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  She shook her head.

  Maggie sat in silence, letting the moment extend. ‘Very well. Here’s what you’re going to do. First of all, you are going to get your act together and make it clear to the Datum government that you are here. We’ll help you with that, and such details as ratifying property claims. Then you have a man in custody without trial, or any due process, and we need to sort that out. Look, to repeat: I’m not here with any mandate to police you. But we can help. And before all that, you’re going to let my ship’s doctor have a good look at the girl.’

  A few hours later Joe Mackenzie came out of the Hartmann house. Mac was in his fifties, grizzled, beaten up by a long career in emergency and battlefield medicine. He was old for a field posting, in fact; Maggie had helped him bend the regulations to have him at her side on this mission. This bright afternoon, the doctor’s expression was as dark as twilight.

  ‘You know, Maggie, sometimes there are no words . . . If I were to say that it could have been worse, you need to understand that even so I would like to spend some time alone in a room with the gentleman concerned and a baseball bat, knowing with surgical precision the right spots to hit—’

  It was at times like this that Maggie was glad she’d stuck to her career, never married, never had kids of her own, left the glorious burden of caring for children to her siblings, cousins, friends; she was happy to be an aunt, honorary or otherwise. ‘It’s OK, Mac.’

  ‘Well, no, it isn’t OK, not for that little girl, and may never be again. I’d prefer her to be sent to a Datum hospital for a full examination. At the least I want to take her up on to the ship for observation for a while.’

  Maggie nodded. ‘Let’s go meet the leaders of this joint.’

  They met in the mayor’s office. At Maggie’s side were Mac and Nathan Boss. Maggie had invited Robinson herself, and a few chosen citizens from the town meeting whom the mayor reckoned to be well-balanced and sensible, at least by the standards of this community, to consider the verdict.

  As they sat down, everybody looked to the Captain – looked to her as a saviour, she realized. Maggie cleared her throat. Time to step up to the plate, she thought.

  ‘For the record – and we are being recorded – this session is nothing more than a panel of inquiry. Judicial processes can follow as necessary. I have no policing role here. But I have taken it upon myself, at the request of the mayor of the town, to ascertain fairly all the facts of the matter.

  ‘I’ll summarize what I’ve been told; the facts are apparently not being denied. A week ago Roderick Bacon plied with drugs Angela Hartmann, a girl of nine years old, the daughter of Raymond Hartmann and Daphne Hartmann. Hearing the girl cry out, her father, Ray Hartmann, rushed to her room and saw Bacon with her. The girl was vomiting, fitting. Hartmann pulled the man away, handed the girl to her mother, and then beat Bacon, dragged him out of the house, and set about him again, causing, after a minute or two, his death. The neighbours, alerted by the screams, told us that Bacon was pleading for his life, saying that “a lurid angel” made him do it, made him want to give this “pure child” the gift of his own “inner light” . . . You get the picture.

  ‘In the absence of a lawyer I’ve had my XO, Commander Nathan Boss, take a personal statement from Hartmann about the events of that night, and also a statement by Bacon’s wife. And according to the wife, before the crime Bacon had been out processing a harvest of the apparently psychoactive flowers endemic in the woods hereabouts. He ran a side business, of dubious legality, selling the stuff in stepwise worlds . . .’

  Maggie stopped there. She wished she’d had better training for something like this. She looked around at the others in the room. ‘For the record the child will be cared for overnight on the Benjamin Franklin, under the care of Dr. Mackenzie. I’ll invite the girl’s mother to spend the night with her daughter; I’ll send a crewman down to escort her up to the ship. Meanwhile – well, Bacon is dead, and Ray Hartmann is in custody.

  ‘I think I understand the feelings of all involved in this. I’m no lawyer, I’m no judge, but I can give you my personal assessment. I have to say that Bacon was guilty, in any reasonable sense of the word. He knowingly exposed himself to narcotics, these flowers from the woods; my view is he’s responsible for his behaviour thereafter. As for Hartmann, murder is murder. Yet I find myself loath to condemn the actions of an overwrought husband and father.

