Contents
About the Book
Diagram
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Also by Terry Pratchett
Also by Stephen Baxter
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Doubleday,
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Terry and Lyn Pratchett and Stephen Baxter 2013
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448127054
ISBN 9780857520111
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Lyn and Rhianna, as always
T.P.
For Sandra
S.B.
ON AN ALTERNATE world, two million steps from Earth:
The troll female was called Mary by her handlers, Monica Jansson read on the rolling caption on the video clip. No one knew what the troll called herself. Now two of those handlers, both men, one in a kind of spacesuit, faced Mary as she cowered in a corner of what looked like a high-tech laboratory – if a beast built like a brick wall covered in black fur could be said to cower at all – and she held her cub to her powerful chest. The cub, itself a slab of muscle, was similarly dressed up in its own silvery spacesuit, with wires dangling from sensors attached to its flat skull.
‘Give him back, Mary,’ one of the men could be heard to say. ‘Come on now. We’ve been planning this test for a long time. George here will haul him over into the Gap in his spacesuit, he’ll float around in vacuum for an hour or so, and then he’ll be right back here safe and sound. He’ll even have fun.’
The other man stayed ominously silent.
The first approached Mary, a step at a time. ‘No ice cream if you keep this up.’
Mary’s big, very human hands made gestures, signs, a blur. Rapid, hard to follow, but decisive.
As the incident had been replayed over and over there had been a lot of online speculation about why Mary hadn’t just stepped away at this point. Probably it was simply that she was being held underground: you couldn’t step into or out of a cellar, into the solid rock you’d find stepwise. Besides, Jansson, a retired lieutenant formerly of Madison Police Department, knew there were plenty of ways to stop a troll stepping, if you could get your hands on the animal.
The theory of what these men were trying to do was much discussed too. They were in a world next door to the Gap – a step away from vacuum, from space, from a hole where an Earth ought to be. They were building a space programme out there, and wanted to see if troll labour, highly useful across the Long Earth, could be exploited in the Gap. Not surprisingly adult trolls were very reluctant to step over into that drifting emptiness, so the GapSpace researchers were trying to habituate the young. Like this cub.
‘We haven’t got time for this,’ said the second man. He produced a metal rod, a stunner. He walked forward, holding the rod out towards Mary’s chest. ‘Time for Mommy to say goodnight for a while—’
The adult troll grabbed the rod, snapped it in two, and jammed the sharp, broken end into the second man’s right eye.
Every time you saw it, it was shocking.
The man fell back screaming, blood spilling, very bright red. The first guy pulled him back, out of shot. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’
Mary, holding her cub, her fur splashed with human blood, repeated the gestures she had made, over and over.
Things happened quickly after that. These space cadets had tried to put down this troll, this mother, immediately. They even pulled a gun on her. But they’d been stopped by an older guy, more dignified, who looked to Jansson like a retired astronaut.
And now retribution was on hold, because of the attention focused on the case.
Since this lab recording had been leaked it had become an outernet sensation in itself, and had led to a flood of similar reports. There was cruelty to beasts, and especially the trolls, it seemed, all over the Long Earth. Internet and outernet were alight with flame wars between those who believed in mankind’s right to do as it wished with the denizens of the Long Earth, all the way to putting them down when it suited – some referring back to the Biblical dominion given to humans over fish, fowl, cattle, and creeping things – and others who wished that mankind didn’t have to take all its flaws out into the new worlds. This incident at the Gap, precisely because it had taken place at the heart of a nascent space programme, an expression of mankind’s highest aspirations – and even though it betrayed a kind of insensitivity, Jansson thought, rather than downright cruelty – had become a poster case. A vociferous minority called for the federal government on Datum Earth to do something about it.
And others wondered what the trolls thought about it all. Because trolls had ways of communicating too.
Monica Jansson, watching the clip in her apartment in Madison West 5, tried to read Mary’s hand signs. She knew the language trolls were taught in experimental establishments like this one was based on a human language, American Sign Language. Jansson had had a little familiarization with signing in the course of her police career; she was no expert, but she could read what the troll was saying. And so, she imagined, could millions of others across the Long Earth, wherever this clip was being accessed:
I will not.
I will not.
I will not.
