The Long War

Of course this world was no longer pristine, Joshua thought, as the three of them walked to the town hall for the school show. You could see the clearances nibbling into the forest by the river banks, and the smoke from the forges and workshops, and the tracks cutting through the forest straight and sharp. But still, what caught your eye was the essentials of the landscape, the bend of this stepwise copy of the Mississippi, and the bridges and the wooded expanses beyond the banks. Hell-Knows-Where looked the way its parent town back on the Datum – Hannibal, Missouri – had back in the nineteenth century, maybe, Mark Twain’s day. That was perfection, for his money.

But right now that perfect sky was marred by a twain hanging in the air.

The airship was being unloaded by rope chains, trunk by trunk, bale by bale. In the gathering twilight, its hull shining like bronze, it looked like a ship from another world, which in a sense it was. And though the town hall show was about to start, there were a few students outside watching the sky, the boys in particular looking hungry – boys who would give anything in the world to be twain drivers some day.

The twain was a symbol of many things, Joshua thought. Of the reality of the Long Earth itself, for a start.

The Long Earth: suddenly, on Step Day, twenty-five years before, mankind had found itself with the ability to step sideways, simply to walk into an infinite corridor of planet Earths, one after the next and the next. No spaceships required: each Earth was just a walk away. And every Earth was like the original, more or less, save for a striking lack of humanity and all its works. There was a world for everybody who wanted one, uncounted billions of worlds, if the leading theories were right.

There were some people who, faced with such a landscape, bolted the door and hid away. Some people did the same thing inside their heads. But others flourished. And for such people in their scattered settlements across the new worlds, a quarter-century on, the twains were becoming an essential presence.

After the pioneering exploratory journey ten years back by Joshua and Lobsang in the Mark Twain – that ship had been a prototype, the first cargo- and passenger-carrying craft capable of stepwise motion – Douglas Black, of the Black Corporation who’d built the Twain

, and the majority owner of the subsidiary that supported Lobsang and his various activities, had announced that the technology was to be a gift to the world. It had been a typical gesture by Black, greeted with loud cynicism about his motives, welcomed with open arms by all. Now, a decade later, the twains were doing for the colonization of the Long Earth what the Conestoga wagon and Pony Express had once done for the Old West. The twains flew and flew, knitting together the burgeoning stepwise worlds . . . They had even stimulated the growth of new industries themselves. Helium for their lift sacs, scarce on Datum Earth, was now being extracted from stepwise copies of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Nowadays even the news was dispersed across the Long Earth by the airship fleets. A kind of multi-world internet was growing up, known as the ‘outernet’. On each world they passed through the airships would download rapid update packets to local nodes to be spread laterally across that world, and would upload any ongoing messages and mail. And when airships met, away from the big Datum–Valhalla spine route, they would hold a ‘gam’ – a word resurrected from the days of the old whaling fleets – where they would swap news and correspondence. It was all kind of informal, but then so had been the structure of the pre-Step Day internet on the Datum. And being informal it was robust; as long as your message had the right address, it would find its way home.

Of course there were some in places like Hell-Knows-Where who resented the presence of these interlopers, because the twains, one way or another, represented the reach of the Datum government: a reach that wasn’t always welcome. The administration’s policy towards its Long Earth colonies had swung back and forth with the years, from hostility and even exclusion, to cooperation and legislation. Nowadays the rule was that once a colony had more than one hundred people, it was supposed to report itself back to the federal government on Datum Earth as an ‘official’ presence. Soon you would be on the map, and the twains would come, floating down from the sky to deliver people and livestock, raw materials and medical care, and carry away any produce you wanted to export via local links to the great stepwise transport hubs like Valhalla.