The Long War

‘He’s fast becoming a major embarrassment, is what he is,’ Helen said sternly.

‘This hanging around wasn’t part of the deal,’ Sally snapped at Joshua. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Joshua shrugged. ‘Well, you didn’t wait to be consulted. Besides, how would you have reacted? Just like this, right?’

Sally picked up her pack. ‘I’m out of here.’ She disappeared with a pop of displaced air.

Thomas sighed. ‘What a woman. I hope I have a chance to get her autograph. Come on, let’s get you checked in.’

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.