The Long War Read online

  Joshua asked, ‘It’s the trolls, right? Sally, what exactly is it you want me to do about that?’

  ‘Follow up the arguments about animal protection laws. Raise the current cases, at Plumbline and the Gap, and elsewhere. Try to get some kind of troll protection order properly drawn up and enforced—’

  ‘You mean, go back to the Datum.’

  She smiled. ‘Do a Davy Crockett, Joshua. Come in from the backwoods and go to Congress. You’re one of the few Long Earth pioneers who have any kind of profile on the Datum. You, and a few axe murderers.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So will you come?’

  Joshua glanced at Helen. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Helen looked away. ‘Come on, let’s find Dan. Enough excitement for one night, it will be a trial getting him to sleep . . .’

  Helen had to get up twice that night before she got Dan settled.

  When she returned the second time she nudged Joshua. ‘You awake?’

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking. If you do go, Dan and I are coming with you. At least as far as Valhalla. And he ought to see the Datum once in his life.’

  ‘He’d love that,’ Joshua murmured sleepily.

  ‘Not when he finds out we’re planning to send him to school at Valhalla . . .’ For all she’d bigged up the town’s school to Sally Linsay, Helen still wanted to send Dan to the city for a while, so he could broaden his contacts, get an experience wide enough for him to make his own informed choices about his future. ‘Sally’s really not so bad when she isn’t channelling Annie Oakley.’

  ‘Mostly she means well,’ murmured Joshua. ‘And if she doesn’t mean well the recipient of her wrath generally deserves it.’

  ‘You seem . . . preoccupied.’

  He rolled over to face her. ‘I looked up the outernet updates from the twain. Sally wasn’t exaggerating, about the troll incidents.’

  Helen felt for his hand. ‘It’s all been set up. It’s not just Sally turning up like this. I get the impression that your chauffeur is sitting waiting for you in the sky.’

  ‘It is a coincidence that a twain should show up just now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Can’t you leave it to Lobsang?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, honey. Lobsang doesn’t work like that.’ Joshua yawned, leaned over, kissed her cheek, and rolled away. ‘Grand show, wasn’t it?’

  Helen lay, still sleepless. After a while she asked, ‘Do you have to go?’

  But Joshua was already snoring.

  4

  JOSHUA WASN’T SURPRISED when Sally didn’t turn up for breakfast.

  Nor to find she’d gone altogether. That was Sally. By now, he thought, she was probably far away, off in the reaches of the Long Earth. He looked around the house, searching for signs of her presence. She travelled light, and was fastidious about not leaving behind a mess. She’d come, she’d gone, and turned his life upside down. Again.

  She had left a note saying simply, ‘Thanks.’

  After breakfast he went down to his office in the town hall, to put in a few hours’ mayoring. But the shadow of that twain in the sky fell across his office’s single window, a looming distraction that made it impossible to concentrate on the routine stuff.

  He found himself staring at the single large poster on the wall, the so-called ‘Samaritan Declaration’, drafted in irritation by some hard-pressed pioneer somewhere, and since spread in a viral fashion across the outernet and adopted by thousands of nascent colonies:

  Dear Newbie:

  The GOOD SAMARITAN by definition is kind and forbearing. However, in the context of the Long Earth land rush, the GOOD SAMARITAN demands of you:

  ONE. Before you leave home find out something about the environment into which you are heading.

  TWO. When you get there, listen to what the guys already there tell you.

  THREE. Don’t be fooled by maps. Even the Low Earths haven’t been properly explored. We don’t know what’s out there. And if we don’t, you certainly don’t.

  FOUR. Use your noggin. Travel with at least one buddy. Carry a radio where feasible. Tell somebody where you’re going. That kind of thing.

  FIVE. Take every precaution, if not for your own sake, then for the sake of the poor saps who have to bring what’s left of your sorry ass back home in a body bag.

  HARSH language, but necessary. The Long Earth is bountiful but not forgiving.

  THANK you for reading.

