The Long War

Living off the endlessly generous land, he became a comber—this was before the word itself, derived from “beachcomber’, had become common currency. In due course he would start to hear legends of Joshua Valienté and other super-steppers, legends that were spreading across the Long Earth, and he would begin to take a more academic view of those who shared his new lifestyle… And then he met Joshua himself, in the silence of a very distant America.

“But all that lay in the future,” he told Helen now. “As I remember it, I just patted the Hunting Man—Hunting Man West 10—and straightened up, and touched my Stepper, and I was gone for good.”

She smiled. “The Long Earth has given us all stories, I guess.”

“Too right. So what about yours. Tell me about this place Reboot. Another coffee?”

12

They spent three more weeks in Valhalla, trying to get Dan used to the place, and to the idea of coming here to school—even though headmaster Jacques Montecute and the taciturn Roberta had in the meantime left for the Datum, to join the Chinese expedition. Helen had plenty of time to sample the local cuisine, including lots more coffee—enough to establish that, whatever Valhalla was good at, coffee wasn’t it.

But that was remedied once they boarded the Gold Dust. In the first twenty-four hours Helen spent most of her time relaxing, sitting in the family’s saloon, sipping the finest coffee she’d drunk since—well, since the last time her father had taken her to a Datum Madison mom-and-pop local coffee shop aged about twelve, before they left the old world behind for good.

That was the Gold Dust for you. It was like the best hotel in all the worlds, she thought, uprooted and drifting in the sky, an eight-hundred-foot-long envelope from which hung a gondola of polished High-Megger hardwood, like one vast piece of furniture. Helen had felt embarrassed just to climb aboard. Even the gangplank was carpeted, and you could have lost their whole Hell-Knows-Where house in the reception hall.

Of course they were honoured guests, Joshua, Dan, Helen, even Bill Chambers—and Sally Linsay, who Helen noticed wasn’t too high-minded to hitch a ride aboard this flying palace. Honoured because of Joshua, of course, the hero explorer. If he wished, the Joshua Valienté could dine out on his legend, but he hardly ever did. Full of contradictions, her Joshua. But when he got offered such treats as this ride in the Gold Dust, he’d learned not to turn them away—that was how Helen had trained him anyhow.

Dan was in his element, of course. He’d wanted to be a twain driver since he could walk, and would run after even the scrubby little local ships that drifted over Hell-Knows-Where. Helen had thought his eyes would pop out when they walked aboard the Gold Dust.

But there was some concern for him, at the beginning. This was Dan’s first long-distance haul. Helen was not a natural stepper, while Joshua was the world’s model natural stepper. Just as his colouring was mixed—Dan had his father’s dark hair but his mother’s paler complexion—as a stepper Dan was somewhere in between his parents. And in his genetic background he did have a phobic uncle, Helen’s brother Rod, who couldn’t step at all. The medicinal treatments for controlling the symptoms of stepping nausea were advanced now, so that almost everybody could withstand even a high-speed journey like this—almost all, but not quite all. If Dan had shown any distress, it would have been the end of the journey for his parents (well, for Helen anyhow; she had no doubt Joshua would have gone on with Sally)—and the end of a dream for Dan. Joshua and Helen were both privately relieved when the ship’s surgeon, who had been hovering over the passengers as the twain set off, gave them a discreet thumbs-up.

After that the crew made a huge fuss of Dan. At Helen’s insistence he was to be accompanied at all times by either one of his parents or a junior crewman, appointed by the Captain. The crewman told Dan his name was Bosun Higgs, and Helen didn’t believe that for a second. But apart from that the crew gave Dan the run of the ship, from the ladders and gantries inside the envelope itself with its huge sacs of helium, to the gondola’s cargo hold and engine room, and the staterooms and restaurant cum ballroom—even the wheelhouse, a huge transparent-walled blister at the prow, where you could watch the great ships rising from world after world to join the fleet as it ploughed East towards the Datum, with views of the American Sea and its forest-coated fringe shivering by, a new world with every heartbeat. An incredible, thrilling sight, even to a sedentary type like Helen.