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.’
After Helen’s eighteen-year-old homealone brother had played a part in the anti-stepper terrorist nuking of Datum Madison, Wisconsin, he’d spent a lifetime in custodial institutions. He’d died in there only recently, of an infection he’d caught in hospital. Joshua realized with a shock that he’d committed his single, terrible crime when younger than Rod was now.
‘OK, but you’re kind of throwing this in their faces. Jack’s particularly. You shouldn’t judge them, Rod. They just couldn’t find a way to make it work for everybody.’
‘We all make mistakes, eh, Dad?’
‘Yes, frankly. You just haven’t made yours yet, son. Or maybe you just don’t know it.’
‘Thanks for that. Now maybe you should shut up and let me fly this thing.’
‘Rod, I—’
‘Forget it.’
After that, much of the night was spent in not very companionable silence. Long hours of darkness which Joshua spent much of beating himself up for what he’d said, or hadn’t said, not for the first time where his family was concerned.
Maybe Joshua slept a little. He suspected Rod napped too, leaving the flying to the autopilot. Even the flaring of an occasional Joker did not disturb them.
The sun came up on all the worlds of the Long Earth.
Some fifty thousand steps from the Datum they were still deep in the thick band of worlds known as the Mine Belt: cooler and less well forested than the Earths of the Corn Belt, which began around the location of Reboot and stretched away to the stepwise West. The Mine Belt worlds were mostly exploited only as sources of minerals of various kinds, either for local use or for export to the Datum and the Low Earths – though even that kind of trade was dwindling now. But there were herds of animals to be seen, drawn to the water courses and lakes, mostly four-legged mammals but not much like anything that populated the human cultural imagination: things like giant camels, and things like elephants with oddly shaped tusks, stalked by things like huge cats. As they stepped, the herds, dark flowing masses, were there and gone in an eye blink.
They had a silent breakfast of Helen’s cookies and lukewarm coffee from a flask.
Around eight a.m. the character of the worlds below changed again, subtly. This was the Ice Belt, a band of periodically glaciatedworlds, of which Datum Earth – at least in its primordial state, before humanity got to work – appeared to have been a typical example. These Earths were cooler, with open prairie and grasslands, the forests shrunk back to patches of evergreen, and tundra in the far north. As Joshua had learned during his own forays into the Long Earth, and on that first journey of exploration with Lobsang two decades ago, when you crossed the Long Earth it was like flying through the branches of some tremendous tree of possibilities and probabilities. The closer you got to the Datum, the more links in the chain of coin-toss cosmic accidents that had led to the peculiar circumstances of the home world locked into place, and the more familiar the landscapes became. So now, on the sparsely populated grasslands below, they saw animals of the kinds alongside which humans had evolved, even if
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.’
After Helen’s eighteen-year-old homealone brother had played a part in the anti-stepper terrorist nuking of Datum Madison, Wisconsin, he’d spent a lifetime in custodial institutions. He’d died in there only recently, of an infection he’d caught in hospital. Joshua realized with a shock that he’d committed his single, terrible crime when younger than Rod was now.
‘OK, but you’re kind of throwing this in their faces. Jack’s particularly. You shouldn’t judge them, Rod. They just couldn’t find a way to make it work for everybody.’
‘We all make mistakes, eh, Dad?’
‘Yes, frankly. You just haven’t made yours yet, son. Or maybe you just don’t know it.’
‘Thanks for that. Now maybe you should shut up and let me fly this thing.’
‘Rod, I—’
‘Forget it.’
After that, much of the night was spent in not very companionable silence. Long hours of darkness which Joshua spent much of beating himself up for what he’d said, or hadn’t said, not for the first time where his family was concerned.
Maybe Joshua slept a little. He suspected Rod napped too, leaving the flying to the autopilot. Even the flaring of an occasional Joker did not disturb them.
The sun came up on all the worlds of the Long Earth.
Some fifty thousand steps from the Datum they were still deep in the thick band of worlds known as the Mine Belt: cooler and less well forested than the Earths of the Corn Belt, which began around the location of Reboot and stretched away to the stepwise West. The Mine Belt worlds were mostly exploited only as sources of minerals of various kinds, either for local use or for export to the Datum and the Low Earths – though even that kind of trade was dwindling now. But there were herds of animals to be seen, drawn to the water courses and lakes, mostly four-legged mammals but not much like anything that populated the human cultural imagination: things like giant camels, and things like elephants with oddly shaped tusks, stalked by things like huge cats. As they stepped, the herds, dark flowing masses, were there and gone in an eye blink.
They had a silent breakfast of Helen’s cookies and lukewarm coffee from a flask.
Around eight a.m. the character of the worlds below changed again, subtly. This was the Ice Belt, a band of periodically glaciatedworlds, of which Datum Earth – at least in its primordial state, before humanity got to work – appeared to have been a typical example. These Earths were cooler, with open prairie and grasslands, the forests shrunk back to patches of evergreen, and tundra in the far north. As Joshua had learned during his own forays into the Long Earth, and on that first journey of exploration with Lobsang two decades ago, when you crossed the Long Earth it was like flying through the branches of some tremendous tree of possibilities and probabilities. The closer you got to the Datum, the more links in the chain of coin-toss cosmic accidents that had led to the peculiar circumstances of the home world locked into place, and the more familiar the landscapes became. So now, on the sparsely populated grasslands below, they saw animals of the kinds alongside which humans had evolved, even if
Similar Books