This was no dumb animal. This was a mother trying to protect a child.
Don’t get involved, Jansson told herself. You’re retired, and you’re sick. Your crusading days are over.
There was, of course, no choice. She turned off the monitor, popped another pill, and started making calls.
And on a world almost as far away as the Gap:
A creature that was not quite a human faced a creature that was not quite a dog.
People called the humanoid’s kind kobolds, more or less inaccurately. ‘Kobold’ was an old German name for a mine-spirit. This particular kobold, peculiarly addicted to human music – in particular 1960s rock music – had never been near a mine.
And people called these dog-like creatures beagles, equally inaccurately. They were not beagles, and they were like nothing Darwin had seen from the most famous Beagle of all.
Neither kobold nor beagle cared about names humans gave them. But they cared about humans. Or rather, despised them. Even though, in the kobold’s case, he was also helplessly fascinated by humans and their culture.
‘Trollen unhap-ppy, everywhere,’ hissed the kobold.
‘Good,’ the beagle growled. She was a bitch. She wore a gold finger-ring set with sapphires on a thong around her neck. ‘Good. Smell of c-hrr-imes of stink-crotches stains world.’
The kobold’s speech was almost like a human’s. The beagle’s was a matter of growls, gestures, postures, pawing at the ground. Yet they understood each other, using a quasi-human language as a common patois.
And they had a common cause.
‘Drive stink-crotches back to their-hrr den.’ The beagle lifted her body and stood upright, raised her wolf-like head, and howled. Soon responses came from all across the humid landscape.
The kobold exulted at the chance of acquisition as a result of all this trouble, acquisition of the goods he treasured himself, and of others he could trade. But he strove to hide his fear of the beagle princess, his unlikely customer and ally.
And at a military base on Datum Hawaii, US Navy Commander Maggie Kauffman gazed up in wonder at the USS Benjamin Franklin, an airship the size of the Hindenburg, the brand new vessel that was hers to command …
And in a sleepy English village the Reverend Nelson Azikiwe pondered his little parish church in the context of the Long Earth, a treasured scrap of antiquity amid unmapped immensity, and considered his own future …
And in a bustling city more than a million steps from the Datum, a one-time stepwise pioneer called Jack Green carefully phrased an appeal for liberty and dignity in the Long Earth …
And at Yellowstone Park, Datum Earth:
It was only Ranger Herb Lewis’s second day on the job. He sure as hell didn’t know how to deal with this angry in-your-face complaint from Mr and Mrs Virgil Davies of Los Angeles about how upset their nine-year-old, Virgilia, had become, and how Daddy had been made to look a liar, on her birthday. It wasn’t Herb’s fault if Old Faithful had failed to blow. It was no consolation at all when, later that day, the family found their faces all over the news channels and websites as the geyser’s misbehaviour hit the headlines …
And in a Black Corporation medical facility on a Low Earth:
‘Sister Agnes? I have to wake you again for a little while, just for calibration …’
Agnes thought she heard music. ‘I am awake. I think.’
‘Welcome back.’
‘Back from where? Who are you? And what’s that chanting?’
‘Hundreds of Tibetan monks. For forty-nine days you have been—’
‘And that dreary music?’
‘Oh. You can blame John Lennon for that. The lyrics are quotes from the Book of the Dead.’
‘What a racket.’
‘Agnes, your physical orientation will take some time yet. But I think it should be possible for you to see yourself in the mirror. This won’t take long …’
She could not tell how long, but eventually there was light, very soft but growing steadily.
‘You will feel some pressure as you are lifted to a standing position. It should not be unpleasant. We cannot work on your ambulant abilities until you are stronger, but you will meld into your new body with minimal pain. Trust me, I have been through this myself many times before. You will be able to see yourself about … now.’
And Sister Agnes looked down at herself. At her body: pink, naked, raw, and very female. Without feeling her lips move – and indeed without actually feeling her lips at all – Agnes demanded, ‘Who ordered those?’
SALLY LINSAY ARRIVED at Hell-Knows-Where fast and furious. But when had that ever been unusual?
