The Long War (2 page)

He found Sally sitting at the kitchen table, nursing coffee in a local-pottery mug. She was looking away from him, she hadn’t noticed him yet, and he paused at the door to study her, taking in the scene, getting his bearings.

Helen was in the dry store, and Joshua saw she was digging out salt, pepper, matches. On the table, meanwhile, Sally had dumped enough butchered meat to last for weeks. This was pioneer protocol. The Valientés didn’t need the meat, of course, but that was no matter. The deal was that the visiting traveller brought the meat, and the householder repaid the gift not only with a meal, the catch properly dressed and cooked, but also with some of those little comforts that were hard to find in the wilderness, such as salt, pepper, a good night’s sleep in a proper bed. Joshua smiled. Sally prided herself on being somewhat more self-sufficient than Daniel Boone and Captain Nemo put together, but surely even Daniel Boone must’ve craved pepper – just like Sally.

She was forty-three years old now, a few years older than Joshua – and sixteen years older than Helen, which didn’t help their various interrelationships. Her greying hair was tied neatly back, and she wore her usual garb of heavy-duty jeans and sleeveless, multi-pocketed jacket. Just as she’d always been, she was lean, wiry, eerily still – and watchful.

Right now she was watching an object on the wall: a gold ring set with sapphires, hanging on a loop of string from a stubby local-forge iron nail. It was one of the few trophies Joshua had kept of the journey of discovery across the Long Earth that the two of them had made with Lobsang. Or,
The Journey
, as the world knew it ten years later. It was a gaudy thing, and too large for a human finger. But then, humans hadn’t made it, as Sally would remember. Just below the ring hung another bit of jewellery, a monkey bracelet, plastic and paste: a thing for a kid, gaudy, silly. Joshua was pretty sure Sally would remember the significance of that too.

He walked forward, deliberately pushing the door to make it creak. She turned and surveyed him, critical, unsmiling.

He said, ‘Heard you arrive.’

‘You’ve put on weight.’

‘Nice to see you too, Sally. I take it you’ve a reason for coming here. You always have a reason.’

‘Oh, yes.’

I wonder if Calamity Jane was like this, Joshua thought as he reluctantly sat down. Like a gunpowder explosion going off periodically in the middle of your life. Maybe, though Sally had marginally better access to toiletries.

Helen was now in the kitchen, and Joshua smelled meat on the griddle. When he caught Helen’s eye she waved away his silent offer of help. He recognized tact when he saw it. Helen was trying to give them some space. Tact, yes, but he also feared this was the beginning of one of Helen’s icy silences. Sally after all was a woman who’d had a long, complicated and
famous
relationship with her husband before he’d even known Helen. Sally had been at his side, in fact, when he first met Helen, then a seventeen-year-old pioneer in a brand-new Long Earth colony town. His young wife was never going to jump for joy when Sally showed up again.

Sally was waiting for him to respond, ignorant of such subtleties, or uncaring.

He sighed. ‘So tell me. What brings you here this time?’

‘Another slimeball killed another troll.’

He grunted. There had been a blizzard of such incidents in the news brought by the outernet – incidents occurring across the Long Earth, from the Datum to Valhalla and beyond, evidently all the way up to the Gap, judging from recent sensational reports of a lurid case involving a cub in a 1950s-type spacesuit.

‘Butchered it, in this case,’ Sally said. ‘I mean, literally. Reported at an Aegis administration office at Plumbline, just inside the Meggers—’

‘I know it.’

‘It was a young one this time. Body parts taken for some kind of folk medicine. For once the guy’s actually been arrested on a cruelty charge. But his family are kicking up because, what the hell, it was just an animal, wasn’t it?’

Joshua shook his head. ‘We’re all under the US Aegis. What’s the argument? Aren’t Datum animal cruelty laws supposed to apply?’

‘
That’s
all a mess, Joshua, with different rulings at federal and state level, and arguments about how such rulings extend to the Long Earth anyhow. Not to mention the lack of resources to police them.’

‘I don’t follow Datum politics too closely. You know, here we protect trolls under an extension of our citizenship rights.’

‘Really?’

