The Long War

“Good idea,” Jack said firmly. “That’s one point of Valhalla, of cities like this, to found good schools and incubate free, open and educated minds. Essential in any democracy.”

“Dad! Less of the lectures.”

“Sorry, sorry. It’s just my way, honey. And I’m sorry to be distracted. But the situation is urgent. It’s not just the increasingly repressive taxation. There’s a vicious undercurrent that seeps out of the Humanity First douche-bags who are paying for Cowley’s re-election campaign, no matter how inclusive he pretends to be. It’s worse than racism. In their language we steppers are a lesser species, we’re malevolent, moral-free mutants… We have to stand up for ourselves. And now we’re doing it. Some of the commentators are already saying that Keyes’s speech today will be our Declaration of Independence moment, before they’ve even heard the text. Think of that!”

“And you just have to be involved, don’t you?”

“Well, what else should I be doing?”

“You were just the same at Reboot. Distracting yourself from your own life by ordering other people around, right?”

“What’s this, are you channelling your sister?”

Katie, a few years older than Helen, married, had stayed in Reboot, and generally disapproved of the rest of the family moving out. “No, Dad. Look, I know you’re not old.”

“I’m not about to become a minuteman, honey.”

“I know, I know… I just think you need to stop running away.”

“Running from what?”

“It wasn’t your fault Mom got ill.”

“Go on,” he said. “What else wasn’t my fault?”

“It also wasn’t your fault Rod did what he did.”

“Your brother planted a nuke under Datum Madison, for God’s sake.”

“No, he didn’t. He was part of a dumb plot by resentful home-alones, which—I’m sorry, Dad. It’s just that I think you’re working on all this stuff to, to—”

“To assuage some kind of Freudian guilt? My daughter the psychologist.” His tone turned harder now. “Look, it’s not about blame, or guilt. People do what they do. But that doesn’t mean that, whatever your deeper hidden personal motives, you can’t try to do something good.”

She pointed at the screen. “Like your Mayor Keyes right now?”

He turned that way.

Ben Keyes walked up to the podium, a sheaf of pulpy locally manufactured paper in his hands. Aged maybe forty, he had media-star good looks, but he’d let his hair grow long, pioneer style, and he wore, not a suit, but a practical worker’s coverall in a drab olive. When he began to speak Helen could barely make out his words over the clapping and hollering from an off-stage audience: “People of Valhalla! This is an historic day in this world, in all the worlds of the Long Earth. Today, we have it in our power to begin the world over again…”

Her father grinned. “Tom Paine! That was one of my lines.”

“…certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness… That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it…”

“Ha!” Jack Green clapped his hands. “And that is straight out of the Declaration of Independence. What a moment for an American government, to have its own founding principles thrown right back at it!”

Now the screen showed images of the crowd before Keyes, who were making sign-language gestures, just like the troll at the Gap, and chanting, “I will not! I will not!”

Helen had lost her father to the screen, to the speech, to the commentaries that would follow. Quietly she stood and crept out of the room. He didn’t look round.

Helen knew nothing about revolutions. She couldn’t imagine what might flow from this moment. She did wonder, however, about where the “rights” of the trolls and other creatures who had to share the Long Earth with mankind might fit into all this.

Thomas Kyangu was waiting for her in the lobby, with sympathetic eyes. She guessed he knew enough about her complicated family now to understand how she was feeling.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll stand you a Valhallan coffee.”

And, in a cosy coffee shop a couple of blocks away, Thomas told her something of his own story.

11

Thomas Kangu could remember precisely the day his life had turned. The day he had left the conventional world and become a professional comber—if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms. It had been twenty years ago, just five years after Step Day itself, when the whole phenomenon was still startling and new. Thomas had been thirty years old.