The Long Earth by Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett

Author:Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

28

JOSHUA AND LOBSANG pressed deeper into the Long Earth, extending their tentative survey.

Embedded in the blandness of the Corn Belt were plenty of Jokers. Here was a locust world; the airship appeared right in the middle of a flying plague of big heavy insects that battered briefly against the gondola walls. They lingered in one world where, Lobsang suspected, the Tibetan plateau, an accident of tectonic collision, had never formed. His aerial drones revealed that without the Himalayas the climate of the whole of central and southern Asia, even Australia, was radically different.

And there were worlds they couldn’t understand at all. A world immersed in a perpetual crimson-red dust storm, like a nightmare version of Mars. A world like a bowling ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep blue sky.

The stepping halted again. There was that usual odd lurch, like falling off a swing. Joshua looked down. This was a world of yellowed grass and spindly trees. The airship drifted over a river that had shrivelled in its bed, exposing wide borders of cracked mud. Animals crowded thick around the water, eyeing each other nervously. Joshua glanced at the earthometer: 127,487. A meaningless string of digits.

‘You can see this world is suffering a particularly dry season,’ Lobsang said. ‘Which has drawn an unusual concentration of animals to the water. It gives us an opportunity to observe efficiently. You may have noticed I am making a habit of pausing at such convenient locales.’

‘There are a hell of a lot of horses.’

And so there were, small and large, ranging in size from a Shetland pony to a zebra, and of subtly different designs, some shaggier, some tubbier, some with two toes on each foot, or three or four… None of them looked quite like real horses, like Datum horses.

But in amongst the herds, jostling to get to the water, were other animals. One family of tall, spindly beasts were like camels rebuilt to the plan of a giraffe. Their young, with legs like drinking straws, looked heartbreakingly fragile. And there were elephants, with a variety of tusk types. And things like rhinos, things like hippos… These herbivores, temporarily forced together, were skittish, nervous, for there were carnivores too. There were always carnivores. Joshua spotted what looked like a pack of hyenas, and a cat not unlike a leopard. Waiting, watching the throngs of wary drinkers at the lake.

Now a creature looking very much like a beefy ostrich approached. A family of rhino-like beasts backed off nervously. But the bird stretched out its neck, opened its beak wide, and fired out a ball, like a cannonball. This slammed into the ribcage of a big male rhino, that went down bellowing. The family scattered, and the bird closed in to feed on the fallen male.

Lobsang used an anaesthetic rifle mounted on the gondola to bring down the bird, and sent down his ambulant unit to inspect it. The bird had a separate stomach sac which filled up with a mixture of faeces, bones, gravel, bits of wood, other indigestibles.

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