The Long War

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.”