The Long War

‘. . . 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.

11

THOMAS KYANGU 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.

And he knew of a secret out here, that was his alone.

He bent to look into a cave, cut into the side of the bluff by millennia of wind. It was hardly a cave at all, just a hollow half choked by dry drifting sand. But it was a site he had discovered for himself as a boy, visiting his grandparents at Jigalong, exploring alone in the bush: even then he’d been a solitary kid. And, so deep inside the cave you had to crouch to see, there was the Hunting Man, as he called it, a stick figure with some kind of spear chasing a huge, ill-defined creature, while spirals and starbursts spun around him. It was thousands of years old, he’d figured out, as you could tell by the patina over it.

And, as far as he knew, it had been discovered by nobody before his own boyish eyes had settled on it. Nobody found it later, either. He’d kept the secret of it ever since.

He’d always thought of the Hunting Man as a kind of friend. An invisible companion. A stable point in a life of whirling change.

Thomas had been a bright kid. Picked out of the local school and groomed for better things, he’d gone to college at Perth and even spent some time in America, before returning to Melbourne to become a whizz-kid games designer. He’d been black enough to serve as a poster boy for liberals, white enough that those around him had been able to treat him as one of their own.