  The GOOD SAMARITAN

  Joshua liked the Declaration. He thought it reflected the robust, good-humoured common sense that characterized the new nations emerging in the reaches of the Long Earth. New nations, yes . . .

  The town hall: a grand name for a solidly built wooden building that housed everything the settlement needed in the way of paperwork, and looked kind of battered this morning, in the aftermath of the kids’ show. Well, it was fit for purpose; marble could wait.

  And of course it had no statues outside, unlike similar buildings in towns back in Datum America. No Civil War cannons, no bronze plaques with the names of the fallen. When the growing town had registered for the twain service the federal government had offered a kind of home-improvement monument kit, to cement this community of the future to America’s past. But the residents of Hell-Knows-Where rejected that, for a wide number of reasons, many of them going all the way back to great-grandpa’s experiences at Woodstock or Penn State. Nobody had shed blood for this land yet, apart from when Hamish fell off the town clock, and of course the predations of the mosquitoes. So why a monument?

  Joshua had been startled at the vehemence of his fellow citizens on the issue, and he’d since given it some thought, in his patient way. He’d come to the conclusion that it was all to do with identity. Look at history. The founding fathers of the United States for the most part were Englishmen, right up until the moment when they realized that they needn’t be. The folk of Hell-Knows-Where by default still thought of themselves as American. But they were starting to feel closer to their neighbours on this world, a handful of communities in stepwise copies of Europe and Africa and even China with which they communicated by shortwave radio, than to the Datum folks back home. Joshua found it interesting to watch that sense of identity shifting.

  And meanwhile the relationship with Datum America itself was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The wrangling had been going on for years. Legally speaking, a few years back President Cowley’s administration had worked out – Cowley having previously argued successfully to have all the colonists’ rights and benefits removed – that in practice it was losing out on significant tax revenues, from the trade that was blossoming both between the various Long Earth communities, and between the remote worlds on the one hand and the Low Earths and Datum on the other. And so Cowley had declared that, if you were under the ‘Aegis’ of the United States – that is, if you lived in the footprint of the nation, projected across the stepwise worlds out to infinity, East and West – you were de facto a United States citizen, living under United States laws, and liable to pay United States taxes.

  And there was the rub. Taxes? Taxes on what? Taxes to be paid how? A lot of local trade was conducted by barter, or using local scrip, or even with intangibles: a service for a service. It was only when you traded with the Low Earths that dollars and cents came into play. It was a burden on many tax-payers, in fact, to assemble enough currency to satisfy said tax demands.

  Even if you did pay, the taxes bought you what? The colonists were rich in food, fresh water and unspoiled air, and land: lots and lots of land. As for advanced products, even ten years ago you had had to run home to Uncle Sam for anything high-tech or complicated, from dentistry to veterinarian services, and you needed US dollars to purchase such things. But now, why, there was a spanking new clinic in Hell-Knows-Where itself, and a veterinarian downriver in Twisted Peak, and he had a fast horse and a partner and an apprentice. If you needed a city, well, Valhalla was an authentic campus cit
y growing up in the High Meggers, with everything cultural and all the tech you could want.

  The colonists found it increasingly hard to understand what they needed the Datum government for – and, therefore, what they were buying with their taxes, principally sliced off the profits on the shipments of raw materials the twain caravans hauled endlessly back to the Datum. Even in this neat and civilized town, far from the think-tanks of Valhalla inhabited by the likes of Helen’s father Jack, there were some who called for cutting ties with the old US altogether.

  And meanwhile, in turn, after years of relative appeasement, in recent dealings with the Datum Joshua had detected an increasing unpleasantness about the federal government’s regard for its new young colonies. There were even mutterings back in Datum USA that the colonists were in some way parasitical, even though all their residual holdings back home had long since been liquidated. All this was no doubt linked to Cowley’s push for re-election this year; having tacked to the centre during his first run for the White House – a necessity in the aftermath of the Madison incident, when much of the population had been saved from a nuclear attack by stepping away from ground zero – some commentators suggested he was now veering back to his original support base, the virulently anti-stepper Humanity First movement. The United States had long been used to being suspicious of every other country on the planet, and was now becoming suspicious of itself.