He smiled. ‘You sound surprised. You’re not the only one with a conscience, you know. Anyhow trolls are too damn useful to have them bothered, or driven away.’

‘Well, not everywhere is as civilized, evidently. You must remember, Joshua, that the Aegis is presided over by Datum politicians, which is to say, buttholes. And they really don’t get it! They are
not
the kind of people to get mud on their shiny shoes anywhere much beyond a park in Earth West 3. They have no idea of how important it is that humanity stays friendly with the trolls. The long call is full of it.’

Meaning every troll everywhere would soon know all about this.

Sally said now, ‘You know, the problem is that before Step Day most of what trolls knew and understood about humanity came from their experiences in places like Happy Landings, where they lived closely with humans. Peacefully, constructively . . .’

‘If a little creepily.’

‘Well, yes. What is happening now is that trolls are encountering ordinary folk. That is, idiots.’

With a sense of dread he asked, ‘Sally – why have you come here? What do you want me to do about this?’

‘Your duty, Joshua.’

She meant, Joshua knew, that he was to go with her, off into the Long Earth. Saving the worlds once again.

The hell with that, he thought. Times had changed. He’d changed. His duty was
here
: to his family, his home, this township which had, foolishly enough, elected him mayor.

Joshua had fallen in love with the place even before he had seen it, reckoning that the first-footers who had given their home a name like Hell-Knows-Where were very likely to be decent people with a sense of humour, as indeed they’d turned out to be. As for Helen, who had trekked out with her family to found a brand-new township, this way of living was what she had grown up with. And this place they had come to, in a million-step-remote footprint of the Mississippi valley, had turned out to have air that was clean, a river lively with fish, a land rich with game and replete with other resources such as lead and iron ore seams. Thanks to a twain mass-spectrometry scan of nearby formations that Joshua had called in as a favour, they even had the makings of a copper mine. As a bonus, the climate here happened to be just a little cooler than on the Datum, and in the winter the local copy of the Mississippi regularly froze over – a thrilling spectacle, even if it did threaten a couple of careless lives every year.

When they’d arrived, Joshua, even compared with his new young wife, had been a novice settler, for all his trekking experience in the Long Earth. But now he was recognized as a skilled hunter, butcher, general artificer – and pretty nearly, these days, blacksmith and smelter. Not to mention mayor until the next poll. Helen, meanwhile, was a senior midwife and a top herbalist.

Of course it was hard work. A pioneer family lived beyond the reach of shopping malls, and bread always needed baking, hams needed curing, tallow had to be made, and beer had to be brewed. Out here, in fact, you worked all the time. But the work was pleasing. And the work was Joshua’s life now . . .

Sometimes he missed isolation. His sabbaticals, as he called them. The sense of emptiness when he was entirely alone on a world. The absence of the pressure of other minds, a pressure he felt even here, though it was a ghost compared with what he felt on the Datum. And the eerie sense of the
other
that he’d always called the Silence, like a hint of vast minds, or assemblages of minds, somewhere far off. He’d once met one of those mighty remote minds in the extraordinary First Person Singular. But there were more out there, he knew. He could hear them, like gongs sounding in distant mountains . . . Well, he’d had all that. But
this
, he’d belatedly discovered, was far more precious: his wife, their son, perhaps a second child some day.

Nowadays he tried to ignore what was going on beyond the town limits. After all, it wasn’t as though he owed the Long Earth anything. He’d saved lives on stepwise worlds on Step Day itself, and later had opened up half of them with Lobsang. He’d done his duty in this new age, hadn’t he?

But here was Sally, an incarnation of his past, sitting at his kitchen table, waiting for an answer. Well, he wasn’t going to rush to reply. Generally speaking, Joshua wasn’t a trigger-fast speaker at the best of times. He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.

They stared it out.

To his relief, Helen walked in at last, and set out beer and burgers: home-brewed beer, home-raised beef, home-baked bread. She sat with them and began a pleasant enough conversation, asking Sally about her recent ports of call. When they’d eaten, Helen bustled about once more, clearing the plates, again refusing Joshua’s offer of help.

