The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online Page B

was a little statue of a man who’d been nailed to a cross because He’d been a Problem.
    She had said that it seemed to her that he might be trapped in a vocation, not unlike her own. She knew how difficult it was to make people understand what they didn’t want to understand, for instance when she insisted that ‘For Crying Out Loud’ was one of the holiest songs that had ever been recorded. She told him to follow his heart, and also to come and go whenever he liked, because the Home
was
his home.
    And she said that he could trust Officer Jansson, a good policewoman and a good Steinman fan (inserting ‘Steinman fan’ into the conversation at the point where another nun might have used the word ‘Catholic’), who had been to see Sister Agnes, and had asked if she could meet Joshua, and ask for his help.

9
    MEANWHILE, SIX MONTHS after Step Day, Monica Jansson’s own career path had taken a decisive knight’s-move sideways.
    She had stood outside the Madison PD South District building, braced, slid the switch on her Stepper, and received the usual punch in the gut, as the station vanished to be replaced by tall trees, green shade. In a clearing cut into this scrap of primeval forest was a small wooden shack with the MPD crest on the door, and a low bench outside, and a Stars and Stripes hanging from a stripped sapling. Jansson sat on the bench, folded over, nursing the nausea. The bench was put here precisely to allow you to recover from the stepping before you had to face your fellow officers.
    Since Step Day, things had moved on quickly. The techs had come up with a police-issue Stepper, robust components in a sleek black plastic case, resistant even to a close-range gunshot. Of course, as with all Steppers – just as she’d found at the start with Linsay’s prototype – to make it work for you, you had to finish the assembly of the working components yourself. It was a nice piece of kit, although you had to ignore the jokes about the potatoes needed to run it. ‘Do you want fries with that, Officer?’ Ha ha.
    But nobody had been able to do anything about the nausea that incapacitated most people for ten or fifteen minutes after a step. There was a drug that was supposed to help, but Jansson always tried to avoid becoming dependent on drugs, and besides it turned your piss blue.
    When the dizziness and nausea started to subside, she stood up. The day, in Madison West 1 anyhow, was still and cold, sunless but rainless. This stepwise world was still much as it had been the first time she’d stepped here, from out of the ruin of Willis Linsay’s house: the rustle of leaves, the clean air, the birdsong. But it was changing, bit by bit, as clearings were nibbled into the forest and the prairie flowers were cut back: householders ‘extending’ their properties, entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to exploit a world of high-quality lumber and exotic wildlife, official presences like the MPD establishing a foothold in world-next-door annexes to their principal buildings. Already, it was said, there was smoky smog on very still days. Jansson wondered how long it would be before she would see airplane contrails in that empty sky.
    She wondered where Joshua Valienté was, right now. Joshua, her own guilty secret.
    She was almost late for her appointment with Clichy.
    Inside the shack, the smell of long-brewed coffee was strong.
    There were two officers here, Lieutenant Clichy behind his desk staring into a laptop – customized and non-ferrous – and a junior patrol officer called Mike Christopher who was painstakingly handwriting some kind of report in a big ledger of lined yellow paper. Still largely without electronic support, all over the country cops were having to learn to write legibly again, or as legibly as they ever had.
    Clichy waved at her, without taking his eyes from the laptop. ‘Coffee, seat.’
    She fetched a mug of coffee so thick she thought it would dissolve the bronze spoon she used to