The Long War

Then he’d had his crisis of conscience, and he started to find out about the plight of the people he’d left behind, his mother’s family. How a culture a staggering sixty thousand years old, a people free and self-sufficient a mere three centuries ago, had become the most dependent on the planet: marginalized, removed from their lands, shattered by unemployment and drug abuse, their culture broken up by forced evictions and ‘white’ education. How in his own grandmother’s time her clan had been moved from their country to avoid the British Blue Streak missiles test-launched from Woomera.

Granted, all this hand-wringing had been brought on by Thomas’s own beating-up by a bunch of thugs in Sydney who didn’t like his kind in their city, even one in a suit and tie. But it was a real eye-opener even so.

Then he’d got married. Hannah was a trainee lawyer, another bright young thing, white, from a well-connected New South Wales family. They’d been hoping for a kid.

But then the cancer had taken her, and that had been that. She had been just twenty-three. Helen could sympathize with that part of his story, remembering the suddenness of the loss of her own mother.

After that Thomas’s work seemed pointless. He’d gone back to Perth and worked for a progressive association there, promoting Aboriginal rights. And he’d taken the chance to study his mother’s culture. He’d even become a ‘native guide’ for parties of earnest white tourists. His mother’s family had sneered at that, but he’d learned a lot.

And then had come the Stepper box, and the opening up of the Long Earth. Another huge jolt to Thomas’s personal universe, as to everybody else’s. Many Aborigines, especially young men, had immediately grasped the potential of the technology, and stepped away in search of a better world than the Datum, and its bloody history.

Thomas himself had rarely stepped, in those early days, save for a couple of experiments. Why should he? After all the turnarounds in his life, Thomas no longer felt he knew who he was. He was a contradiction, neither white nor black, married but alone. What was he going to discover about himself out in all those other worlds that he couldn’t find right here? Rather than travel forward, he kept on being drawn back, in fact, to the same point, the Hunting Man in the cave, the one stable locus in his life, like a nail hammered through his psyche.

But this time he had come back here with his Stepper. He had an experiment in mind.

He picked a direction at random, and turned the switch.

Australia West 1.

They were farming kangaroos here, as indeed they were in East 1: he saw heaps of carcasses, tethered horses, a stack of bronze-based rifles heaped up like a tepee. A couple of ranchers sat on a log. When they saw Thomas they raised plastic bottles of beer to him. He waved back.

Roo farming was becoming commonplace, even in the Datum. Kangaroos were efficient as food animals. Pound for pound a roo needed a third the plant material a sheep did, a sixth the water, and produced almost no methane; roo farts were parsimonious. Thomas didn’t object for any rational reasons. It just didn’t feel right. Anyhow this new world was an annexe to the old, and nothing to do with him.

He stepped away, to West 2. And 3. And 4. Each step was a wrench to the stomach, and he needed time to recover.

It took him two hours to get to West 10, where he stopped. He sat on an eroded shelf at the edge of the rocky outcrop, which appeared unchanged from the ‘original’ in the Datum. He looked around, taking his time, absorbing the new world.

And off in the distance he saw movement. A herd of some huge, slow-moving, rather lumbering creatures, seen in silhouette against a pale blue sky. Walking on all fours, they looked like rhinos to his untutored eye. Presumably they were some marsupial equivalent, perhaps hunted by a local version of a lion. There were kangaroos here too, standing up, plucking at the lowest leaves of some tree, but these were big animals, bigger than any roo in the Datum, big and muscular. And there, scampering in the distance, a thing like a dinosaur, a raptor, that was probably a flightless bird. The world was intensely silent, save for the distant bellow of one giant herbivore or another.

He drank water from a plastic bottle. Some of the nearer worlds had been visited by hunters unable to resist the lure of going after the native megafauna, but here, ten steps out, there was no sign of humanity, not so much as a footprint.

And it was a different sort of world, without humans. Naively you’d think that one copy of the Western Desert was going to be much the same as any other. Not so. This country was always going to be arid, but Thomas could see at a glance that it was greener than he was used to, with patches of tough-looking grass, scrubby trees. On the Datum his mother’s people had shaped the land with fire for sixty thousand years; this was a land without Europeans, but without the Martu and their ancestors too.