  ‘So, what next? We’ll file a report, and in the end the Datum cops will come out here, go through this fully, refer it to the judicial system – but that could take years; the Aegis is a big place, and tough to police. In the meantime you have Ray Hartmann stuck in that ice house. What to do with him? Well, frankly, you – all of you – must be judge and jury, prosecution and defence. We can leave you advice on due process. But it’s up to you to run your own affairs, and I urge you to work out how to deal with this yourselves, within US law as best you understand it.’ She eyed them one by one. ‘This kind of autonomy was, after all, presumably what you wanted when you came out here.

  ‘In the longer term, get together with your stepwise neighbours. I’m sure that together you could support the equivalent of a county court. I’m told that’s becoming common in the colony worlds. Hire a lawyer or two – even a visiting circuit judge.’ She ran out of steam. She stood up. ‘That’s all from me. The rest is up to you as a community. But for God’s sake – Nathan, make sure the science boys take samples first, and make sure they do this when the wind isn’t blowing into the town – burn those flowers. That’s all, people, at least for today. I’ll have the minutes of this session ready for all of you tomorrow.’

  That evening, Maggie met Joe Mackenzie coming out of the ship’s small medical bay.

  ‘How is she?’ she asked.

  ‘Thank goodness I spent a semester in a children’s hospital before I signed up.’

  ‘Would coffee help?’

  In Maggie’s sea cabin, Mackenzie accepted the mug with gratitude, and after two blessed swigs, said, ‘You know, the bastard got what was coming to him, in my personal view. But we are officers of the United States Navy. Even Wyatt Earp had to look as if he respected the law.’

  ‘I’m hoping they’ll work that out for themselves. Plenty of other communities out here have done.’

  ‘But other communities don’t have those damn flowers. And, to me, there was a definite feel of hippie about the place – you know what I mean? – the feeling that people aren’t taking care of business. The counter-culture gone bad scenario, too many people frazzled out of their brains.’

  Maggie stared at the medic. ‘Where did all that come from, Mac?’

  ‘My grandfather left me a complete collection of the Whole Earth Catalog, a load of sixties and seventies counter-culture stuff . . . I got quite interested in it, you know. Some of their values were laudable. But when it comes to the meat and potatoes – the secret to building a home in a place like this isn’t about ideals and theory, and not about getting high. It’s about hard work, alongside a sense of humour, and the goodwill of your neighbours, and putting your back into the future. But what you’ve got down there, I think, is the seed of tragedy. Along with Margarita Jha from biology, I analysed that lovely little flower that grows everywhere in their woods. Addictive and hallucinogenic like there’s no tomorrow. Growing like a weed.’

  ‘But, Mac – ye gods! Are we going to have to send a Drug Enforcement Agency unit to every settlement? They have to work it out for themselves.’

  ‘That’s how it got resolved on the Datum, in the end. After Step Day there was an explosion in the drug trade – with stepping pushers, there was no way to police it. In the inner cities, the cops pulled back and . . . Well, let’s say they let natural selection take its course.’

  She looked at him as he said these words, his tone neutral. In the course of his career Mac had evidently seen a lot of stuff even she, in the military, had been shielded from. She said, ‘Well, we’re done with this particular can of worm
s. I think they’ll let this guy Hartmann out. But it’s been a salutary shock; they’ll figure out ways to order their affairs better.’

  ‘Sure. A neat wrap-up,’ said Mac sourly. ‘But the frightening part of it is that we’ve barely started this mission. What’s waiting for us in the world next door?’

  16

  SIX DAYS OUT of Valhalla, somewhere around the Earth million mark, the Gold Dust made a stop at a clearing cut into yet another raw world’s continent-sized forest. From the air the Valientés saw it as a neat little rectangular patch etched out of the green, an oddly touching island of humanity all but lost in this global forest.

  But when you looked more closely you could see that it wasn’t humans who’d created the clearing but a party of trolls, under the direction of a human, labouring even as the passengers looked down on them, those massive muscles working under their black pelts.

