The Long War Page 6

  They reached Thomas’s buggy, a low, open electric-engine vehicle with eight plastic seats. ‘Please, jump in . . .’ The cart pulled away, heading south.

  ‘Thomas and I are old buddies,’ Joshua said to Sally, by way of explanation, or peacekeeping.

  ‘You mean, he’s a long-term stalker,’ Sally said.

  ‘We met up out in the High Meggers, years ago . . . We were both on sabbatical, though Thomas calls it going walkabout. We’re like minds, kind of. Knowing he was here in Valhalla I asked him to help us out.’

  Helen said, ‘Well, thank you, Mr. Kyangu. But what do you do the rest of the time?’

  ‘Look at him,’ Sally said. ‘Can’t you tell? Look at the way he’s dressed. He’s a comber. A professional drifter.’

  ‘More or less,’ Thomas called over his shoulder as he drove. ‘I grew up in Australia, and I’ve always been fascinated by combers. Many of my family’s people went off to become combers themselves, you know, in stepwise versions of Oz. And I’m intrigued by natural steppers – like you, like Joshua, the whole phenomenon. Though I’m not one myself. I’m also interested in the whole question of how human civilization is going to be shaped by the Long Earth. I mean, it’s still only a single generation since Step Day; we’re only at the beginning. I had a hand in the concept design of Valhalla, of the city itself.’

  Sally snorted. ‘“Concept design!”’

  Thomas was unperturbed. ‘The purest way of life in the Long Earth is the comber – the solitary individual, or maybe a family, a small cohesive group, just wandering, picking the lowest-hanging fruit. The Long Earth is so rich there’s no need to do anything else. But the point of Valhalla is that it’s a city, a genuine city with all the essential attributes of a Datum community, but sustained by combers . . .’

  They were entering a more built-up area now, Joshua saw. He glimpsed a sign: DOWNTOWN FOUR. The buildings, of brick, concrete or timber, were low, squat, massively constructed, and set out in sprawling, empty plots: typical colony-world architecture. If this was a downtown it was definitely a High-Meggers downtown, full of room, with more of the feel of a suburban mall back on the Datum. There were few vehicles on the wide roads, most of them horse-drawn, and few pedestrians to be seen, with most of them wearing Steppers. This wasn’t a place you stayed put in for long.

  But it was evidently a city in political ferment. Some of those big blank walls were adorned with posters and graffiti:

  SUPPORT THE FOOTPRINT CONGRESS

  NO TO DATUM TAXES!

  And:

  DOWN WITH COWLEY THE GENOCIDE

  Thomas was still talking about combers and cities. ‘I’ve written a book on the subject,’ he said now. ‘Combers, and a new theory of civilization.’

  Helen frowned. ‘A book? Nobody reads books now. Or at least, not new books.’

  Thomas, steering one-handed, tapped his forehead. ‘All in here. I travel the worlds and give readings.’

  ‘A regular Johnny Shakespeare,’ Sally said dismissively.

  The cart pulled up outside a four-storey building with an expansive street-level frontage. Thomas said, ‘Here you go. The Healed Drum, the best hotel in Valhalla. You’re in there for three weeks if you need it.’

  Sally scowled. ‘How long? Why? We’ve only come here to catch a twain down to the Datum.’

  Joshua said gently, ‘Sally, Helen and I are here to look at a school for Dan.’

  Dan’s little jaw dropped. ‘You’re sending me here? To school?’

  Helen glared at Joshua. ‘Great way to break the news.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She patted Dan’s arm. ‘Valhalla’s schools have got a reputation as the best in the High Meggers, Dan. It would be fun, and you’d learn so much new stuff. Things you could never learn at Hell-Knows-Where. But if you don’t want to be away from home—’

  Dan scowled. ‘I’m not a little kid, Mom. Can I learn to be a twain driver here?’

  Joshua laughed and tousled his hair. ‘You can be anything you want, kiddo. That’s the point.’

  Helen said to Sally, ‘Also I need to see my father.’

  Thomas nodded. ‘Jack Green! Fast becoming another hero. A founder of the Children of Freedom movement, now an organizer of the Footprint Congress which has attracted delegates from thousands of inhabited Americas—’

  ‘He’s fast becoming a major embarrassment, is what he is,’ Helen said sternly.

