The Long War (9 page)

And he knew of a secret out here, that was his alone.

He bent to look into a cave, cut into the side of the bluff by millennia of wind. It was hardly a cave at all, just a hollow half choked by dry drifting sand. But it was a site he had discovered for himself as a boy, visiting his grandparents at Jigalong, exploring alone in the bush: even then he’d been a solitary kid. And, so deep inside the cave you had to crouch to see, there was the Hunting Man, as he called it, a stick figure with some kind of spear chasing a huge, ill-defined creature, while spirals and starbursts spun around him. It was thousands of years old, he’d figured out, as you could tell by the patina over it.

And, as far as he knew, it had been discovered by nobody before his own boyish eyes had settled on it. Nobody found it later, either. He’d kept the secret of it ever since.

He’d always thought of the Hunting Man as a kind of friend. An invisible companion. A stable point in a life of whirling change.

Thomas had been a bright kid. Picked out of the local school and groomed for better things, he’d gone to college at Perth and even spent some time in America, before returning to Melbourne to become a whizz-kid games designer. He’d been black enough to serve as a poster boy for liberals, white enough that those around him had been able to treat him as one of their own.

Then he’d had his crisis of conscience, and he started to find out about the plight of the people he’d left behind, his mother’s family. How a culture a staggering sixty thousand years old, a people free and self-sufficient a mere three centuries ago, had become the most dependent on the planet: marginalized, removed from their lands, shattered by unemployment and drug abuse, their culture broken up by forced evictions and ‘white’ education. How in his own grandmother’s time her clan had been moved from their country to avoid the British Blue Streak missiles test-launched from Woomera.

Granted, all this hand-wringing had been brought on by Thomas’s own beating-up by a bunch of thugs in Sydney who didn’t like his kind in their city, even one in a suit and tie. But it was a real eye-opener even so.

Then he’d got married. Hannah was a trainee lawyer, another bright young thing, white, from a well-connected New South Wales family. They’d been hoping for a kid.

But then the cancer had taken her, and that had been that. She had been just twenty-three. Helen could sympathize with that part of his story, remembering the suddenness of the loss of her own mother.

After that Thomas’s work seemed pointless. He’d gone back to Perth and worked for a progressive association there, promoting Aboriginal rights. And he’d taken the chance to study his mother’s culture. He’d even become a ‘native guide’ for parties of earnest white tourists. His mother’s family had sneered at that, but he’d learned a lot.

And then had come the Stepper box, and the opening up of the Long Earth. Another huge jolt to Thomas’s personal universe, as to everybody else’s. Many Aborigines, especially young men, had immediately grasped the potential of the technology, and stepped away in search of a better world than the Datum, and its bloody history.

Thomas himself had rarely stepped, in those early days, save for a couple of experiments. Why should he? After all the turnarounds in his life, Thomas no longer felt he knew who he was. He was a contradiction, neither white nor black, married but alone. What was he going to discover about himself out in all those other worlds that he couldn’t find right here? Rather than travel forward, he kept on being drawn back, in fact, to the same point, the Hunting Man in the cave, the one stable locus in his life, like a nail hammered through his psyche.

But this time he had come back here with his Stepper. He had an experiment in mind.

He picked a direction at random, and turned the switch.

Australia West 1.

They were farming kangaroos here, as indeed they were in East 1: he saw heaps of carcasses, tethered horses, a stack of bronze-based rifles heaped up like a tepee. A couple of ranchers sat on a log. When they saw Thomas they raised plastic bottles of beer to him. He waved back.

Roo farming was becoming commonplace, even in the Datum. Kangaroos were efficient as food animals. Pound for pound a roo needed a third the plant material a sheep did, a sixth the water, and produced almost no methane; roo farts were parsimonious. Thomas didn’t object for any rational reasons. It just didn’t
feel
right. Anyhow this new world was an annexe to the old, and nothing to do with him.

He stepped away, to West 2. And 3. And 4. Each step was a wrench to the stomach, and he needed time to recover.

It took him two hours to get to West 10, where he stopped. He sat on an eroded shelf at the edge of the rocky outcrop, which appeared unchanged from the ‘original’ in the Datum. He looked around, taking his time, absorbing the new world.

