‘Show me,’ Agnes said. ‘Show me how you do your trade.’

Nikos shrugged. He just held out a bit of rock. Silvery limbs unfolded from the creature’s belly, took the rock, and handed over a small silver artefact in return, like a pendant.

Agnes said, ‘George, do you see that? The limbs. They’re not just sleeved. Some of those arms are metal.’

‘Mmm. Maybe that dark chitin-like carapace is actually artificial too. This thing could be some kind of cyborg. Half biological, half mechanical.’

‘In that case,’ Agnes said, ‘it should feel right at home with us.’

Nikos glanced at her, puzzled by that.

Lobsang asked, ‘Nikos, you say there are more of these creatures?’

‘Masses. The first time I came down here the whole place was swarming. You don’t see that so much now. I think maybe they’d nearly finished what they were doing down here.’

‘OK. But you also see them in this place you call a planetarium, right?’

‘I mean, it’s not really a planetarium—’

Agnes asked, ‘Another name from your mother’s picture books?’

‘Yeah. Seems kind of babyish now, I guess.’

‘Never mind that,’ Lobsang said. ‘Can you show us?’ He looked around. ‘What, is it an adjoining chamber, another shaft?’

‘Oh, no. You have to step there.’

Agnes recoiled as he said that, instinctively. ‘That’s impossible. Everybody knows that. You can’t step out of an underground chamber, a mine, a cellar.’ She thought of Joshua, who had taught her most of what she knew about stepping.

Nikos twisted his face. ‘Well, it’s a funny kind of step. I’ll have to show you.’

Agnes glanced at Lobsang. ‘You think we should follow? If he’s survived it – and for all we know Ben too – I guess we can.’

Lobsang said pointedly, ‘But we don’t have our Stepper boxes with us, remember, Agnes. We weren’t expecting to travel stepwise today.’

That was true, but they both knew, and Nikos didn’t, that they had Stepper technology integrated into their bodies. Agnes even had a peculiar little hatch in the small of her back where she could insert a potato.

But Nikos said, utterly without fear, ‘You won’t need them. I’ve got my box on my belt.’ He held out his hands. ‘Come on. I’ll take you.’

The beetle creature curled back to the ground, scuttled away with a scrape of chitin and metal on rock – and, as it receded into the shadows, Agnes thought she saw it wink out of existence. Maybe stepping was somehow possible down here, then.

She grabbed Nikos’s right hand. ‘Let’s do it. What can possibly go wrong?’

Lobsang, more reluctantly, took the boy’s left hand.

And—

The sky was orange-brown and crowded with stars, some of them big enough to show as discs, some tinged faintly green against the general background. A sun, fat and red, sat on the horizon, its hull fragmented by refraction. The ground was crowded with blisters, like domes, some low and close to the ground, some taller and bulging at the top, like mushrooms, almost like trees. Agnes saw something like a river, what might be a road alongside it.

It was all quite baffling. She took a deep breath. The air was thin and smelled of insects, like crushed cockroaches, metallic, sour.

And silver beetles crawled everywhere, along that riverside road, across the open spaces between the bubble-things. If the one they had encountered in the Gallery had crossed over with them, it was already lost in the crowd. None of them seemed to be paying any attention to a fifteen-year-old boy, and two androids masquerading as a farmer and his wife.

Nikos grinned. ‘This is the Planetarium. Isn’t it great?’

Agnes looked at him, and then down at herself. The strange light from the sky made the skin of her hands look orange, washed out the green dye of her shirt, the blue of her jeans. She didn’t fit here, not at all. The strangeness seemed to descend on her, all at once. She couldn’t handle it. She felt herself shivering.

Lobsang immediately hugged her. ‘Calm, Agnes.’

‘I didn’t sign up for this, Lobsang,’ she whispered, away from the boy.

‘Well, it was your idea to come here.’

‘Only because I thought Ben had been down here before us. Oh, God, Ben, he must have been terrified if he got this far …’

‘I don’t think he was. He kept coming back, didn’t he?’

‘Where are we, Lobsang? Some distant part of the Long Earth? Have we been through one of Sally Linsay’s soft places?’

‘I don’t think any Earth ever had a sky like this. We’re far from home.’

‘How far? The Long Mars? Mars has an orange sky, doesn’t it?’

‘But not all those stars.’

‘How did we get here? How could a step—’

‘There have been rumours.’

‘Of what?’

‘Flaws in the Long Earth. Places where stepping a certain kind of way can take you – elsewhere. There were stories of Jokers with this sort of property – one, called the Cueball, Joshua and I discovered ourselves. Not that we stuck around to find out how strange it was.’

Yes, Agnes thought. This is a flaw. Not just the Poulson house, the hole in the ground. The whole of Earth West 1,217,756. Just as had been her intuition, almost from the beginning. A flaw, something that shouldn’t be here. Somehow it was all connected. It had to be.

‘Interesting,’ Lobsang said.

She managed to laugh. ‘What, one thing in particular as opposed to all the rest?’

‘The sky. Those green-tinged stars. On one side of the sky, not the other. Now, why that odd asymmetry?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She pushed away Lobsang’s arm. Nikos was watching her; she felt embarrassed by the weakness she had shown.

‘Take me home,’ she said sternly.

At their cabin, Shi-mi was waiting for them by the door. She seemed to be bursting with news.

The cat said without hesitation, ‘I was able to observe your experiments. The pendulum and the timer funnels and the sundial. I have come to a conclusion. I regret that the precision is uncertain—’

‘That’s OK,’ Agnes said. ‘Just tell me.’

‘When we came here the day was twenty-four hours long. Just as on all the worlds of the Long Earth – well, almost all. I remember that well; I observed it myself. But now—’ And she shuddered.

Agnes crouched down. ‘Shi-mi, are you all right? Let me get you something.’

‘No. Please, Agnes.’ She opened her green eyes wide. ‘Now, according to your clocks, the day is shorter. Twenty-three hours only, plus a few minutes. You were right. You were right …’

Agnes stared at Lobsang. ‘The silver beetles. The Planetarium. Now this, the world spinning faster on its damn axis. What does it mean, Lobsang?’

‘I’ll have to find out.’ He sighed. ‘So much for the homesteading.’

‘To find out – what do you need to do that?’

‘A twain,’ he said. ‘I need a twain, so I can see the whole world. And Joshua Valienté, Agnes. I need Joshua.’

23

FOR NELSON AZIKIWE, patiently enquiring, the mysteries of the deeper history of Joshua Valienté and his family continued to unravel …

Luis Valienté never forgot his adventure with Abel and Simon, the runaway slaves, back in 1852. It was an incident that had made him proud to be British, and indeed to be a Waltzer, one of Oswald Hackett’s Knights of Discorporea. A validation too, for the first time in his life, of what he was.

But as the years passed, he gradually became less and less entangled in the affairs of the Knights, and his life followed its own distinct path.

That path took a decisive turn thanks to his share in a fictitious Californian gold mine – all Fraser Burdon’s doing, of course – a lode easily extracted thanks to their piggybacking on the results of some poor fellow’s five years of prospecting in the true California. Luis marvelled at Fraser’s ingenious cover-up of their strike’s peculiar provenance. The mine, according to Fraser’s account for the authorities, had supposedly been opened up by a ‘distant cousin’. Its location had been ‘lost’, along with all documentation, in a botched robbery attempt when the ‘cousin’ had come into town and attempted to register his latest ‘strike’ … They got away with it. There were, it seemed, even wilder stories than that circulating in the strange subculture of the Gold Rush.