The Long Earth (11 page)

But neither was he running a philanthropic foundation, Jansson knew. The workers, mostly young and ill-educated, often had no real idea of what was going on out in the Long Earth before they came out here to work in places like this. As soon as they realized that they could be using their strength to build something for themselves, they tended to start agitating to join one of the new Companies and go trekking off into the deep crosswise to colonize – or else, as it dawned on them that there was an infinity of worlds out there none of which were owned by people like Jim Russo, they simply walked away, into the endless spaces. Some people just seemed to keep walking and walking, living off the land as best they could. Long Earth Syndrome, they called it. And that was where the complaints about Russo were coming from. He was said to be tying his workers up with punitive contracts to keep them from straying, and then going after them with hired muscle if they reneged.

She had the sudden instinct that this man was going to fail, as he had before. And when it all started going belly-up he was going to be cutting even more corners.

‘Mr Russo, we need to get down to the specifics of the complaints against you. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’

‘Of course …’

All over the nearby Earths, Jansson knew, on worlds becoming sweatshops overnight, people were dreaming of escape, of freedom. As she waited for a coffee Jansson spotted a flyer in Russo’s own in-tray, just a page crudely printed on pulpy paper, about the formation of yet another new Company to go trek up West. Dreams of the new frontier, even here in this minor businessman’s office. Sometimes Jansson, nearing forty now, wondered if she should up sticks and go out herself, and leave the Datum and the increasingly murky Low Earths behind.

14

DREAMS OF THE
Long Earth. Dreams of the frontier. Yes, ten years after Step Day, Jack Green had understood that. Because they had been his wife’s dreams, and Jack had feared they were tearing his family apart.

January 1. Madison West 5. We came to stay at a lodge here for New Year after
Cristmas
Christmas at home but we will have to go
bak
back to the Datum for school. My name is Helen Green. I am
elven
eleven years old. My mother (Dr Tilda Lang Green) says I should keep a
jurnal jorunal
journal in this
bok
book which was a Christmas
presnt
present from Aunt Meryl because there
mite
might be no
electrics
electronics this thing have no spellchecker it drive me CRAYZEE!!! …

Jack Green carefully turned the pages of his daughter’s journal. It was like a fat paperback book, though with the pulpy graininess of much of the paper produced here in West 5. He was alone in Helen’s room, on a bright Sunday afternoon. Helen was out playing softball in ParkZone Four. Katie was out too, he wasn’t sure where. And Tilda was downstairs talking with a group of the friends and colleagues she had managed to snag into the idea of forming a Company to go West.

‘… Empires rise and they fall. Look at Turkey. That was a great empire once and you wouldn’t believe it now …’

‘… If you’re middle class you look to the left and see the activists
undermining
American values, and to the right and you see how free trade has exported our jobs …’

‘… We believed in America. Now we seem to be mired in mediocrity, while the Chinese steam ahead …’

Tilda’s voice: ‘The notion of Manifest Destiny is historically suspect, of course. But you can’t deny the importance of the frontier experience to the making of the American consciousness. Well, now the frontier is opening up again, for our generation and maybe for uncountable generations to follow …’

The group conversation broke up into a general susurrus of noise, and Jack smelled a rich aroma. Time for coffee and cookies.

He returned to the diary. At last he came to an entry that mentioned his son. He read on, skimming over the spelling errors and crossings-out.

March 23. We have moved to our new house in Madison West 5. It will be fun here in the summer. Dad and Mom take it in turns to go back, they have to work on the Datum for the money. And we had to leave Rod again with Auntie Meryl because he is a fobic
[she meant phobic, a non-stepper – Jack tripped over that spelling]
and can’t step it’s sad I cried this time after we stepped away but Rod didn’t cry unless he did after we had gone. I will write to him in the summer and will go back and see him IT IS SAD because it is fun here in the summer and Rod can’t come …

‘Tut tut.’ His wife’s voice. ‘That’s private.’

