And the beetle disappeared, with a pop of air.

Nikos was astonished. It was as if the beetle had stepped, out of this big cellar, this cavern under the ground! How was that possible?

Again they closed in on him, moving more cautiously now, those strange half-faces with their single eyes following the flashlight as he swung it back and forth. He couldn’t get away, and if they rushed him he couldn’t get them all.

He tried to think.

That beetle had stepped away. You couldn’t step out of a hole in the ground. But the beetle had. If a beetle could, he could.

His Stepper box was still at his belt. He turned its big clunky switch left and right, East and West, and tried to step – but both ways he felt the strange push-back you got if you tried to step out of a cellar, or into a space occupied by something massive, like a big sequoia. It was impossible; you couldn’t step into solid earth or rock. But that beetle had stepped! There must be some way to do this.

The beetles were still closing in.

With a spasm of fear and disgust he tried again. He twisted the switch of his Stepper box until it broke off in his hand. But then he stepped, neither East nor West—

He wasn’t in a hole any more.

He was sitting on hard, smooth ground. There was a sky above him, brilliant, dazzling, and the light hurt his eyes after the darkness of the big cellar. But this sky was orange-brown, not blue, and there was no sun or moon – nothing but stars, like the clearest night, with many more stars than he’d ever seen, and some of those stars were bright, brighter than any star or planet, brighter than the moon, bright as shards of the sun.

Frozen by shock, he took a jerky breath. The air was thin and smelled of metal, of dryness.

He looked around. The ground under him was like compacted earth. He sat on a slope that stretched down to what looked like a river. On the far bank some kind of pale, translucent bubbles crowded together. They were like the blisters he’d seen on the belly of the beetle beasts, he thought, but these were bigger, the size of buildings, and they were fixed to the ground – or some were, while others seemed to be straining to rise into the air.

And beetle things crawled along paths and roads that tracked the river bank, and crossed low bridges over the water, hundreds of them in great crowds, rustling, scraping.

All this in a heartbeat, a rush of impressions.

There was a beetle right beside him. Nikos hadn’t seen it approach. That half-silvered face hovered in front of him, and a coiling pseudopod reached for his right temple. He felt overcome; he’d seen too much to take in, and couldn’t react. He didn’t resist.

He noticed one more odd thing about the shining sky: that many of the stars to his left, while bright, were tinged green, but those to his right were pure white.

Then something cold touched his head. Blackness closed in around his vision, like he was falling down another tunnel.

He woke with a start.

He was lying on his back. There was blue sky above him, and around him were walls of dirt, good clean ordinary dirt. He was back in that half-dug pit, under the ordinary sky. Out of the big cellar. Almost in a panic he took a breath, and sweet air, thick with the scents of the flowers of the forest, filled his lungs.

He sat up, gasped and coughed, his throat aching.

Something touched his face. Thinking it was the silver tentacle of one of the nightmarish beetle creatures, he twisted away and got to his feet.

It was Rio. She’d licked Nikos’s face. And she’d dropped an animal on the ground beside him: just a dwarf raccoon, unremarkable, limp and dead.

Nikos looked around quickly, and searched his pockets, his pouch. He still had those baby moccasins. He’d lost his flashlight, and he wondered how he was going to explain that away.

But here was Rio, safe and sound. She submitted to being grabbed and petted. Then she was first to scramble out of the pit and head for home.

Nikos said nothing to his parents about his adventure in the old Poulson place.

The fear gripped him for a whole day and a night. He couldn’t even sleep for thinking about it.

But on the second day he went back to the fringe of the ragged clearing, and inspected the Poulson house from the safety of the cover of the trees.

By the third day he was going back in, with his buddies. Back into the big cellar.

5

JOSHUA VALIENTÉ’S SON Rod called for him at the old family home in Reboot, in a stepwise footprint of New York State a hundred thousand steps West of the Datum. Joshua met him on the porch. It was a little after midnight on May 1, 2052.

‘Happy birthday, Dad.’

Joshua shook the hand of his only child warmly. At twenty, the boy was taller than Joshua, taller than his mother. He had her paler complexion, his father’s darker hair. He wore clothes of treated leather and what looked like spun wool dyed a pale green. In fact he looked alien in the lantern light of the Green homestead, but comfortable in himself, in his own skin. And he looked like he must fit right in with the shifting, ever fragmenting, kaleidoscopic communities of the stepwise forests to which he seemed increasingly drawn.

And he’s Rod now, Joshua reminded himself. We named him Daniel Rodney, the boy was always Dan, and the man is Rod. His choice. Joshua simultaneously felt pride in this handsome, confident young man, and a stab of regret at the evident distance between them. ‘Thanks for coming, son. And thanks for making this trip with me. Or the chunk you’re doing anyhow.’

‘Well, we haven’t done it yet. And you haven’t seen the ship I got for you to ride in.’

‘Your “stepping aircraft”. You were kind of enigmatic.’

‘It’s not a twain, Dad. Nothing like that big old ship we rode to the Datum when I was a kid. What was it called?’

‘The Gold Dust.’ That was Helen, Joshua’s ex-wife, Rod’s mother; she came out of the house now and wrapped her son in a hug. Helen was dressed plainly, and kept her greying strawberry-blonde hair pulled back in a practical bun. On coming back to Reboot, after her marriage to Joshua had broken up, she’d resumed her profession of midwife, and by now was pretty senior in the stepwise-extended community of New Scarsdale. She was strong, you could see that, strong in the upper body, strong and competent. On such a birthday as this Joshua was very aware of his own age, but Helen herself would be forty next year.

And out came the house’s final inhabitant. Helen’s father Jack, leaning precariously on a stick, was in his seventies. ‘My boy, my boy.’ He wrapped his free arm around Rod’s shoulders, and Rod submitted with good grace.

Helen bustled around. ‘Come inside and let’s get this door closed. It might be May but the nights are still cold.’ She led them all into the house’s main room, the core of the structure and the first to be built, where, as a pioneer family in the years before she’d met Joshua, all the Greens had once lived in a cosy heap … All the Greens, except of course Rod the phobic, who they’d left behind in Datum Madison: Helen’s brother Rod, to her son a mysterious lost uncle, and whose name he had chosen to adopt.

Rod stood there awkwardly, by a table laden with food, back in a room into which he evidently didn’t feel he fitted any more. ‘Mom, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’

Helen smiled. ‘You knew I would, though, didn’t you? Look, I know you two are going to be keen to get away—’

Jack growled, ‘Not even stopping by to say hi to Aunt Katie and her girls, and the grandkids? You know how they look up to you, the great twain driver.’

‘I’m not a twain driver any more, Granddad.’

‘But even so—’

‘I’m only here for Dad.’

‘Fool stunt!’