The Long Earth

you can’t imagine the pride you get in setting a vase you made on a shelf you built, full of flowers you grew in the garden you dug out from the raw earth.
    But that’s nothing compared to the first iron tools from Franklin’s forge. We couldn’t function without our iron and steel tools, of course. But the iron has had an odd impact on our domestic economy. When we arrived the hundred of us actually spread out over a thin sheaf of nearby worlds, rather than in just one. Why not? There was room. But of course you can’t carry iron across the worlds, even stuff manufactured locally. So people are slowly moving back into 754, the world with the forge in it, rather than start up the whole process over again somewhere else (although Franklin offered to do just that for multiples of his fee).
    Strikes me that everything about the way humanity is opening up the Long Earth is shaped by one simple fact: that you can’t step metallic iron across. As an example, we had the idea of opening up parallel fields on next-door Earths so no single crop could be lost to a blight or poor weather. Not worth it; better to use the iron tools we have already made here to extend our holdings on 754.
    The way we pay visitors like the Amish for their services is interesting, by the way. Well, I find it so. Money! What has worth, out here in the Long Earth? What has value when every man can own his own goldmine? Interesting theoretical question when you think about it, isn’t it?
    Among ourselves we do use Datum currencies. Since the Long Earth recession cut in, the yen and the US dollar have held up, especially since they are unforgeable. The British pound collapsed earlier, when half the population fled from that crowded little island – including Franklin, our invaluable smith. Nevertheless, Britain, not for the first time, showed the way out of adversity. In their bad economic years the Brits evolved the ‘favour’, a currency of flexible worth. In short, it was a unit notional coin whose value was agreed by the buyer and seller at the point of transaction – which made it rather difficult to tax, and so it worked very badly back on the Datum. But it’s the ideal currency in the new worlds, which is not surprising since the system was once used in the embryo United States of America, when there was no coin to be had and no effective government to validate its use even if there were.
    In places like Reboot, you see, your life is full of small trades. You boil animal fats and make tallow, and since you made too much, maybe your neighbour could use some, and indeed she could, and offers a pound of iron ore in return. That isn’t very useful to you, but it certainly is to Franklin the smith, and you hand it over to him in exchange for favour, to be repaid at some future time. So you are now
owed
a favour, which might be something solid, or even an offer to bring back store-bought goods next time he has to go to Hundred K or the Datum. Or whatever.
    It’s no system to run a civilization on, but a pretty good one for a colony of a hundred people every single one of whom you know personally, and they know you. No point in cheating;
that
will only work for a little while. After all you don’t want to be the person who has the doors shut on you when you most desperately need help.
    And so every day or so you total up your favours, positive and negative, and if you are ahead of the game then you might take a day off and go fishing. The nurses and midwives do particularly well. How many favours is a successful birth worth? What price an injured hand, treated so conscientiously that you can work again?
    Common sense works well in a small community like this, where everybody ultimately depends on the goodwill and good humour of everybody else. It even applies to the way we treat the hobos, as we call them, who occasionally come trickling through our landscape. Drifters, working their way from world to world across the Long Earth, without any intention of settling down like us so far as I can see, just walking through the green and helping themselves to the low-hanging fruit. Well, why not? In the Long Earth there’s plenty of room for people to live like that. They come to us drawn by the smoke of the fires; we make them welcome, we’ll feed them and have our doctors treat them if they need it.
    We make it clear we expect something in return, usually a little labour, maybe just interesting news from home. Most people accept that kind