The Long War (15 page)

Jack sighed. ‘But what am I going to do with dollars? You imagine I can pay Bill here in dollars for a catch of fish? What the hell is
he
going to do with them? You’d end up with bits of paper circling around and around this community like flies over a cowpat . . .’

Allen was going to snap back some angry response.

But Fox leaned forward, interested. ‘Then how
would
you want paying, sir? How does that work around here?’

‘We call it favours,’ Jack said.

‘Favours?’

‘I give you a room for a few nights. That’s a favour. Now you owe me a favour. We agree what that is before you move in, right? If it was Bill it would be so many pounds of fish. He does the favour for me, and we’re square. Or – if I don’t need any fish, then Bill can go to old Mike Doak down the street, who can shoe horses like he was raised to it, and give him the fish, thus transferring the favour he owes me to Mike, and then when my horse throws a shoe—’

‘I get it.’ Allen raised his hands.

Fox said, ‘So you don’t use paper money. But you must get outside workers coming through. Doctors, dentists—’

‘We support them with favours, one way or another.’

‘Specialists, like engineers to build you a dam. Something like that. There must be occasions when there’s
nothing
you can do for someone like that. You can only eat one meal at a time, wear one pair of trousers—’

Jack winked at Fox. ‘Good question. OK, we do have stashes. Gold, silver, jewellery. Even a little paper money, if you must know – we accept all this if there’s no other way for a person to pay, who’s desperate enough. We’re not monks here, enslaved to a rule book. We cheat a little. Whatever works. But basically we’re self-sufficient, locally; almost all of it is favours.’

Allen eyed him. ‘So you do take dollars. But you won’t take dollars from us. From members of the US armed forces.’

Jack laughed in his face. ‘Listen, you and your paymasters in Washington forfeited any right to help from me and my community when you cut us off a dozen years ago. When you trashed Pioneer Support, and impounded my life savings. You even fired poor old Bill, here.’

Lovell grinned. ‘Don’t bring me into it. I’m doing fine.’

‘And none of the “Aegis rights and responsibilities” crap spouted by President Cowley cuts any ice with
me
,’ Jack said. ‘Yes, Lieutenant, I’ll give you water to relieve the discomfort of these children you’re leading astray. Other than that – I could take your dollars, but I won’t, because I don’t like you, or the Datum government you represent, and I want to see the back of you.’

Nathan could see Lieutenant Allen’s temperature rising, like a volcano on slow heat. ‘This is all bullshit!’

Fox said earnestly, ‘With respect, sir, it’s not. This kind of meeting of minds is precisely why—’

‘Shut your cakehole, sailor.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Fox shrank back immediately.

Allen produced a fold of currency from an inside pocket, hundred-dollar bills. He set this on Jack’s homemade desk. ‘I’m asking you to take this, sir. Or face the consequences.’

Jack, totally at ease, just faced him. ‘What is it that poor troll said, when the likes of you tried to take her cub away?’

‘That was nothing to do with the US military—’

‘
I will not
.’ He repeated the phrase, backing it up with troll sign language. ‘
I will not
, sir.
I will not
.’

Allen glowered. ‘Ensign Fox, cuff this man.’

Jack just laughed. Fox sat frozen, indecisive.

There was a flurry in the corner where the guys were playing Scrabble. ‘McKibben, you butthole, there is no way under the sun that
DUCTTAPE
is a single word . . .’

‘I don’t think cuffing is an appropriate response, Lieutenant Allen,’ Nathan said calmly.

Allen stalked out of the house, furious.

Nathan wondered how the hell he was going to explain all this to Captain Kauffman.

When he did try, the first thing she did was to put Lieutenant Sam Allen off her ship, the first opportunity she got.

The second thing she did was to ask to meet this character Jack Green, so she could learn all about this business of the favours for herself.

I
N THE
M
INE
Belt, the Valientés aboard
Gold Dust
witnessed a crisis.

The airship fleet had stopped a couple of times over the arid worlds of this band, to take on board ore of various kinds – not just bulky stuff like bauxite, or even obviously precious metals like silver and gold, but a slew of minerals that were scarce now on the Datum, or at any rate hugely valuable: germanium, cobalt, gallium.

