The Long War

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.
    And when Harry Bergreen kissed his bride a little after midday and everybody applauded, and the bride’s mother held on to her husband’s arm to make sure she stayed standing for the pictures, even Bill the mailman had tears welling in his eyes.
    That one was a good day, Helen recorded in her journal.
    And three months later:
    ‘2nd baby for Betty Doak Hansen. Hlthy B, 7lb. Mthr ill, ndd stches & bld . . .’
    Helen had been tired. Too tired to write in this damn code in her journal, even if they did have to conserve paper now.
    This latest delivery hadn’t been a bad birth, as they went. Belle Doak and her little team of midwives and helpers, including Helen, were pretty competent at it by now. Although, this morning, it had been a close-run thing. Helen had to run around town asking for blood donors. They were all walking blood banks, for the benefit of their neighbours. But it wasn’t always fast enough. Memo to self, she thought: set up some kind of list of blood types and willing donors.
    Dad had left early this morning, not long after Helen got in. Down at Mom’s grave probably, the stone by the river. Mom had always loved that spot. It was already a month since she’d died of her tumour, and Dad was still racked by guilt over it, as if it were somehow his fault, somehow caused by his bringing her here. It made no sense, especially since as far as Helen remembered her mother had always been the driving force behind their leaving the Datum in the first place.
    A month, though, which made it more than six months since they had all been fired en masse by the federal government. Gosh, Helen thought now, we’re still here, who’d have thought it?
    They had had to learn fast. They had relied more than they’d realized on various props from the old country. Now they made everything ! They knitted, brewed beer, dipped candles, made soap. You could make a good vinegar from pumpkin rind. Toothpaste! – from ground-up charcoal. It helped a lot when Bill Lovell came round selling his new product: miniaturized sets of encyclopaedias, and copies of Scientific American from pre-1950, full of exploded diagrams of steam engines and practical advice on a whole slew of stuff. They were even rethinking the crops they were growing in the farms and gardens, after the vitamin pill supply dried up and they’d even had a couple of cases of scurvy. Scurvy!
    And they helped each other out: I fetch water for you while your little one’s ill, you feed my chickens when I’m away up country. There was a kind of unwritten price for everything, recorded as ‘favours’, a loosely defined currency based on service and barter and promissory notes. Mom would probably have loved the theory of it all, an emerging, self-organizing local economy.
    Despite dire warnings from some about what would happen when the theoretical protection of the Datum government had been lifted, they hadn’t suddenly been overwhelmed by armies of bandits. Oh, there had been problems, for instance the waves of ‘new’ colonists who sporadically walked out from the Datum or the Low Earths and tried to settle in Reboot’s country. Legally it was a tricky situation, since such claims as the Reboot colonists did have were lodged with a Datum federal government which showed no interest in them any more. But the mayor in New Scarsdale was usually able to buy the newcomers off by signing bits of paper granting them land fifty or a hundred worlds further up West, a deal lubricated with fistfuls of vouchers for drinks in the tavern. There was always room , so much room up here that almost any problem like that could be resolved.
    Of course there was a steady drizzle of thefts, of food, from the fields – even, in this age of stepping, from within houses. Mostly you turned a blind eye. Things got more serious when a boy called Doug Collinson was caught red-handed taking beta blockers