‘As I told you, I’ve asked Sally Linsay for help with that, when we need it. Who else knows the Long Earth as she does?’

Agnes looked over at Sally. ‘She’s the only one who knows about you?’

‘Yes. Save for you, the only one. In fact she said she’d never really believed my end was final; she kind of knew anyhow, before I approached her. But she’s discreet. I’ll swear she keeps secrets from herself.’

‘Hmm. I’m not entirely sure I trust her. Not about her discretion, I accept that.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know. Sally has … an odd sense of humour. She’s a trickster. And you are sure you want to do this, aren’t you? To put everything aside, and just—’

He looked at her. ‘Just be human? Do you?’

And that was the question that stirred her own emotions, deep in the lump of Black Corporation gel she used as a heart.

Father Gavin read another line, and ‘George’ frowned. ‘Did I hear that correctly? Something about being like a sinner at heaven’s gate, and crawling back to me …’

She linked her arm in his. ‘You have Newton, I have Steinman. Come on. Let’s get out of here before anybody gets suspicious.’

3

IF NOT FOR his dog Rio chasing some imaginary furball around the back of the old Poulson place, Nikos Irwin would most likely never have found the big cellar at all. It was a kind of unlikely accident – or maybe not, not if you knew Rio, and the qualities of stubbornness and curiosity she had inherited from her Bernese mountain dog ancestors. But if not for Nikos and his stubborn pet, the whole subsequent history of mankind might have been different – for better or worse.

It was April of 2052. Nikos was ten years old.

It wasn’t as if Nikos particularly liked the old Poulson house, or the abandoned township it was part of. It was just that the Poulson place was used as the local swap house, and he’d been sent here by his mother in search of baby shoes, for her friend Angie Clayton was carrying.

So, with Rio loping at his side, he walked out of the shade of the trees, out of the dense green where somewhere a band of forest trolls hooted a gentle song, and into the harsh unfiltered sunlight.

He looked around at the big houses that loomed silently over this open space. Nikos had grown up in the forest, and instinctively he didn’t like clearings, for they left you without cover. And this abandoned community was an odd place besides. His parents always told him that the Long Earth was too new to mankind to have much history yet, but if there was history anywhere in Nikos’s own world, it was here. Some of these old houses were being swallowed by the green, but the rest still stood out in the light, hard and square and alien, with their peeling whitewash and cracked windows. The place even smelled odd to Nikos, not just of general decay after years of abandonment, but of cut wood and dried-out, dusty, lifeless ground.

All this was basically the work of the very first colonists to come here, the founders. They had opened up the forest to build their little town. You could still see the neatly cut and burned-out stumps where great old trees had been removed, and the fields they’d planted, and the tracks they’d marked out with white-painted stones, and of course the houses they’d hammered together in a few short years, with their picket fences and screen doors and bead curtains. Some of the houses had stained glass windows. There was even a little chapel, half-finished, with a truncated steeple open to the elements.

And in one big old house there was even, incredibly, a piano, a wooden box which somebody must have built from the local wood, and fitted out with pedals and an inner frame and strung with wire, all carried from the Low Earths: a remarkable feat of almost pointless craftsmanship.

Nikos’s parents said the founders had been keen and eager and energetic, and when they’d come travelling out to these remote worlds – more than a million steps from the Datum, the first world of mankind – they’d had a kind of fever dream of their past, when their own ancestors had spread out into the original America and had built towns like this, towns with farms and gardens and schools and churches. They had even named their town: New Springfield.

But the trouble was, this wasn’t colonial America.

And this Earth wasn’t the Datum. Nikos’s father said that this world, and a whole bunch of similar Earths in a band around it, was choked with trees from pole to equator to the other pole, and he meant that literally: here, there were forests flourishing even in the Arctic night. Certainly this footprint of Maine was thick with trees that looked like sequoias and laurels but probably weren’t, and an undergrowth of things like tea plants and fruit bushes and ferns and horsetails. The warm, moist, dark air fizzed with insects, and the trees and the loamy ground swarmed with furballs, as everybody called them, jumpy little mammals that spent their lives scurrying after said insects.

And in such a world, the founders’ children had soon started to explore other ways of living, in defiance of their parents, the pioneers.

Why go to all the hard work of farming when you were surrounded by whole empty worlds full of ever-generous fruit trees? And rivers full of fish, and forests full of furballs so numerous they were easily trapped? Oh, maybe farming made sense on the more open worlds of the Corn Belt, but here … The drifters who came through here periodically, calling themselves combers or okies or hoboes, vivid examples of other ways of living, had helped inspire the breakaway. Nikos’s parents’ friends still spoke of one particularly persuasive and evidently intelligent young woman who had stayed here for a few weeks, preaching the virtues of a looser lifestyle.

Pioneers tended to have their children young; the sooner you raised a new crop of willing workers the better. But the numerous children of New Springfield, growing up in a world utterly unlike their parents’, had quickly learned independence of mind, and had rebelled. Most of the youngsters, and a good number of their parents, had given up and walked off into the green. The will to maintain the township had kind of dissolved away – indeed it had only lasted one generation.

Nowadays the Irwins and the other family groups didn’t really have permanent residences at all. Instead they had a kind of cycle of living places, which you’d visit according to the fruits of the gentle seasons, and keep clear of fresh brush with a little burning, and repair last year’s lean-tos and hearths. So they’d climb Manning Hill on one particular world a couple of steps East in the spring months, when the squirrel-moles came bursting out of the ground to choose new queens and found new burrows, and were easy to trap. Or, in the fall, they’d go to Soulsby Creek four steps further West where the annual spawning run of the local salmon was particularly rich. Nikos had grown up with all this, and knew no different.

As for the old township itself, meanwhile, as they grew old and weary a lot of the founders had gone back to the Datum. A few disappointed pioneers had clung on as best they could, and their relatives had kept an eye on these ageing heroes. Nikos’s mother told a wistful story of how she used to hear one old lady play that piano of an evening, and Chopin waltzes would waft out into the silence of the world forest, music written down in a century long gone and in a world very far from here, and sometimes picked up by responsive choruses of forest trolls. But the piano lost its tuning, and there came a day when the music ceased altogether, and now nobody played the piano any more.

Even after it had been wholly abandoned, though, Nikos’s group worked together to keep the New Springfield clearing open. It had some uses. Everybody needed a Stepper box, and for that you needed potatoes, and potatoes needed cultivating, so that was something useful to do with the remains of the founders’ farms. It had taken somebody a lot of effort to build the forge beside the Poulson place, and that was kept functional; you couldn’t carry iron across worlds, and preserving the craft of iron-working seemed another good idea. Some of the animals the founders had brought here – chickens and goats and pigs and even sheep – had survived, and bred. Every so often you’d be surprised by a wild descendant of those first porcine colonists bursting out of the undergrowth before you.