The Long War Read online

  Joshua had fallen in love with the place even before he had seen it, reckoning that the first-footers who had given their home a name like Hell-Knows-Where were very likely to be decent people with a sense of humour, as indeed they’d turned out to be. As for Helen, who had trekked out with her family to found a brand-new township, this way of living was what she had grown up with. And this place they had come to, in a million-step-remote footprint of the Mississippi valley, had turned out to have air that was clean, a river lively with fish, a land rich with game and replete with other resources such as lead and iron ore seams. Thanks to a twain mass-spectrometry scan of nearby formations that Joshua had called in as a favour, they even had the makings of a copper mine. As a bonus, the climate here happened to be just a little cooler than on the Datum, and in the winter the local copy of the Mississippi regularly froze over – a thrilling spectacle, even if it did threaten a couple of careless lives every year.

  When they’d arrived, Joshua, even compared with his new young wife, had been a novice settler, for all his trekking experience in the Long Earth. But now he was recognized as a skilled hunter, butcher, general artificer – and pretty nearly, these days, blacksmith and smelter. Not to mention mayor until the next poll. Helen, meanwhile, was a senior midwife and a top herbalist.

  Of course it was hard work. A pioneer family lived beyond the reach of shopping malls, and bread always needed baking, hams needed curing, tallow had to be made, and beer had to be brewed. Out here, in fact, you worked all the time. But the work was pleasing. And the work was Joshua’s life now . . .

  Sometimes he missed isolation. His sabbaticals, as he called them. The sense of emptiness when he was entirely alone on a world. The absence of the pressure of other minds, a pressure he felt even here, though it was a ghost compared with what he felt on the Datum. And the eerie sense of the other that he’d always called the Silence, like a hint of vast minds, or assemblages of minds, somewhere far off. He’d once met one of those mighty remote minds in the extraordinary First Person Singular. But there were more out there, he knew. He could hear them, like gongs sounding in distant mountains . . . Well, he’d had all that. But this, he’d belatedly discovered, was far more precious: his wife, their son, perhaps a second child some day.

  Nowadays he tried to ignore what was going on beyond the town limits. After all, it wasn’t as though he owed the Long Earth anything. He’d saved lives on stepwise worlds on Step Day itself, and later had opened up half of them with Lobsang. He’d done his duty in this new age, hadn’t he?

  But here was Sally, an incarnation of his past, sitting at his kitchen table, waiting for an answer. Well, he wasn’t going to rush to reply. Generally speaking, Joshua wasn’t a trigger-fast speaker at the best of times. He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.

  They stared it out.

  To his relief, Helen walked in at last, and set out beer and burgers: home-brewed beer, home-raised beef, home-baked bread. She sat with them and began a pleasant enough conversation, asking Sally about her recent ports of call. When they’d eaten, Helen bustled about once more, clearing the plates, again refusing Joshua’s offer of help.

  All the time there was another dialogue going on under the surface. Every marriage had its own private language. Helen knew very well why Sally was here, and after nine years of marriage Joshua could hear the feeling of imminent loss as if it were being broadcast on the radio.

  If Sally heard it, she didn’t care. Once Helen had left them alone at the table once more, she started in again. ‘As you say, it’s not the only case.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘The Plumbline slaughter.’

  ‘So much for the chit-chat, eh, Sally?’

  ‘It’s not even the most notorious, right now. You want an itemized list?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You see what’s happening here, Joshua. Humanity has been given a chance, with the Long Earth. A new start, an escape from the Datum, a whole world we already screwed up—’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’ Because she’d said it a million times before, in his hearing. ‘We’re going to bollocks up our second chance at Eden, even before the paint has dried.’

  Helen deposited a large bowl of ice cream in the middle of the table with a definite thud.

  Sally stared at it like a dog confronted by a brontosaurus bone. ‘You make ice cream? Here?’