Joshua Valienté heard her voice coming from the house, as he was heading back from an afternoon’s work in his forge. On this world, as on all the worlds of the Long Earth, it was late March, and the light was already fading. Since she’d shown up on the day of his wedding nine years ago a visit from this particular old friend had been rare, and generally meant that something was amiss – amiss in spades. As Helen, his wife, would also know all too well. His stomach knotting, Joshua hurried his step.
He found Sally sitting at the kitchen table, nursing coffee in a local-pottery mug. She was looking away from him, she hadn’t noticed him yet, and he paused at the door to study her, taking in the scene, getting his bearings.
Helen was in the dry store, and Joshua saw she was digging out salt, pepper, matches. On the table, meanwhile, Sally had dumped enough butchered meat to last for weeks. This was pioneer protocol. The Valientés didn’t need the meat, of course, but that was no matter. The deal was that the visiting traveller brought the meat, and the householder repaid the gift not only with a meal, the catch properly dressed and cooked, but also with some of those little comforts that were hard to find in the wilderness, such as salt, pepper, a good night’s sleep in a proper bed. Joshua smiled. Sally prided herself on being somewhat more self-sufficient than Daniel Boone and Captain Nemo put together, but surely even Daniel Boone must’ve craved pepper – just like Sally.
She was forty-three years old now, a few years older than Joshua and sixteen years older than Helen, which didn’t help their various interrelationships. Her greying hair was tied neatly back, and she wore her usual garb of heavy-duty jeans and sleeveless, multi-pocketed jacket. Just as she’d always been, she was lean, wiry, eerily still – and watchful.
Right now she was watching an object on the wall: a gold ring set with sapphires, hanging on a loop of string from a stubby local-forge iron nail. It was one of the few trophies Joshua had kept of the journey of discovery across the Long Earth that the two of them had made with Lobsang. Or, The Journey, as the world knew it ten years later. It was a gaudy thing, and too large for a human finger. But then, humans hadn’t made it, as Sally would remember. Just below the ring hung another bit of jewellery, a monkey bracelet, plastic and paste: a thing for a kid, gaudy, silly. Joshua was pretty sure Sally would remember the significance of that too.
He walked forward, deliberately pushing the door to make it creak. She turned and surveyed him, critical, unsmiling.
He said, ‘Heard you arrive.’
‘You’ve put on weight.’
‘Nice to see you too, Sally. I take it you’ve a reason for coming here. You always have a reason.’
‘Oh, yes.’
I wonder if Calamity Jane was like this, Joshua thought as he reluctantly sat down. Like a gunpowder explosion going off periodically in the middle of your life. Maybe, though Sally had marginally better access to toiletries.
Helen was now in the kitchen, and Joshua smelled meat on the griddle. When he caught Helen’s eye she waved away his silent offer of help. He recognized tact when he saw it. Helen was trying to give them some space. Tact, yes, but he also feared this was the beginning of one of Helen’s icy silences. Sally after all was a woman who’d had a long, complicated and famous relationship with her husband before he’d even known Helen. Sally had been at his side, in fact, when he first met Helen, then a seventeen-year-old pioneer in a brand new Long Earth colony town. His young wife was never going to jump for joy when Sally showed up again.
Sally was waiting for him to respond, ignorant of such subtleties, or uncaring.
He sighed. ‘So tell me. What brings you here this time?’
‘Another slimeball killed another troll.’
He grunted. There had been a blizzard of such incidents in the news brought by the outernet – incidents occurring across the Long Earth, from the Datum to Valhalla and beyond, evidently all the way up to the Gap, judging from recent sensational reports of a lurid case involving a cub in a 1950s-type spacesuit.
‘Butchered it, in this case,’ Sally said. ‘I mean, literally. Reported at an Aegis administration office at Plumbline, just inside the Meggers—’
‘I know it.’
‘It was a young one this time. Body parts taken for some kind of folk medicine. For once the guy’s actually been arrested on a cruelty charge. But his family are kicking up because, what the hell, it was just an animal, wasn’t it?’
Joshua shook his head. ‘We’re all under the US Aegis. What’s the argument? Aren’t Datum animal cruelty laws supposed to apply?’
‘That’s all a mess, Joshua, with different rulings at federal and state level, and arguments about how such rulings extend to the Long Earth anyhow. Not to mention the lack of resources to police them.’
