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gave everyone the chance to live as they liked. Helen had decided she liked the happy compromise they were figuring out in Reboot.
    Well, not long after that, along had come Joshua Valienté, returning from the far stepwise West, towing a defunct airship and trailing the romance of the High Meggers – and, yes, with Sally Linsay at his side. Helen, then seventeen years old, had had her world turned upside down. Soon she’d moved away with Joshua, and married him, and now here they were building another fine young community.
    The Datum government, meanwhile, had reached out to its scattered colonies once more, and gathered them into the embrace of its ‘Aegis’. Suddenly everybody had to pay taxes. Jack Green, who had been enraged by the Letter and the cut-off, was if anything even more enraged by the imposition of the Aegis . . . Without her mother, Helen believed, he was filling an empty life with politics.
    And then Sally showed up again, and once more Joshua was distracted.
    The night before they were due to leave on the twain for Valhalla, with their bags all packed, Helen couldn’t sleep. She went out on to their veranda, into air that was warm for March on this chilly Earth. She looked at the twain still waiting at anchor in the sky over the town, its running lights like a model galaxy. She murmured, ‘ We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise . . .’
    Joshua came out to find her. He folded his strong arms around her waist, and nuzzled her neck. ‘What’s that, honey?’
    ‘Oh, an old poem. By a Victorian poet called Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. I helped Bob Johansen teach it to the eighth-graders the other day. We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise, / And the door stood open at our feast, / When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, / And a man with his back to the East . Isn’t that haunting?’
    ‘You won’t lose me, to West or East. I promise.’
    She found she couldn’t reply.

6
    N ELSON A ZIKIWE – or the Reverend Nelson as his congregation called him in church, or Rev as they called him down the pub – watched as Ken the shepherd grabbed a pregnant ewe and slung it over his shoulder. To Nelson this was an astounding display of strength: Ken’s ewes were no lightweights. Then Ken walked forward towards a hedgerow.
    And took another step and completely vanished.
    And reappeared a few seconds later, wiped his hands with a none too clean towel, and said, ‘That will do for now. There’s still a few wolves that haven’t got the message yet. I suppose I’d better get Ted to draw me another thousand yards of electric fence. Don’t you want to come and see, Rev? You’ll be surprised at how much we’ve done. Just a step away, you know.’
    Nelson hesitated. He hated the nausea that came with stepping; they said that after a while you hardly noticed, and maybe so, at least for some, but for Nelson every step was a penance. But it paid to be neighbourly. After all it had been a long time since breakfast, and with luck he might get away with a few dry heaves. So he fingered the Stepper switch in his pocket, clapped his handkerchief over his mouth . . .
    When he’d recovered somewhat, the first thing he noticed, in this England one step away from home, was not the painstakingly cleared field of grass at his feet but the trees of the remnant forest beyond Ken’s dry stone wall. Big trees, old trees, giants. Some were fallen, their trunks bright with moulds and fungi, and to a clergyman that could have been the spark for a nice little inspirational sermon on the mighty and the futility of their ambitions. But Nelson, in his late forties now, wasn’t planning to be a clergyman for much longer.
    The light seemed to be a little more golden than it was pre-step, and he glanced up at the sun, which seemed to be in the right place this March day . . . more or less. Though time on the various Earths seemed to flow at the same rate, and the events that defined the