The Long War

weathered wooden marker, and climbed out into the midday heat, Stepper box at his side. Apart from the dirt road back to Jigalong, and a fenced-off scrap of bloodstained land that marked the portal to stepwise roo farms, there was nothing here, even in the Datum. Nothing but the expanse of the Western Desert, vast, crushing, its flatness broken by a single, heavily eroded bluff of rock. Nothing anyhow in the eyes of the first Europeans to come here, who had barely been able even to see the people who already lived here. To them it was a terra nullius , an empty land, and that had become a legal principle which justified their land-grab.
    But Thomas was a half-blood Martu. He had always been welcomed by his mother’s people, even though her marriage, to a white man for love, had broken the Martu’s strict marriage rules. And to Thomas’s eyes, educated in the ways of his ancestors at least to a theoretical level, this land was rich. Complex. Ancient: you could feel the weight of deep time here. He knew how this at first glance barren land worked, how it supported its freight of life. He even knew how to survive, how to feed himself out here, if he had to.
    And he knew of a secret out here, that was his alone.
    He bent to look into a cave, cut into the side of the bluff by millennia of wind. It was hardly a cave at all, just a hollow half choked by dry drifting sand. But it was a site he had discovered for himself as a boy, visiting his grandparents at Jigalong, exploring alone in the bush: even then he’d been a solitary kid. And, so deep inside the cave you had to crouch to see, there was the Hunting Man, as he called it, a stick figure with some kind of spear chasing a huge, ill-defined creature, while spirals and starbursts spun around him. It was thousands of years old, he’d figured out, as you could tell by the patina over it.
    And, as far as he knew, it had been discovered by nobody before his own boyish eyes had settled on it. Nobody found it later, either. He’d kept the secret of it ever since.
    He’d always thought of the Hunting Man as a kind of friend. An invisible companion. A stable point in a life of whirling change.
    Thomas had been a bright kid. Picked out of the local school and groomed for better things, he’d gone to college at Perth and even spent some time in America, before returning to Melbourne to become a whizz-kid games designer. He’d been black enough to serve as a poster boy for liberals, white enough that those around him had been able to treat him as one of their own.
    Then he’d had his crisis of conscience, and he started to find out about the plight of the people he’d left behind, his mother’s family. How a culture a staggering sixty thousand years old, a people free and self-sufficient a mere three centuries ago, had become the most dependent on the planet: marginalized, removed from their lands, shattered by unemployment and drug abuse, their culture broken up by forced evictions and ‘white’ education. How in his own grandmother’s time her clan had been moved from their country to avoid the British Blue Streak missiles test-launched from Woomera.
    Granted, all this hand-wringing had been brought on by Thomas’s own beating-up by a bunch of thugs in Sydney who didn’t like his kind in their city, even one in a suit and tie. But it was a real eye-opener even so.
    Then he’d got married. Hannah was a trainee lawyer, another bright young thing, white, from a well-connected New South Wales family. They’d been hoping for a kid.
    But then the cancer had taken her, and that had been that. She had been just twenty-three. Helen could sympathize with that part of his story, remembering the suddenness of the loss of her own mother.
    After that Thomas’s work seemed pointless. He’d gone back to Perth and worked for a progressive association there, promoting Aboriginal rights. And he’d taken the chance to study his mother’s culture. He’d even become a ‘native guide’ for parties of earnest white tourists. His mother’s family had sneered at that, but he’d learned a lot.
    And then had come the Stepper box, and the opening up of the Long Earth. Another huge jolt to Thomas’s personal universe, as to everybody else’s. Many Aborigines, especially young men, had immediately grasped the potential of the technology, and stepped away in search of a better world than the Datum, and its bloody history.
    Thomas himself had rarely stepped, in those early days,