The Long War

5

HELEN VALIENTÉ, NÉE Green, remembered very well the moment when relations between the Datum and its far-flung children across the Long Earth had first soured.

She’d been a young teenager, still living at Reboot, on Earth West 101,754. She’d kept a journal throughout those years, all the way from her childhood in Datum Madison, their move to Madison West 5, and then her family’s trek across a hundred thousand worlds to found a new town in an empty world, a town they had hammered together themselves, starting with nothing but their own hands and minds and hearts. And their reward from Datum America – and they had still thought of themselves as Americans – had been rejection. That had been the moment, in retrospect, even more than her mother’s illness, when Helen’s mild-mannered father Jack Green had completed his own inner journey from Datum-raised software engineer, to sturdy colonist, to firebrand radical thinker.

Twelve years ago. She had been fifteen years old . . .

Crisis. The still-young town of Reboot had split apart.

Some people had walked out, to start up again on their own. Others had gone back to the Hundred K station to wait for a Company to form up for a trek back to Datum Earth.

Worst of all for Helen, Dad wasn’t speaking to Mom, despite her illness.

It was all the government’s fault. They all got The Letter, every household, delivered by shamefaced mailman Bill Lovell. Bill himself had already been fired by the US Mail, but he said he was going to keep making his rounds even so until his boots wore out, and the people promised to feed him, in return.

The Letter was from the federal government. Everybody with a permanent residence beyond Earth 20, West or East, with assets back on Datum Earth, was having those assets frozen, and ultimately impounded.

With Mom ill in bed, Dad had to explain all this to Helen – words like ‘assets’ and ‘impounded’. Basically it meant that all the money Dad and Mom had earned before upping sticks for their trek into the Long Earth, and had left in bank accounts and other funds back on Earth to pay for stuff like Mom’s cancer medicines and for stay-at-home brother Rod’s care and for a college education for Helen and sister Katie if they ever wanted it, had been stolen by the government. Stolen. That was Dad’s word. It didn’t seem too harsh to Helen.

Dad said the economy on Earth had taken a knock from stepping. That was obvious even before the Greens had left. All those people who disappeared into the Long Earth had been a big drain from the labour pool, and only a trickle of goods came back the other way; those left behind were furious at having to subsidize work-shy hoboes, as they saw the departed. Meanwhile some people couldn’t step at all, and had started to resent those who could. People like Rod, of course, Helen’s own home-alone non-stepper brother. She often wondered what he was feeling.

Dad said, ‘I’m guessing the government is appeasing the anti-stepper lobby by perpetrating this theft. I blame that loudmouth Cowley.’

‘So what are we going to do about it?’

‘We’ll hold a meeting in city hall, that’s what.’

Well, they didn’t have a city hall, at that time. They did have a communal field cleared of forest and rocks that they called city hall, so that was where they gathered. Just as well it wasn’t raining, Helen thought.

Reese Henry, the former used-car salesman who was the nearest they had to a mayor, chaired the meeting, in his usual bullying way. He held up The Letter. ‘What are we going to do about this?’

They weren’t going to put up with it, that was what. There was a lot of talk about forming up a mass hike and marching on Datum Washington. But who was going to feed the chickens?

They resolved to make inventories of all the stuff they still imported from Datum Earth. Medicines, for one. Books, paper, pens, electronic gadgets, even luxuries like perfumes. By sharing and swapping and mending, maybe they could manage with what they had until things settled down. The idea was floated of getting together with the neighbours. There was a bunch of nearby settlements spread over a few dozen worlds that some were starting to call ‘New Scarsdale County’. They could help each other out in case of scarcities and emergencies.

Some spoke of going back. A mother with a diabetic kid. Folk who found that advancing age wasn’t mixing well with the hard work of farming. A few who just seemed to feel scared without the backing of the government, however remote it was. But others, like Helen’s dad, urged nobody to leave. They all relied on each other. They had put together a spectrum of complementary skills that enabled them to survive if they worked together. They couldn’t let the community they’d built be pulled apart. And so on.

