The Long War Read online

  As time wore on people showed up from outside Reboot itself, friends and acquaintances from communities like New Scarsdale and even further afield. The guests brought gifts: flowers and food for the day, and practical stuff – cutlery, pots, plates, coffee pots, kettles, frying pans, a hearth set, a boot scraper. Some of this stuff had been made locally, pottery cast on Reboot wheels, or iron gadgets hammered out in Reboot forges. It didn’t look much, piled up before the Greens’ big hearth, but Helen realized it soon amounted to pretty much all a young couple would need to equip their first home.

  Around noon Reese Henry arrived. Wearing a reasonably smart jacket, clean jeans and boots, and a string tie, he scrubbed up well. Helen knew that nobody in Reboot took ‘Mayor Henry’ as seriously as he took himself. But still, you needed one individual in a community with the authority to formalize a marriage – an authority backed by some remote government, or not – and he played the part well. Plus his hair was magnificent.

  And when Harry Bergreen kissed his bride a little after midday and everybody applauded, and the bride’s mother held on to her husband’s arm to make sure she stayed standing for the pictures, even Bill the mailman had tears welling in his eyes.

  That one was a good day, Helen recorded in her journal.

  And three months later:

  ‘2nd baby for Betty Doak Hansen. Hlthy B, 7lb. Mthr ill, ndd stches & bld . . .’

  Helen had been tired. Too tired to write in this damn code in her journal, even if they did have to conserve paper now.

  This latest delivery hadn’t been a bad birth, as they went. Belle Doak and her little team of midwives and helpers, including Helen, were pretty competent at it by now. Although, this morning, it had been a close-run thing. Helen had to run around town asking for blood donors. They were all walking blood banks, for the benefit of their neighbours. But it wasn’t always fast enough. Memo to self, she thought: set up some kind of list of blood types and willing donors.

  Dad had left early this morning, not long after Helen got in. Down at Mom’s grave probably, the stone by the river. Mom had always loved that spot. It was already a month since she’d died of her tumour, and Dad was still racked by guilt over it, as if it were somehow his fault, somehow caused by his bringing her here. It made no sense, especially since as far as Helen remembered her mother had always been the driving force behind their leaving the Datum in the first place.

  A month, though, which made it more than six months since they had all been fired en masse by the federal government. Gosh, Helen thought now, we’re still here, who’d have thought it?

  They had had to learn fast. They had relied more than they’d realized on various props from the old country. Now they made everything! They knitted, brewed beer, dipped candles, made soap. You could make a good vinegar from pumpkin rind. Toothpaste! – from ground-up charcoal. It helped a lot when Bill Lovell came round selling his new product: miniaturized sets of encyclopaedias, and copies of Scientific American from pre-1950, full of exploded diagrams of steam engines and practical advice on a whole slew of stuff. They were even rethinking the crops they were growing in the farms and gardens, after the vitamin pill supply dried up and they’d even had a couple of cases of scurvy. Scurvy!

  And they helped each other out: I fetch water for you while your little one’s ill, you feed my chickens when I’m away up country. There was a kind of unwritten price for everything, recorded as ‘favours’, a loosely defined currency based on service and barter and promissory notes. Mom would probably have loved the theory of it all, an emerging, self-organizing local economy.

  Despite dire warnings from some about what would happen when the theoretical protection of the Datum government had been lifted, they hadn’t suddenly been overwhelmed by armies of bandits. Oh, there had been problems, for instance the waves of ‘new’ colonists who sporadically walked out from the Datum or the Low Earths and tried to settle in Reboot’s country. Legally it was a tricky situation, since such claims as the Reboot colonists did have were lodged with a Datum federal government which showed no interest in them any more. But the mayor in New Scarsdale was usually able to buy the newcomers off by signing bits of paper granting them land fifty or a hundred worlds further up West, a deal lubricated with fistfuls of vouchers for drinks in the tavern. There was always room, so much room up here that almost any problem like that could be resolved.

