The Long Earth

25

JOSHUA WATCHED WORLDS pass like the turning pages of a picture book. And, heading steadily geographical west, they passed a boundary marker of their own: the Ural mountains, a north — south band of crumpled landscape that endured across most of the worlds.

But the worlds were different now. Both Ice Belt and Mine Belt were far behind them. Now the Earths below were Corn Belt worlds, as the American scouts and trek captains liked to call them: rich, warm worlds, and at least in North America covered with grassland and prairie littered with familiar-looking trees and scrub and dense with herds of healthy-looking animals. Worlds ripe for farming. The Earths below now numbered over a hundred thousand on Lobsang’s earthometer. It took trekkers nine months to come out as far as this, on foot. The airship had made it in four days.

Whenever they stopped, Lobsang scanned for short-wave radio transmissions, which ought to carry around the curve of any Earth with an ionosphere. They paused at a couple of Corn-Belt-worlds to listen, one being West 101,754, where they got a long and chatty news update from a colony in a stepwise New England: some kid, originally from Madison as it happened, blogging by reading from her journal. One of a whole trail of such hopeful townships, Joshua imagined, scattered thin across the continents of the Long Earth. And each, he supposed, would have its own story to tell…

Hi, my loyal listeners, Helen Green here, your low-tech blogger clogging up the airwaves again. This bit’s from three years ago. It was July 5 — which, as you will be aware, is the day after July 4. Here goes…

Is this what they call a hangover?

Oh! My! God!

Yesterday was Independence Day! Yay. We’ve been here eight months, and nobody’s dead yet, yay! That’s an excuse for a party if ever there was one. We’re Americans, and this is officially America, and it was July 4, and that was that.

Though to look at us, this first summer, you’d imagine we were Indians. We’re all living in lean-tos and tepees and benders and big square communal houses, and some folk are still using their trek tents. There are chickens and puppy dogs that people carried here on their backs, running around everywhere. We ain’t farming. Next year will be the first harvest. We have a rota clearing the fields — burn, slash, haul away the rocks, all brute labour, nothing but human muscle available to do it. For the future we’ve brought seeds, corn and beans and flax and cotton, enough to survive years of failed crops if necessary. Oh, we’ve already planted pumpkins and squash and beans in the cleared ground near the houses, in our ‘gardens’.

But for now we’re hunter-gatherers! And it’s a rich country to hunt and gather in. In the winter we got bass from the river. In the forest we took things that look like rabbits and things that look like deer and some of those funny little horses, though we were all a bit squeamish about that, it was like eating a pony. Now in the summer we’re spending more time at the coast, where we’re fishing and collecting clams.

You do feel like you’re out in the wild. Back home on the Datum I was living on top of centuries of other people’s efforts to tame everything. Here the forest has never been cleared, the swamps never drained, the river never dammed or leveed. It’s strange. And dangerous.

I think my Dad thinks some of the people are dangerous too. We’re all learning more about each other, but slowly, you can’t always tell from the outside. Some folk have come out here, not to go somewhere, but to get away from something. An army veteran. A woman who my Mom thinks was abused, as a child. Another woman who lost a child. Well, that’s fine by me.

But anyhow, we’re here. And if you go tracking in the woods or up river you can see the little plumes of smoke rising up from the houses, and hear the voices of the workers in the fields. You can feel the difference if you step even just a world or two to either side. A world with humans in, versus a world without. Honestly, it’s true, you can feel it in your head.

We had a big argument about what to call our new community. The adults had a meet about it, and it turned into the usual word fest. Melissa was determined it should be called some long uplifting name like ‘New Independence’ or ‘Deliverance’ or maybe just ‘New Hope’, but my Dad laughed at that one and made a joke about Star Wars.

I’m not sure if it was just my suggestion or Ben Doak’s, but we found something that stuck. Or at least that nobody hated enough to veto loudly. When it was agreed, Dad and a few others made up a sign, on the trail up from the coast.

‘Now all we need is a zip code,’ said my Dad.

And now here’s a bit from a year later than that, written by my Dad! Well, he has helped me out with this journal, including with the spelling, huh. Thanks, Dad!..

My name is Jack Green. I guess if you’re reading this you’ll know I’m Helen’s father. I have special permission from Helen to add a few notes to this journal, which has become a rather precious thing itself. Just now Helen herself is otherwise engaged, but this is her birthday, and I wanted to be sure the day was marked properly.

So, where do I begin?

We have our houses built now, mostly. And fields we’re slowly clearing. Usually I have my head down, working. We all do. But every so often I take a walk around the town, and I see how we’re nibbling into the green.

The sawmill is working. That was the first big communal project. I can hear it now, as I write — we try to keep it going day and night, with that distinctive two-stroke sound as it slowly processes forest into town. We have a pottery kiln, and a lime kiln, and a soap kettle, and of course our forge thanks to our Brit boy wonder Franklin. The geological survey maps were spot on. In some ways it’s incredible how fast we’ve been able to progress.

But we were able to rely on help from outside. A family of Amish came our way, following a lead from the Reverend Herrin, our itinerant preacher. Odd folk they are, but friendly enough, and very competent at what they do. Such as when they helped us set up our pottery kiln, which is a boxy oven with a chimney stack. Our pots are rough as hell, but you can’t imagine the pride you get in setting a vase you made on a shelf you built, full of flowers you grew in the garden you dug out from the raw earth.