  ‘This hanging around wasn’t part of the deal,’ Sally snapped at Joshua. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘Well, you didn’t wait to be consulted. Besides, how would you have reacted? Just like this, right?’

  Sally picked up her pack. ‘I’m out of here.’ She disappeared with a pop of displaced air.

  Thomas sighed. ‘What a woman. I hope I have a chance to get her autograph. Come on, let’s get you checked in.’

  9

  IN THE MORNING, Bill went off for ‘a bit of an old explore on me own’, as he put it. Joshua made sure he had a cellphone so he could call for a ride back, if he got ‘incapable’.

  Bill had gone by the time Thomas showed up to give Joshua, Helen and Dan a lift to Dan’s prospective school. This was in a different urban ‘hub’ called Downtown Seven, on the other side of this intricately designed city. So they climbed into Thomas’s buggy once more, and set off across town.

  The city had grown hugely since the last time Joshua had seen it. Valhalla, starting from a clean slate, was always intended to be more than just another city. It looked attractively different even in its basic layout, built on hexagonal plots that were spreading around the southern shore of the American Sea of this world, and cutting into the native forest. Many of the houses glittered with solar paint, but others had grass and other plants growing thick on their roofs, a natural thatch.

  And wherever the view opened up to the north, Joshua glimpsed the sea, a flat, silver horizon. The coastline lay at about the same latitude as Datum Chicago. At the shore the city took on an older feel to Joshua’s eyes, an echo of an antique America, a maritime past. There was a respectable port now, mostly wooden buildings, warehouses and boat yards, even what looked like a fishermen’s chapel – he supposed the chapel would already have its memorial stones to those lost in this version of the American Sea, stones without graves, stones with no bones beneath. Further out there were wharves and jetties and moles. On the sea itself there were ships, grey shadows, some mechanically driven, mostly coal-burning probably, but many were sailing ships, like reconstructions, museum pieces.

  Sailors were working this new ocean, fishing, trapping. They hunted tremendous reptilian swimmers, something like plesiosaurs, and adorned their boats with their giant jaws and vertebrae. Like the whalers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries back on the Datum, these seafarers were studying their worlds with an intensity that outshone the more scientific explorers, and were linking together the scattered, growing communities around the shores of these stepwise American oceans. They weren’t whalers, for there were no whales here, but Joshua thought he would try to make time to explore all this with Dan, and they could talk about Moby-Dick.

  And whenever they glimpsed the city’s landward edge the party saw something much stranger, in its mundane way. The outer suburbs, thick with factories and forges, just ended, terminating in cut-back forest, or partially drained swamp and marsh. There wasn’t a field anywhere, no cattle grazing, not a blade of cultivated grass outside the city boundary. This was a city without a hinterland of farmers.

  Joshua knew the theory of Valhalla. It was part of this generation’s response to the challenge of the endless spaces of the Long Earth. On Step Day, mankind (or most of it, those unlike Sally and her family who had known it all already) had begun to spread out across an extended Earth that had a diameter of eight thousand miles and a surface area that made a Dyson sphere look like a ping-pong ball. How they lived out there depended on preference, education and instinct. Some dashed back and forth bet
ween the Datum and the Low Earths, looking for a little more room, a way to make a little more money. Some, like Helen’s family the Greens, had gone trekking out into the stepwise wilderness and had begun to build new communities: the story of colonial-era America, rerun across an infinite frontier. And some just wandered off, helping themselves to the inexhaustible riches of the Long Earth: Thomas’s combers.

  All of which was fine, until the day you needed root-canal dentistry. Or your e-book reader broke down. Or you worried whether your kids were ever going to learn anything more than how to plough a field or trap a rabbit. Or you got sick of the mosquitoes. Or, damn it, you just wanted to go shopping. Some people drifted back to the Datum, or the crowded Low Earths.

  Valhalla was another response: a brand-new city growing out in the High Meggers, the remote Long Earth, but deriving from Long Earth lifestyles: that is, supported by combers, not farmers. There had been precursors in human history, across Datum Earth. Given time and a rich environment, hunter-gatherer populations could achieve huge feats, and develop complex societies. At Watson Brake, Louisiana, five thousand years in the past, nomadic Native American hunter-gatherers had constructed major earthwork complexes. Valhalla had just taken this to a new, modern, more consciously designed level.

