The Long War

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.