Helen gave Joshua a dismissive look. ‘I know it’s his birthday, but don’t make him any more big-headed. And he knows as well as I do that I’d much rather he spent this big day with his family instead of going off on yet another dumb Long Earth jaunt.’
‘A jaunt with my son,’ Joshua pointed out. ‘Some of it anyhow. Quality time.’
Jack said, ‘It’s only because you couldn’t manage the trip any other way, you old fossil.’
Rod laughed. ‘And speaking of the journey, we need to get going. Mom, thanks – these cookies are delicious, and the sugar will help keep me awake.’
Jack grunted. ‘It keeps me awake knowing how much we had to barter for that sugar. They use the damn stuff as currency out here.’
‘Could I get a doggy bag? …’
So the midnight party, such as it was, broke up. There was a final packing up, a stiff hug and handshake for Joshua from ex-wife and father-in-law, a last slurp of strong coffee.
Then Rod, carrying a lantern, led his father out of the little township and down a forest trail to the river, where there still stood a stone commemorating the too-brief life of Helen’s mother, Jack’s wife.
And where, in a clearing, Rod had landed a small plane.
6
THE AIRCRAFT’S HULL was a smooth white ceramic, unmarked save for a registration number and the inevitable Black Corporation Buddhist-monk logo that marked a capability to fly stepwise. The wings were stubby, the tailplane fat. The main body was a squat cylinder, just big enough for a small cockpit and couches for four passengers.
Inside, the plane had a striking smell of new machinery, of cleanliness – like a new car maybe, Joshua thought, a stray memory from back in the first decades of the twenty-first century when he was growing up, and the Datum was the only world there was, and it had been full of cars, new and otherwise. Once their bits of luggage were stowed, and Rod and Joshua were strapped into the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, Rod passed his hands over built-in tablets that filled the small cockpit with their glow. Joshua didn’t recognize a single aspect of the virtual instrumentation.
‘You know I’m not really a gadget kind of guy. But this is pretty wicked.’
Rod winced. ‘“Wicked”? How old did you say you were, Dad? Hold on to your hat, the take-off is kind of sudden.’
With a hum of a biofuel engine and a subdued roar of jets, the craft jolted forward across a grassy sward, bumping a little on the uneven ground. There was nothing like a runway at Reboot; there weren’t enough aerial visitors to justify it – and most of them came in airships that didn’t need a runway at all. Evidently this little plane didn’t need a runway either. After a remarkably short taxi, it leapt into the dark sky.
They didn’t step immediately. Rod had the plane bank on autopilot in a wide, lazy circle as he checked the Stepper box at his waist, and then opened up a small pack of pharmaceuticals and began to guzzle pills. As far as stepping was concerned Rod had mixed ancestry: his father, Joshua, was the world’s prototype natural stepper, but there were phobics on his mother’s side – those unable to step at all, such as his notorious uncle, whose name he’d taken. Rod himself was somewhere near typical. With a Stepper box, Rod could step maybe three or four times a minute, but he’d be hit by nausea each time, and needed treatments to control the reaction. Luckily for him, by the time he was trying to fulfil his boyhood dream of flying the twains – the great stepwise-bound freight-carrying airships – the anti-nausea drugs had reached a pinnacle of effectiveness, and steps coming every few seconds, or even faster, were manageable.
This self-medication went unremarked by Joshua. Although he did wonder if the modern treatments still turned your piss blue.
The cabin windows were big and generous, and as the ground opened up beneath him Joshua was able to see the scattered lights of Reboot, and the neighbouring farms and shepherds’ shelters. But they hadn’t risen far before the settlement was lost in the continent-spanning forest, a deep green-black sea on this moonless night. ‘Makes you think how few we are, on worlds like this, even after all these years. And after all the breeding we’ve done.’
Rod grunted. ‘To me and my buddies this is normal. A planet’s not supposed to glow in the dark.’ He stowed away the pharma kit. ‘So you ready?’
‘Let’s go.’
Rod tapped a corner of another of his glowing screens.
The first step was a faint jolt, like a bump in the road – and suddenly they were in a rainstorm – and out of it with the second step.
After that, worlds flapped past Joshua’s view, one after another, variations on a theme of black, with not a light to be seen on the ground below. From the beginning the stepping was faster than Joshua’s heartbeat, which was a little disconcerting, like too-fast music. But as the step rate increased the inevitable juddering sensation soon smoothed out, to be masked, in fact, by the faint vibrations of the smooth-running engines as the plane settled into its run, heading generally geographic west, towards the heart of the continent and the footprints of Wisconsin, even as the stepping continued.
‘Nice machine,’ Joshua said.
‘Sure. “Wicked.”’
‘I won’t ask how much you paid to use it. Or how you earned the money in the first place, living the way you do.’
‘I’m making my living my own way, which you know nothing about. Look, here I am for you, just as you asked. You wanted us to spend time. Fine. This ride is my gift to you, Dad. Happy birthday, OK? But why the hell are you doing this?’
‘Why the hell not? I’m fifty. I’ve spent my life wandering the Long Earth. Why not cross a hundred thousand worlds in a day? Why not mark it with a stunt like this, while I still can?’
‘I hate to tell you, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a speed record.’
Joshua shrugged. ‘I don’t care about comparisons. I never much cared what other people thought of me, as long as they left me alone.’
‘Well, maybe you should care, Dad. I mean, like Mom said, you could have marked your birthday with something which wouldn’t have involved you being out here all alone.’
‘Like what? A barbecue?’ Joshua looked at his son sideways. Rod’s face was softly illuminated by the glow of the control tablets.
‘Now you sound like your mother. Or your grandfather. Once Dan was going to be a twain driver. Now here’s Rod the comber, who knows it all.’
Rod replied irritably, ‘I wanted to fly twains when I was a little boy, for God’s sake. And I got to do it, for a while. But there aren’t the opportunities now – you know that.’
It was true enough. Twains still flew locally, especially across the more industrialized Low Earths, but the big Datum–Valhalla route, a ‘Long Mississippi’ that had spanned a million worlds with a bridge of trade and cultural exchange, had withered after the Datum Earth had been effectively knocked out by Yellowstone. And then, after the catastrophic winter of 2046 and a new wave of emigration from the battered Datum, most Long Earth trade had shrunk back to relatively short-range exchanges.
Still, changing career plans was one thing; changing your name was a different kind of statement.
Joshua hesitated before saying, ‘I think it’s disturbed your mother that you’ve started to use your uncle’s name, you know.’
‘It’s my middle name. You gave it to me.’
‘True, but—’
‘This is the hidden secret of the Greens, isn’t it? Jack the great political firebrand, my mother the midwife: once hero trekkers, now the heartbeat of Reboot. But they are only out here because they abandoned their phobic son back on Earth, and look what happened to him in the end.’