Terry Pratchett - The Long War

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.”