  Bosun Higgs had proved to be a bright kid and surprisingly knowledgeable about the Long Earth – and the importance of the trolls. The big humanoids were ubiquitous, though not necessarily in large numbers. And they shaped the country they moved through, just on account of what they ate, pushed through, moved aside. In their ecological role they were like the big animals of Africa, maybe, like elephants or wildebeest. As a result, Helen learned now, the landscapes of the stepwise worlds, while quite unlike the Datum, were not quite like the Datum as it had once been before humanity either, not for a long time – because as mankind had risen up, the trolls had fled.

  Well, the working trolls below looked content enough. But their overseer carried a whip, as Sally quickly pointed out. Joshua suggested he only used it to make a noise, to attract the trolls’ attention.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Sally.

  Helen knew it was hard to tell how happy a troll was. You did hear of distressing incidents, such as the notorious case of the troll called Mary at the Gap, the case everyone was talking about, even the snobs aboard the Gold Dust. But you saw trolls wherever people were, working like this. They seemed to enjoy it. Of course if you pushed them too hard they could simply step away.

  Maybe they were just too useful to have a conscience about. Disturbing thought. And, as Sally said to Joshua, you wondered what they thought about humans.

  The party dropped off supplies for the logging team, and brought up samples of exotic lichen in little plastic packs, lichen taken from very old trees. Old trees were rare on Datum Earth and were becoming so even on the heavily logged Low Earths. That was the nature of the trade across the ‘Long Mississippi’, as Helen had learned the pilots called this stepwise route. Raw materials flowed in towards the Datum – timber, foodstuffs, minerals – but bulk goods mostly came from the Corn Belt worlds further in, and only rare or precious items were worth bringing in from beyond the half-million-step mark, such as unique old-tree lichens and other exotic flora and fauna. Indeed, Joshua suggested as they watched this trade proceed, their own community ought to think about exporting Hell-Knows-Where maple liquor. In exchange the Datum shipped out low-mass but high-tech goods, from medical kit to electrical generators, to coils of fibre-optic cable so the colonists could establish decent communication networks in their new worlds. It was the kind of trade that had always characterized the settlement of new territories, such as between Britain and its American colonies before the Revolution, with high-quality manufactured products being sent out from the homeland in return for raw materials. Helen’s father and his Footprint Congress buddies would probably claim it was exploitative. Maybe, but it seemed to Helen to work.

  And besides, whoever was ripping off whom, it had to be a good thing for this great river of airships to be linking all the worlds of mankind together. So Helen thought, anyhow.

  Twelve days out from Valhalla and they crossed a diffuse boundary into the Corn Belt, the great band of farming worlds a third of a million steps thick, stretching in towards the Datum from about four hundred and sixty thousand worlds out. The skies were a lot busier now, with twains like their own heading towards the Datum passing those heading back out, ‘upstream’, so to speak.

  The Gold Dust had made pretty fast progress to this point, but from now on the stops would be more frequent. There were waystations spread out stepwise all along the Long Mississippi, and further down the river geographically too, in many of these worlds. Helen was told that as they approached the Datum these stations would show up more frequently. At the waystations the twains stopped to take on cargo loads gathered here from the nearby worlds for collection. Sacks of corn were the staple export from these particular Earths, and the crews, with plenty of troll labour, worked in chains to get the twains’ gaping holds loaded up. The stations had inns and the like for rest and recreation. These weren’t polite places, Helen observed. Many of them had a calaboose, a little jailhouse.

  One waystation they stopped at, however, was in a world that happened to be a little warmer than the rest, and the owners had taken the opportunity to establish sprawling sugar plantations and orange groves and palmettos, rare this far north in any America. The sugar-house where they processed their cane was a huge clanking factory. The owners’ house was like a colonial mansion constructed of the local timber, with verandas and carved pillars draped with magnolias, and the Captain, the Valienté family, and a few other guests were invited down to drink orange liqueur. In the fields you could see the bent backs of the troll workers, and their song floated on the hot breeze.