But it wasn’t a colonized world where the incident happened.

The family happened to be making one of their visits to the wheelhouse at the time, and Helen and Dan saw it all. The twain had slowed because they were approaching a notorious Joker, some eighty thousand steps from the Datum, and the pilot knew to take care, driving them forward at only a couple of steps a minute. When they finally stepped into the Joker, the landscape of the neighbouring world – a sparse green with forest clumps and prairie – vanished to reveal bare, brick-red, dust-strewn rock. Even the local Mississippi was reduced to a rusty trickle, striped down the centre of a valley that looked much too wide for it. From unknown causes, this Joker happened to be suffering from some kind of global desertification. It was like a landscape on Mars.

And here was the downed ship.

She was called the
Pennsylvania
. She had been caught in a dust storm when she tried, cautiously, to cross the Joker, and then one of her helium sacs, maybe already carrying a fault, split open at the sudden expansion caused by the heat of the Joker’s dry air. The leak had been quick but the crash slow, relentless; it must have been a terrifying experience. The
Gold Dust
passengers saw the wreck now through a veil of windblown dust that hissed against the windows, the remnants of the storm that had killed the ship. From the air it was a six-hundred-foot reef already half covered by drifting red sand.

The
Gold Dust
was the first of the following fleet to come upon the wreck, and the largest. As Dan and Helen hung back, trying to keep out of the way, there was a hasty conference call with the Captain in his cabin, and the commanders of the other craft as they arrived in this world. A strategy was soon cooked up, and the crew swung into action with an efficiency and dedication that warmed Helen’s soul. They dropped anchor, and soon had a kind of improvised elevator working, taking crew to and from the ground on an open platform. Helen saw Dan’s buddy Bosun Higgs go down, joining working parties assembled from all the crews of the fleet.

Then, as the crew worked, the Captain used the ship’s intercom to ask for volunteers from among the passengers to go down to help.
Volunteers from among the passengers
. Helen’s heart sank when she heard that phrase.

Of course she couldn’t stop him.

It all went well enough, for three, four hours, as the sun slowly went down, and the sandstorm finally petered out. From Helen’s godlike point of view high in the sky, she watched what looked like very organized ants working on the carcass of the fallen ship. They cut channels through the wreckage, led out walking wounded, and carried out the worst afflicted, and the dead. A field medical post was set up under a tent, and soon the first of the most seriously injured were being brought up to the
Gold Dust
on the elevator. The
Gold Dust
was the best placed of the fleet to take the injured on board, with a well-equipped medical bay that could be quickly expanded into a hospital. Other parties worked at salvaging what they could of the
Pennsylvania
’s cargo, mostly Corn Belt wheat. Still others performed the sad duty of digging out graves around the crash site.

Then there was an alarm in the wheelhouse. One of the
Gold Dust
contingent had got himself trapped, deep in the interior of the
Pennsylvania
’s envelope, when a bit more of the structure had collapsed around him as he was trying, heroically, to reach one last group of stranded passengers. He was stuck in the collapsed framework, too high off the ground to be able to step out safely. A rescue attempt was quickly improvised.

‘Wow,’ Dan said, listening to the crackly radio messages. ‘Who do you think it is, Mom?’

Not your father, Helen pleaded silently. Not Joshua. Just this once, not Joshua.

A new line was let down from the nose of the
Gold Dust
, with two individuals clinging to it: Bosun Higgs and Sally Linsay. Helen’s hopes sank faster than the platform. With great caution they were lowered through a rip in the twain’s collapsed envelope, and disappeared into darkness. Helen heard muttered reports on the radio link, saw the spark of cutting torches deep in the
Pennsylvania
’s carcass. Then a period of silence.

At last Sally called: ‘Take her up!’

Slowly, cautiously, the winch turned. The platform came up first, with Sally and the crewman, trailing a length of cable. Then the line shuddered, and Sally waved a halt. Helen heard: ‘He’s OK. Not very dignified, but OK. Keep lifting.’

Up came the cable, rising out of the wreck. And at last, lifted into the low sunlight, dangling upside down with the cable wrapped around one ankle, was Joshua.