  As it happened, the theory of the city was the first topic Jacques Montecute, the school’s headmaster, chose to talk about when he brought Dan and his family into his office for an introductory chat.

  ‘The central ethos of Valhalla is balance,’ Montecute said.

  Aged about thirty, slender, slightly severe, he had an accent that Joshua might have pegged as French, but with a naggingly familiar overlay. His name rang a bell too. Montecute . . .

  There was one other child here, aside from Dan, a dark, unsmiling girl of about fifteen, called Roberta Golding.

  ‘Most of our adult citizens chose to leave the old world, to leave the old ways behind. They want some of what a city can give, but they didn’t come out into the Long Earth to break their backs farming, or to live in some slum suburb, in order to serve that city’s needs. But here we are, maintaining city life without all that.’ He smiled encouragingly at Dan. ‘Can you see how we make a living, without farmers to grow our food for us?’

  Dan shrugged his slim shoulders. ‘Maybe you’re all robbers.’

  Helen sighed.

  Roberta Golding spoke for the first time since being introduced. ‘Valhalla is a city supported by combers. Hunter-gatherers. The logic is elementary. Intensive farming can support orders of magnitude more people per acre than hunting and gathering. On a single world a comber community, even if natural resources are rich, would necessarily be spread out, diffuse; the concentration of population needed to sustain a city would be impossible. Here, it is sufficient for the combers to be spread out, not geographically, but over many stepwise Earths – over a hundred parallel Valhallas, left wild for the hunting.’ She made a sandwich of her hands, pressing. ‘The city is the product of a layer of worlds, each lightly harvested, rather than the product of a single intensively farmed world. This is intensive gathering: a uniquely post-stepping urban solution.’

  Joshua thought the kid spoke like a textbook.

  ‘You’ve been reading up,’ said Helen, as if accusing her of cheating.

  ‘Very good, Roberta,’ said Montecute. ‘I mean, it also helps that we live in such a rich location, geographically, by the shore of a fecund sea . . .’

  Joshua snapped his fingers. ‘Happy Landings. That’s it. You’re from Happy Landings. Both of you, right? You, Mr. Montecute, I recognize your accent – and your name. I may have met your grandmother once.’

  He looked a little uncomfortable, but he smiled. ‘Kitty? Actually my great-grandmother. She always remembered running into you, Mr. Valienté, all those years ago. Yes, I’m from Happy Landings, as it’s become known. As is Roberta.’

  ‘Happy Landings,’ Helen murmured to Joshua. ‘Sally Linsay’s name for it, right? Seems to have stuck. Happy Landings, where all the kids are super-smart. That’s what they say.’ She glanced uneasily at Dan, who seemed to be trying to tie his legs in a knot.

  ‘It’s good for you to have met a schoolmate already, Dan,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Actually I will not be here long,’ Roberta said, politely enough, but rather blankly. ‘I’ve been invited to join the East Twenty Million mission.’

  Joshua goggled. ‘With the Chinese?’

  Montecute smiled. ‘And me,’ he admitted. ‘Though I’ll be there more in a supervisory capacity. Roberta has won a sort of scholarship, a gesture of good faith between the Datum US government and the new regime in China . . . All of which is by the by. Well.’ He stood up. ‘Why don’t I show you around the school, Dan? While Mom and Dad grab a coffee, perhaps – our canteen is just down the corridor.’ Dan followed him, willingly enough. ‘So what do you like at school? Logic, mathematics, debating, technical drawing?’

  ‘Softball,’ said Dan.

  ‘Softball? Anything else?’

  ‘Wood-chopping.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve got a badge.’

  Joshua and Helen glanced at each other, and at the silent, serious Roberta. Then: ‘Coffee,’ they said together, and followed Montecute and Dan out of the room.

  10

  TO GET TO see her father Helen actually had to make an appointment, which infuriated her.

