The Long Earth

14

DREAMS OF THE Long Earth. Dreams of the frontier. Yes, ten years after Step Day, Jack Green had understood that. Because they had been his wife’s dreams, and Jack had feared they were tearing his family apart.

Jack Green carefully turned the pages of his daughter’s journal. It was like a fat paperback book, though with the pulpy graininess of much of the paper produced here in West 5. He was alone in Helen’s room, on a bright Sunday afternoon. Helen was out playing softball in ParkZone Four. Katie was out too, he wasn’t sure where. And Tilda was downstairs talking with a group of the friends and colleagues she had managed to snag into the idea of forming a Company to go West.

‘… Empires rise and they fall. Look at Turkey. That was a great empire once and you wouldn’t believe it now…’

‘… If you’re middle class you look to the left and see the activists undermining American values, and to the right and you see how free trade has exported our jobs …’

‘… We believed in America. Now we seem to be mired in mediocrity, while the Chinese steam ahead…’

Tilda’s voice: ‘The notion of Manifest Destiny is historically suspect, of course. But you can’t deny the importance of the frontier experience to the making of the American consciousness. Well, now the frontier is opening up again, for our generation and maybe for uncountable generations to follow…’

The group conversation broke up into a general susurrus of noise, and Jack smelled a rich aroma. Time for coffee and cookies.

He returned to the diary. At last he came to an entry that mentioned his son. He read on, skimming over the spelling errors and crossings-out.

‘Tut tut.’ His wife’s voice. ‘That’s private.’

He turned, guilty. ‘I know, I know. But we’re going through such changes. I feel the need to know what’s going on in their heads. I think that trumps the privacy thing, just for now.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s your judgement.’ She had brought him a coffee, a brimming mug. She turned and stood by the big picture window, the best in the house, the least flawed pane they could find of the locally manufactured sheet glass. They looked out over Madison West 5, across which the afternoon shadows were just beginning to stretch. She wore her slightly greying strawberry blonde hair cut short, and the graceful curve of her neck was silhouetted against the window. ‘Still a lovely day,’ she said.

‘Lovely place, too…’

‘Yes. Nearly perfect.’

Nearly perfect. Under that phrase lurked a real bear trap.

Madison West 5 sprawled comfortably over essentially the same landscape dominated by its elder brother back on the Datum. But this was a place of grace and light and open spaces, with only a fraction of true Madison’s population. That wasn’t to deny that many of the buildings were massive. The architectural styles that had developed on the Low Easts and Wests were characterized by weight. Raw materials were dirt cheap on the virgin worlds, which meant that buildings and furnishings could often be variations on the theme of slab. Thus the town hall with its cathedral-thick walls, and roof beams laser-cut from whole trees. But there were a lot of electronics and other kinds of smartness around, lightweight and easily imported from the Datum. So you saw little pioneer log cabins with solar paint on the roofs.

But you could never forget you weren’t on Earth, not on the Datum. At the perimeter of the city there was a wide system of fences and ditches, designed to keep out some of the more exotic wildlife. The migration of a herd of Columbian mammoths had once caused a rushed suburban evacuation.

In the first years after Step Day, a lot of couples like Jack and Tilda Green, with careers and kids and savings in the bank, had started looking at the new stepwise worlds with a view to buying a little extra property, a place for their kids to go play. They rapidly found that Madison West 1 was too much of a slave to the Datum, a jumble of hasty extensions to homes and office developments. At first the Greens had rented a small cabin on West 2. But the place soon came to feel like a theme park. Over-organized, too close to home. And the land already belonged to somebody else.

But then they’d discovered the project to develop Madison West 5, starting from a clean slate, high-tech, eco-friendly from the start, intended to be more than just another city. They’d both been enthused, and had invested a chunk of their savings to get in on the ground floor. Jack and Tilda had contributed a lot to the finalizing of the design, he as a software engineer working on details of the city’s smarts, she as a lecturer in cultural history devising novel forms of local government and community forums. It was only unfortunate that they couldn’t make enough of a living here, and they both had to cut back to the Datum to their regular jobs.

‘This is our city. But it’s only “nearly perfect”?’ he said.

‘Uh huh. We’re living in a dream, but it’s somebody else’s dream. I want my own dream.’

‘But our son the phobic—’

‘Don’t use that word.’

‘Well, it’s what people say, Tilda. He won’t be able to share that dream.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘We have to think about what’s best for all of us. For Katie and Helen too, as well as Rod — we can’t be tied down by that. It’s a unique moment, Jack. Just now, under the aegis rules and the new Homestead Acts, the government is practically giving away the land in the stepwise Americas. That’s a window that’s not going to stay open for ever.’

Jack grunted. ‘It’s all ideology.’ The New Frontier: that was the slogan, borrowed from an old John F. Kennedy election pitch. The federal government was encouraging emigration to the new worlds by Americans, and indeed by others, the sole understanding being that under the American aegis you would obey American laws, and pay American taxes: you would be an American. ‘The federal government just wants to make sure all those stepwise versions of the US are colonized by us before somebody else moves in.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that. The same sort of impulse drove the expansion west in the nineteenth century. Of course it’s intellectually interesting that most Americans choose to go West, even though that’s just an arbitrary label with no reference to geographical west. Similarly I heard that most Chinese emigrants are heading East …’

‘Christ, the journey itself takes months. All for a chance to dump the kids in an uncivilized wilderness. And what use is a software engineer going to be out there? Or a lecturer in cultural history, come to that.’

She smiled fondly. It was infuriating; he could see she wasn’t taking him remotely seriously. ‘Whatever we need to know, we’ll learn.’ She put down her coffee and slipped her arms around him. ‘I think we need to do this, Jack. It’s our chance. Our generation. Our kids’ chance.’

Our kids, he thought. All save poor Rod. Here was his wife, one of the most intelligent people he’d ever met, her head full of idealism about the future of America and mankind, and yet contemplating abandoning her own son. He rested his cheek on her greying hair, and wondered if he would ever understand her.