  Of course there was a steady drizzle of thefts, of food, from the fields – even, in this age of stepping, from within houses. Mostly you turned a blind eye. Things got more serious when a boy called Doug Collinson was caught red-handed taking beta blockers from Melissa Harris’s medicine chest, prescribed for her mild heart condition. Doug didn’t need them himself; he was just going to sell them someplace else. Decent drugs were among the most precious commodities they had. Well, Melissa caught him, and she had the presence of mind to swing her stick and smash his Stepper so he couldn’t get away before the neighbours came running in. Right now Doug was in confinement in somebody’s cellar, while the adults debated what to do about it. Slowly, out of the need to react to such incidents, a framework for maintaining law and order was emerging, maybe ultimately based on some kind of court shared with communities like New Scarsdale in the neighbouring worlds.

  The framework of Helen’s own life was slowly emerging too. Dad constantly pointed out that Helen was sixteen years old now and needed to choose a path in life. Well, fine. There was her midwifery. And she was thinking of specializing in medicines: herbs and stuff. A lot of the plants and fungi they found on Earth West 101,754 weren’t familiar from Datum Earth. She could become an itinerant seller, or maybe a tutor, a guru, taking her arts and wares and unique flora across the worlds. Or not. She thought she’d find her way.

  They weren’t in paradise. The Long Earth was a big arena, where you could feel lost, and you could lose yourself. But maybe all this room was going to be the ultimate gift of the Long Earth to mankind. Room that 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

  NELSON AZIKIWE – or the Reverend Nelson as his congregation called him in church, or Rev as they called him down the pub – watch
ed 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 calendar – sunrise and sunset, the seasons – seemed synchronized from world to world, according to last week’s Nature some of the new Earths did not appear to tick exactly to the same clock, sometimes leading or following their immediate neighbours by a fraction of a second, as you could prove by such means as very precise astronomical observations, like the occultation of stars by the moon. The discrepancies were minute but real. Nelson could think of no plausible explanation for this. Nobody knew how or why this phenomenon happened, but as yet nobody was researching it because it was just one of a multitude of puzzles generated by the multiple worlds. How strange, how eerie . . .

  Of course he had stopped thinking like a priest, having, perhaps shamefully, reverted to his ground state of being: a scientist. But still, people all over the world – including some of his own flock – had for a quarter of a century now been abandoning their homes and packing up their kids and buggering off into this great hall of worlds called the Long Earth, and yet nobody knew how it worked, even on the most basic level of how time flowed, or how all those worlds had got there . . . and still less what they were for. How was a priest supposed to react to that?

  Which was, indirectly anyhow, the reason for Nelson’s current inner turmoil.

  Fortunately for the goats and the gravid sheep around him, and for Joy, the young sheepdog Ken was training, they did not have to lie awake at night wondering about this sort of thing. Having given him their usual slotted glances, the animals ambled away, the sheep eating the grass, the goats devouring just about everything else.

  Shepherd Ken had told him how the whole Long Earth deal worked for the likes of him. In England West and East 1 and 2, the farmers had been clearing forested land on a scale not seen since the Stone Age – and they had had to relearn how to do it. First you cut down a lot of trees, being careful to put the timber to good use, and then you set loose the animals, either bred here or carried over as young from the Datum one by one. Any hopeful saplings would succumb to the onslaught of the sheep and goats, forestalling the return of the forest. And in time the grass would come. Clever stuff, grass, Ken liked to say, a plant that actually thrived on being eaten down to the ground.

  Nelson had rather misjudged Ken when he had first met this suntanned, rugged, rather taciturn man, a local whose ancestors had lived on these hills since there were such things as ancestors. It was only by chance that he found out that Ken had been a lecturer at the University of Bath until, like many others, shortly after Step Day he re-evaluated his lifestyle and his future – which turned out, in his case, to be this farm just one step away from the Datum.

  In that, Ken was typical of his nation, in a way. The British experience of the Long Earth had been in the beginning mostly a painful one. Such had been the early exodus from these crowded islands, particularly from the battered industrial cities of the north, Wales and Scotland, regions isolated from the increasingly complacent city-state that was London, that a rapid population loss had led to an economic crash – even a collapse of the currency, briefly. They had called it the Great Bog Off.

  But then the stepwise Britains had begun their own economic growth. And there had been a second wave of emigration, more cautious, hard-headed and industrious. By now there were whole new Industrial Revolutions going on in the Low Earths; the British seemed to have the building of steam engines and railways in their genes. Some of that hard-acquired wealth had already started to flow back into the Datum.