‘I don’t follow Datum politics too closely. You know, here we protect trolls under an extension of our citizenship rights.’
‘Really?’
He smiled. ‘You sound surprised. You’re not the only one with a conscience, you know. Anyhow trolls are too damn useful to have them bothered, or driven away.’
‘Well, not everywhere is as civilized, evidently. You must remember, Joshua, that the Aegis is presided over by Datum politicians, which is to say, buttholes. And they really don’t get it! They are not the kind of people to get mud on their shiny shoes anywhere much beyond a park in Earth West 3. They have no idea of how important it is that humanity stays friendly with the trolls. The long call is full of it.’
Meaning every troll everywhere would soon know all about this.
Sally said now, ‘You know, the problem is that before Step Day most of what trolls knew and understood about humanity came from their experiences in places like Happy Landings, where they lived closely with humans. Peacefully, constructively …’
‘If a little creepily.’
‘Well, yes. What is happening now is that trolls are encountering ordinary folk. That is, idiots.’
With a sense of dread he asked, ‘Sally – why have you come here? What do you want me to do about this?’
‘Your duty, Joshua.’
She meant, Joshua knew, that he was to go with her, off into the Long Earth. Saving the worlds once again.
The hell with that, he thought. Times had changed. He’d changed. His duty was here: to his family, his home, this township which had, foolishly enough, elected him mayor.
Joshua had fallen in love with the place even before he had seen it, reckoning that the first-footers who had given their home a name like Hell-Knows-Where were very likely to be decent people with a sense of humour, as indeed they’d turned out to be. As for Helen, who had trekked out with her family to found a brand new township, this way of living was what she had grown up with. And this place they had come to, in a million-step-remote footprint of the Mississippi valley, had turned out to have air that was clean, a river lively with fish, a land rich with game and replete with other resources such as lead and iron ore seams. Thanks to a twain mass-spectrometry scan of nearby formations that Joshua had called in as a favour, they even had the makings of a copper mine. As a bonus, the climate here happened to be just a little cooler than on the Datum, and in the winter the local copy of the Mississippi regularly froze over – a thrilling spectacle, even if it did threaten a couple of careless lives every year.
When they’d arrived, Joshua, even compared with his new young wife, had been a novice settler, for all his trekking experience in the Long Earth. But now he was recognized as a skilled hunter, butcher, general artificer – and pretty nearly, these days, blacksmith and smelter. Not to mention mayor until the next poll. Helen, meanwhile, was a senior midwife and a top herbalist.
Of course it was hard work. A pioneer family lived beyond the reach of shopping malls, and bread always needed baking, hams needed curing, tallow had to be made, and beer had to be brewed. Out here, in fact, you worked all the time. But the work was pleasing. And the work was Joshua’s life now …
Sometimes he missed isolation. His sabbaticals, as he called them. The sense of emptiness when he was entirely alone on a world. The absence of the pressure of other minds, a pressure he felt even here, though it was a ghost compared with what he felt on the Datum. And the eerie sense of the other that he’d always called the Silence, like a hint of vast minds, or assemblages of minds, somewhere far off. He’d once met one of those mighty remote minds in the extraordinary First Person Singular. But there were more out there, he knew. He could hear them, like gongs sounding in distant mountains … Well, he’d had all that. But this, he’d belatedly discovered, was far more precious: his wife, their son, perhaps a second child some day.
Nowadays he tried to ignore what was going on beyond the town limits. After all, it wasn’t as though he owed the Long Earth anything. He’d saved lives on stepwise worlds on Step Day itself, and later had opened up half of them with Lobsang. He’d done his duty in this new age, hadn’t he?
But here was Sally, an incarnation of his past, sitting at his kitchen table, waiting for an answer. Well, he wasn’t going to rush to reply. Generally speaking Joshua wasn’t a trigger-fast speaker at the best of times. He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.
They stared it out.
To his relief, Helen walked in at last, and set out beer and burgers: home-brewed beer, home-raised beef, home-baked bread. She sat with them and began a pleasant enough conversation, asking Sally about her recent ports of call. When they’d eaten, Helen bustled about once more, clearing the plates, again refusing Joshua’s offer of help.