Reese Henry let it all ramble on, and run down. They broke up without resolution.

The next morning, however, the sun rose on schedule, the chickens needed feeding and the water needed toting from the well, and somehow life went on.

Three months later.

Helen’s sister Katie had quietly brought forward her wedding. She and Harry Bergreen had been planning to wait until the following year, when they were hoping for a proper house-raising. Everybody knew that they were getting married now while Mom was still around to see it.

Helen was enough of a girly girl that she had grown up dreaming of fairytale-princess weddings. Well, this day turned out to be a pioneers’ wedding. Kind of different, but still fun.

The guests had started arriving early, but Katie and Harry and their families were ready to meet them. Bride and groom were dressed in informal clothes, no white gowns or morning suits here, but Katie was wearing a small, pretty veil made by sister Helen from the lining of an old hiking jumpsuit.

As time wore on people showed up from outside Reboot itself, friends and acquaintances from communities like New Scarsdale and even further afield. The guests brought gifts: flowers and food for the day, and practical stuff – cutlery, pots, plates, coffee pots, kettles, frying pans, a hearth set, a boot scraper. Some of this stuff had been made locally, pottery cast on Reboot wheels, or iron gadgets hammered out in Reboot forges. It didn’t look much, piled up before the Greens’ big hearth, but Helen realized it soon amounted to pretty much all a young couple would need to equip their first home.

Around noon Reese Henry arrived. Wearing a reasonably smart jacket, clean jeans and boots, and a string tie, he scrubbed up well. Helen knew that nobody in Reboot took ‘Mayor Henry’ as seriously as he took himself. But still, you needed one individual in a community with the authority to formalize a marriage – an authority backed by some remote government, or not – and he played the part well. Plus his hair was magnificent.

And when Harry Bergreen kissed his bride a little after midday and everybody applauded, and the bride’s mother held on to her husband’s arm to make sure she stayed standing for the pictures, even Bill the mailman had tears welling in his eyes.

That one was a good day, Helen recorded in her journal.

And three months later:

‘2nd baby for Betty Doak Hansen. Hlthy B, 7lb. Mthr ill, ndd stches & bld . . .’

Helen had been tired. Too tired to write in this damn code in her journal, even if they did have to conserve paper now.

This latest delivery hadn’t been a bad birth, as they went. Belle Doak and her little team of midwives and helpers, including Helen, were pretty competent at it by now. Although, this morning, it had been a close-run thing. Helen had to run around town asking for blood donors. They were all walking blood banks, for the benefit of their neighbours. But it wasn’t always fast enough. Memo to self, she thought: set up some kind of list of blood types and willing donors.

Dad had left early this morning, not long after Helen got in. Down at Mom’s grave probably, the stone by the river. Mom had always loved that spot. It was already a month since she’d died of her tumour, and Dad was still racked by guilt over it, as if it were somehow his fault, somehow caused by his bringing her here. It made no sense, especially since as far as Helen remembered her mother had always been the driving force behind their leaving the Datum in the first place.

A month, though, which made it more than six months since they had all been fired en masse by the federal government. Gosh, Helen thought now, we’re still here, who’d have thought it?

They had had to learn fast. They had relied more than they’d realized on various props from the old country. Now they made everything! They knitted, brewed beer, dipped candles, made soap. You could make a good vinegar from pumpkin rind. Toothpaste! – from ground-up charcoal. It helped a lot when Bill Lovell came round selling his new product: miniaturized sets of encyclopaedias, and copies of Scientific American from pre-1950, full of exploded diagrams of steam engines and practical advice on a whole slew of stuff. They were even rethinking the crops they were growing in the farms and gardens, after the vitamin pill supply dried up and they’d even had a couple of cases of scurvy. Scurvy!

