The Long War

He seemed pleased by the simplicity of the reply. ‘Yes! We will count the worlds, and we will catalogue them, number them. We will establish the longitude of the Long Earth East, so to speak. I have seen your academic record: your intellect is evidently remarkable. You don’t think a mere voyage of exploration, of fact-gathering, is trivial? We are like butterfly collectors, are we not?’

She shrugged. ‘If you want to understand butterflies, you first have to collect butterflies. Or finches.’

Chen seemed to puzzle over that word. ‘Ah! Like Darwin on Galapagos. A neat reference. Well, I can’t promise you finches, but butterflies . . .’ He let that tail off mysteriously.

‘Why did you bring the trolls?’

He glanced at her sharply. ‘Good question. I should have known you would ask it. In the planning, most people dismissed our trolls as – what, as a cabaret, an animal show? Not you! The trolls, in a sense, are the Long Earth, are they not? Their long call stitches it together – and, I believe, appeals to the musical sensibilities of all Chinese people. Now we may be venturing further than even any troll has travelled before. Think of that! And we want whatever we discover in those remote footprints of China to become part of the troll song.’

Jacques said, ‘Of course you know that trolls are an integral part of our lives, in the community we come from.’

‘Ah, yes. So I hear. Although you keep its location secret, don’t you?’

‘We treasure our privacy.’

‘Of course you do.’ Chen pressed his button, and they stepped once again. Jacques noticed a counter on the wall: flickering digits that would count the worlds.

In East 2 the sky was bright, the sun high, and the land was carpeted with green, with forest. The contrast with the Datum, and even East 1 – the sudden flood of colour, the light illuminating the observation deck – was breathtaking.

Chen said, ‘You can see why a sudden access to all this so startled

people. Our nation is older than yours, older than Europe. China has been cultivated, built on, fought over, mined, for five thousand years. It was a shock for us to walk into this primordial green. There were immediate cultural responses. An upsurge in support for environmental protection. Songs, poems, paintings, most of them bad. Ha! Well, there was nothing much we could do about East 1, or West 1. Quickly ruined by the first flood of travellers, the first helpless and hapless migrants. Each footprint became one big shanty town. But the government organized quickly, and we kept East 2 as a kind of national park, a memorial of Step Day, of our sudden access to our country’s own past – as best we could, anyhow; even here we are harmed by pollution from the heavy industrialization of this Low Earth in such places as the United States footprint, and there are ongoing negotiations in the United Nations about that. We also store some of our treasures here – the heritage of our deep culture. Even a few buildings, temples dismantled and rebuilt. Just as humanity is preserved from extinction by the existence of the Long Earth, should any calamity befall our home world, so now is our cultural past.’

Roberta pressed her forehead against the window, gawping, briefly looking like any curious teenager. ‘I see animals, moving through the forest. Elephants? Heading towards that river over there, to the north.’

Chen smiled. ‘Elephants, which roam as far north as Beijing in some worlds. And camels, bears, lions, tigers, black swans, even river dolphins. Tapirs! Deer! Pangolins! On Step Day, our children choked in the smog-free air, were frightened by the brightness of the sun, and goggled at the animals.’

The Captain pressed his control button again.

In East 3 the forest had been cleared, and the river dammed to flood the ground. In the resulting paddy fields, people laboured, bent over, not looking up as the shadows of the airships passed. It was the same in East 4, 5, 6 and beyond, though the methods of farming differed. In some worlds there was industrialization, with smoke rising from distant power stations and foundries, and crude-looking machines rolling across vast fields; in others, just the people and their animals.

‘Very organized,’ Jacques said.

‘Oh, yes,’ Yue-Sai said brightly. ‘We Chinese were able to move out into the stepwise worlds in a disciplined and industrious way, matched, I would suggest, nowhere else in the world. Under the Communists we were a one-party state equipped with the tools of late capitalism – capable of very large-scale feats. In recent decades we had already had experience of massive projects on the Datum: infrastructure like dams and bridges and rail lines, even a space programme. Now the Long Earth offered a blank canvas. Since the regime change, despite a revision of ideology, we have lost none of those skills. That’s China for you!’

Roberta said, ‘Could we pause here?’

‘Of course.’ Chen pressed his buttons.