  Helen sat down. ‘Last year Joshua put in the hours on an ice house. It wasn’t a difficult project once we got round to it. The trolls like the ice cream. And we do get hot weather here; it’s wonderful to have something like this when you’re bartering with the neighbours.’

  Joshua could hear the subtext, even if Sally couldn’t. This isn’t about ice cream. This is about our life. What we’re building here. Which you, Sally, have no part of.

  ‘Go on, help yourself, we have plenty more. It’s getting late – of course you’re welcome to stay the night. Would you like to come see Dan’s school play?’

  Joshua saw the look of sheer terror on Sally’s face. As an act of mercy he said, ‘Don’t worry. It won’t be as bad as you think. We have smart kids, and decent and helpful parents, good teachers – I should know, I’m one of them, and so is Helen.’

  ‘Community schooling?’

  ‘Yes. We concentrate on survival skills, metallurgy, medical botany, Long Earth animal biology, the whole spectrum of practical skills from flint-working to glass-making . . .’

  Helen said, ‘But it’s not all pioneer stuff. We have a high scholastic standard. They even learn Greek.’

  ‘Mr. Johansen,’ said Joshua. ‘Peripatetic. Commutes twice a month from Valhalla.’ He smiled and pointed to the ice cream. ‘Get it while it’s cold.’

  Sally took one large scoop, demolished it. ‘Wow. Pioneers with ice cream.’

  Joshua felt motivated to defend his home. ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be like the Donner Party, Sally—’

  ‘You’re also pioneers with cellphones, aren’t you?’

  It was true that life was a tad easier here than for pioneers on the Long Earth elsewhere. On this Earth, West 1,397,426, they even had sat-nav – and only Joshua, Helen and a few others knew why the Black Corporation had decided to use this particular world to try out their prototype technology, orbiting twenty-four nanosats from a small portable launcher. Call it a favour from an old friend . . .

  Among those few others in the know was Sally, of course.

  Joshua faced her. ‘Lay off, Sally. The sat-nav and the rest are here because of me. I know it. My friends know it.’

  Helen grinned. ‘One of the engineers who called to fix up that stuff once told Joshua that the Black Corporation sees him as a “valuable long-term investment”. Worth cultivating, I suppose. Worth keeping sweet with little gifts.’

  Sally snorted. ‘Meaning that’s how Lobsang sees you. How demeaning.’

  Joshua ignored that, as he generally ignored any mention of that particular name. ‘And besides, I know that some people are drawn here because of me.’

  ‘The famous Joshua Valienté.’

  ‘Why not? It’s good not to have to advertise for good people. And if they don’t fit, they leave anyhow.’

  Sally opened her mouth, ready for a few more jabs.

  But Helen had evidently had enough. She stood up. ‘Sally, if you want to freshen up we’ve got a guest room down the passage there. Curtain up is in an hour. Dan – that’s our son, maybe you remember him – is already down at the town hall helping out, which is to say bossing the other kids about. Take some of the ice cream when we go over if you like. It’s only a short walk.’

  Joshua forced a smile. ‘Everywhere’s a short walk here.’

  Helen glanced out through the crude glass of the window. ‘And it looks like another perfect evening . . .’

  3

  IT WAS INDEED a perfect early spring evening.

  Of course this world was no longer pristine, Josh
ua thought, as the three of them walked to the town hall for the school show. You could see the clearances nibbling into the forest by the river banks, and the smoke from the forges and workshops, and the tracks cutting through the forest straight and sharp. But still, what caught your eye was the essentials of the landscape, the bend of this stepwise copy of the Mississippi, and the bridges and the wooded expanses beyond the banks. Hell-Knows-Where looked the way its parent town back on the Datum – Hannibal, Missouri – had back in the nineteenth century, maybe, Mark Twain’s day. That was perfection, for his money.

  But right now that perfect sky was marred by a twain hanging in the air.

