The Long War

3

IT WAS INDEED a perfect early spring evening.

Of course this world was no longer pristine, Joshua thought, as the three of them walked to the town hall for the school show. You could see the clearances nibbling into the forest by the river banks, and the smoke from the forges and workshops, and the tracks cutting through the forest straight and sharp. But still, what caught your eye was the essentials of the landscape, the bend of this stepwise copy of the Mississippi, and the bridges and the wooded expanses beyond the banks. Hell-Knows-Where looked the way its parent town back on the Datum – Hannibal, Missouri – had back in the nineteenth century, maybe, Mark Twain’s day. That was perfection, for his money.

But right now that perfect sky was marred by a twain hanging in the air.

The airship was being unloaded by rope chains, trunk by trunk, bale by bale. In the gathering twilight, its hull shining like bronze, it looked like a ship from another world, which in a sense it was. And though the town hall show was about to start, there were a few students outside watching the sky, the boys in particular looking hungry – boys who would give anything in the world to be twain drivers some day.

The twain was a symbol of many things, Joshua thought. Of the reality of the Long Earth itself, for a start.

The Long Earth: suddenly, on Step Day, twenty-five years before, mankind had found itself with the ability to step sideways, simply to walk into an infinite corridor of planet Earths, one after the next and the next. No spaceships required: each Earth was just a walk away. And every Earth was like the original, more or less, save for a striking lack of humanity and all its works. There was a world for everybody who wanted one, uncounted billions of worlds, if the leading theories were right.

There were some people who, faced with such a landscape, bolted the door and hid away. Some people did the same thing inside their heads. But others flourished. And for such people in their scattered settlements across the new worlds, a quarter-century on, the twains were becoming an essential presence.

After the pioneering exploratory journey ten years back by Joshua and Lobsang in the Mark Twain – that ship had been a prototype, the first cargo- and passenger-carrying craft capable of stepwise motion – Douglas Black, of the Black Corporation who’d built the Twain, and the majority owner of the subsidiary that supported Lobsang and his various activities, had announced that the technology was to be a gift to the world. It had been a typical gesture by Black, greeted with loud cynicism about his motives, welcomed with open arms by all. Now, a decade later, the twains were doing for the colonization of the Long Earth what the Conestoga wagon and Pony Express had once done for the Old West. The twains flew and flew, knitting together the burgeoning stepwise worlds . . . They had even stimulated the growth of new industries themselves. Helium for their lift sacs, scarce on Datum Earth, was now being extracted from stepwise copies of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Nowadays even the news was dispersed across the Long Earth by the airship fleets. A kind of multi-world internet was growing up, known as the ‘outernet’. On each world they passed through the airships would download rapid update packets to local nodes to be spread laterally across that world, and would upload any ongoing messages and mail. And when airships met, away from the big Datum–Valhalla spine route, they would hold a ‘gam’ – a word resurrected from the days of the old whaling fleets – where they would swap news and correspondence. It was all kind of informal, but then so had been the structure of the pre-Step Day internet on the Datum. And being informal it was robust; as long as your message had the right address, it would find its way home.

Of course there were some in places like Hell-Knows-Where who resented the presence of these interlopers, because the twains, one way or another, represented the reach of the Datum government: a reach that wasn’t always welcome. The administration’s policy towards its Long Earth colonies had swung back and forth with the years, from hostility and even exclusion, to cooperation and legislation. Nowadays the rule was that once a colony had more than one hundred people, it was supposed to report itself back to the federal government on Datum Earth as an ‘official’ presence. Soon you would be on the map, and the twains would come, floating down from the sky to deliver people and livestock, raw materials and medical care, and carry away any produce you wanted to export via local links to the great stepwise transport hubs like Valhalla.

As they travelled between the old United States and the worlds of its Aegis – all the way out to Valhalla, the best part of a million and a half steps from the Datum – the twains connected the many Americas, comfortably suggesting that they were all marching to the same drum. This despite the fact that many people in the stepwise worlds didn’t know which drum you were talking about or what the hell beat it was playing, their priority being themselves and their neighbours. The Datum and its regulations, politics and taxes seemed an increasingly remote abstraction, twains or not . . .

And right now two people looked up at this latest twain with suspicious eyes.

Sally said, ‘Do you think he is up there?’

Joshua said, ‘An iteration at least. The twains can’t step without some artificial intelligence on board. You know him; he is all iteration. He likes to be where the action is, and right now everywhere is where the action is.’

They were talking about Lobsang, of course. Even now Joshua would have difficulty in explaining who exactly Lobsang was. Or what. Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else’s computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan . . .

Joshua said, ‘Incidentally I heard a rumour that he has an iteration headed out of the solar system altogether, on some kind of spaceprobe. You know him, he always takes the long view. And there’s no such thing as too much backup.’

‘So now he could survive the sun exploding,’ Sally said dryly. ‘That’s good to know. You have much contact with him?’

‘No. Not now. Not for ten years. Not since he, or whichever version of him resides on the Datum, let Madison be flattened by a backpack nuke. That was my home town, Sally. What use is a presence like Lobsang if he couldn’t stop that? And if he could have stopped it, why didn’t he?’

Sally shrugged. Back then, she’d stepped into the ruins of Madison at his side. Evidently she had no answer.

He became aware of Helen walking ahead of the two of them, talking to a gaggle of neighbours, wearing what Joshua, a veteran of nine years of marriage, called her ‘polite’ expression. Suitably alarmed, he hurried to catch her up.

