Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“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?”

Six 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.

Well, the working trolls below looked content enough. But their overseer carried a whip, as Sally quickly pointed out. Joshua suggested he only used it to make a noise, to attract the trolls’ attention.

“Yeah, right,” said Sally.

Helen knew it was hard to tell how happy a troll was. You did hear of distressing incidents, such as the notorious case of the troll called Mary at the Gap, the case everyone was talking about, even the snobs aboard the Gold Dust . But you saw trolls wherever people were, working like this. They seemed to enjoy it. Of course if you pushed them too hard they could simply step away.

Maybe they were just too useful to have a conscience about. Disturbing thought. And, as Sally said to Joshua, you wondered what they thought about humans.

The party dropped off supplies for the logging team, and brought up samples of exotic lichen in little plastic packs, lichen taken from very old trees. Old trees were rare on Datum Earth and were becoming so even on the heavily logged Low Earths. That was the nature of the trade across the “Long Mississippi’, as Helen had learned the pilots called this stepwise route. Raw materials flowed in towards the Datum—timber, foodstuffs, minerals—but bulk goods mostly came from the Corn Belt worlds further in, and only rare or precious items were worth bringing in from beyond the half-million-step mark, such as unique old-tree lichens and other exotic flora and fauna. Indeed, Joshua suggested as they watched this trade proceed, their own community ought to think about exporting Hell-Knows-Where maple liquor. In exchange the Datum shipped out low-mass but high-tech goods, from medical kit to electrical generators, to coils of fibre-optic cable so the colonists could establish decent communication networks in their new worlds. It was the kind of trade that had always characterized the settlement of new territories, such as between Britain and its American colonies before the Revolution, with high-quality manufactured products being sent out from the homeland in return for raw materials. Helen’s father and his Footprint Congress buddies would probably claim it was exploitative. Maybe, but it seemed to Helen to work.