  In the long run, in their exploration and colonization of the Long Earth, the British had proved to be thorough, patient, careful, and ultimately pretty successful. Just like Ken.

  But now Nelson had his own journey to make.

  They spent some time discussing the vigour and health of Ken’s flock. Then Nelson cleared his throat and said, ‘You know, Ken, I’ve loved my time here in the parish. There’s been a kind of peacefulness. A sense that although the surface of things changes, the soul of them does not. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Umm,’ said Ken.

  ‘When I first came here I walked the hills. There are signs of people having lived here for ever – since before England was England. In the graveyard and on the war memorial I found family names repeated across hundreds of years. Sometimes a man went away to fight for a king he didn’t know, in a place he’d never heard of. Sometimes he didn’t come back at all. And yet the land endured, you know? Even as this countryside, remote from the urban centres, has survived more or less intact through the great convulsions since Step Day. It must have been very hard for such men to leave such a place. Just as it will be for me.’

  ‘You, Rev?’

  ‘You are the first to know. I have had a word with the Bishop, and he has agreed that I can move out just as soon as my successor is in place.’ He looked out over the flocks. ‘Look at them. They graze as if they will graze for eternity, and are content with that.’

  ‘But you’re no sheep, Rev.’

  ‘Quite so. The fact is I’ve spent a lot of my life being a scientist, and am obligated to a different covenant than the one I bow to at the moment – although I must say that in my head the two have rather melded together. In short I need to find a new purpose, one more suited to my talents and my background. If you’ll pardon my immodesty.’

  ‘You’ve pardoned me for worse, Rev.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not. Now if you’re done here let me stand you a pint down the pub. And then I have some calls to make.’

  Ken said, ‘Well, that’s nice. About the pint, I mean.’ He whistled. ‘Joy! Here, girl.’

  The dog came bounding up, tail wagging, and leapt into Ken’s strong arms, just as she’d been trained, so she could be carried back to the Datum. She was a dog whose supper bowl was currently lodged in a different corner of the multiverse entirely, but who had no concern about that as long as her master whistled for her.

  7

  TELLING KEN A bit of news like that was as good as hiring a skywriter, Nelson knew. Well, what was done was done.

  Once back at the rectory Nelson made a few follow-up calls, disclosing, apologizing, accepting congratulations.

  Then, with relief, he told his computer to boot up, leaned back in his office chair, and watched the multiple screens light up. �
�Search terms. One: the return of the airship the Mark Twain. Two: the Lobsang Project. Supplementary: soc-media streams for last twenty-four hours, slanting towards current concerns, depth three Occam’s razor . . .’

  Bandwidth here was generally dreadful, but not for Nelson. A man with a past like his – he’d once worked for the Black Corporation itself, if only indirectly – had a great many contacts in many useful places: favour speaks unto favour. Only last year a black helicopter had landed just short of the graveyard and the team of technicians that stepped out on to the glebe had left him with access to as much satellite traffic as he wanted – including some channels known to very few people indeed – and moreover the means to decipher those channels.

  When he’d done with the latest soc-media chit-chat, he left his study for the kitchen. A search like the one he’d just initiated was never going to be quick, and, while his software agents were scuttling across the web, he warmed up a microwave curry.

  And he reflected, as he often did, about the previous inhabitants of this parsonage. The equipment in his study – his phone, laptop, tablets – was all state of the art, more or less, though it would mostly have been familiar to a user of ten or twenty years ago. This was an argument seized on by some critics of the Long Earth migration. Need exerted a necessary pressure on humanity: you had to be hungry to innovate, and you needed to be surrounded by competitors to be driven to achieve. And in the Long Earth, with bellies filled too easily and plenty of space to spread out into, invention had stalled. Still, none of Nelson’s predecessors here, not even the most recent, had had access to anything like the technology at his fingertips now, retro or not.

  And every single one of them had been unable, just like Nelson, to make the antique toilet work properly. He liked that reflection; it helped keep him down to earth.

  The cooking done, he returned to his study – the Lobsang search was still in progress – and as he ate he logged into the Quizmasters.