The Long War (11 page)

They had been coached to respond: ‘I’ll go. Send me! Send me!’ The discipline of the ranks softened a little, as the sailors and marines whooped and yelled.

Beside Maggie, Joe Mackenzie grunted in grudging appreciation. ‘Cowley may be a slimeball, but he is still the President.’

‘And he’s supple, Doc,’ Maggie murmured. ‘Here he is pleasing one constituency by appearing to take on the colonists, while appeasing the colonists by presenting our mission as a kind of embrace.’

Mac glanced up at the heavily armed twains. ‘Some embrace. That isn’t Santa’s sleigh up there. We’ll be lucky if we don’t provoke some kind of shooting war.’

‘It won’t come to that.’

‘Well, however it turns out you can’t beat being given a mission to fulfil.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Maggie.

Of course, once they were actually out in the Long Earth, they had encountered much wariness about their mission.

Many Long Earth pioneers, at least the first generation, had left the Datum precisely
because
they had been intensely suspicious of central government, deriving from a country in which from its founding that sentiment had always run deep. What could the Datum government offer a far-stepwise colony now? It could threaten to tax, but provided damn few services – and over the years had withdrawn what little it had once offered. Protection? The major problem with that argument was that there was no detectable adversary, no bad guys to spy on or shadow, no bogeymen to point to as hostiles. China was still reeling from its own post-Step Day revolution. The parallel Europes were filling up with peaceful farmers. A new generation of Africans were reclaiming their ravaged continent, or stepwise copies of it. And so on. There was no threat to counter.

However weak the case, Maggie Kauffman knew she was expected to diplomatically remind these estranged colonial sheep that they were part of a bigger flock, because back in DC there was a profound sense that, under the American Aegis, this newly extended country was fragmenting – and
that
, it was instinctively felt, couldn’t be allowed. That had been true even before the provocative ‘Declaration of Independence’ that had come out of Valhalla.

All that was for the future. Right now Maggie found the present hard enough to manage: a horrible ethical and legal knot for her raw crew to untangle, in a ship still being shaken down, that they’d encountered just weeks after Cowley’s send-off.

T
HE OFFICE OF
the mayor of Four Waters City was predictable pioneering architecture, though a veritable mansion compared with anything that Daniel Boone would have known, Maggie thought. However, he
would
have recognized and approved of the drying pelts, the jars of pickles in the corner, the miscellaneous shovels and other gardening implements – all the detritus of a pioneering life busily being lived. And there was a basement, which suggested that the mayor and her family were thoughtful people, and perhaps mildly paranoid (or sensibly cautious): it was impossible for an intruder to step into an underground room—

‘The child,’ Robinson blurted. ‘Let’s get to it, Captain.’

‘Fine.’ Maggie sat down.

‘Her name is Angela Hartmann. It happened a week ago. She was found by her family, stoned out of her mind . . . Sorry. She wouldn’t wake up, she was in a kind of coma, took days to come out of it. We know who did it, who gave her the drugs and got high with her. And we know who committed the murder.’

What murder?
‘Where are these people now?’

The mayor shrugged. ‘It never dawned on us before to build a jail. We were building a stone ice house for the winter. We used that. It’s pretty well made. I don’t think anyone could possibly get out of it, it’s real big and heavy.’

‘And this is where you put the guy who gave the kid the drugs?’

Robinson glanced at her. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve misunderstood, I’ve not been clear, I kind of gabble stuff out when I’m nervous.
That
bastard isn’t in the ice house. That bastard’s in the mortuary. Such as it is. The guy we’re keeping in the ice house – he was the father of the little girl.’

‘Ah. So the father found the pusher—’

‘And killed him.’

‘OK.’ Maggie began to see it. ‘Two crimes: the drugs, the murder.’

‘Nobody’s denying any of this. But as a result of all this, we are – riven. About how to handle this. What to do with the father.’

Why me?
Maggie thought to herself. She was supposed to be cheerfully showing the flag, and maintaining goodwill. Right now Nathan Boss, her XO, was out bartering for fresh vegetables. And now this.
Well, why not me? This is what I came out here for
. ‘I take it you haven’t tried to contact the Datum authorities.’

Robinson flushed. ‘To tell you the truth, we were scared. We never even told the Datum that we were here. We thought it wasn’t their business, after all.’

