The Long War

‘Yes!’ Chen cried. ‘We are now travelling at our peak rate, an astounding fifty worlds per second – worlds passing faster than the refresh frames in a digital screen, faster than your eye can follow. At such a rate we could traverse the great treks of the first pioneers of the Long Earth in little more than half an hour. At such a rate, if we kept it up, we could traverse more than four million worlds per day.’

Jacques asked, ‘But we’re moving laterally too, right? Why’s that?’

‘Continental drift,’ Roberta said immediately.

Chen nodded approvingly. ‘Correct. On Datum Earth the continents drift with time. The rate is something like an inch per year. Thanks to those cumulative effects there is also some drift as you move stepwise. So we move laterally, the great engines working to keep us over the heart of the tectonic plate on which South China rides. Sooner that than get lost altogether.’ He winked at Jacques. ‘Our Chinese airship technology has, incidentally, also set airspeed records.’ He checked his watch. ‘Now if you will excuse me I have engineers who need praising, or calming down, or both. Duty calls . . .’

Jacques noticed that the lower digits on the Earth counter mounted on the wall of the deck had become a blur, like the worlds they were tracking, while higher, grander, slower-changing digits marked the tremendous strides they were making, off into the unknown.

The trolls, meanwhile, sang on.

42

VIGNETTES FROM THE continuing mission of Captain Maggie Kauffman, as the summer wore on across the Long Earth:

The voyage of the USS Benjamin Franklin progressed in a rather disorderly, zigzagging way. The colonists of the Long Earth didn’t organize themselves consciously, either geographically or stepwise, and yet a kind of organization was emerging nevertheless, Maggie noticed, with clusters of homesteads growing up in neighbouring worlds. Gerry Hemingway of Science was developing a mathematical model of this, of a percolation of mankind into the Long Earth which resulted in a distribution that he described as ‘on the edge of chaos’. Maggie, wearily, thought that summed it up pretty well.

Once, on the Atlantic coast in a temperate Corn Belt sky, they encountered a British dirigible called the Sir George Cayley, returning from a mission to Iceland. At such locations as Iceland, incoming steppers rummaged through the parallel worlds looking for beneficent weather. If you got the choice, you would go to a world with the local climatic optima – change your world, change your weather. In Iceland’s case, you sought out analogues of the relatively benign first-millennium country first discovered and colonized by the Dark Age Vikings. (Dressing up to play the part was apparently optional.)

Parties from each ship visited the other. British ships always had the best booze, in Maggie’s experience, including gin-and-tonics raised in toasts to His Majesty – and the Brit crews, charmingly, always stayed seated for the loyal toast, a tradition going back to Nelson’s day, when there had been no room on those crowded wooden ships to stand.

However, such pleasing adventures, for the Franklin crew, were not the norm.

More typical was a call to a world some seven hundred thousand steps from the Datum where a hopeful silver miner, who seemed to have got his ideas about excavation techniques solely from the movies, had turned his wannabe mine shaft into a death trap. Getting him out was a technical challenge, but luckily one of the crew, Midshipman Jason Santorini, had misspent some of his early years caving; he just loved worming his way into the rubble heaps.

When the dispiriting rescue was over, Maggie gave the crew a couple of days’ shore leave before moving on.

On the second day, as Maggie sat eating lunch with her senior officers, on the ground in the shadow of the Franklin – with Midshipman Santorini being rewarded for his efforts with lunch at the Captain’s table – another twain, a small commercial vessel, drifted in from the horizon. It lowered a stairway a little way away in the scrub, and two people alighted stiffly: an elderly woman, a middle-aged man.

And a cat, that followed them down the ramp.

Maggie and her officers stood to greet the couple. Joe Mackenzie eyed the cat suspiciously.

The man said, ‘Captain Maggie Kauffman? I’m pleased to meet you in the flesh, having heard so much about you! It took us some time to arrange a rendezvous, as you can imagine . . .’

‘And you are?’

‘My name is George Abrahams. This is my wife, Agnes. My title is Doctor, though that need not concern us.’ His accent sounded vaguely Bostonian, the name naggingly familiar to Maggie. He was tall, slim, a little stooped, and wore a heavy black overcoat, and a homburg over silver hair. His face was oddly neutral, expressionless – unmemorable, Maggie thought.

The cat, slim, white, looked around, sniffed, and set off in the general direction of the Franklin.