All the time there was another dialogue going on under the surface. Every marriage had its own private language. Helen knew very well why Sally was here, and after nine years of marriage Joshua could hear the feeling of imminent loss as if it were being broadcast on the radio.
If Sally heard it, she didn’t care. Once Helen had left them alone at the table once more, she started in again. ‘As you say, it’s not the only case.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘The Plumbline slaughter.’
‘So much for the chit-chat, eh, Sally?’
‘It’s not even the most notorious, right now. You want an itemized list?’
‘No.’
‘You see what’s happening here, Joshua. Humanity has been given a chance, with the Long Earth. A new start, an escape from the Datum, a whole world we already screwed up—’
‘I know what you’re going to say.’ Because she’d said it a million times before, in his hearing. ‘We’re going to bollocks up our second chance at Eden, even before the paint has dried.’
Helen deposited a large bowl of ice cream in the middle of the table with a definite thud.
Sally stared at it like a dog confronted by a brontosaurus bone. ‘You make ice cream? Here?’
Helen sat down. ‘Last year Joshua put in the hours on an ice house. It wasn’t a difficult project once we got round to it. The trolls like the ice cream. And we do get hot weather here; it’s wonderful to have something like this when you’re bartering with the neighbours.’
Joshua could hear the subtext, even if Sally couldn’t. This isn’t about ice cream. This is about our life. What we’re building here. Which you, Sally, have no part of.
‘Go on, help yourself, we have plenty more. It’s getting late – of course you’re welcome to stay the night. Would you like to come see Dan’s school play?’
Joshua saw the look of sheer terror on Sally’s face. As an act of mercy he said, ‘Don’t worry. It won’t be as bad as you think. We have smart kids, and decent and helpful parents, good teachers – I should know, I’m one of them, and so is Helen.’
‘Community schooling?’
‘Yes. We concentrate on survival skills, metallurgy, medical botany, Long Earth animal biology, the whole spectrum of practical skills from flint-working to glass-making …’
Helen said, ‘But it’s not all pioneer stuff. We have a high scholastic standard. They even learn Greek.’
‘Mr Johansen,’ said Joshua. ‘Peripatetic. Commutes twice a month from Valhalla.’ He smiled and pointed to the ice cream. ‘Get it while it’s cold.’
Sally took one large scoop, demolished it. ‘Wow. Pioneers with ice cream.’
Joshua felt motivated to defend his home. ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be like the Donner Party, Sally—’
‘You’re also pioneers with cellphones, aren’t you?’
It was true that life was a tad easier here than for pioneers on the Long Earth elsewhere. On this Earth, West 1,397,426, they even had sat-nav – and only Joshua, Helen and a few others knew why the Black Corporation had decided to use this particular world to try out their prototype technology, orbiting twenty-four nanosats from a small portable launcher. Call it a favour from an old friend …
Among those few others in the know was Sally, of course.
Joshua faced her. ‘Lay off, Sally. The sat-nav and the rest are here because of me. I know it. My friends know it.’
Helen grinned. ‘One of the engineers who called to fix up that stuff once told Joshua that the Black Corporation sees him as a “valuable long-term investment”. Worth cultivating, I suppose. Worth keeping sweet with little gifts.’
Sally snorted. ‘Meaning that’s how Lobsang sees you. How demeaning.’
Joshua ignored that, as he generally ignored any mention of that particular name. ‘And besides, I know that some people are drawn here because of me.’
‘The famous Joshua Valienté.’
‘Why not? It’s good not to have to advertise for good people. And if they don’t fit, they leave anyhow.’
Sally opened her mouth, ready for a few more jabs.
But Helen had evidently had enough. She stood up. ‘Sally, if you want to freshen up we’ve got a guest room down the passage there. Curtain up is in an hour. Dan – that’s our son, maybe you remember him – is already down at the town hall helping out, which is to say bossing the other kids about. Take some of the ice cream when we go over if you like. It’s only a short walk.’
Joshua forced a smile. ‘Everywhere’s a short walk here.’
Helen glanced out through the crude glass of the window. ‘And it looks like another perfect evening …’
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.
JOSHUA WASN’T SURPRISED when Sally didn’t turn up for breakfast.
