‘Not yet . . .’

When Snowy walked up the ramp to the airship, Shi-mi, who usually emerged to greet Maggie when she returned from a surface jaunt, took one look, arched her spine, fled back into the gondola, and wasn’t seen for days.

12

JOSHUA ACCEPTED LOBSANG’S request to seek out and contact his hypothetical new race of superior human beings – his true Homo sapiens.

Somehow he never doubted that there was something in Lobsang’s theory, his deduction of the existence of a new breed of humanity from what seemed like the slightest of scraps of evidence. Joshua had known Lobsang for fifteen years now; he knew that Lobsang saw the world as a piece, he thought on scales Joshua could barely grasp. He thought holistically, Sally Linsay had once said. If Lobsang had predicted the true Homo sap existed, then Joshua was confident they did exist, and if he looked he’d find them.

But where was he to start? Joshua was no scholar, no detective. He wasn’t that much of a loner any more – he was a family man, he had been mayor of Hell-Knows-Where, and he supposed he would always return to his deep roots in Madison, where he’d grown up. But he wasn’t entangled in the wider affairs of humanity.

In the event, Joshua’s way in to this mystery was through his friendship with one individual.

In fact, Joshua Valienté had first met Paul Spencer Wagoner many years before, in Happy Landings, back in 2031. Paul then was five years old. Joshua, on the other hand, was twenty-nine.

It had been Joshua’s third visit to the place Sally Linsay had dubbed Happy Landings. He’d come here the year before in the course of his exploration, with Lobsang and Sally, aboard the prototype stepper-airship Mark Twain, of the far Westward reaches of the Long Earth – a jaunt that had subsequently become known, in some fan circles at least, as ‘The Journey’. Under Sally’s guidance they had called into Happy Landings, more than a million and a half steps from the Datum, in the course of their outward-bound trek – and on the way back had called in again, with the Twain now a semi-derelict in the sky, and having lost Lobsang, after their shattering encounter with the entity they called First Person Singular. Now, a year after The Journey, Joshua had been passing through this particular world, on his way home from a brief, head-clearing sabbatical – and home for Joshua, just now anyhow, meant a Corn Belt town called Reboot, where he was going to marry Helen Green, daughter of a pioneering family.

He couldn’t resist calling in again on Happy Landings.

He wasn’t far from the Pacific coast in this version of Washington State. In fact this was the footprint of a Datum township called Humptulips, in Grays Harbor County. Joshua would always remember his surprise on seeing this place for the first time, a township where no township had a right to be, far beyond where the consensus at that time had it that the colonizing wavefront might yet have reached, just fifteen years after Step Day. Yet here it was.

The town hugged the bank of its river, surrounded by tracks that cut off into thick forest. There were no fields, no sign of agriculture. Like the great city of Valhalla a few years later, this was a place where people lived off the natural fruits of the land – and especially in an area as rich as this, as long as you controlled your numbers and spread out a little, that was an easy way to live. And, by the river, in the town itself, visible even from the air during that first visit, Joshua had spotted trolls, everywhere he looked. It was a unique population, a blend of human and troll – which was maybe what made it so strange in other ways.

Now Joshua strolled alone around the town, roughly centring on the big square by City Hall. The dusk was gathering, but as ever the square was full of smiling townsfolk, and bands of trolls singing scraps of song – people and trolls mixing casually. People nodded politely to Joshua, more or less a stranger making his third brief visit. As always it was all remarkably gentle, civilized, comfortable.

But, paradoxically, that had made Joshua uncomfortable. The community seemed too calm. Not entirely human . . . ‘It all feels a bit Stepford Wives to me,’ was how he’d tried once to express it to Sally.

And she’d said later, ‘Sometimes I wonder . . . I wonder if there’s something so big going on here that even Lobsang would have to recalibrate his thinking. Just a hunch, for now. I’m just suspicious. But then a stepper who isn’t suspicious is soon a dead stepper . . .’

‘Hey, mister.’

The kid had stood directly before Joshua, staring up. He was five years old, dark-haired, smut-nosed, wearing clothes that were clean but just a tad too big for him and extensively patched. Typical colony wear, heavily reused. Just a kid, but something in his sharp gaze cut right through Joshua’s weary, vaguely muddled thinking.

‘Hello,’ Joshua said.

‘You’re Joshua Valienté.’

‘I won’t deny it. How do you know? I don’t remember seeing you before.’

‘I never saw you before. I deduced who you were.’ He stumbled over that word, deduced.

‘You did?’

‘Everybody heard about the airship you flew in before. My parents talked about the people on board. There was a young man, and now he’s back, everybody’s talking about it. You’re a stranger. You’re a young man.’

‘Good work, Sherlock.’

The kid looked puzzled at that reference.

‘So who are you?’

‘Paul Spencer Wagoner. Wagoner is my father’s name, Spencer’s my mother’s name, and Paul is my name.’

‘Good for you. Spencer, like the mayor?’

‘He’s my mother’s second cousin. That’s why we came here.’

‘So you weren’t born here? I thought you had a different accent from most.’

‘My mom came from here but my dad’s from Minnesota. I was born in Minnesota. The mayor invited us to come because we’re family. Well, my mother is. Most people come here by accident.’

‘I know.’ Although Joshua didn’t understand how. That was another mysterious thing about Happy Landings. People somehow came unstuck in the Long Earth, and just drifted here, from all over . . .

Once he’d tried to discuss this with Lobsang. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the network of soft places. People drift and gather, like snowflakes collecting in a hollow, maybe.’

‘Yes, perhaps it’s something like that,’ Lobsang had said. ‘We know that stability is somehow a key to the Long Earth. Maybe Happy Landings is something like a potential well. And it’s clearly been operating long before Step Day, deep into the past . . .’

‘How did it fly?’

Again Joshua, exhausted from his journey, had allowed himself to get lost in his own thoughts. ‘What?’

‘The airship you came in on.’

Joshua smiled. ‘You know, it’s amazing how few people ask that. How do you think it flies?’

‘It might be full of smoke.’

‘Smoke?’

‘Smoke rises up from a fire.’

‘Hmm. That’s not a bad try. I think the smoke is actually lifted up by hot air from the fire. And the hot air rises up because it’s less dense than cold air. Some airships, balloons anyhow, are lifted by hot air. You have to have burners under the envelope. But the Mark Twain’s envelope was full of a gas called helium. It’s less dense than ordinary air.’

‘What does “dense” mean?’

Joshua had to think. ‘It’s how much amount of stuff there is in a given space. How many molecules, I guess. Iron is more dense than wood, say. A brick-sized block of iron is heavier than a brick-sized block of wood. And wood is more dense than air.’

Paul screwed up his nose. ‘I know what molecules are. Helium is a gas.’

‘Yes.’

‘Air is a gas. Lots of gases, mixed up, I know that.’

Joshua started to feel nervous, like he was being led down a trail into a thickening forest. ‘Yes . . .’