  The airship was being unloaded by rope chains, trunk by trunk, bale by bale. In the gathering twilight, its hull shining like bronze, it looked like a ship from another world, which in a sense it was. And though the town hall show was about to start, there were a few students outside watching the sky, the boys in particular looking hungry – boys who would give anything in the world to be twain drivers some day.

  The twain was a symbol of many things, Joshua thought. Of the reality of the Long Earth itself, for a start.

  The Long Earth: suddenly, on Step Day, twenty-five years before, mankind had found itself with the ability to step sideways, simply to walk into an infinite corridor of planet Earths, one after the next and the next. No spaceships required: each Earth was just a walk away. And every Earth was like the original, more or less, save for a striking lack of humanity and all its works. There was a world for everybody who wanted one, uncounted billions of worlds, if the leading theories were right.

  There were some people who, faced with such a landscape, bolted the door and hid away. Some people did the same thing inside their heads. But others flourished. And for such people in their scattered settlements across the new worlds, a quarter-century on, the twains were becoming an essential presence.

  After the pioneering exploratory journey ten years back by Joshua and Lobsang in the Mark Twain – that ship had been a prototype, the first cargo- and passenger-carrying craft capable of stepwise motion – Douglas Black, of the Black Corporation who’d built the Twain, and the majority owner of the subsidiary that supported Lobsang and his various activities, had announced that the technology was to be a gift to the world. It had been a typical gesture by Black, greeted with loud cynicism about his motives, welcomed with open arms by all. Now, a decade later, the twains were doing for the colonization of the Long Earth what the Conestoga wagon and Pony Express had once done for the Old West. The twains flew and flew, knitting together the burgeoning stepwise worlds . . . They had even stimulated the growth of new industries themselves. Helium for their lift sacs, scarce on Datum Earth, was now being extracted from stepwise copies of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

  Nowadays even the news was dispersed across the Long Earth by the airship fleets. A kind of multi-world internet was growing up, known as the ‘outernet’. On each world they passed through the airships would download rapid update packets to local nodes to be spread laterally across that world, and would upload any ongoing messages and mail. And when airships met, away from the big Datum–Valhalla spine route, they would hold a ‘gam’ – a word resurrected from the days of the old whaling fleets – where they would swap news and correspondence. It was all kind of informal, but then so had been the structure of the pre-Step Day internet on the Datum. And being informal it was robust; as long as your message had the right address, it would find its way home.

  Of course there were some in places like Hell-Knows-Where who resented the presence of these interlopers, because the twains, one way or another, represented the reach of the Datum government: a reach that wasn’t always welcome. The administration’s policy towards its Long Earth colonies had swung back and forth with the years, from hostility and even exclusion, to cooperation and legislation. Nowadays the rule was that once a colony had more than one hundred people, it was supposed to report itself back to the federal government on Datum Earth as an ‘official’ presence. Soon you would be on the map, and the twains would come, floating down from the sky to deliver people and livestock, raw materials and medical care, and carry away any produce you wanted to export via local links to the great stepwise transport hubs like Valhalla.

  As they travelled between the old United States and the worlds of its Aegis – all the way out to Valhalla, the best part of a million and a half steps from the Datum – the twains connected the many Americas, comfortably suggesting that they were all marching to the same drum. This despite the fact that many people in the stepwise worlds didn’t know which drum you were talking about or what the hell beat it was playing, their priority being themselves and their neighbours. The Datum and its regulations, politics and taxes seemed an increasingly remote abstraction, twains or not . . .

  And right now two people looked up at this latest twain with suspicious eyes.

  Sally said, ‘Do you think he is up there?’

  Joshua said, ‘An iteration at least. The twains can’t step without some artificial intelligence on board. You know him; he is all iteration. He likes to be where the action is, and right now everywhere is where the action is.’

  They were talking about Lobsang, of course. Even now Joshua would have difficulty in explaining who exactly Lobsang was. Or what. Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else’s computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan . . .

  Joshua said, ‘Incidentally I heard a rumour that he has an iteration headed out of the solar system altogether, on some kind of spaceprobe. You know him, he always takes the long view. And there’s no such thing as too much backup.’

