The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online

try to step into a wall. You just get pushed away, you know, but it distresses them.’
    And with a puff of displaced air Harry appeared, a grubby, sweating six-year-old, stepping straight from the forest on to the carpet. Exactly where Bettany was pointing.
    Where she, stuck in Earth West 31, had seen him standing, in Earth West 32.
    Harry’s little face crumpled, and he held his sick bag to his mouth, but he didn’t throw up. His mother reached for him, unseeing. ‘Good boy. Brave boy. Come here now . . .’
    Mann and Jansson withdrew to the kitchen.
    Bettany’s husband made them a pot of coffee. He was in white shirt and tie, crisp slacks, black leather shoes; he’d come home from work when Bettany was released from the hospital so he could get the kids back from her sister where they’d been staying, and the family could be together again here in this holiday home, this refuge from the current anti-stepper madness back on the Datum. When he’d poured the coffee, the husband left them alone.
    Mann sipped from his mug. ‘I can see why the doctors called you in, Lieutenant Jansson. Knowing of your, umm, vocation. The work you’ve done on stepping-related crime and social issues.’
    â€˜But the doctors don’t understand. She’s actually a near-phobic, isn’t she? Bettany Diamond. She has significant difficulties stepping, even though she’s set up this holiday home thirty-one steps out. And though she’s wearing a stepper bracelet. She believes in stepping and its benefits, even though she can’t do it so well herself . . .’
    This was a time when evidence was first spreading widely that some people were able to step naturally, that is without the aid of a Linsay Stepper box, despite the official cover-ups. And the tension between non-steppers and natural steppers was mounting. Humanity had found the latest in a long line of sub-groups to pick on, and a kit bag of discriminatory horrors inherited from the past was being rummaged through. In some Central Asian countries, according to human rights activists, they laced the bodies of steppers with iron, so that if you stepped away you’d bleed out of some pierced artery. Some states in the US were considering something horribly similar, where steel-based pacemakers would be installed into the bodies of high-category cons: step away, and your heart stopped.
    At minimum, in most states, as in many countries around the world, natural steppers were being forced to wear markers of some kind, such as electronic wristband tags. The argument was that the tags were needed to keep track of potential criminals. Yellow stars , the critics called the markers. Jansson imagined this foolishness would pass soon enough. In the meantime it had become a fashion among the young to wear dummy stepper tokens as a badge of defiance. It had even generated a kind of street art, as designers extended the wristband concept into loops of copper or even platinum, supposed representations of the chain of worlds that was the Long Earth.
    None of which had anything much to do with Bettany Diamond, lawyer, wife, mother. In the Datum Madison hospital another patient had actually assaulted her just because she was admitted for her sight problems, a condition apparently related to stepping. It didn’t help that she defiantly wore a pro-stepper bracelet, but that was hardly an invitation to attack.
    Jansson asked, ‘So what do you make of her condition?’
    Mann sipped his coffee. ‘It’s very early to say. Perhaps we need more cases like hers to make sense of the phenomenon. In the past, after all, we learned a lot about how the brain functions from instances of damage. You broke a bit on the inside, and saw what stopped working on the outside.
    â€˜I do firmly believe, however, that stepping is an attribute of human consciousness – or at least humanoid. Animals with significantly different kinds of