He turned, guilty. ‘I know, I know. But we’re going through such changes. I feel the need to know what’s going on in their heads. I think that trumps the privacy thing, just for now.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s your judgement.’ She had brought him a coffee, a brimming mug. She turned and stood by the big picture window, the best in the house, the least flawed pane they could find of the locally manufactured sheet glass. They looked out over
Madison
West 5, across which the afternoon shadows were just beginning to stretch. She wore her slightly greying strawberry blonde hair cut short, and the graceful curve of her neck was silhouetted against the window. ‘Still a lovely day,’ she said.

‘Lovely place, too …’

‘Yes. Nearly perfect.’

Nearly perfect
. Under that phrase lurked a real bear trap.

Madison West 5 sprawled comfortably over essentially the same landscape dominated by its elder brother back on the Datum. But this was a place of grace and light and open spaces, with only a fraction of true Madison’s population. That wasn’t to deny that many of the buildings were massive. The architectural styles that had developed on the Low Easts and Wests were characterized by weight. Raw materials were dirt cheap on the virgin worlds, which meant that buildings and furnishings could often be variations on the theme of slab. Thus the town hall with its cathedral-thick walls, and roof beams laser-cut from whole trees. But there were a lot of electronics and other kinds of smartness around, lightweight and easily imported from the Datum. So you saw little pioneer log cabins with solar paint on the roofs.

But you could never forget you weren’t on Earth, not on the Datum. At the perimeter of the city there was a wide system of fences and ditches, designed to keep out some of the more exotic wildlife. The migration of a herd of Columbian mammoths had once caused a rushed suburban evacuation.

In the first years after Step Day, a lot of couples like Jack and Tilda Green, with careers and kids and savings in the bank, had started looking at the new stepwise worlds with a view to buying a little extra property, a place for their kids to go play. They rapidly found that Madison West 1 was too much of a slave to the Datum, a jumble of hasty extensions to homes and office developments. At first the Greens had rented a small cabin on West 2. But the place soon came to feel like a theme park. Over-organized, too close to home. And the land already belonged to somebody else.

But then they’d discovered the project to develop Madison West 5, starting from a clean slate, high-tech, eco-friendly from the start, intended to be more than just another city. They’d both been enthused, and had invested a chunk of their savings to get in on the ground floor. Jack and Tilda had contributed a lot to the finalizing of the design, he as a software engineer working on details of the city’s smarts, she as a lecturer in cultural history devising novel forms of local government and community forums. It was only unfortunate that they couldn’t make enough of a living here, and they both had to cut back to the Datum to their regular jobs.

‘This is our city. But it’s only “nearly perfect”?’ he said.

‘Uh huh. We’re living in a dream, but it’s somebody else’s dream. I want my
own
dream.’

‘But our son the phobic—’

‘Don’t use that word.’

‘Well, it’s what people say, Tilda.
He
won’t be able to share that dream.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘We have to think about what’s best for all of us. For Katie and Helen too, as well as Rod – we can’t be tied down by that. It’s a unique moment, Jack. Just now, under the aegis rules and the new Homestead Acts, the government are practically giving away the land in the stepwise Americas. That’s a window that’s not going to stay open for ever.’

Jack grunted. ‘It’s all ideology.’
The New Frontier
: that was the slogan, borrowed from an old John F. Kennedy election pitch. The federal government was encouraging emigration to the new worlds by Americans, and indeed by others, the sole understanding being that under the American aegis you would obey American laws, and pay American taxes: you would
be
an American. ‘The federal government just wants to make sure all those stepwise versions of the US are colonized by us before somebody else moves in.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that. The same sort of impulse drove the expansion west in the nineteenth century. Of course it’s
intellectually
interesting that most Americans choose to go
West
, even though that’s just an arbitrary label with no reference to geographical west. Similarly I heard that most Chinese emigrants are heading
East
…’

‘Christ, the journey itself takes months. All for a chance to dump the kids in an uncivilized wilderness. And what use is a software engineer going to be out there? Or a lecturer in cultural history, come to that.’

