‘Stay calm, Agnes.’
‘I am calm, Lob—George. I am calm. What the hell is it?’
Lobsang held his hands up to show they were empty, and carefully walked around the creature.
The beetle stood passively before Nikos, who had unwrapped his pack to reveal chunks of rock of various sorts, some hard like granite, some softer sandstone. Boy and beetle were a silent tableau while Lobsang inspected them.
‘I’ve known people who’ve travelled to the ends of the Long Earth,’ Lobsang said softly as he walked. ‘I’ve travelled pretty far myself. But I never heard of anything like this.’
Nikos grinned. ‘There’s plenty more where he came from.’
‘How do you know it’s a he?’
‘I don’t imagine Nikos does, for sure,’ Agnes said testily.
‘Agnes – just tell me what you see.’
‘Like an insect,’ she said immediately. ‘It is like a beetle. That black shell stuff that covers it looks segmented. I can’t count how many legs it’s got. Legs, or arms. Maybe it’s more like a centipede?’
‘I don’t think it matches any class of creature known on Earth. Or on the Long Earth, in any working-out of terrestrial evolution. Not even the intelligent crustaceans Maggie Kauffman found during her journey of exploration aboard the Armstrong II.’
‘Something new, then,’ Agnes said.
‘Or something not from here. Not from any Earth. Damn it,’ he said with sudden petulance, ‘I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want mystery. I wish you hadn’t brought me down here!’
‘You don’t wish that at all, George.’
He sighed. ‘OK. What about the silver?’
Agnes looked closely. ‘I see … belts. A kind of sash, slung across its upper body. Little studs that seem to be stuck in the, umm, carapace. Things like bangles on some of the limbs – just like the bracelet Ben came home with. And that mask, of course. The head, George. The head looks almost human, apart from the eye.’
‘Eerie, isn’t it? Probably a coincidence of form.’
His lecturing tone irritated her. ‘Well, you don’t know anything at all, George, not yet. But maybe Nikos does. Nikos, can you talk to this thing?’
‘No,’ Nikos said firmly. ‘I’ve never heard them make a sound. Except for a kind of scraping when they walk. That’s their armoured bodies, I reckon. Some of them fly. Their backs open up and wings unfold. When they fly, they kind of rustle.’
Somehow, illogically, that detail made Agnes shudder.
Nikos said, ‘But you see more of that in the Planetarium. Not here.’
Lobsang said, ‘The Planetarium? … Never mind. Tell us later. OK, you don’t speak to them. So tell me what you’re doing with those rocks.’
‘I swap them for the silver things. The rings, the pendants. We pick up bits of rock from the ground, all around the forest, and we bring them here. If we’re doing it properly we have to show them where we found the rocks on a map. I say map. It’s just a kind of scribble I drew once.’
‘You’re swapping rock samples for silver artefacts?’
‘I guess you could call it that.’
Agnes asked, ‘If you can’t speak to them, how did you work all this out? The whole idea of the trade.’
Nikos seemed irritated at having to be quizzed like this, in his own little empire. ‘It took a long time. It started with a bit of quartz I had in my pocket, one of the first times. I just showed it to one of them. After that—’
‘Never mind,’ Lobsang said. ‘Agnes, I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow. But why would they want rock samples? Well, because they want to do some more mining, I guess. They need to study the landscape. But to what end? …’
‘Show me,’ Agnes said. ‘Show me how you do your trade.’
Nikos shrugged. He just held out a bit of rock. Silvery limbs unfolded from the creature’s belly, took the rock, and handed over a small silver artefact in return, like a pendant.
Agnes said, ‘George, do you see that? The limbs. They’re not just sleeved. Some of those arms are metal.’
‘Mmm. Maybe that dark chitin-like carapace is actually artificial too. This thing could be some kind of cyborg. Half biological, half mechanical.’
‘In that case,’ Agnes said, ‘it should feel right at home with us.’
Nikos glanced at her, puzzled by that.
Lobsang asked, ‘Nikos, you say there are more of these creatures?’
‘Masses. The first time I came down here the whole place was swarming. You don’t see that so much now. I think maybe they’d nearly finished what they were doing down here.’
‘OK. But you also see them in this place you call a planetarium, right?’
‘I mean, it’s not really a planetarium—’
Agnes asked, ‘Another name from your mother’s picture books?’
‘Yeah. Seems kind of babyish now, I guess.’
‘Never mind that,’ Lobsang said. ‘Can you show us?’ He looked around. ‘What, is it an adjoining chamber, another shaft?’
‘Oh, no. You have to step there.’
Agnes recoiled as he said that, instinctively. ‘That’s impossible. Everybody knows that. You can’t step out of an underground chamber, a mine, a cellar.’ She thought of Joshua, who had taught her most of what she knew about stepping.
Nikos twisted his face. ‘Well, it’s a funny kind of step. I’ll have to show you.’
Agnes glanced at Lobsang. ‘You think we should follow? If he’s survived it – and for all we know Ben too – I guess we can.’
Lobsang said pointedly, ‘But we don’t have our Stepper boxes with us, remember, Agnes. We weren’t expecting to travel stepwise today.’
That was true, but they both knew, and Nikos didn’t, that they had Stepper technology integrated into their bodies. Agnes even had a peculiar little hatch in the small of her back where she could insert a potato.
But Nikos said, utterly without fear, ‘You won’t need them. I’ve got my box on my belt.’ He held out his hands. ‘Come on. I’ll take you.’
The beetle creature curled back to the ground, scuttled away with a scrape of chitin and metal on rock – and, as it receded into the shadows, Agnes thought she saw it wink out of existence. Maybe stepping was somehow possible down here, then.
She grabbed Nikos’s right hand. ‘Let’s do it. What can possibly go wrong?’
Lobsang, more reluctantly, took the boy’s left hand.
And—
The sky was orange-brown and crowded with stars, some of them big enough to show as discs, some tinged faintly green against the general background. A sun, fat and red, sat on the horizon, its hull fragmented by refraction. The ground was crowded with blisters, like domes, some low and close to the ground, some taller and bulging at the top, like mushrooms, almost like trees. Agnes saw something like a river, what might be a road alongside it.
It was all quite baffling. She took a deep breath. The air was thin and smelled of insects, like crushed cockroaches, metallic, sour.
And silver beetles crawled everywhere, along that riverside road, across the open spaces between the bubble-things. If the one they had encountered in the Gallery had crossed over with them, it was already lost in the crowd. None of them seemed to be paying any attention to a fifteen-year-old boy, and two androids masquerading as a farmer and his wife.
Nikos grinned. ‘This is the Planetarium. Isn’t it great?’
Agnes looked at him, and then down at herself. The strange light from the sky made the skin of her hands look orange, washed out the green dye of her shirt, the blue of her jeans. She didn’t fit here, not at all. The strangeness seemed to descend on her, all at once. She couldn’t handle it. She felt herself shivering.