The Long Earth

find and hire. But the core of the party were the people who would be settling together a hundred thousand worlds away. You needed complementary skill types: tailors, carpenters, coopers, smiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, weavers, furniture makers. Doctors, of course – a dentist if you could find one. Tilda, after being rejected by the first Companies she had approached, had retrained herself, packaging herself as a teacher and historian. Jack had gone for basic farming skills – he felt he was physically fit enough for that – and for backup medical competences.
    It struck Jack, on this first glance at his new companions, that they were mostly like
him
and Tilda. A mix of ethnicities, but they all looked prosperous enough, earnest, a little anxious – middle-class types setting off into the unknown. That was the classic profile of the Long Earth pioneer, just as, according to Tilda, it had been in the Old West. The very rich wouldn’t travel, for they were too comfortable back on the Datum to give it all up. And nor would the very poor, at least not in an organized party like this, for they didn’t have the means to pay for the trek itself. No, it was the middle classes who were heading off into the far West, especially those distressed in difficult economic times.
    The blowhard on his feet was called Reese Henry, Jack gathered, some kind of salesman, a survivalist in his spare time. He had moved on from latrine rotas. ‘Once again young Americans are going out into the wild, to places where the streetlights do not shine, where there isn’t a cop at the other end of a cellphone connection. Urbanized, online, civilized, pampered and preened – and now pitched back into nature in the raw.’ He grinned. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to reality.’

17
    RICHMOND WEST 10’S only bookseller exulted with every sale he made to the would-be pioneers who passed through here. Books, printed on paper, every one of them! Dead tree technology! Information that, if carefully stored, would last for millennia! And no batteries required. It ought to be on an ad hoarding, he thought.
    If Humphrey Llewellyn III could have his way, every book ever written would be treasured, at least one copy bound in sheepskin and illuminated by monks (or specifically by naked nuns, his predilection being somewhat biased in that direction). So now, he hoped, here was a chance to bring mankind back into the book-loving fold. He gloated. There was still no electronics in the pioneer worlds, was there? Where was your internet? Hah! Where was Google? Where was your mother’s old Kindle? Your iPad 25? Where was Wickedpedia? (Very primly, he always called it that, just to show his disdain; very few people noticed.) All gone, unbelievers! All those fancy toy-gadgets stuffed in drawers, screens blank as the eyes of corpses, left behind.
    Books – oh yes, real books – were flying off his shelves. Out in the Long Earth humanity was starting again in the Stone Age. It needed to know the old ways. It needed to know what to eat and what not to eat. It needed to know how to build an outdoor privy, and how to manure fields with human and animal waste in safe proportions. It needed to know about wells. About shoemaking! Yes, it had to know how to find iron ore, but also how to work graphite , and how to make ink. And so Humphrey’s presses ran hot, with geological maps and surveys and commonplace books and almanacs, reclaiming the knowledge that had been all but lost to the printed page.
    He stroked a polished-leather volume. Oh, sooner or later all that knowledge once more would be precariously imprisoned by electricity. But for now the books had been patient long enough, and their time had come again.
    In another part of Richmond West 10, meanwhile, there was a kind of labour market, where Companies tried to find recruits to fill the remaining gaps. Franklin Tallyman carefully pushed his way through the crowd, holding his sign above his head. It was a hot day and he wished he had drunk more water.
    He was approached by a small party led by a middle-aged man. ‘You are Mr Tallyman, the blacksmith? We saw your résumé at the Prairie Marble Inn.’
    He nodded. ‘Yes, sir, that’s me.’
    ‘We’re looking to complete our Company.’ The man stuck out a hand. ‘The name’s Green, Jack Green. This gentleman is Mr Batson, our Captain. Tallyman, isn’t that a Caribbean name?’
    ‘No, sir, it’s a Caribbean job description, as far as I