The Long War

31

THEIR FINAL FALL through the soft places, the longest of all, brought Sally and Jansson to a world only a dozen steps or so from the Gap itself. Soft places transported you geographically as well as stepwise. They landed in England, the north-west, near the Irish Sea coast – a location Sally knew was close to the footprint of GapSpace, home of the new space cadets.

Monica Jansson arrived exhausted, bewildered. Sally had to help her lie down on the soft grass of this latest hillside, wrapped in a cocoon of silvery emergency blankets.

It had taken a week for them to traverse the two million worlds to the Gap through the soft places – a lot faster than any twain, but a gruelling journey even so. Sally had to scry out the soft places, using motions like a kind of tai chi. They seemed to cluster in the continental heartlands, away from the coasts. They were easier to find at dawn or sunset. Sometimes Jansson could even see them, a kind of shimmer. Weird stuff. But they would take you wherever you wanted to go, in four or five steps.

Jansson had, for her part, never complained as they travelled, and it had taken a few transitions for Sally to work out just how hard it was for her. A soft place was a flaw in the Long Earth’s quasi-linear pan-dimensional geometry. Finding soft places was the unique skill Sally’s genetic inheritance had given her. And it was a hell of a lot easier than plodding all the way out, step by step, the way that dull little mouse Helen Valienté had once walked through a hundred thousand worlds with her family to set up their pioneer-type log cabin. But nothing came for free, and the soft places did take something out of you. It wasn’t an instantaneous transition, like a regular step; there was a sense of falling, of deep sucking cold, of a passage that lasted a finite time – that was how you remembered it, even if your watch showed that no time had passed at all. It was gruelling, energy-sapping. Plus Jansson was already ill, even before they set off. Jansson wasn’t the type who would complain, whatever you did.

Sally bustled around, collecting wood for a fire, unpacking their food and drink. Then, in this late afternoon, a warm enough late May day in this particular stepwise England, she sat quietly beside her fire, letting Jansson sleep off the journey.

And Sally watched the moon rise.

It wasn’t the moon she was used to. In this world, only a few steps from the Gap itself, Luna was liberally spattered with recent craters. The Mare Imbrium, the man in the moon’s right eye, was almost obliterated, and Copernicus was outdone by a massive new scar, a brilliant splash whose rays stretched across half the visible disc. It must have been something to see, she thought, on this world and its neighbours, when Bellos and its stepwise brothers had made their shuddering close approach – missing this particular Earth, but passing near by – and the ground below would have convulsed from bombardment by random fragments, while the face of the moon above lit up like a battlefield in the sky . . .

Jansson stirred now, and sat up. Sally had set a pot of coffee on the little stand over the fire. Jansson took a tin mug gratefully in gloved hands, and looked up at the sky, in a vague way. ‘What’s wrong with the moon?’

‘We’re too close to the Gap, is what’s wrong with it.’

Jansson nodded, sipping the coffee. ‘Listen. Before we get there. Just imagine I’m a dumb cop who knows more about bloodstains and drunks than about cosmology and spaceships. What exactly is the Gap? And what’s it got to do with space cadets?’

‘The Gap is a hole in the Long Earth. Look, the alternate Earths go on for ever, as far as we know, all broadly similar though differing in detail. But the Gap is the only place so far found where the Earth is missing altogether. If you were to step over you’d find yourself floating in vacuum. There was an impact. A big rock – maybe an asteroid, or comet, or something like a rogue moon – came calling. The space cadets call this hypothetical object Bellos.’

‘Why Bellos?’

Sally shrugged. ‘Some dumb old movie reference, I think. Joshua might know. And Lobsang’s probably got the movie . . . Everything that can happen must happen somewhere, right? Bellos, or copies of it, came swimming out of the dark, and completely missed uncounted billions of Earths. A few, like this one, were close enough to its path to be sideswiped by fragments, and suffered varying amounts of damage.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like splattering new craters over the moon. Like stripping away lots of atmosphere from the Earth. Or changing the pole positions. Or messing with continental shift. Generally making the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a street fight. But not wiping out the planet altogether.’

Jansson nodded. ‘I can see where the story is going. And one Earth—’

‘One Earth was taken out entirely.’

Jansson whistled. The idea seemed to frighten her. ‘It could have hit us,’ she said.

‘Datum Earth was way up the other end of the probability curve.’

‘Yes, but if it hadn’t been – even if we’d been living on one of these nearby worlds—’

‘Earthquakes, tidal waves, that kind of fun. Oh, the dust winter would probably have killed us off. Us, or our primate ancestors, more likely, it was that long ago.’

‘Nasty.’

‘No, it’s just statistics. It happened, that’s all.’ Sally poured more coffee. ‘It couldn’t happen now, at least. Not that way. The extinction of mankind, I mean. We’ve spread out. The Long Earth is an insurance policy. Even a Bellos couldn’t take out all of us.’

‘OK. And this Gap is useful because—’

‘Because you can just step into space. You see, on world Gap Minus One, you put on a spacesuit, step over – and there you are, gently orbiting the sun. No need to ride a rocket the size of a skyscraper to fight Earth’s gravity, because there ain’t no Earth there. And once you’re out there, you can go anywhere. That’s the dream, anyhow. Access to space.’

Jansson’s head was drooping. ‘Can’t wait to see it. In the morning, yes?’

‘In the morning. You sleep. I’ll put the tent up before it gets dark. Are you hungry?’

‘No, thanks. And I took my meds.’ She lay down again, pulling the blankets over her.

‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight, Sally.’

As Jansson slipped back into sleep Sally sat silently, perhaps the only awake, sapient mind on this planet.

And as the light dimmed, and the battered moon brightened, she felt as if someone had knocked out the walls of her mind. The landscape, a grassy hillside stretching away before her, seemed to acquire depth, otherness in a direction she could almost see. It was bottomless, multi-dimensional, endless. She had once dreamed that she had found out how to fly; it was absurdly easy, all you had to do was jump into the air and jump again when you were up there. Now she chased the tantalizing feeling that all she needed was the trick of it and she could step away, not into one world at a time, but spread across the Long Earth, a whole thick band of worlds, all at once. The very air around her felt prickly, the land as insubstantial as smoke.

But then Jansson coughed, and moaned softly in her sleep. Sally’s infinity high evaporated as quickly as it had come.