Nor to find she’d gone altogether. That was Sally. By now, he thought, she was probably far away, off in the reaches of the Long Earth. He looked around the house, searching for signs of her presence. She travelled light, and was fastidious about not leaving behind a mess. She’d come, she’d gone, and turned his life upside down. Again.
She had left a note saying simply, ‘Thanks.’
After breakfast he went down to his office in the town hall, to put in a few hours’ mayoring. But the shadow of that twain in the sky fell across his office’s single window, a looming distraction that made it impossible to concentrate on the routine stuff.
He found himself staring at the single large poster on the wall, the so-called ‘Samaritan Declaration’, drafted in irritation by some hard-pressed pioneer somewhere, and since spread in a viral fashion across the outernet and adopted by thousands of nascent colonies:
Dear Newbie:
The GOOD SAMARITAN by definition is kind and forbearing.
However, in the context of the Long Earth land rush, the GOOD SAMARITAN demands of you:
ONE. Before you leave home find out something about the environment into which you are heading.
TWO. When you get there, listen to what the guys already there tell you.
THREE. Don’t be fooled by maps. Even the Low Earths haven’t been properly explored. We don’t know what’s out there. And if we don’t, you certainly don’t.
FOUR. Use your noggin. Travel with at least one buddy. Carry a radio where feasible. Tell somebody where you’re going. That kind of thing.
FIVE. Take every precaution, if not for your own sake, then for the sake of the poor saps who have to bring what’s left of your sorry ass back home in a body bag.
HARSH language, but necessary. The Long Earth is bountiful but not forgiving.
THANK you for reading.
The GOOD SAMARITAN
Joshua liked the Declaration. He thought it reflected the robust, good-humoured common sense that characterized the new nations emerging in the reaches of the Long Earth. New nations, yes …
The town hall: a grand name for a solidly built wooden building that housed everything the settlement needed in the way of paperwork, and looked kind of battered this morning, in the aftermath of the kids’ show. Well, it was fit for purpose; marble could wait.
And of course it had no statues outside, unlike similar buildings in towns back in Datum America. No Civil War cannons, no bronze plaques with the names of the fallen. When the growing town had registered for the twain service the federal government had offered a kind of home-improvement monument kit, to cement this community of the future to America’s past. But the residents of Hell-Knows-Where rejected that, for a wide number of reasons, many of them going all the way back to great-grandpa’s experiences at Woodstock or Penn State. Nobody had shed blood for this land yet, apart from when Hamish fell off the town clock, and of course the predations of the mosquitoes. So why a monument?
Joshua had been startled at the vehemence of his fellow citizens on the issue, and he’d since given it some thought, in his patient way. He’d come to the conclusion that it was all to do with identity. Look at history. The founding fathers of the United States for the most part were Englishmen, right up until the moment when they realized that they needn’t be. The folk of Hell-Knows-Where by default still thought of themselves as American. But they were starting to feel closer to their neighbours on this world, a handful of communities in stepwise copies of Europe and Africa and even China with which they communicated by shortwave radio, than to the Datum folks back home. Joshua found it interesting to watch that sense of identity shifting.
And meanwhile the relationship with Datum America itself was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The wrangling had been going on for years. Legally speaking, a few years back President Cowley’s administration had worked out – Cowley having previously argued successfully to have all the colonists’ rights and benefits removed – that in practice it was losing out on significant tax revenues, from the trade that was blossoming both between the various Long Earth communities, and between the remote worlds on the one hand and the Low Earths and Datum on the other. And so Cowley had declared that, if you were under the ‘Aegis’ of the United States – that is, if you lived in the footprint of the nation, projected across the stepwise worlds out to infinity, East and West you were de facto a United States citizen, living under United States laws, and liable to pay United States taxes.
And there was the rub. Taxes? Taxes on what? Taxes to be paid how? A lot of local trade was conducted by barter, or using local scrip, or even with intangibles: a service for a service. It was only when you traded with the Low Earths that dollars and cents came into play. It was a burden on many tax-payers, in fact, to assemble enough currency to satisfy said tax demands.