Dan rolled his eyes. ‘Oh,
Dad!
’

Helen thought that summed it up.

Eventually, to Helen’s chagrin, the whole incident made it on to the outernet, and the news channels. Sometimes it was hard being Lois Lane.

And – as Joshua had to point out later, for Helen hadn’t been looking at
her
– as soon as Joshua was clear of the wreck, Sally had grinned up at the watching crew of the
Gold Dust
, and disappeared.

A
S IT HAPPENED
the
Benjamin Franklin
passed through the Mine Belt only a few days after the wreck. Via an outernet communiqué, the
Franklin
had been ordered to backtrack from Reboot to a Mine Belt world around seventy thousand steps from home, where some idiot had shot a couple of trolls.

As the
Franklin
ploughed through the worlds, Maggie Kauffman wondered – not for the first time since the start of this mission – whether the whole Long Earth was a test which humanity was singularly failing. On the one hand there were still Datum-Earthers who led lives that had nothing to do with the landscape outside their heads, the immensity beyond their garden walls; and on the other hand, even now, twenty-five years after Step Day, there were still people stepping East and West, even to the High Meggers and beyond, without so much as looking up which mushrooms were safe to pick. One of the unstated duties of this voyage, as it had emerged, was to give a ride to a place of safety to the wounded, or even just the severely embarrassed, who had given up after their first winter without electricity, or a visit by an unexpected bear or pack of wolves – or maybe the odd dinosaur-descendant if you went far enough. Smart people, while they might at first have everything to learn, soon developed effective ways of making things work out here, but Maggie was seeing very little of
them
. Dumb people kept doing dumb things – such as shooting trolls, despite the intense political atmosphere after the Gap incident. And it was to the fallout from such dumbness that the
Franklin
, Maggie was finding, was repeatedly summoned.

So the dirigible drifted across arid versions of Texas, listening out on shortwave, looking for a party whose location stepwise and geographically was only roughly known. The crew was intrigued by accounts of the disaster that had befallen the
Pennsylvania
; Maggie ascertained that no assistance was needed from her in the aftermath.

At last, not far from the footprint of Houston, the ship flew over a rough campsite, with a small, solitary figure looking up from below. Nathan Boss pointed out a clump of woods near by which showed a lot of disturbance, the result of some kind of fight maybe.

And Mac gently drew her attention to an infrared image of slumped, cooling forms, deep inside the forest clump. Where the bodies had been dumped, evidently.

Maggie, Nathan and Joe Mackenzie descended. The lone figure at the campsite, a woman, waiting for them by a smoking fire, was a tough-looking forty-something – a few years older than Maggie – evidently a pioneer type. She gave her name simply as ‘Sally’. Among the weaponry lashed to her back was a ceramic composite rifle, and she had a face full of unfinished business.

Maggie knew her officers well enough to be sure they would step lightly. And she also knew, she thought, from her pre-mission briefings on the Long Earth, who this woman was.

Sally offered them coffee, rolls of bedding to sit on. After that she didn’t waste any time. ‘I don’t want you here. I believe in handling this kind of stuff myself.
I
didn’t call you.’

Nathan asked, ‘Then who did?’

‘
He
’
s
long gone – lit out of here. However, you’re here. So here’s the set-up. I’ve secured near by several so-called scientists who have killed at least three trolls.’

Nathan asked, ‘Scientists?’

‘Biologists. Actually up here to study the trolls, so they say. One of them was the one who called for help; I let him go. The rest—’

‘And “secured”?’ Maggie asked sharply. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Sally grinned evilly. ‘The trolls were captured here for some kind of “experiment” in cross-breeding with other humanoids. Unsurprisingly they resisted and stepped away, heading due West, which led to a chase, and a male and two females being shot dead – at least that number, I didn’t see it all. Left behind one orphaned cub. I’m sure you’re aware of the furore around our treatment of the trolls just now—’

‘That doesn’t sanction some kind of vigilante action by you, whoever you are,’ Mac said thickly.

Sally just smiled. ‘Oh, nobody’s dead. They’re not exactly comfortable, but nobody’s
dead
. Unlike those trolls. And by the way if your crew try to apprehend me I’ll step out of here faster than you can say “beam me up”.’