The Long War

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 between 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.