But that’s nothing compared to the first iron tools from Franklin’s forge. We couldn’t function without our iron and steel tools, of course. But the iron has had an odd impact on our domestic economy. When we arrived the hundred of us actually spread out over a thin sheaf of nearby worlds, rather than in just one. Why not? There was room. But of course you can’t carry iron across the worlds, even stuff manufactured locally. So people are slowly moving back into 754, the world with the forge in it, rather than start up the whole process over again somewhere else (although Franklin offered to do just that for multiples of his fee).

Strikes me that everything about the way humanity is opening up the Long Earth is shaped by one simple fact: that you can’t step metallic iron across. As an example, we had the idea of opening up parallel fields on next-door Earths so no single crop could be lost to a blight or poor weather. Not worth it; better to use the iron tools we have already made here to extend our holdings on 754.

The way we pay visitors like the Amish for their services is interesting, by the way. Well, I find it so. Money! What has worth, out here in the Long Earth? What has value when every man can own his own goldmine? Interesting theoretical question when you think about it, isn’t it?

Among ourselves we do use Datum currencies. Since the Long Earth recession cut in, the yen and the US dollar have held up, especially since they are unforgeable. The British pound collapsed earlier, when half the population fled from that crowded little island — including Franklin, our invaluable smith. Nevertheless, Britain, not for the first time, showed the way out of adversity. In their bad economic years the Brits evolved the ‘favour’, a currency of flexible worth. In short, it was a unit notional coin whose value was agreed by the buyer and seller at the point of transaction — which made it rather difficult to tax, and so it worked very badly back on the Datum. But it’s the ideal currency in the new worlds, which is not surprising since the system was once used in the embryo United States of America, when there was no coin to be had and no effective government to validate its use even if there were.

In places like Reboot, you see, your life is full of small trades. You boil animal fats and make tallow, and since you made too much, maybe your neighbour could use some, and indeed she could, and offers a pound of iron ore in return. That isn’t very useful to you, but it certainly is to Franklin the smith, and you hand it over to him in exchange for favour, to be repaid at some future time. So you are now owed a favour, which might be something solid, or even an offer to bring back store-bought goods next time he has to go to Hundred K or the Datum. Or whatever.

It’s no system to run a civilization on, but a pretty good one for a colony of a hundred people every single one of whom you know personally, and they know you. No point in cheating; that will only work for a little while. After all you don’t want to be the person who has the doors shut on you when you most desperately need help.

And so every day or so you total up your favours, positive and negative, and if you are ahead of the game then you might take a day off and go fishing. The nurses and midwives do particularly well. How many favours is a successful birth worth? What price an injured hand, treated so conscientiously that you can work again?

Common sense works well in a small community like this, where everybody ultimately depends on the goodwill and good humour of everybody else. It even applies to the way we treat the hobos, as we call them, who occasionally come trickling through our landscape. Drifters, working their way from world to world across the Long Earth, without any intention of settling down like us so far as I can see, just walking through the green and helping themselves to the low-hanging fruit. Well, why not? In the Long Earth there’s plenty of room for people to live like that. They come to us drawn by the smoke of the fires; we make them welcome, we’ll feed them and have our doctors treat them if they need it.

We make it clear we expect something in return, usually a little labour, maybe just interesting news from home. Most people accept that kind of deal easily enough. People, unfettered, know how to live, how to treat each other. I imagine Neanderthal man learned all this. I guess sometimes the lesson doesn’t stick. Sometimes they seem kind of stunned, as if they’ve been staring at the horizon too long, and they find it difficult to sit still in any one Earth. Long Earth Syndrome, it’s called, so I’m told.

We’ve had more formal contact from home. A postman does the rounds! A good man called Bill Lovell. From the mail we learned that some remote federal agency has validated our various land claims. The most important missive for me was a statement from Pioneer Support, the government agency that was set up to handle the affairs of emigrants. My bank accounts and investment funds are still running. I’m providing for Rod, of course, our ‘phobic’ son, our ‘homealone’, as I’m told current Datum slang has it. Tilda feels this is somehow cheating. Not in the pioneer spirit. But my intention was never to have any of us suffer out here. Why should we? This is my solution, my compromise to ensure my family is protected.

There’s been no letter from Rod, not one. We do write to him; he hasn’t written back. For better or worse we don’t discuss this. It breaks my heart slowly, however.

I want to finish this on a joyous note.

It’s now twenty-four hours or more since Cindy Wells went into labour, the colony’s first birth. Cindy called in her friends, and Helen went along, who’s training up on midwifery. She’s only just fifteen, my God. Well, the labour was long, but the birth came without complications. And as I write, it’s not long past dawn, they’re all still with Cindy.

I can’t tell you how proud I am. On Helen’s birthday too. (Thanks, Dad!)

So I have one extra chore to perform today. That town sign of ours needs modifying:

And in a sky on the other side of the world a gaudy airship hovered in the dawn light, listening to such whispered stories, before it vanished into deeper stepwise realities.