He thought they were all relieved when they got to the town hall. Sally read the title of the show from a hand-painted poster tacked to the wall: ‘“The Revenge of Moby-Dick”. You have got to be kidding me.’

Joshua couldn’t suppress a grin. ‘It’s good stuff. Wait for the bit where the illegal whaling fleet gets its comeuppance. The kids learned some Japanese just for that scene. Come on, we’ve got seats up front . . .’

It was indeed a remarkable show, from the opening scene in which a narrator in a salt-stained oilskin jacket walked to the front of the stage: ‘Call me Ishmael.’

‘Hi, Ishmael!’

‘Hi, boys and girls! . . .’

By the time the singing squid got three encores after the big closing number, ‘Harpoon of Love’, even Sally was laughing out loud.

In the after-show party, children and parents mingled in the hall. Sally stayed on, clutching a drink. But her expression, Joshua thought, as she looked around at the chattering adults, the children’s bright faces, gradually soured.

Joshua risked asking, ‘What’s on your mind now?’

‘It’s all so damn nice.’

Helen said, ‘You never did trust nice, did you, Sally?’

‘I can’t help thinking you’re wide open.’

‘Wide open to what?’

‘If I was a cynic I would be wondering if sooner or later some charismatic douche-bag might stomp all over this Little House on the Prairie dream of yours.’ She glanced at Helen. ‘Sorry for saying “douche-bag” in front of your kids.’

To Joshua’s amazement, and apparently Sally’s, Helen burst out laughing. ‘You don’t change, do you, Sally? Well, that’s not going to happen. The stomping thing. Look – I think we’re pretty robust here. Physically and intellectually robust, I mean. For a start we don’t do God here. Most of the parents at Hell-Knows-Where are atheist unbelievers, or agnostics at best – simply people who get on with their lives without requiring help from above. We do teach our kids the golden rule—’

‘Do as you would be done by.’

‘That’s one version. And similar basic life lessons. We get along fine. We work together. And I think we do pretty well for the kids. They learn because we make it fun. See young Michael, the boy in the wheelchair over there? He wrote the script for the play, and Ahab’s song was entirely his own work.’

‘Which one? “I’d Swap My Other Leg for Your Heart”?’

‘That’s the one. He’s only seventeen, and if he never gets a chance at developing his music there is no justice.’

Sally looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. ‘Well, with people like you two around, he’ll get his chance.’

Helen’s expression flickered. ‘Are you mocking us?’

Joshua tensed for the fireworks.

But Sally merely said, ‘Don’t tell anybody I said so. But I envy you, Helen Valienté née Green. A little bit anyhow. Although not over Joshua. This drink’s terrific, by the way, what is it?’

‘There is a tree in these parts, a maple of sorts . . . I’ll show you if you like.’ She held up her glass in a toast. ‘Here’s to you, Sally.’

‘What for?’

‘Well, for keeping Joshua alive long enough to meet me.’

‘That’s true enough.’

‘And you’re our guest here for as long as you wish. But – tell me the truth. You’re here to take Joshua away again, aren’t you?’

Sally looked into her glass and said calmly, ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

Joshua asked, ‘It’s the trolls, right? Sally, what exactly is it you want me to do about that?’

‘Follow up the arguments about animal protection laws. Raise the current cases, at Plumbline and the Gap, and elsewhere. Try to get some kind of troll protection order properly drawn up and enforced—’

‘You mean, go back to the Datum.’

She smiled. ‘Do a Davy Crockett, Joshua. Come in from the backwoods and go to Congress. You’re one of the few Long Earth pioneers who have any kind of profile on the Datum. You, and a few axe murderers.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So will you come?’

Joshua glanced at Helen. ‘I’ll think about it.’

Helen looked away. ‘Come on, let’s find Dan. Enough excitement for one night, it will be a trial getting him to sleep . . .’

Helen had to get up twice that night before she got Dan settled.

When she returned the second time she nudged Joshua. ‘You awake?’

‘I am now.’

‘I’ve been thinking. If you do go, Dan and I are coming with you. At least as far as Valhalla. And he ought to see the Datum once in his life.’

‘He’d love that,’ Joshua murmured sleepily.

‘Not when he finds out we’re planning to send him to school at Valhalla . . .’ For all she’d bigged up the town’s school to Sally Linsay, Helen still wanted to send Dan to the city for a while, so he could broaden his contacts, get an experience wide enough for him to make his own informed choices about his future. ‘Sally’s really not so bad when she isn’t channelling Annie Oakley.’

‘Mostly she means well,’ murmured Joshua. ‘And if she doesn’t mean well the recipient of her wrath generally deserves it.’

‘You seem . . . preoccupied.’

He rolled over to face her. ‘I looked up the outernet updates from the twain. Sally wasn’t exaggerating, about the troll incidents.’

Helen felt for his hand. ‘It’s all been set up. It’s not just Sally turning up like this. I get the impression that your chauffeur is sitting waiting for you in the sky.’

‘It is a coincidence that a twain should show up just now, isn’t it?’

‘Can’t you leave it to Lobsang?’

‘It doesn’t work like that, honey. Lobsang doesn’t work like that.’ Joshua yawned, leaned over, kissed her cheek, and rolled away. ‘Grand show, wasn’t it?’

Helen lay, still sleepless. After a while she asked, ‘Do you have to go?’

But Joshua was already snoring.