She smiled fondly. It was infuriating; he could see she wasn’t taking him remotely seriously. ‘Whatever we need to know, we’ll learn.’ She put down her coffee and slipped her arms around him. ‘I think we need to do this, Jack. It’s our chance. Our generation. Our kids’ chance.’

Our kids, he thought. All save poor Rod. Here was his wife, one of the most intelligent people he’d ever met, her head full of idealism about the future of America and mankind, and yet contemplating abandoning her own son. He rested his cheek on her greying hair, and wondered if he would ever understand her.

15

DREAMS OF THE
Long Earth, all across the old world. Some dreams were new, and at the same time very, very old …

The mates sat near the car, deep in the bush, drinking beer and pondering the changing world, and the stepping boxes they had all made that were resting on the red sand. Overhead, the central Australian sky was so full of stars that some had to wait their turn to twinkle.

After a while one of them said gloomily, ‘Something clawed Jimbo’s guts out, left him looking like a dugout canoe. You know that, don’t you? It ain’t no joke! A cop went in there too!
He
came out with his face off!’

Billy, who tended not to speak until he had thought for a while, like maybe a week, said, ‘It’s dreamtime stuff, mate, like it was before the ancestors came here. Don’t you remember what that scientist bloke told us, one time? They dug up the bones of big, big animals all over the bloody place, as big as you like! Big, slow food, but with big, big teeth. All these new worlds under the same sky! And no people to be seen in any of them, right? Like this world before it was buggered up! Just think what we could do if we got out there!’

Somebody opposite the fire said, ‘Yeah, mate, we could bugger it up all over again. And I like my head with a face on it!’

There was laughter. But Albert said, ‘Know what happened? Our ancestors bloody well killed them all, ate them up. They wiped out everything except what we got now. But we don’t have to do that,
right
? They say the world out there is just like here, except no men, no women, no policemen, no cities, no guns, just the land over and over again. The waterhole here is the waterhole there, all ready and waiting for us!’

‘No, it isn’t. The waterhole’s half a mile over
there
.’

‘Near enough, you know what I mean. Why don’t we give it a go, boys?’

‘Yeah, but this is
our
country. This one right here.’

Albert leaned forward, eyes sparkling. ‘Yes, but you know what?
So are those others! All of them!
I heard the scientist guys talking. Every rock, every stone, all there. It’s true!’

In the morning, the little group, slightly hungover, tossed coins to select the one who would give it a go.

Billy came back half an hour later, retching horribly, arriving out of nowhere. They picked him up and gave him water, and waited. He opened his eyes and said, ‘It’s true, but it’s bloody raining over there, mates!’

They looked at one another.

Somebody said, ‘Yeah, but what about all those creatures I’ve heard about, back in the old time? Roos with teeth! Bloody big ones! Big creatures with claws!’

There was silence. Then Albert said, ‘Well, ain’t we as good as our ancestors? They saw off these buggers. Why can’t we?’

There was a shuffling of feet.

Finally Albert said, ‘Look, tomorrow,
I’m
going over for good. Who’s with me? It’s all there, mates. It’s all been left there waiting for us, since the beginning …’

By the end of the next day the songlines had begun to expand, as the never-never began to become the ever-ever. Although sometimes the blokes came back for a beer.

Later, there were towns, unfamiliar towns admittedly, and new ways of living, a mix of past and present, as old ways were
seamlessly
woven into new ones. The eating was good, too.

And later still, surveys showed that in the great post-Step Day migration a greater proportion of Australian Aborigines left Datum Earth for good than any other ethnic group on the planet.

16

Excerpts from the Journal of Helen Green,
resceptfully
respectfully spellchecked by Dad, aka Mr J. Green
:

Here is the story
of how the Green family
walked across the Long Earth
to our new home
.

February 11, 2026. We rode on a helicopter, yay! We are going to start out from Richmond West 10, that’s Richmond
Virgina
Virginia, because you have to trek from south of all the ice in the Ice Age worlds, and we went back to the Datum and we rode to Richmond on a helicopter!! But we had to say goodbye to Rod at Chicago airport and that was sad sad …