  Joshua, looking at the sunlit sky through his window, sighed. How far could this go? It was well known that Cowley was putting together some kind of twain-based military arm to go out into the Long Earth. Seeping through the outernet there had been darker rumours, or maybe disinformation, of sterner actions to come.

  Could there even be war? Most wars of the past had been over land and wealth, one way or another. Given the literally endless riches of the Long Earth, surely there was no longer any reason for war. Was there? But there were precedents, when the repressive taxation and other policies of a central government had led to its colonies agitating for independence . . .

  A Long War?

  Joshua gazed at the twain still mysteriously hanging over the town. Waiting to take him away, to participate in the affairs of the wider world once more.

  He wandered out to look for Bill Chambers, the town’s secretary, accountant, best hunter, excellent cook, and amazingly good liar, although this latter skill threw minor suspicions on his claim to be a distant heir to the Blarney estate in Ireland.

  Bill was about Joshua’s age, and had once been a buddy at the Home, as much as a recluse like Joshua had had any buddies at all. A few years back Joshua had welcomed Bill, when he’d shown up at Hell-Knows-Where, with open arms. When Joshua had returned from his journey with Lobsang and discovered his unwelcome celebrity – not helped by the fact that Lobsang himself, along with Sally, had retreated to the shadows, leaving Joshua exposed – he’d found himself turning increasingly to people he’d known before he was ‘famous’, and who therefore were discreet and tended not to demand anything of him.

  In some ways Bill hadn’t changed. He had an Irish background, and he liked to play that up when he got the chance. Also he drank a lot more than he had as a teenager. Or rather, even more.

  Right now, Bill was ambling to the lumber yard when he spotted Joshua. ‘Top, Mister Mayor.’

  ‘Yeah, top to you too. Listen . . .’ Joshua told Bill about his need to go to the Datum. ‘Helen’s insisting on coming, with Dan. Well, it’s not a bad idea. But I could do with some backup.’

  ‘The Datum, is it? Full of hoodlums and thugs and other bad lads. Ah, sure, I’m your man.’

  ‘Will Morningtide let you go?’

  ‘She’s busy making tallow in the yard right now. I’ll ask her later.’ He coughed, his best attempt at delicacy. ‘There is the question of the fare.’

  Joshua looked up at the waiting twain. ‘I have a feeling none of us will be paying for this trip, buddy.’

  Bill whooped. ‘Fair play to you. In that case I’ll book us the finest ride I can find. And you’ve got your own release forms signed by Helen, have ye?’

  Joshua sighed. Another hard scene waiting in his future. ‘I will do, Bill. I will do.’

  They walked together.

  ‘How was your lad’s show, by the way?’

  ‘Jumped the shark.’

  ‘Oh, was it that bad?’

  ‘No, Captain Ahab really did jump the shark. Big set piece of the second act. Pretty impressive on one water-ski . . .’

  5

  HELEN VALIENTÉ, NÉE Green, remembered very well the moment when relations between the Datum and its far-flung children across the Long Earth had first soured.

  She’d been a young teenager, still living at Reboot, on Earth West 101,754. She’d kept a journal throughout those years, all the way from her childhood in Datum Madison, their move to Madison West 5, and then her family’s trek across a hundred thousand worlds to found a new town in an empty world, a town they had hammered together themselves, starting with nothing but their own hands and minds and hearts. And their reward from Datum America – and they had still thought of themselves as Americans – had been rejection. That had been the moment, in retrospect, even more than her mother’s illness, when Helen’s mild-mannered father Jack Green had completed his own inner journey from Datum-raised software engineer, to sturdy colonist, to firebrand radical thinker.

  Twelve years ago. She had been fifteen years old . . .

  Crisis. The still-young town of Reboot had split apart.

