The Long War

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.

10

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