And off in the distance he saw movement. A herd of some huge, slow-moving, rather lumbering creatures, seen in silhouette against a pale blue sky. Walking on all fours, they looked like rhinos to his untutored eye. Presumably they were some marsupial equivalent, perhaps hunted by a local version of a lion. There were kangaroos here too, standing up, plucking at the lowest leaves of some tree, but these were big animals, bigger than any roo in the Datum, big and muscular. And there, scampering in the distance, a thing like a dinosaur, a raptor, that was probably a flightless bird. The world was intensely silent, save for the distant bellow of one giant herbivore or another.

He drank water from a plastic bottle. Some of the nearer worlds had been visited by hunters unable to resist the lure of going after the native megafauna, but here, ten steps out, there was no sign of humanity, not so much as a footprint.

And it was a different sort of world, without humans. Naively you’d think that one copy of the Western Desert was going to be much the same as any other. Not so. This country was always going to be arid, but Thomas could see at a glance that it was greener than he was used to, with patches of tough-looking grass, scrubby trees. On the Datum his mother’s people had shaped the land with fire for sixty thousand years; this was a land without Europeans, but without the Martu and their ancestors too.

Thomas wasn’t here for the flora and fauna, however.

When he felt well enough to stand he walked around the bluff to the cave – it was here just as in the Datum – and knelt down, the Stepper box awkward at his waist. He had to shield his eyes against the light of a descending sun to see inside.

And there it was, in the cave. Somehow he had known it would be. Not
his
Hunting Man, not exactly. Another human figure chasing another crudely sketched animal. Around it, a different array of spirals and starbursts and hatchings and zigzags. And when he touched the drawing, cautiously, he could feel the patina that covered it. It was every bit as ancient as the one in the Datum. Put there by some scrawny guy who had figured out how to step, all by himself, millennia ago.

He sat with his back to the rock. He would have laughed, save he didn’t want to disrespect the silence, or indeed draw the attention of any nearby marsupial lions. Of course there must have been Aboriginal steppers. Where would an ability to step have been of more use than in the arid heart of Australia? If his ancestors
had
been able to exploit a sheaf of worlds, even just in emergencies, the resources available to them would have been multiplied hugely. And they had had sixty thousand years to discover how.

But even so, surely not in such numbers as today. Maybe this was a new Dreamtime, he thought, a replay of the age when the Ancestors had moved across an empty landscape, and in doing so had brought the land itself into being. It was the turn of his generation to become the new Ancestors, to begin a new Dreamtime that might encompass all of the Long Earth.

And this time they would shape a landscape no white colonist could ever appropriate.

So here was Thomas, with a cellphone in his pocket, sitting by a rock, alone in this world.

He could go back and report his bit of archaeology, at last.

Or maybe it was his own time to go walkabout. He could strip down to his boxers, just dump everything, and wander off . . .

Living off the endlessly generous land, he became a comber – this was before the word itself, derived from ‘beachcomber’, had become common currency. In due course he would start to hear legends of Joshua Valienté and other super-steppers, legends that were spreading across the Long Earth, and he would begin to take a more academic view of those who shared his new lifestyle . . . And then he met Joshua himself, in the silence of a very distant America.

‘But all that lay in the future,’ he told Helen now. ‘As I remember it, I just patted the Hunting Man – Hunting Man West 10 – and straightened up, and touched my Stepper, and I was gone for good.’

She smiled. ‘The Long Earth has given us all stories, I guess.’

‘Too right. So what about yours. Tell me about this place Reboot. Another coffee?’

T
HEY SPENT THREE
more weeks in Valhalla, trying to get Dan used to the place, and to the idea of coming here to school – even though headmaster Jacques Montecute and the taciturn Roberta had in the meantime left for the Datum, to join the Chinese expedition. Helen had plenty of time to sample the local cuisine, including lots more coffee – enough to establish that, whatever Valhalla was good at, coffee wasn’t it.

But that was remedied once they boarded the
Gold Dust
. In the first twenty-four hours Helen spent most of her time relaxing, sitting in the family’s saloon, sipping the finest coffee she’d drunk since – well, since the last time her father had taken her to a Datum Madison mom-and-pop local coffee shop aged about twelve, before they left the old world behind for good.

