The Long War

6

NELSON AZIKIWE – or the Reverend Nelson as his congregation called him in church, or Rev as they called him down the pub – watched as Ken the shepherd grabbed a pregnant ewe and slung it over his shoulder. To Nelson this was an astounding display of strength: Ken’s ewes were no lightweights. Then Ken walked forward towards a hedgerow.

And took another step and completely vanished.

And reappeared a few seconds later, wiped his hands with a none too clean towel, and said, ‘That will do for now. There’s still a few wolves that haven’t got the message yet. I suppose I’d better get Ted to draw me another thousand yards of electric fence. Don’t you want to come and see, Rev? You’ll be surprised at how much we’ve done. Just a step away, you know.’

Nelson hesitated. He hated the nausea that came with stepping; they said that after a while you hardly noticed, and maybe so, at least for some, but for Nelson every step was a penance. But it paid to be neighbourly. After all it had been a long time since breakfast, and with luck he might get away with a few dry heaves. So he fingered the Stepper switch in his pocket, clapped his handkerchief over his mouth . . .

When he’d recovered somewhat, the first thing he noticed, in this England one step away from home, was not the painstakingly cleared field of grass at his feet but the trees of the remnant forest beyond Ken’s dry stone wall. Big trees, old trees, giants. Some were fallen, their trunks bright with moulds and fungi, and to a clergyman that could have been the spark for a nice little inspirational sermon on the mighty and the futility of their ambitions. But Nelson, in his late forties now, wasn’t planning to be a clergyman for much longer.

The light seemed to be a little more golden than it was pre-step, and he glanced up at the sun, which seemed to be in the right place this March day . . . more or less. Though time on the various Earths seemed to flow at the same rate, and the events that defined the calendar – sunrise and sunset, the seasons – seemed synchronized from world to world, according to last week’s Nature some of the new Earths did not appear to tick exactly to the same clock, sometimes leading or following their immediate neighbours by a fraction of a second, as you could prove by such means as very precise astronomical observations, like the occultation of stars by the moon. The discrepancies were minute but real. Nelson could think of no plausible explanation for this. Nobody knew how or why this phenomenon happened, but as yet nobody was researching it because it was just one of a multitude of puzzles generated by the multiple worlds. How strange, how eerie . . .

Of course he had stopped thinking like a priest, having, perhaps shamefully, reverted to his ground state of being: a scientist. But still, people all over the world – including some of his own flock – had for a quarter of a century now been abandoning their homes and packing up their kids and buggering off into this great hall of worlds called the Long Earth, and yet nobody knew how it worked, even on the most basic level of how time flowed, or how all those worlds had got there . . . and still less what they were for. How was a priest supposed to react to that?

Which was, indirectly anyhow, the reason for Nelson’s current inner turmoil.

Fortunately for the goats and the gravid sheep around him, and for Joy, the young sheepdog Ken was training, they did not have to lie awake at night wondering about this sort of thing. Having given him their usual slotted glances, the animals ambled away, the sheep eating the grass, the goats devouring just about everything else.

Shepherd Ken had told him how the whole Long Earth deal worked for the likes of him. In England West and East 1 and 2, the farmers had been clearing forested land on a scale not seen since the Stone Age – and they had had to relearn how to do it. First you cut down a lot of trees, being careful to put the timber to good use, and then you set loose the animals, either bred here or carried over as young from the Datum one by one. Any hopeful saplings would succumb to the onslaught of the sheep and goats, forestalling the return of the forest. And in time the grass would come. Clever stuff, grass, Ken liked to say, a plant that actually thrived on being eaten down to the ground.

Nelson had rather misjudged Ken when he had first met this suntanned, rugged, rather taciturn man, a local whose ancestors had lived on these hills since there were such things as ancestors. It was only by chance that he found out that Ken had been a lecturer at the University of Bath until, like many others, shortly after Step Day he re-evaluated his lifestyle and his future – which turned out, in his case, to be this farm just one step away from the Datum.

In that, Ken was typical of his nation, in a way. The British experience of the Long Earth had been in the beginning mostly a painful one. Such had been the early exodus from these crowded islands, particularly from the battered industrial cities of the north, Wales and Scotland, regions isolated from the increasingly complacent city-state that was London, that a rapid population loss had led to an economic crash – even a collapse of the currency, briefly. They had called it the Great Bog Off.

But then the stepwise Britains had begun their own economic growth. And there had been a second wave of emigration, more cautious, hard-headed and industrious. By now there were whole new Industrial Revolutions going on in the Low Earths; the British seemed to have the building of steam engines and railways in their genes. Some of that hard-acquired wealth had already started to flow back into the Datum.

In the long run, in their exploration and colonization of the Long Earth, the British had proved to be thorough, patient, careful, and ultimately pretty successful. Just like Ken.

But now Nelson had his own journey to make.

They spent some time discussing the vigour and health of Ken’s flock. Then Nelson cleared his throat and said, ‘You know, Ken, I’ve loved my time here in the parish. There’s been a kind of peacefulness. A sense that although the surface of things changes, the soul of them does not. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Umm,’ said Ken.

‘When I first came here I walked the hills. There are signs of people having lived here for ever – since before England was England. In the graveyard and on the war memorial I found family names repeated across hundreds of years. Sometimes a man went away to fight for a king he didn’t know, in a place he’d never heard of. Sometimes he didn’t come back at all. And yet the land endured, you know? Even as this countryside, remote from the urban centres, has survived more or less intact through the great convulsions since Step Day. It must have been very hard for such men to leave such a place. Just as it will be for me.’

‘You, Rev?’

‘You are the first to know. I have had a word with the Bishop, and he has agreed that I can move out just as soon as my successor is in place.’ He looked out over the flocks. ‘Look at them. They graze as if they will graze for eternity, and are content with that.’

‘But you’re no sheep, Rev.’

‘Quite so. The fact is I’ve spent a lot of my life being a scientist, and am obligated to a different covenant than the one I bow to at the moment – although I must say that in my head the two have rather melded together. In short I need to find a new purpose, one more suited to my talents and my background. If you’ll pardon my immodesty.’

‘You’ve pardoned me for worse, Rev.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. Now if you’re done here let me stand you a pint down the pub. And then I have some calls to make.’

Ken said, ‘Well, that’s nice. About the pint, I mean.’ He whistled. ‘Joy! Here, girl.’

The dog came bounding up, tail wagging, and leapt into Ken’s strong arms, just as she’d been trained, so she could be carried back to the Datum. She was a dog whose supper bowl was currently lodged in a different corner of the multiverse entirely, but who had no concern about that as long as her master whistled for her.