Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“The Datum, is it? Full of hoodlums and thugs and other bad lads. Ah, sure, I’m your man.”

“Will Morningtide let you go?”

“She’s busy making tallow in the yard right now. I’ll ask her later.” He coughed, his best attempt at delicacy. “There is the question of the fare.”

Joshua looked up at the waiting twain. “I have a feeling none of us will be paying for this trip, buddy.”

Bill whooped. “Fair play to you. In that case I’ll book us the finest ride I can find. And you’ve got your own release forms signed by Helen, have ye?”

Joshua sighed. Another hard scene waiting in his future. “I will do, Bill. I will do.”

They walked together.

“How was your lad’s show, by the way?”

“Jumped the shark.”

“Oh, was it that bad?”

“No, Captain Ahab really did jump the shark. Big set piece of the second act. Pretty impressive on one water-ski…”

Helen Vlienté, née Green, remembered very well the moment when relations between the Datum and its far-flung children across the Long Earth had first soured.

She’d been a young teenager, still living at Reboot, on Earth West 101,754. She’d kept a journal throughout those years, all the way from her childhood in Datum Madison, their move to Madison West 5, and then her family’s trek across a hundred thousand worlds to found a new town in an empty world, a town they had hammered together themselves, starting with nothing but their own hands and minds and hearts. And their reward from Datum America—and they had still thought of themselves as Americans—had been rejection. That had been the moment, in retrospect, even more than her mother’s illness, when Helen’s mild-mannered father Jack Green had completed his own inner journey from Datum-raised software engineer, to sturdy colonist, to firebrand radical thinker.

Twelve years ago. She had been fifteen years old…

Crisis. The still-young town of Reboot had split apart.

Some people had walked out, to start up again on their own. Others had gone back to the Hundred K station to wait for a Company to form up for a trek back to Datum Earth.

Worst of all for Helen, Dad wasn’t speaking to Mom, despite her illness.

It was all the government’s fault. They all got The Letter, every household, delivered by shamefaced mailman Bill Lovell. Bill himself had already been fired by the US Mail, but he said he was going to keep making his rounds even so until his boots wore out, and the people promised to feed him, in return.

The Letter was from the federal government. Everybody with a permanent residence beyond Earth 20, West or East, with assets back on Datum Earth, was having those assets frozen, and ultimately impounded.

With Mom ill in bed, Dad had to explain all this to Helen—words like “assets” and “impounded”. Basically it meant that all the money Dad and Mom had earned before upping sticks for their trek into the Long Earth, and had left in bank accounts and other funds back on Earth to pay for stuff like Mom’s cancer medicines and for stay-at-home brother Rod’s care and for a college education for Helen and sister Katie if they ever wanted it, had been stolen by the government. Stolen . That was Dad’s word. It didn’t seem too harsh to Helen.

Dad said the economy on Earth had taken a knock from stepping. That was obvious even before the Greens had left. All those people who disappeared into the Long Earth had been a big drain from the labour pool, and only a trickle of goods came back the other way; those left behind were furious at having to subsidize work-shy hoboes, as they saw the departed. Meanwhile some people couldn’t step at all, and had started to resent those who could. People like Rod, of course, Helen’s own home-alone non-stepper brother. She often wondered what he was feeling.

Dad said, “I’m guessing the government is appeasing the anti-stepper lobby by perpetrating this theft . I blame that loudmouth Cowley.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“We’ll hold a meeting in city hall, that’s what.”

Well, they didn’t have a city hall, at that time. They did have a communal field cleared of forest and rocks that they called city hall, so that was where they gathered. Just as well it wasn’t raining, Helen thought.

Reese Henry, the former used-car salesman who was the nearest they had to a mayor, chaired the meeting, in his usual bullying way. He held up The Letter. “What are we going to do about this?”

They weren’t going to put up with it, that was what. There was a lot of talk about forming up a mass hike and marching on Datum Washington. But who was going to feed the chickens?

They resolved to make inventories of all the stuff they still imported from Datum Earth. Medicines, for one. Books, paper, pens, electronic gadgets, even luxuries like perfumes. By sharing and swapping and mending, maybe they could manage with what they had until things settled down. The idea was floated of getting together with the neighbours. There was a bunch of nearby settlements spread over a few dozen worlds that some were starting to call “New Scarsdale County’. They could help each other out in case of scarcities and emergencies.

Some spoke of going back. A mother with a diabetic kid. Folk who found that advancing age wasn’t mixing well with the hard work of farming. A few who just seemed to feel scared without the backing of the government, however remote it was. But others, like Helen’s dad, urged nobody to leave. They all relied on each other. They had put together a spectrum of complementary skills that enabled them to survive if they worked together. They couldn’t let the community they’d built be pulled apart. And so on.

Reese Henry let it all ramble on, and run down. They broke up without resolution.

The next morning, however, the sun rose on schedule, the chickens needed feeding and the water needed toting from the well, and somehow life went on.

Three months later.

Helen’s sister Katie had quietly brought forward her wedding. She and Harry Bergreen had been planning to wait until the following year, when they were hoping for a proper house-raising. Everybody knew that they were getting married now while Mom was still around to see it.

Helen was enough of a girly girl that she had grown up dreaming of fairytale-princess weddings. Well, this day turned out to be a pioneers’ wedding. Kind of different, but still fun.

The guests had started arriving early, but Katie and Harry and their families were ready to meet them. Bride and groom were dressed in informal clothes, no white gowns or morning suits here, but Katie was wearing a small, pretty veil made by sister Helen from the lining of an old hiking jumpsuit.

As time wore on people showed up from outside Reboot itself, friends and acquaintances from communities like New Scarsdale and even further afield. The guests brought gifts: flowers and food for the day, and practical stuff—cutlery, pots, plates, coffee pots, kettles, frying pans, a hearth set, a boot scraper. Some of this stuff had been made locally, pottery cast on Reboot wheels, or iron gadgets hammered out in Reboot forges. It didn’t look much, piled up before the Greens’ big hearth, but Helen realized it soon amounted to pretty much all a young couple would need to equip their first home.

Around noon Reese Henry arrived. Wearing a reasonably smart jacket, clean jeans and boots, and a string tie, he scrubbed up well. Helen knew that nobody in Reboot took “Mayor Henry” as seriously as he took himself. But still, you needed one individual in a community with the authority to formalize a marriage—an authority backed by some remote government, or not—and he played the part well. Plus his hair was magnificent.