Somehow, illogically, that detail made Agnes shudder.
Nikos said, ‘But you see more of that in the Planetarium. Not here.’
Lobsang said, ‘The Planetarium? … Never mind. Tell us later. OK, you don’t speak to them. So tell me what you’re doing with those rocks.’
‘I swap them for the silver things. The rings, the pendants. We pick up bits of rock from the ground, all around the forest, and we bring them here. If we’re doing it properly we have to show them where we found the rocks on a map. I say map. It’s just a kind of scribble I drew once.’
‘You’re swapping rock samples for silver artefacts?’
‘I guess you could call it that.’
Agnes asked, ‘If you can’t speak to them, how did you work all this out? The whole idea of the trade.’
Nikos seemed irritated at having to be quizzed like this, in his own little empire. ‘It took a long time. It started with a bit of quartz I had in my pocket, one of the first times. I just showed it to one of them. After that—’
‘Never mind,’ Lobsang said. ‘Agnes, I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow. But why would they want rock samples? Well, because they want to do some more mining, I guess. They need to study the landscape. But to what end? …’
‘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 …’