And they helped each other out: I fetch water for you while your little one’s ill, you feed my chickens when I’m away up country. There was a kind of unwritten price for everything, recorded as ‘favours’, a loosely defined currency based on service and barter and promissory notes. Mom would probably have loved the theory of it all, an emerging, self-organizing local economy.

Despite dire warnings from some about what would happen when the theoretical protection of the Datum government had been lifted, they hadn’t suddenly been overwhelmed by armies of bandits. Oh, there had been problems, for instance the waves of ‘new’ colonists who sporadically walked out from the Datum or the Low Earths and tried to settle in Reboot’s country. Legally it was a tricky situation, since such claims as the Reboot colonists did have were lodged with a Datum federal government which showed no interest in them any more. But the mayor in New Scarsdale was usually able to buy the newcomers off by signing bits of paper granting them land fifty or a hundred worlds further up West, a deal lubricated with fistfuls of vouchers for drinks in the tavern. There was always room, so much room up here that almost any problem like that could be resolved.

Of course there was a steady drizzle of thefts, of food, from the fields – even, in this age of stepping, from within houses. Mostly you turned a blind eye. Things got more serious when a boy called Doug Collinson was caught red-handed taking beta blockers from Melissa Harris’s medicine chest, prescribed for her mild heart condition. Doug didn’t need them himself; he was just going to sell them someplace else. Decent drugs were among the most precious commodities they had. Well, Melissa caught him, and she had the presence of mind to swing her stick and smash his Stepper so he couldn’t get away before the neighbours came running in. Right now Doug was in confinement in somebody’s cellar, while the adults debated what to do about it. Slowly, out of the need to react to such incidents, a framework for maintaining law and order was emerging, maybe ultimately based on some kind of court shared with communities like New Scarsdale in the neighbouring worlds.

The framework of Helen’s own life was slowly emerging too. Dad constantly pointed out that Helen was sixteen years old now and needed to choose a path in life. Well, fine. There was her midwifery. And she was thinking of specializing in medicines: herbs and stuff. A lot of the plants and fungi they found on Earth West 101,754 weren’t familiar from Datum Earth. She could become an itinerant seller, or maybe a tutor, a guru, taking her arts and wares and unique flora across the worlds. Or not. She thought she’d find her way.

They weren’t in paradise. The Long Earth was a big arena, where you could feel lost, and you could lose yourself. But maybe all this room was going to be the ultimate gift of the Long Earth to mankind. Room that gave everyone the chance to live as they liked. Helen had decided she liked the happy compromise they were figuring out in Reboot.

Well, not long after that, along had come Joshua Valienté, returning from the far stepwise West, towing a defunct airship and trailing the romance of the High Meggers – and, yes, with Sally Linsay at his side. Helen, then seventeen years old, had had her world turned upside down. Soon she’d moved away with Joshua, and married him, and now here they were building another fine young community.

The Datum government, meanwhile, had reached out to its scattered colonies once more, and gathered them into the embrace of its ‘Aegis’. Suddenly everybody had to pay taxes. Jack Green, who had been enraged by the Letter and the cut-off, was if anything even more enraged by the imposition of the Aegis . . . Without her mother, Helen believed, he was filling an empty life with politics.

And then Sally showed up again, and once more Joshua was distracted.

The night before they were due to leave on the twain for Valhalla, with their bags all packed, Helen couldn’t sleep. She went out on to their veranda, into air that was warm for March on this chilly Earth. She looked at the twain still waiting at anchor in the sky over the town, its running lights like a model galaxy. She murmured, ‘We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise . . .’

Joshua came out to find her. He folded his strong arms around her waist, and nuzzled her neck. ‘What’s that, honey?’

‘Oh, an old poem. By a Victorian poet called Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. I helped Bob Johansen teach it to the eighth-graders the other day. We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise, / And the door stood open at our feast, / When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, / And a man with his back to the East. Isn’t that haunting?’

‘You won’t lose me, to West or East. I promise.’

She found she couldn’t reply.