The Long War (8 page)

And whenever they glimpsed the city’s landward edge the party saw something much stranger, in its mundane way. The outer suburbs, thick with factories and forges, just ended, terminating in cut-back forest, or partially drained swamp and marsh. There wasn’t a field anywhere, no cattle grazing, not a blade of cultivated grass outside the city boundary. This was a city without a hinterland of farmers.

Joshua knew the theory of Valhalla. It was part of this generation’s response to the challenge of the endless spaces of the Long Earth. On Step Day, mankind (or most of it, those unlike Sally and her family who had known it all already) had begun to spread out across an extended Earth that had a diameter of eight thousand miles and a surface area that made a Dyson sphere look like a ping-pong ball.
How
they lived out there depended on preference, education and instinct. Some dashed back and forth between the Datum and the Low Earths, looking for a little more room, a way to make a little more money. Some, like Helen’s family the Greens, had gone trekking out into the stepwise wilderness and had begun to build new communities: the story of colonial-era America, rerun across an infinite frontier. And some just wandered off, helping themselves to the inexhaustible riches of the Long Earth: Thomas’s combers.

All of which was fine, until the day you needed root-canal dentistry. Or your e-book reader broke down. Or you worried whether your kids were ever going to learn anything more than how to plough a field or trap a rabbit. Or you got sick of the mosquitoes. Or, damn it, you just wanted to go
shopping
. Some people drifted back to the Datum, or the crowded Low Earths.

Valhalla was another response: a brand-new city growing out in the High Meggers, the remote Long Earth, but deriving from Long Earth lifestyles: that is, supported by combers, not farmers. There had been precursors in human history, across Datum Earth. Given time and a rich environment, hunter-gatherer populations could achieve huge feats, and develop complex societies. At Watson Brake, Louisiana, five thousand years in the past, nomadic Native American hunter-gatherers had constructed major earthwork complexes. Valhalla had just taken this to a new, modern, more consciously designed level.

As it happened, the theory of the city was the first topic Jacques Montecute, the school’s headmaster, chose to talk about when he brought Dan and his family into his office for an introductory chat.

‘The central ethos of Valhalla is balance,’ Montecute said.

Aged about thirty, slender, slightly severe, he had an accent that Joshua might have pegged as French, but with a naggingly familiar overlay. His name rang a bell too.
Montecute
. . .

There was one other child here, aside from Dan, a dark, unsmiling girl of about fifteen, called Roberta Golding.

‘Most of our adult citizens
chose
to leave the old world, to leave the old ways behind. They want some of what a city can give, but they didn’t come out into the Long Earth to break their backs farming, or to live in some slum suburb, in order to serve that city’s needs. But here we are, maintaining city life without all that.’ He smiled encouragingly at Dan. ‘Can you see how we make a living, without farmers to grow our food for us?’

Dan shrugged his slim shoulders. ‘Maybe you’re all robbers.’

Helen sighed.

Roberta Golding spoke for the first time since being introduced. ‘Valhalla is a city supported by combers. Hunter-gatherers. The logic is elementary. Intensive farming can support orders of magnitude more people per acre than hunting and gathering. On a single world a comber community, even if natural resources are rich, would necessarily be spread out, diffuse; the concentration of population needed to sustain a city would be impossible. Here, it is sufficient for the combers to be spread out, not geographically, but over many stepwise Earths – over a hundred parallel Valhallas, left wild for the hunting.’ She made a sandwich of her hands, pressing. ‘The city is the product of a layer of worlds, each lightly harvested, rather than the product of a single intensively farmed world. This is
intensive gathering
: a uniquely post-stepping urban solution.’

Joshua thought the kid spoke like a textbook.

‘You’ve been reading up,’ said Helen, as if accusing her of cheating.

‘Very good, Roberta,’ said Montecute. ‘I mean, it also helps that we live in such a rich location, geographically, by the shore of a fecund sea . . .’

Joshua snapped his fingers. ‘Happy Landings. That’s it. You’re from Happy Landings. Both of you, right? You, Mr. Montecute, I recognize your accent – and your name. I may have met your grandmother once.’

He looked a little uncomfortable, but he smiled. ‘Kitty? Actually my great-grandmother. She always remembered running into you, Mr. Valienté, all those years ago. Yes, I’m from Happy Landings, as it’s become known. As is Roberta.’

