Terry Pratchett - The Long War

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…

The climax of the show—the Captain had timed the meal so they could witness the specific moment, just as the dessert trolley reached their table, and just as the setting sun touched the horizon—came when the great American Sea, the inland ocean whose footprint had been their constant companion since they left Valhalla, melted away, first crumbling into scattered lakes, then submitting to a forest cover that stretched as far as the eye could see, dark green-black in the light of the setting sun. Helen’s heart ached a bit when they lost contact with their sea, or at least its footprint.

But as the light faded further they began to see what had taken its place, below the prow: a river, wide and placid, a shining ribbon cutting across the land. It was the Mississippi, or a remote cousin of that great river on the Datum, a constant in most Americas—indeed Hell-Knows-Where stood on the banks of one stepwise copy. The river would be an unfailing companion for the rest of the trip.

They had a hell of a time getting Dan to sleep after that. Helen blamed the dessert: too much chocolate. Joshua, meanwhile, went off to find Bill, who’d spent his own raucous night with the crew.

The good people of Four Waters City, deep in a stepwise Idaho, seemed happy to see the USS Benjamin Franklin appear in the skies above their town. They quickly threw a kind of mass lunch for the dirigible’s entire fifty-person crew; the beef was so flavour-some and so relished that the ghost of the steer was probably looking down approvingly, Maggie thought.

But afterwards the conversation soon grew tricky, to say the least.

Captain Maggie Kauffman strolled along the main, indeed the only, drag of Four Waters City. Somewhere in the region of a hundred and fifty thousand steps from the Datum, set in a typical Corn Belt farming world, the place was neatly laid out and was bustling with people. It looked at first glance like Dodge City without the gunplay, but with, of course, the inevitable mobile communications tower courtesy of the Black Corporation. Maggie’s local guide, Mayor Jacqueline Robinson, pointed out with some pride various other civic improvements, including a reasonable hospital which the town shared with similar cities in neighbouring stepwise worlds.

But the mayor, a tough-looking woman of about fifty, was oddly tense, nervous. Maggie wondered if that was because of the small stands of cannabis she saw flourishing in one or two gardens, along with a few other exotic blooms, out in open view, by the street.

When Mayor Robinson finally noticed Maggie looking, she said, “Actually, that’s mostly just hemp. Blameless. Gives a good fabric for working clothes. My maternal family were originally Czech. My grandfather told me that one day the cops raided what was eventually to have been his new shirt…”

Maggie let that stand. She knew when to let silence do the questioning. Then she said, “ Mostly? ”

Robinson admitted, “Look, as for the other usage—the kids don’t seem interested, and the opinion of the town meeting, in this town, is that for mature people it’s OK, but keep the kids off it. Also, I have to tell you, there’s some local stuff—an exotic flower in the woods to the west, native to this world apparently. Wow, that blows your head off. Even a walk in the woods—well.” She was talking too quickly; eventually she ran down, and shrugged. “No offence to you, Captain, seeing as you are, in theory at least, a representative of the government. We have our own set of values here. I mean, we regard ourselves as American, bound by the Constitution. But we don’t believe in any remote authority telling us what we should or should not be doing, or thinking for that matter.”

Maggie said, “I’m a serving Navy officer. I’m not a cop; in fact, traditionally the Navy has specific directives against carrying out internal policing functions. Mayor Robinson, I’m not here to criticize or judge. On the other hand, we in the dirigible fleet are here to offer help. As Captain, I do have a lot of discretion in how I interpret my orders.” She wasn’t sure how convincing that was. The mayor still betrayed that odd nervousness. “Look—is there something else you want to tell me?”

Suddenly the mayor looked as if she’d been caught out doing something bad. “What would you do? I mean, about something serious.”

Maggie repeated deliberately, “I’m not a cop. Maybe we can help.”

Robinson still looked uncertain. But with a nervous defiance she said at last, “There has been… a crime. In fact two crimes. We’re not sure how to handle the situation.”

“Yes?”

“A child was harmed. Drugs. OK—it was drugs. And a murder.”

Maggie felt her stomach turn. But she had thought that garbled defence of the local drug culture had been a little forced.

“Look,” Robinson said, “I don’t want to talk any more out here. We’d better go into my office.”

The crew of the USS Benjamin Franklin did not have a specifically military mission, even though the dirigible was a Navy vessel.

The Franklin ’s voyage, a long jaunt across the Long Earth, was strictly speaking an exercise in maintaining the integrity of the United States Aegis, the concept of which was still prized in Datum Washington, DC, if nowhere else. Oh, the voyage did have scientific purposes. Every stepwise world was to be logged, every Joker recorded. The crew was to sample novel life forms, geological formations and climatic conditions—and was specifically tasked to search for sapience wherever it could be found. So, a ship fit for such a mission, the Benjamin Franklin was no cargo scow: it was an extremely modern aircraft, bristling with scientific sensors—as well as weapons.

But the true reason for the voyage of the Benjamin Franklin was to travel the stepwise Earths within the footprint of the United States of America and to show the flag to as many of the new colonies out there as it could locate—or indeed discover; many of them had not registered their existence with any Datum authority. It was the job of the Franklin to find, and count, Americans, and to remind them that they were Americans.

The operation had been launched three weeks before, on an April day in Richmond, Virginia, Datum Earth. Maggie Kauffman had stood there in the open, in a downtown park, with her officers and crew, Executive Officer Nathan Boss and ship’s chief surgeon Joe Mackenzie at her side, before an empty stage with an unoccupied podium, a big Stars and Stripes dangling limply to either side, and a huge banner draped above: UNITY IS STRENGTH. This downtown park wasn’t far from the north bank of the James, and, this being Datum Earth, high-rise buildings had loomed out of the smog, some obviously abandoned, their windows boarded up like poked-in eyes.