  Jack Green, sixty years old, had an office in the modest building which served as Valhalla’s city hall, courtroom, police headquarters and mayor’s residence. He was working when Helen was shown into the room, sitting behind a desk laden with a laptop, a couple of cellphones, a stack of grainy-looking writing paper. A big TV screen was fixed to the wall. He barely glanced up at the daughter he hadn’t seen since – when? The Christmas before last? Now he held up one finger, eyes fixed on the laptop, while she stood there, waiting.

  At last he tapped a key with finality and sat back. ‘There. Sent. Sorry about that, honey.’ He got up, kissed her cheek, sat down again. ‘Just a few last tweaks to the speech we’ve been writing for Ben.’ Ben being Ben Keyes, she knew, mayor of Valhalla, for whom her father worked. ‘Oh, which reminds me—’ He picked up a remote and pressed it; the big wall screen lit up with an image of a podium, a couple of aides in suits, the Stars and Stripes and the ocean-blue flag of Valhalla hanging from poles side by side in the background. ‘Ben’s delivering the speech any moment now. Talk about last minute, right? But as soon as he’s done his words will be all over this world, of course, and will go all the way down to the Datum as fast as the outernet can carry them. Impressive, huh?’

  Evidently Helen had picked a bad moment to call. ‘Can I sit down, Dad?’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ He got up again, a little stiffly, and pushed over a chair for her. Like many of his generation, who had built Long Earth towns like Reboot from scratch, in his late middle age he was plagued by arthritis. ‘How’s Dan?’

  ‘You got his age wrong on the last birthday card you sent.’

  ‘Umm. Sorry about that. I hope he wasn’t upset.’

  She shrugged. ‘He’s used to it.’

  He smiled, but he kept glancing at the screen.

  She pushed down her irritation. ‘I’m just dropping in, Dad. You know we’re going on to the Datum. We’re here to show Dan around the Free School. We’re hoping to get him a place, if it suits him.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Jack said firmly. ‘That’s one point of Valhalla, of cities like this, to found good schools and incubate free, open and educated minds. Essential in any democracy.’

  ‘Dad! Less of the lectures.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. It’s just my way, honey. And I’m sorry to be distracted. But the situation is urgent. It’s not just the increasingly repressive taxation. There’s a vicious undercurrent that seeps out of the Humanity First douche-bags who are paying for Cowley’s re-election campaign, no matter how inclusive he pretends to be. It’s worse than racism. In their language
we steppers are a lesser species, we’re malevolent, moral-free mutants . . . We have to stand up for ourselves. And now we’re doing it. Some of the commentators are already saying that Keyes’s speech today will be our Declaration of Independence moment, before they’ve even heard the text. Think of that!’

  ‘And you just have to be involved, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, what else should I be doing?’

  ‘You were just the same at Reboot. Distracting yourself from your own life by ordering other people around, right?’

  ‘What’s this, are you channelling your sister?’

  Katie, a few years older than Helen, married, had stayed in Reboot, and generally disapproved of the rest of the family moving out. ‘No, Dad. Look, I know you’re not old.’

  ‘I’m not about to become a minuteman, honey.’

  ‘I know, I know . . . I just think you need to stop running away.’

  ‘Running from what?’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault Mom got ill.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What else wasn’t my fault?’

  ‘It also wasn’t your fault Rod did what he did.’

  ‘Your brother planted a nuke under Datum Madison, for God’s sake.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He was part of a dumb plot by resentful home-alones, which—I’m sorry, Dad. It’s just that I think you’re working on all this stuff to, to—’

  ‘To assuage some kind of Freudian guilt? My daughter the psychologist.’ His tone turned harder now. ‘Look, it’s not about blame, or guilt. People do what they do. But that doesn’t mean that, whatever your deeper hidden personal motives, you can’t try to do something good.’

  She pointed at the screen. ‘Like your Mayor Keyes right now?’

  He turned that way.

  Ben Keyes walked up to the podium, a sheaf of pulpy locally manufactured paper in his hands. Aged maybe forty, he had media-star good looks, but he’d let his hair grow long, pioneer style, and he wore, not a suit, but a practical worker’s coverall in a drab olive. When he began to speak Helen could barely make out his words over the clapping and hollering from an off-stage audience: ‘People of Valhalla! This is an historic day in this world, in all the worlds of the Long Earth. Today, we have it in our power to begin the world over again . . .’