That was the
Gold Dust
for you. It was like the best hotel in all the worlds, she thought, uprooted and drifting in the sky, an eight-hundred-foot-long envelope from which hung a gondola of polished High-Megger hardwood, like one vast piece of furniture. Helen had felt embarrassed just to climb aboard. Even the gangplank was carpeted, and you could have lost their whole Hell-Knows-Where house in the reception hall.

Of course they were honoured guests, Joshua, Dan, Helen, even Bill Chambers – and Sally Linsay, who Helen noticed wasn’t too high-minded to hitch a ride aboard this flying palace. Honoured because of Joshua, of course, the hero explorer. If he wished,
the
Joshua Valienté could dine out on his legend, but he hardly ever did. Full of contradictions, her Joshua. But when he got offered such treats as this ride in the
Gold Dust
, he’d learned not to turn them away – that was how Helen had trained him anyhow.

Dan was in his element, of course. He’d wanted to be a twain driver since he could walk, and would run after even the scrubby little local ships that drifted over Hell-Knows-Where. Helen had thought his eyes would pop out when they walked aboard the
Gold Dust
.

But there was some concern for him, at the beginning. This was Dan’s first long-distance haul. Helen was not a natural stepper, while Joshua was the world’s
model
natural stepper. Just as his colouring was mixed – Dan had his father’s dark hair but his mother’s paler complexion – as a stepper Dan was somewhere in between his parents. And in his genetic background he did have a phobic uncle, Helen’s brother Rod, who couldn’t step at all. The medicinal treatments for controlling the symptoms of stepping nausea were advanced now, so that almost everybody could withstand even a high-speed journey like this – almost all, but not quite all. If Dan had shown any distress, it would have been the end of the journey for his parents (well, for Helen anyhow; she had no doubt Joshua would have gone on with Sally) – and the end of a dream for Dan. Joshua and Helen were both privately relieved when the ship’s surgeon, who had been hovering over the passengers as the twain set off, gave them a discreet thumbs-up.

After that the crew made a huge fuss of Dan. At Helen’s insistence he was to be accompanied at all times by either one of his parents or a junior crewman, appointed by the Captain. The crewman told Dan his name was Bosun Higgs, and Helen didn’t believe that for a
second
. But apart from that the crew gave Dan the run of the ship, from the ladders and gantries inside the envelope itself with its huge sacs of helium, to the gondola’s cargo hold and engine room, and the staterooms and restaurant cum ballroom – even the wheelhouse, a huge transparent-walled blister at the prow, where you could watch the great ships rising from world after world to join the fleet as it ploughed East towards the Datum, with views of the American Sea and its forest-coated fringe shivering by, a new world with every heartbeat. An incredible, thrilling sight, even to a sedentary type like Helen.

On the second evening of the voyage the grown-ups had a treat, when they dined at the Captain’s table. What else would you expect, for the Valienté family? The restaurant was at the prow, just beneath the wheelhouse itself. Helen couldn’t believe how ornate the place was, with white wooden filigree work everywhere, and gilt mammoth tusks and oversized acorns hanging in the corners, and what looked like original oil paintings of various Long Earth scenes hanging on the walls, and armchairs and carpets soft as puppy fur – even a chandelier hanging over the table. All of which was a pleasant distraction from their fellow diners, who were generally the obnoxiously rich: Long Earth traders splashing the profits, or tourists from the Datum on the ‘cruise of a lifetime’, who mistook Helen and Joshua for staff more than once.

The view outside was the main attraction. From the Captain’s table right up by the forward window you could see the worlds flash by below, and the gleaming hulls of the companion ships of the fleet, dozens of them hanging like Chinese lanterns under the changing sky. They had already travelled a long way – at its top speed of a step a second, the twain could cover the best part of ninety thousand worlds a day – but they would be slower than that on average, and it would take some weeks to reach the Datum. As the evening gathered in, most of the landscapes that washed beneath the ship’s prow were dark, largely uninhabited – though one sparkled with town lights, and the Captain told them that this was Amerika, the new Dutch nation, one whole copy of the footprint of the United States given by the federal government. The Long Earth hadn’t been much use to the Dutch at first, since on all the stepwise worlds the landscapes they had spent centuries carefully preserving from the sea were still drowned . . .