Even if you did pay, the taxes bought you what? The colonists were rich in food, fresh water and unspoiled air, and land: lots and lots of land. As for advanced products, even ten years ago you had had to run home to Uncle Sam for anything high-tech or complicated, from dentistry to veterinarian services, and you needed US dollars to purchase such things. But now, why, there was a spanking new clinic in Hell-Knows-Where itself, and a veterinarian downriver in Twisted Peak, and he had a fast horse and a partner and an apprentice. If you needed a city, well, Valhalla was an authentic campus city growing up in the High Meggers, with everything cultural and all the tech you could want.
The colonists found it increasingly hard to understand what they needed the Datum government for – and, therefore, what they were buying with their taxes, principally sliced off the profits on the shipments of raw materials the twain caravans hauled endlessly back to the Datum. Even in this neat and civilized town, far from the think-tanks of Valhalla inhabited by the likes of Helen’s father Jack, there were some who called for cutting ties with the old US altogether.
And meanwhile, in turn, after years of relative appeasement, in recent dealings with the Datum Joshua had detected an increasing unpleasantness about the federal government’s regard for its new young colonies. There were even mutterings back in Datum USA that the colonists were in some way parasitical, even though all their residual holdings back home had long since been liquidated. All this was no doubt linked to Cowley’s push for re-election this year; having tacked to the centre during his first run for the White House – a necessity in the aftermath of the Madison incident, when much of the population had been saved from a nuclear attack by stepping away from ground zero – some commentators suggested he was now veering back to his original support base, the virulently anti-stepper Humanity First movement. The United States had long been used to being suspicious of every other country on the planet, and was now becoming suspicious of itself.
Joshua, looking at the sunlit sky through his window, sighed. How far could this go? It was well known that Cowley was putting together some kind of twain-based military arm to go out into the Long Earth. Seeping through the outernet there had been darker rumours, or maybe disinformation, of sterner actions to come.
Could there even be war? Most wars of the past had been over land and wealth, one way or another. Given the literally endless riches of the Long Earth, surely there was no longer any reason for war. Was there? But there were precedents, when the repressive taxation and other policies of a central government had led to its colonies agitating for independence …
A Long War?
Joshua gazed at the twain still mysteriously hanging over the town. Waiting to take him away, to participate in the affairs of the wider world once more.
He wandered out to look for Bill Chambers, the town’s secretary, accountant, best hunter, excellent cook, and amazingly good liar, although this latter skill threw minor suspicions on his claim to be a distant heir to the Blarney estate in Ireland.
Bill was about Joshua’s age, and had once been a buddy at the Home, as much as a recluse like Joshua had had any buddies at all. A few years back Joshua had welcomed Bill, when he’d shown up at Hell-Knows-Where, with open arms. When Joshua had returned from his journey with Lobsang and discovered his unwelcome celebrity – not helped by the fact that Lobsang himself, along with Sally, had retreated to the shadows, leaving Joshua exposed – he’d found himself turning increasingly to people he’d known before he was ‘famous’, and who therefore were discreet and tended not to demand anything of him.
In some ways Bill hadn’t changed. He had an Irish background, and he liked to play that up when he got the chance. Also he drank a lot more than he had as a teenager. Or rather, even more.
Right now, Bill was ambling to the lumber yard when he spotted Joshua. ‘Top, Mister Mayor.’
‘Yeah, top to you too. Listen …’ Joshua told Bill about his need to go to the Datum. ‘Helen’s insisting on coming, with Dan. Well, it’s not a bad idea. But I could do with some backup.’
‘The Datum, is it? Full of hoodlums and thugs and other bad lads. Ah, sure, I’m your man.’
‘Will Morningtide let you go?’
‘She’s busy making tallow in the yard right now. I’ll ask her later.’ He coughed, his best attempt at delicacy. ‘There is the question of the fare.’
Joshua looked up at the waiting twain. ‘I have a feeling none of us will be paying for this trip, buddy.’
Bill whooped. ‘Fair play to you. In that case I’ll book us the finest ride I can find. And you’ve got your own release forms signed by Helen, have ye?’
Joshua sighed. Another hard scene waiting in his future. ‘I will do, Bill. I will do.’
They walked together.
‘How was your lad’s show, by the way?’
‘Jumped the shark.’
‘Oh, was it that bad?’
‘No, Captain Ahab really did jump the shark. Big set piece of the second act. Pretty impressive on one water-ski …’
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.
had