‘Happy Landings,’ Helen murmured to Joshua. ‘Sally Linsay’s name for it, right? Seems to have stuck. Happy Landings, where all the kids are super-smart. That’s what they say.’ She glanced uneasily at Dan, who seemed to be trying to tie his legs in a knot.

‘It’s good for you to have met a schoolmate already, Dan,’ Joshua said.

‘Actually I will not be here long,’ Roberta said, politely enough, but rather blankly. ‘I’ve been invited to join the East Twenty Million mission.’

Joshua goggled. ‘With the Chinese?’

Montecute smiled. ‘And me,’ he admitted. ‘Though I’ll be there more in a supervisory capacity. Roberta has won a sort of scholarship, a gesture of good faith between the Datum US government and the new regime in China . . . All of which is by the by. Well.’ He stood up. ‘Why don’t I show you around the school, Dan? While Mom and Dad grab a coffee, perhaps – our canteen is just down the corridor.’ Dan followed him, willingly enough. ‘So what do you like at school? Logic, mathematics, debating, technical drawing?’

‘Softball,’ said Dan.

‘Softball? Anything else?’

‘Wood-chopping.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve got a badge.’

Joshua and Helen glanced at each other, and at the silent, serious Roberta. Then: ‘Coffee,’ they said together, and followed Montecute and Dan out of the room.

T
O GET TO
see her father Helen actually had to make an appointment, which infuriated her.

Jack Green, sixty years old, had an office in the modest building which served as Valhalla’s city hall, courtroom, police headquarters and mayor’s residence. He was working when Helen was shown into the room, sitting behind a desk laden with a laptop, a couple of cellphones, a stack of grainy-looking writing paper. A big TV screen was fixed to the wall. He barely glanced up at the daughter he hadn’t seen since – when? The Christmas before last? Now he held up one finger, eyes fixed on the laptop, while she stood there, waiting.

At last he tapped a key with finality and sat back. ‘There. Sent. Sorry about that, honey.’ He got up, kissed her cheek, sat down again. ‘Just a few last tweaks to the speech we’ve been writing for Ben.’ Ben being Ben Keyes, she knew, mayor of Valhalla, for whom her father worked. ‘Oh, which reminds me—’ He picked up a remote and pressed it; the big wall screen lit up with an image of a podium, a couple of aides in suits, the Stars and Stripes and the ocean-blue flag of Valhalla hanging from poles side by side in the background. ‘Ben’s delivering the speech any moment now. Talk about last minute, right? But as soon as he’s done his words will be all over this world, of course, and will go all the way down to the Datum as fast as the outernet can carry them. Impressive, huh?’

Evidently Helen had picked a bad moment to call. ‘Can I sit down, Dad?’

‘Of course, of course.’ He got up again, a little stiffly, and pushed over a chair for her. Like many of his generation, who had built Long Earth towns like Reboot from scratch, in his late middle age he was plagued by arthritis. ‘How’s Dan?’

‘You got his age wrong on the last birthday card you sent.’

‘Umm. Sorry about that. I hope he wasn’t upset.’

She shrugged. ‘He’s used to it.’

He smiled, but he kept glancing at the screen.

She pushed down her irritation. ‘I’m just dropping in, Dad. You know we’re going on to the Datum. We’re here to show Dan around the Free School. We’re hoping to get him a place, if it suits him.’

‘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.

T
HOMAS
K
YANGU 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.

He had borrowed his father’s car, had driven out of Jigalong to a weathered wooden marker, and climbed out into the midday heat, Stepper box at his side. Apart from the dirt road back to Jigalong, and a fenced-off scrap of bloodstained land that marked the portal to stepwise roo farms, there was nothing here, even in the Datum. Nothing but the expanse of the Western Desert, vast, crushing, its flatness broken by a single, heavily eroded bluff of rock. Nothing anyhow in the eyes of the first Europeans to come here, who had barely been able even to see the people who already lived here. To them it was a
terra nullius
, an empty land, and that had become a legal principle which justified their land-grab.

But Thomas was a half-blood Martu. He had always been welcomed by his mother’s people, even though her marriage, to a white man for love, had broken the Martu’s strict marriage rules. And to Thomas’s eyes, educated in the ways of his ancestors at least to a theoretical level, this land was rich. Complex. Ancient: you could feel the weight of deep time here. He knew how this at first glance barren land worked, how it supported its freight of life. He even knew how to survive, how to feed himself out here, if he had to.