All the time there was another dialogue going on under the surface. Every marriage had its own private language. Helen knew very well why Sally was here, and after nine years of marriage Joshua could hear the feeling of imminent loss as if it were being broadcast on the radio.

If Sally heard it, she didn’t care. Once Helen had left them alone at the table once more, she started in again. ‘As you say, it’s not the only case.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘The Plumbline slaughter.’

‘So much for the chit-chat, eh, Sally?’

‘It’s not even the most notorious, right now. You want an itemized list?’

‘No.’

‘You see what’s happening here, Joshua. Humanity has been given a chance, with the Long Earth. A new start, an escape from the Datum, a whole world we already screwed up—’

‘I know what you’re going to say.’ Because she’d said it a million times before, in his hearing. ‘We’re going to bollocks up our second chance at Eden, even before the paint has dried.’

Helen deposited a large bowl of ice cream in the middle of the table with a definite
thud
.

Sally stared at it like a dog confronted by a brontosaurus bone. ‘You make
ice cream
? Here?’

Helen sat down. ‘Last year Joshua put in the hours on an ice house. It wasn’t a difficult project once we got round to it. The trolls like the ice cream. And we do get hot weather here; it’s wonderful to have something like this when you’re bartering with the neighbours.’

Joshua could hear the subtext, even if Sally couldn’t.
This isn’t about ice cream. This is about our life. What we’re building here. Which you, Sally, have no part of
.

‘Go on, help yourself, we have plenty more. It’s getting late – of course you’re welcome to stay the night. Would you like to come see Dan’s school play?’

Joshua saw the look of sheer terror on Sally’s face. As an act of mercy he said, ‘Don’t worry. It won’t be as bad as you think. We have smart kids, and decent and helpful parents, good teachers – I should know, I’m one of them, and so is Helen.’

‘Community schooling?’

‘Yes. We concentrate on survival skills, metallurgy, medical botany, Long Earth animal biology, the whole spectrum of practical skills from flint-working to glass-making . . .’

Helen said, ‘But it’s not all pioneer stuff. We have a high scholastic standard. They even learn Greek.’

‘Mr. Johansen,’ said Joshua. ‘Peripatetic. Commutes twice a month from Valhalla.’ He smiled and pointed to the ice cream. ‘Get it while it’s cold.’

Sally took one large scoop, demolished it. ‘Wow. Pioneers with ice cream.’

Joshua felt motivated to defend his home. ‘Well, it doesn’t
have
to be like the Donner Party, Sally—’

‘You’re also pioneers with cellphones, aren’t you?’

It was true that life was a tad easier here than for pioneers on the Long Earth elsewhere. On this Earth, West 1,397,426, they even had sat-nav – and only Joshua, Helen and a few others knew why the Black Corporation had decided to use
this
particular world to try out their prototype technology, orbiting twenty-four nanosats from a small portable launcher. Call it a favour from an old friend . . .

Among those few others in the know was Sally, of course.

Joshua faced her. ‘Lay off, Sally. The sat-nav and the rest are here because of me. I know it. My friends know it.’

Helen grinned. ‘One of the engineers who called to fix up that stuff once told Joshua that the Black Corporation sees him as a “valuable long-term investment”. Worth cultivating, I suppose. Worth keeping sweet with little gifts.’

Sally snorted. ‘Meaning that’s how Lobsang sees you. How demeaning.’

Joshua ignored that, as he generally ignored any mention of that particular name. ‘And besides, I know that some people are drawn here
because
of me.’

‘The famous Joshua Valienté.’

‘Why not? It’s good not to have to advertise for good people. And if they don’t fit, they leave anyhow.’

Sally opened her mouth, ready for a few more jabs.

But Helen had evidently had enough. She stood up. ‘Sally, if you want to freshen up we’ve got a guest room down the passage there. Curtain up is in an hour. Dan – that’s our son, maybe you remember him – is already down at the town hall helping out, which is to say bossing the other kids about. Take some of the ice cream when we go over if you like. It’s only a short walk.’

Joshua forced a smile. ‘Everywhere’s a short walk here.’

Helen glanced out through the crude glass of the window. ‘And it looks like another perfect evening . . .’

I
T WAS INDEED
a perfect early spring evening.

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.