‘And there’s no local justice system, in the stepwise neighbourhood?’

She shook her head.

Maggie sat in silence, letting the moment extend. ‘Very well. Here’s what you’re going to do. First of all, you are going to get your act together and make it clear to the Datum government that you
are
here. We’ll help you with that, and such details as ratifying property claims. Then you have a man in custody without trial, or any due process, and we need to sort that out. Look, to repeat: I’m not here with any mandate to police you. But we can help. And before all that, you’re going to let my ship’s doctor have a good look at the girl.’

A few hours later Joe Mackenzie came out of the Hartmann house. Mac was in his fifties, grizzled, beaten up by a long career in emergency and battlefield medicine. He was old for a field posting, in fact; Maggie had helped him bend the regulations to have him at her side on this mission. This bright afternoon, the doctor’s expression was as dark as twilight.

‘You know, Maggie, sometimes there are no words . . . If I were to say that it could have been worse, you need to understand that even so I would like to spend some time alone in a room with the gentleman concerned and a baseball bat, knowing with surgical precision the right spots to hit—’

It was at times like this that Maggie was glad she’d stuck to her career, never married, never had kids of her own, left the glorious burden of caring for children to her siblings, cousins, friends; she was happy to be an aunt, honorary or otherwise. ‘It’s OK, Mac.’

‘Well, no, it isn’t OK, not for that little girl, and may never be again. I’d prefer her to be sent to a Datum hospital for a full examination. At the least I want to take her up on to the ship for observation for a while.’

Maggie nodded. ‘Let’s go meet the leaders of this joint.’

They met in the mayor’s office. At Maggie’s side were Mac and Nathan Boss. Maggie had invited Robinson herself, and a few chosen citizens from the town meeting whom the mayor reckoned to be well-balanced and sensible, at least by the standards of this community, to consider the verdict.

As they sat down, everybody looked to the Captain – looked to her as a saviour, she realized. Maggie cleared her throat. Time to step up to the plate, she thought.

‘For the record – and we are being recorded – this session is nothing more than a panel of inquiry. Judicial processes can follow as necessary. I have no policing role here. But I have taken it upon myself, at the request of the mayor of the town, to ascertain fairly all the facts of the matter.

‘I’ll summarize what I’ve been told; the facts are apparently not being denied. A week ago Roderick Bacon plied with drugs Angela Hartmann, a girl of nine years old, the daughter of Raymond Hartmann and Daphne Hartmann. Hearing the girl cry out, her father, Ray Hartmann, rushed to her room and saw Bacon with her. The girl was vomiting, fitting. Hartmann pulled the man away, handed the girl to her mother, and then beat Bacon, dragged him out of the house, and set about him again, causing, after a minute or two, his death. The neighbours, alerted by the screams, told us that Bacon was pleading for his life, saying that “a lurid angel” made him do it, made him want to give this “pure child” the gift of his own “inner light” . . . You get the picture.

‘In the absence of a lawyer I’ve had my XO, Commander Nathan Boss, take a personal statement from Hartmann about the events of that night, and also a statement by Bacon’s wife. And according to the wife, before the crime Bacon had been out processing a harvest of the apparently psychoactive flowers endemic in the woods hereabouts. He ran a side business, of dubious legality, selling the stuff in stepwise worlds . . .’

Maggie stopped there. She wished she’d had better training for something like this. She looked around at the others in the room. ‘For the record the child will be cared for overnight on the
Benjamin Franklin
, under the care of Dr. Mackenzie. I’ll invite the girl’s mother to spend the night with her daughter; I’ll send a crewman down to escort her up to the ship. Meanwhile – well, Bacon is dead, and Ray Hartmann is in custody.

‘I think I understand the feelings of all involved in this. I’m no lawyer, I’m no judge, but I can give you my personal assessment. I have to say that Bacon was guilty, in any reasonable sense of the word. He knowingly exposed himself to narcotics, these flowers from the woods; my view is he’s responsible for his behaviour thereafter. As for Hartmann, murder is murder. Yet I find myself loath to condemn the actions of an overwrought husband and father.