  The real tourist spectacle in the Corn Belt was the timber trade. Rafts of the stuff from the forests to the north were floated downstream on one Mississippi or another. At a waystation the rafts would be lifted out of the water by a twain or two, and then ganged together by trolls and human workers. The end result was one tremendous platform that might be an acre in size, suspended in the air, constructed of long straight trunks stripped and roped together, each held up by a squadron of airships. And off the twains would go, stepping across the worlds with their vast dangling freight, with parties of trolls and their human supervisors riding in huts and tents on the timber platforms. Just an astounding sight.

  What was even more remarkable was what they saw going the other way. One of the principal exports of the Low Earths to the outer worlds was horses. So you’d see a twain descend, and the great ramps from the hold fold down, and out would trot a herd of young horses, supervised by cowboys on horseback.

  Occasionally they passed over relics of what used to be an old trekking trail, like the one Helen’s family followed to get out to Reboot, on Earth West 101,754: information flags or warning posts, abandoned halfway houses. Thanks to the twains the days of pioneer trekking, of footslogging across a hundred thousand worlds, were gone, a phase of history that had only lasted a few years but was already passing into legend. Helen wondered what the likes of Captain Batson, who had led her particular trek, were doing now. Yet the trails were still in use, by gangs of humans driving troll bands one direction or the other across the Long Earth. Helen could never tell if the trolls were singing, or not.

  These sights were mostly just glimpses, gone in a second or two as they travelled on.

  17

  TEN YEARS AFTER the epic journey of Joshua Valienté and Lobsang, twain technology, offered as open source by the Black Corporation, had become the standard way of moving groups of people and large cargoes around the Long Earth. But, Jacques Montecute reflected gleefully as he prepared for his mission into deep stepwise China, some twain journeys were more spectacular than others.

  This particular journey, with Roberta Golding, was to begin from Datum China. Once the rather lengthy preliminaries were complete, the sister ships Zheng He and Liu Yang lifted into the dome of smog that hung over Xiangcheng, Henan province. Standing in the Zheng He gondola’s main observation lounge, Jacques was able to look up through the window to see the ship’s great silvery hull overhead, the skin flexing like the hide of some muscular animal, as the twain began, literally, to swim through the air. The ship’s mobile hull would h
ave been a remarkable sight even if it hadn’t been adorned with the clasped-hands symbol of the eight-year-old Federated Republic of China.

  They soon left the airfield behind, and drifted over the factories and car parks and rubbish tips of a grimy industrial zone. Roberta Golding, Jacques’s charge, fifteen years old, stood by the big floor-to-ceiling windows, impassively inspecting the landscape drifting below.

  And a dozen trolls, here in the observation lounge, began to sing ‘Slow Boat to China’, the song strung out into a round and layered with harmony like honey piled on a piece of toast, in the trolls’ usual fashion.

  Around Jacques a scattered handful of crew, along with a few more informally dressed types who looked like scientists, glanced out of the windows and laughed at jokes Jacques couldn’t catch, and couldn’t have translated if he had. Jacques and Roberta, from Happy Landings, were used to having trolls around. But some of the crew stared at the trolls, as if they were an utterly unfamiliar sight. Jacques noticed one crewman close to the big animals wearing a conspicuous weapon of some kind at his hip, as if they might be about to go on the rampage.

  A uniformed young Chinese, a woman, evidently a crew member, offered Jacques and Roberta drinks: fruit juice, water. Jacques took a water and sipped it. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It is my pleasure.’

  ‘Nice choice of song.’

  ‘We thought it was an amusing choice to welcome you,’ she said brightly. ‘We being the crew. For this is a fast boat from China, you see.’ She proffered a hand for a strong shake. Dark haired, sensible looking rather than attractive, she might have been twenty-five years old. ‘I am Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai. A Federal Army officer, but attached to the China National Space Administration.’

  ‘Ah. Which is running this East Twenty Million project.’

  ‘Exactly. You can see the logic. Our space engineers are trained to handle advanced technology in unfamiliar and extreme environments. Who better to confront the mysteries of the far East worlds? I however trained as a pilot. I have ambitions to become an astronaut, some day. For now I have been assigned an informal role as companion to your protégée, Ms. Roberta Golding. If that is acceptable to you, and indeed to Ms. Golding. You will call me Yue-Sai, I hope.’