not just here. If I find settlers who are interesting enough, I stop a while and help them out with their farming, whatever. That’s the way to learn a world, Joshua. Whereas you two, rattling along in your great big penis in the sky, are learning nothing.’
    ‘Told you so,’ Joshua murmured privately to Lobsang.
    ‘Perhaps,’ Lobsang replied quietly. ‘But even so, for all our flaws, she came back to us. You’re right, Joshua. There is something she wants from us. Among all these distractions we must persist in finding out what that is.’
    Sally was saying now, ‘This place is pretty unique, among my stopovers, however. I call it Happy Landings.’
    Lobsang observed, ‘Evidently it has been here a long time.’
    ‘A
very
long time. Folk sort of end up here … It seems to be a kind of people magnet. You’ll see.’
    The only name the mayor gave was Spencer. Over bowls of chowder he was happy to talk about his unique community.
    ‘A “people magnet” – yes, perhaps it is something like that. But over the centuries that people have been coming here they have given it other names, or have cursed it, in a multitude of languages. There is some very old building stock, and we find old bones, some in crude coffins. Centuries, yes. People have been arriving for a long, long time. Thousands of years, even!
    ‘Of course most of the population you see around you were born here – I myself was – but there is always a trickle of newcomers. None of those incoming settlers knows how they got here, and everybody who comes here fresh arrives with the same story: one day you are on Earth, the Datum as they call it now, minding your own business, and suddenly you’re here. Sometimes there’s stress involved, you’re trying to escape something, oftentimes not.’ He lowered his voice and added, ‘Sometimes there are lone children. Strays. Lost boys and lost girls. Even infants. Often they’ve never stepped before at all. They are always made welcome, you may be sure of that. Do try the ale, I like to think we are very good at it. Some more chowder, Mr Valienté? Where was I?
    ‘Of course nowadays the scientific types among us are lining up behind the idea that there is some physical singularity, some kind of hole in space, that leads people here. As opposed to the old thinking that this place is at the centre of some kind of mysterious curse – or possibly, in the circumstances, a
blessing
.
    ‘Anyhow here we are, marooned, as it were, although I daresay no shipwrecked mariner ever arrived on a more hospitable shore. We can hardly complain. From what we hear from recent arrivals, our older folk are generally glad they missed out on most aspects of the twentieth century.’ Spencer sighed. ‘Some get here thinking that they have landed in heaven. Most arrive disorientated and sometimes fearful. But everybody who arrives here is welcomed. From newcomers we can learn about how all the other Earths are going. And we welcome any new information, concepts, ideas and talents; engineers, doctors and scientists are especially welcome. But I am pleased to say that these days we are growing our own culture, as it were.’
    ‘Fascinating,’ Lobsang murmured, as he carefully spooned chowder between artificial lips. ‘An indigenous human civilization, spontaneously forming in the reaches of the Long Earth.’
    ‘And a new way of travelling,’ Joshua said, feeling faintly stunned at this latest conceptual leap. ‘A way to cut out the step-by-step plod.’ In fact, he thought, thinking of Sally, thinking of the ‘stuttering’ she had mentioned,
another
way.
    ‘Yes. The Long Earth is evidently even stranger than it seems; we may learn a lot about its connectivity by studying this place. But it remains to be seen how useful this new phenomenon will be.’
    ‘Useful?’
    ‘Less so if it is like a fixed