‘So, what next? We’ll file a report, and in the end the Datum cops will come out here, go through this fully, refer it to the judicial system – but that could take years; the Aegis is a big place, and tough to police. In the meantime you have Ray Hartmann stuck in that ice house. What to do with him? Well, frankly, you –
all of you
– must be judge and jury, prosecution and defence. We can leave you advice on due process. But it’s up to you to run your own affairs, and I urge you to work out how to deal with this yourselves, within US law as best you understand it.’ She eyed them one by one. ‘This kind of autonomy was, after all, presumably what you wanted when you came out here.

‘In the longer term, get together with your stepwise neighbours. I’m sure that together you could support the equivalent of a county court. I’m told that’s becoming common in the colony worlds. Hire a lawyer or two – even a visiting circuit judge.’ She ran out of steam. She stood up. ‘That’s all from me. The rest is up to you as a community. But for God’s sake – Nathan, make sure the science boys take samples first, and make sure they do this when the wind isn’t blowing into the town –
burn those flowers
. That’s all, people, at least for today. I’ll have the minutes of this session ready for all of you tomorrow.’

That evening, Maggie met Joe Mackenzie coming out of the ship’s small medical bay.

‘How is she?’ she asked.

‘Thank goodness I spent a semester in a children’s hospital before I signed up.’

‘Would coffee help?’

In Maggie’s sea cabin, Mackenzie accepted the mug with gratitude, and after two blessed swigs, said, ‘You know, the bastard got what was coming to him, in my personal view. But we are officers of the United States Navy. Even Wyatt Earp had to
look
as if he respected the law.’

‘I’m hoping they’ll work that out for themselves. Plenty of other communities out here have done.’

‘But other communities don’t have those damn flowers. And, to me, there was a definite feel of
hippie
about the place – you know what I mean? – the feeling that people aren’t taking care of business. The counter-culture gone bad scenario, too many people frazzled out of their brains.’

Maggie stared at the medic. ‘Where did all that come from, Mac?’

‘My grandfather left me a complete collection of the Whole Earth Catalog, a load of sixties and seventies counter-culture stuff . . . I got quite interested in it, you know. Some of their values were laudable. But when it comes to the meat and potatoes – the secret to building a home in a place like this isn’t about ideals and theory, and not about getting high. It’s about hard work, alongside a sense of humour, and the goodwill of your neighbours, and putting your back into the future. But what you’ve got down there, I think, is the seed of tragedy. Along with Margarita Jha from biology, I analysed that lovely little flower that grows everywhere in their woods. Addictive and hallucinogenic like there’s no tomorrow. Growing like a weed.’

‘But, Mac – ye gods! Are we going to have to send a Drug Enforcement Agency unit to every settlement? They have to work it out for themselves.’

‘That’s how it got resolved on the Datum, in the end. After Step Day there was an explosion in the drug trade – with stepping pushers, there was no way to police it. In the inner cities, the cops pulled back and . . . Well, let’s say they let natural selection take its course.’

She looked at him as he said these words, his tone neutral. In the course of his career Mac had evidently seen a lot of stuff even she, in the military, had been shielded from. She said, ‘Well, we’re done with this particular can of worms. I think they’ll let this guy Hartmann out. But it’s been a salutary shock; they’ll figure out ways to order their affairs better.’

‘Sure. A neat wrap-up,’ said Mac sourly. ‘But the frightening part of it is that we’ve barely started this mission. What’s waiting for us in the world next door?’

S
IX DAYS OUT
of Valhalla, somewhere around the Earth million mark, the
Gold Dust
made a stop at a clearing cut into yet another raw world’s continent-sized forest. From the air the Valientés saw it as a neat little rectangular patch etched out of the green, an oddly touching island of humanity all but lost in this global forest.

But when you looked more closely you could see that it wasn’t humans who’d created the clearing but a party of trolls, under the direction of a human, labouring even as the passengers looked down on them, those massive muscles working under their black pelts.

Bosun Higgs had proved to be a bright kid and surprisingly knowledgeable about the Long Earth – and the importance of the trolls. The big humanoids were ubiquitous, though not necessarily in large numbers. And they shaped the country they moved through, just on account of what they ate, pushed through, moved aside. In their ecological role they were like the big animals of Africa, maybe, like elephants or wildebeest. As a result, Helen learned now, the landscapes of the stepwise worlds, while quite unlike the Datum, were not quite
like
the Datum as it had once been before humanity either, not for a long time – because as mankind had risen up, the trolls had fled.