‘Oh, hell no. I just work for them. I’m here to help with your trip.’

Stan scowled at him. ‘So if you’re not a Next, what are you, Jules? A native bearer?’

Rocky winced again. For a young man who was increasingly thought of in these parts as a source of wisdom, Stan could be brutally cruel. But then, Rocky thought, they were both still just seventeen.

Jules did not seem offended, however. ‘Just doing my job, and it’s a job I enjoy. I’ll take you to meet the others. Not far from here stepwise. I see you’ve got your pack. You won’t need much once you’re there, at the Grange. People always take more than they need, the first time. Some kind of comfort thing, I guess.’

Rocky asked, ‘You’ve done this before? Taken people there?’

‘A few times.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We do need to move, however. You understand you’ll be going through soft places?’

Rocky suppressed a shudder. ‘So we’ve been told.’

Jules grinned easily. ‘Don’t sweat it, it’s not so bad. Anyhow, you’re safe in their hands.’ His confidence in the Next seemed absolute, Rocky thought. ‘But the soft places aren’t like stepping. They’re limited in space and time; you have to hit the right moment.’

‘So we’ve appointments to keep.’

‘That’s it. Any more goodbyes you need to make?’

In fact, Rocky thought, as they’d waited for the Next to come take Stan away, it had been nothing but a long drawn-out goodbye for months.

‘No,’ Stan said simply. ‘It’s done. Let’s get on with it.’

So, hastily, very early this September morning – and grumpily, with Rocky’s head aching faintly from the last-night drinks party thrown by their buddies, who’d been told they were leaving to study beanstalk engineering techniques a couple of worlds away – with a stroke of their Stepper boxes they left Earth West 4 behind. Rocky watched the still incomplete space elevator vanish from his view, leaving the unspoiled sky of West 5.

Then, following Jules’s lead, they stepped again, and again. Stan was a natural stepper, who only carried a box for cover. Rocky was a lot less capable, but Roberta Golding had supplied industrial-strength anti-nausea drugs, and these first steps, at least, weren’t difficult.

It took only a few minutes to reach the West 10 footprint of Miami.

Here, Roberta Golding and Marvin Lovelace met them in the middle of a prairie; a scrap of shade from a clump of trees sheltered them from the light of an intense sun. Roberta wore her thick spectacles, and Marvin his card-sharp uniform of shades and small black homburg. They both wore nondescript travelling gear, and carried small packs.

Roberta smiled at them. ‘Good morning. You’re ready to go onwards?’

‘I was expecting you,’ Stan said to Roberta. ‘But not him,’ he jerked a thumb at Jules, ‘or him,’ and he pointed at Marvin.

Roberta laughed, good natured. ‘Well, Jules is one of you who knows us, and who we can trust. He’s here as kind of a middle-man who might be able to tell us if something goes wrong – better than you might be able to articulate for yourselves for now.’

Marvin grinned. ‘And you know me, right? Good old Marvin, who saved you from getting beat up more than once for winning out fair and square over some stalk jack in the poker.’

‘Anything we can do to help you feel grounded,’ Roberta said. ‘Which is why we encouraged you to bring a companion.’

‘I’ve known Rock here all my life. He’s like the brother I never wanted.’

That was classic Stan. Rocky smirked, and punched his arm.

Stan scowled. ‘But it doesn’t make me feel grounded to keep hearing all this talk of us and them.’

Roberta said evenly, ‘This kind of reaction is common. It’s possible for you to back out, at any stage. We will trust your discretion.’

Marvin nudged him. ‘Come on, man. Don’t bail now. Won’t you always be curious about what you’re missing?’

Stan shrugged. ‘Fair point. Let’s do this.’

‘Good,’ Roberta said firmly.

Rocky looked at Roberta dubiously. ‘We’re going through the soft places, right? What do we have to do?’

She smiled, evidently trying to be reassuring. ‘Just hold my hand.’

They emerged in another prairie, with a subtly different ensemble of waist-high green plants, differently shaped trees – and, in the distance, a herd of tremendous beasts of some kind walking in the mist, dimly visible, like mountains on the move …

A passage through a soft place was different.

Regular stepping was like consciously striding from one stone in a stream to the next. Now Rocky felt as if he had fallen through some flaw in the world. He couldn’t have described what he saw during the transition. But the vertiginous sense of falling was real enough, as was the bone-sucking chill he felt now, a harsh contrast to the warmth of the fall day on West 10.

To his shame, Rocky found he was still clinging to Roberta’s hand, like a kid with his mother. He let go hastily.

‘You have just travelled a thousand steps from West 10,’ Roberta said. ‘In fact a little more.’

Rocky asked, ‘Which way did we come? East or West?’

‘Does it matter? And we have moved geographically too; we are far from the footprint of Florida.’ Roberta looked into their eyes. ‘Are you both OK? The chill you feel is real; a soft-place transition extracts energy as a simple Linsay step does not, or not measurably. Also it will have felt as if you were in motion for some time. Seconds, perhaps longer; the feeling is subjective and varies between individuals. But in fact, if you had checked your watches, no physical time passes during the transition.’

‘Teach me how to do this,’ Stan said.

Roberta glanced uncertainly at Marvin, who shrugged.

Stan said, ‘Look, you don’t have a monopoly on soft places. I’ve heard of them before. Some humans who don’t have the pretension to call themselves a separate species can find them too, right?’

‘It is a question of training. Of mental discipline. You will not be ready until—’

‘Just tell me.’

Roberta evidently wasn’t used to being interrupted. But she said, ‘It is all a question of imagination. Just as our hominid ancestors could look at a rock and picture the tool inside, so we can consider this world and imagine another. The more advanced the intellect, you see, the more detailed the visualization. And at last when the visualization is rich enough—’

‘You step.’

‘Yes. Into a world which, we think, crystallizes from a Platonic potential into the realm of the actual. It is just as in quantum mechanics – if two objects have a quantum description sufficiently precise, if their states are identical, they are the same object. To go further than simple Linsay stepping is essentially an application of higher mathematics … Oh, if only you could quicktalk! English is utterly inadequate, and slow. Like shouting poetry down a drainpipe. Stan, you may be able to learn.’ But she glanced at Rocky, and her message was clear. Not you. ‘Are you ready? We will make some stops – call them educational opportunities – before we reach our destination. Hold my hands, both of you …’

And Rocky, helpless, was hurled through another plummeting seven-league-boot leap.

26

THE AIRSHIP SHILLELAGH hovered over Manning Hill, over the Abrahams farmstead, tethered to the remains of the gondola which had delivered Lobsang, Agnes, a little boy and a cat to this world three years before. As Agnes strode up the hill, bearing a box of eggs – a souvenir of a coffee morning at the Irwins’ – she realized that the twain had already been there a week. Agnes had become a lot more aware of the passage of time thanks to her clocks and calendars.

The battered old airship was a novelty, of course, in the sedate green world of New Springfield, and even after a week the children, and some adults too, still came to stare. Joshua Valienté had been introduced as a visitor, an old family friend, and nobody had questioned that simple cover story – even those few who had heard of this hero of the early days of stepping. And Joshua was generous with his time, as ever. After arriving in the airship he had given the local kids rides across the forest-choked landscape of Earth West 1,217,756. These kids thought nothing of stepping, nothing of the existence of the multiple worlds of the Long Earth – but few of them had ever got to see their home from the air.