  ‘So now he could survive the sun exploding,’ Sally said dryly. ‘That’s good to know. You have much contact with him?’

  ‘No. Not now. Not for ten years. Not since he, or whichever version of him resides on the Datum, let Madison be flattened by a backpack nuke. That was my home town, Sally. What use is a presence like Lobsang if he couldn’t stop that? And if he could have stopped it, why didn’t he?’

  Sally shrugged. Back then, she’d stepped into the ruins of Madison at his side. Evidently she had no answer.

  He became aware of Helen walking ahead of the two of them, talking to a gaggle of neighbours, wearing what Joshua, a veteran of nine years of marriage, called her ‘polite’ expression. Suitably alarmed, he hurried to catch her up.

  He thought they were all relieved when they got to the town hall. Sally read the title of the show from a hand-painted poster tacked to the wall: ‘“The Revenge of Moby-Dick”. You have got to be kidding me.’

  Joshua couldn’t suppress a grin. ‘It’s good stuff. Wait for the bit where the illegal whaling fleet gets its comeuppance. The kids learned some Japanese just for that scene. Come on, we’ve got seats up front . . .’

  It was indeed a remarkable show, from the opening scene in which a narrator in a salt-stained oilskin jacket walked to the front of the stage: ‘Call me Ishmael.’

  ‘Hi, Ishmael!’

  ‘Hi, boys and girls! . . .’

  By the time the singing squid got three encores after the big closing number, ‘Harpoon of Love’, even Sally was laughing out loud.

  In the after-show party, children and parents mingled in the hall. Sally stayed on, clutching a drink. But her expression, Joshua thought, as she looked around at the chattering adults, the children’s bright faces, gradually soured.

  Joshua risked asking, ‘What’s on your mind now?’

  ‘It’s all so damn nice.’

  Helen said, ‘You never did trust nice, did you, Sally?’

  ‘I can’t help thinking you’re wide open.’

  ‘Wide open to what?’

  ‘If I was a cynic I would be wondering if sooner or later some charismatic douche-bag might stomp all over this Little House on the Pra
irie dream of yours.’ She glanced at Helen. ‘Sorry for saying “douche-bag” in front of your kids.’

  To Joshua’s amazement, and apparently Sally’s, Helen burst out laughing. ‘You don’t change, do you, Sally? Well, that’s not going to happen. The stomping thing. Look – I think we’re pretty robust here. Physically and intellectually robust, I mean. For a start we don’t do God here. Most of the parents at Hell-Knows-Where are atheist unbelievers, or agnostics at best – simply people who get on with their lives without requiring help from above. We do teach our kids the golden rule—’

  ‘Do as you would be done by.’

  ‘That’s one version. And similar basic life lessons. We get along fine. We work together. And I think we do pretty well for the kids. They learn because we make it fun. See young Michael, the boy in the wheelchair over there? He wrote the script for the play, and Ahab’s song was entirely his own work.’

  ‘Which one? “I’d Swap My Other Leg for Your Heart”?’

  ‘That’s the one. He’s only seventeen, and if he never gets a chance at developing his music there is no justice.’

  Sally looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. ‘Well, with people like you two around, he’ll get his chance.’

  Helen’s expression flickered. ‘Are you mocking us?’

  Joshua tensed for the fireworks.

  But Sally merely said, ‘Don’t tell anybody I said so. But I envy you, Helen Valienté née Green. A little bit anyhow. Although not over Joshua. This drink’s terrific, by the way, what is it?’

  ‘There is a tree in these parts, a maple of sorts . . . I’ll show you if you like.’ She held up her glass in a toast. ‘Here’s to you, Sally.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Well, for keeping Joshua alive long enough to meet me.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  ‘And you’re our guest here for as long as you wish. But – tell me the truth. You’re here to take Joshua away again, aren’t you?’

  Sally looked into her glass and said calmly, ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’