The Long Earth

on. Are you telling me you’ve seen a purple elephant?’
    ‘Not exactly,’ said Sally. ‘But out in one of the Africas there is an elephant which, I swear, has the art of camouflage down to a tee. Somewhere out there in the Long Earth you’ll find almost anything you can imagine.’
    ‘“Anything you can imagine”,’ murmured Lobsang. ‘Interesting choice of phrase. Between ourselves, Sally, I can’t help feeling that the Long Earth as a whole has something approaching what I can only call a meta-organic component. Or perhaps meta-animistic.’
    ‘Hmph. Maybe,’ said Sally, scratching a troll’s scalp. ‘But the whole set-up irritates me. The Long Earth is too kind to us. It’s too pat! Just as we’ve trashed the Datum, just as we’ve wiped out most of the life we shared it with and are about to succumb to our own resource wars, shazam, an infinity of Earths opens up. What kind of God sets up a stunt like that?’
    ‘You object to this salvation?’ Lobsang asked. ‘You really are misanthropic, aren’t you, Sally?’
    ‘I’ve got a lot to be misanthropic about.’
    Lobsang stroked his own trolls. ‘But perhaps it’s nothing to do with any kind of god. Sally, we – I mean humanity – are barely at the beginning of our enquiry into the Long Earth. Newton, you know, spoke of himself as a boy playing on a seashore, distracted by a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. Newton! We understand so little. Why should the universe open itself up to careful and dedicated enquiry at all? And why should it be so generous, so fecund, so nurturing of life, even intelligence? Perhaps in some way the Long Earth is an expression of that nurturing.’
    ‘If so, we don’t deserve it.’
    ‘Well, that’s a debate for another day … You know, my researches
will
be frustrated unless I can obtain the corpse of a troll.’
    ‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Sally.
    Lobsang snapped back, ‘
Please
don’t tell me what to think. I think, therefore I am; it’s what I do. May I suggest that you two go and enjoy the pleasures of Happy Landings, and leave me in peace to converse with my friends? Whom I promise not to kill and dissect.’
    On the access deck below, the elevator hatch slammed open, a clear enough hint that they should leave.
    When they were on the ground again, Sally giggled. ‘He can get pretty ratty, don’t you think?’
    ‘Maybe.’ Joshua was faintly concerned. He’d never heard Lobsang sound quite so unstable.
    ‘Is there
really
a human being in there somewhere?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Joshua, flatly. ‘And you know there is, because you said
he
sounded ratty. You didn’t use the word
it
.’
    ‘Oh, very smart. Come on, let’s look around a few more happy homesteads.’
    For Sally that evening, it was like greeting one long-lost friend after another. Joshua was happy to follow in her wake, trying to analyse his feelings about Happy Landings.
    He
liked
the place. Why? Because it seemed, well, right somehow. Like it was where all mankind belonged, perhaps. Maybe that was because he too had some sense of the soft places, the soft routes all converging here, in Lobsang’s well of stability. The
maybes
in his mind annoyed him, however, as he walked alone. And the sense that he disliked Happy Landings as much as he liked it. As if he didn’t trust it.
    He’d listened to Sally’s arguments with Lobsang – she was more voluble on these issues, if not necessarily any better informed – and he tried to make sense of all he was learning. Where
did
man belong? On the Datum, that was for sure, with ancestral fossils all the way down to bedrock. But now the human race was expanding at speed across the Long Earth, no matter what the governments thought, no matter about aegis; nobody could stop it, and certainly nobody could control it, no matter how many god-bothering spittle-flecked homealone tub-thumpers back on the Datum tried. You would run out of people before you ran out of Earths. But what was the point of it all? Sister Agnes used to tell him that the purpose of life was to be all that you could be – with a side helping, of course, of helping others to do the same. And maybe the Long Earth was a place where, as Lobsang might put it, human potentiality could be maximally expressed … Was there some sense in which that was what the Long Earth was
for
? To allow mankind to make the most of itself? And in the middle of this cosmic