The Long War

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.’