  Some people had walked out, to start up again on their own. Others had gone back to the Hundred K station to wait for a Company to form up for a trek back to Datum Earth.

  Worst of all for Helen, Dad wasn’t speaking to Mom, despite her illness.

  It was all the government’s fault. They all got The Letter, every household, delivered by shamefaced mailman Bill Lovell. Bill himself had already been fired by the US Mail, but he said he was going to keep making his rounds even so until his boots wore out, and the people promised to feed him, in return.

  The Letter was from the federal government. Everybody with a permanent residence beyond Earth 20, West or East, with assets back on Datum Earth, was having those assets frozen, and ultimately impounded.

  With Mom ill in bed, Dad had to explain all this to Helen – words like ‘assets’ and ‘impounded’. Basically it meant that all the money Dad and Mom had earned before upping sticks for their trek into the Long Earth, and had left in bank accounts and other funds back on Earth to pay for stuff like Mom’s cancer medicines and for stay-at-home brother Rod’s care and for a college education for Helen and sister Katie if they ever wanted it, had been stolen by the government. Stolen. That was Dad’s word. It didn’t seem too harsh to Helen.

  Dad said the economy on Earth had taken a knock from stepping. That was obvious even before the Greens had left. All those people who disappeared into the Long Earth had been a big drain from the labour pool, and only a trickle of goods came back the other way; those left behind were furious at having to subsidize work-shy hoboes, as they saw the departed. Meanwhile some people couldn’t step at all, and had started to resent those who could. People like Rod, of course, Helen’s own home-alone non-stepper brother. She often wondered what he was feeling.

  Dad said, ‘I’m guessing the government is appeasing the anti-stepper lobby by perpetrating this theft. I blame that loudmouth Cowley.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

  ‘We’ll hold a meeting in city hall, that’s what.’

  Well, they didn’t have a city hall, at that time. They did have a communal field cleared of forest and rocks that they called city hall, so that was where they gathered. Just as well it wasn’t raining, Helen thought.

  Reese Henry, the former used-car salesman who was the nearest they had to a mayor, chaired the meeting, in his usual bullying way. He held up The Letter. ‘What are we going to do about this?’

  They weren’t going to put u
p with it, that was what. There was a lot of talk about forming up a mass hike and marching on Datum Washington. But who was going to feed the chickens?

  They resolved to make inventories of all the stuff they still imported from Datum Earth. Medicines, for one. Books, paper, pens, electronic gadgets, even luxuries like perfumes. By sharing and swapping and mending, maybe they could manage with what they had until things settled down. The idea was floated of getting together with the neighbours. There was a bunch of nearby settlements spread over a few dozen worlds that some were starting to call ‘New Scarsdale County’. They could help each other out in case of scarcities and emergencies.

  Some spoke of going back. A mother with a diabetic kid. Folk who found that advancing age wasn’t mixing well with the hard work of farming. A few who just seemed to feel scared without the backing of the government, however remote it was. But others, like Helen’s dad, urged nobody to leave. They all relied on each other. They had put together a spectrum of complementary skills that enabled them to survive if they worked together. They couldn’t let the community they’d built be pulled apart. And so on.

  Reese Henry let it all ramble on, and run down. They broke up without resolution.

  The next morning, however, the sun rose on schedule, the chickens needed feeding and the water needed toting from the well, and somehow life went on.

  Three months later.

  Helen’s sister Katie had quietly brought forward her wedding. She and Harry Bergreen had been planning to wait until the following year, when they were hoping for a proper house-raising. Everybody knew that they were getting married now while Mom was still around to see it.

  Helen was enough of a girly girl that she had grown up dreaming of fairytale-princess weddings. Well, this day turned out to be a pioneers’ wedding. Kind of different, but still fun.

  The guests had started arriving early, but Katie and Harry and their families were ready to meet them. Bride and groom were dressed in informal clothes, no white gowns or morning suits here, but Katie was wearing a small, pretty veil made by sister Helen from the lining of an old hiking jumpsuit.