The Long Mars

‘You’re telling me that’s how it was for you and this Miriam?’

‘More or less. But I can’t help myself, Joshua. It hurts me as much as it hurts them.’

‘I doubt that very much. Paul, what did you mean by your kind?’

Paul smiled. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you, when you showed up again. I know you can keep a secret, because you kept enough of your own, didn’t you? Look – I’ll show you. I have my Stepper box. I know you don’t need one. I’ve paid, let’s get out of here—’

He stepped away with the slightest pop of displaced air, leaving his coffee half-finished.

When Joshua had first built a Stepper box of his own, on Step Day, aged thirteen, he had stepped out of the Home in the city of Datum Madison, and into forest, primeval, untouched, unexplored, as far as he could tell. Since those days, thirty years on, the Low Earths had soaked up most of the stepwise migration away from the Datum, including the big flow since Yellowstone had popped.

But – and even Joshua sometimes forgot this – a stepwise Earth was a whole world, as big and roomy as the original, all but empty of humans before Step Day, and it could absorb a large stepping population while keeping much that was wild and primitive.

Thus it was that, only a few steps away from West 5, in the footprint of Madison itself, Joshua found himself in a forest glade as untouched as any unexamined world in the High Meggers, in this little corner at least. It was the old trees that gave it away, Joshua always thought. If you saw a really old tree, centuries or even mille

And in this glade a dozen young people, from middle teenagers to twenty-somethings, were at play.

Most of them sat around a heap of food, ca

And they weren’t like ordinary kids in the way that the nearest of them immediately rounded on Joshua when he stepped in with Paul, all armed with bronze knives, and a couple further out with raised crossbows.

‘It’s OK,’ Paul said, hands held high. He squirted out some of the high-speed babble.

Joshua was still subject to suspicious stares, but the knives were lowered.

‘Come have a sandwich,’ Paul said to Joshua.

‘No thanks . . . What did you say to them?’

‘That you’re a dim-bulb. No offence, Joshua, but that was obvious to them already. Just from the way you looked around, with your jaw slack. Like you showed up dragging your knuckles, you know?’

‘A dim-bulb?’

‘But I also said you’re the famous Joshua Valienté, that I’ve known you since I was a little kid, that I trusted you to keep our secret. So you’re in. Not that there’s much of a secret to keep. We move the whole time, never visit the same place twice.’

‘Why do you need to do that?’

‘Well, we’ve all got scars, Joshua. If you want to know why, ask the people who gave them to us.’

‘All right. You say these are your kind.’

He gri

‘How did you find each other?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not so hard in the Low Earths. You people keep good records. A lot of our kind have problems at school and the like. And a lot of us have been institutionalized, one way or another, Joshua. Spent time in places like the Home, foster care agencies – in lunatic asylums, juvenile penal institutes. Also there are family names that can provide a link. Spencer, my mother’s maiden name. Montecute.’

‘Happy Landings names.’

‘Yeah. That was the breeding ground, or one of them. We don’t fit in your world, Joshua, but at least we leave a trace as we pass through it. Having said that, there must be some who do fit in, who keep their heads down, who find a place in your society somehow. We haven’t found any of them yet. They may be aware of us . . . I guess we’ll meet up some day.’

‘Hmm. I’ll be honest, Paul. The way you keep saying us and you is disturbing me.’

‘Well, that’s bad luck for you, Joshua. Get used to it. Because it’s been obvious to me ever since I hooked up with others of my kind – for the first time since they took my little sister away, and I had no one to talk to – that we are a different kind, fundamentally. That’s not to say we haven’t had a few disputes. We’re arrogant sons of bitches; we’re all used to being the brightest in our own little circle of dim-bulbs. But when we’re together, we just race away.

‘Joshua, you needn’t think we’re cooking up the next atom bomb here. We’re super-smart, but right now we don’t know anything. Nothing much more than you know, I mean, and half of that’s wrong and the rest is mostly illusion . . . We’re like the young Einstein in that patent office in Switzerland, staring at an empty notebook, dreaming of flying on a beam of light. He had the vision, but lacked the mathematical tools, yet, to realize his theory.’

‘Modest, aren’t you?’

‘No. Nor immodest. Just honest. For now we’re more potential than achievement. But that will come. Already is coming, in a way.’ He glanced at Joshua. ‘I saw you watching me in the coffee bar. Wondering where the hell I got my money from, yes? It’s all legal, Joshua. We’re particularly good at mathematics, an area where you don’t necessarily need a lot of life experience to excel. Some of us came up with investment-analysis algorithms – it wasn’t hard to find loopholes in the rules, ways to beat the system. We don’t play the markets ourselves; we just found middle men to sell the software. That kind of thing – that’s how we make our money.’

‘Sounds like you’re playing with fire. You need to be careful.’

‘Oh, we’re careful. It’s not as if we need to spend much anyhow. Not for now, not until we figure out what we’re going to do, where we’re going to go . . . Look, Joshua, one reason I brought you here is because I thought you would understand. For us to gather like this – it’s not about mathematics or philosophy, or making money or whatever, not even about the future. It’s just about being with others like ourselves. Can you imagine how it was for a kid like me, alone? To be surrounded by a bunch of upright apes with minds like guttering candles, and yet who had built this vast civilization full of rules and a crushing weight of tradition, none of which makes any sense if you just look at it . . . And having to act like you’re the same as everybody else. Then, can you imagine what it’s like, for the first time in your life, to find people who can keep up with you? For whom you don’t have to slow down, or explain – or, worse yet, pretend? Where you can just be the way you need to be?’

Joshua met Paul’s intense stare, trying not to flinch. Paul was just a not particularly well-turned-out nineteen-year-old boy. His face was smooth, young, his brow clear. But his eyes were like a predator’s eyes – like the eyes of a cave lion, and Joshua had encountered plenty of those out in the Long Earth in his time. He had met at least one super-intelligent entity before, he reminded himself, in Lobsang. But even Lobsang’s artificial visages showed more empathy than he detected in Paul’s gaze.