The Long War

save for a couple of experiments. Why should he? After all the turnarounds in his life, Thomas no longer felt he knew who he was. He was a contradiction, neither white nor black, married but alone. What was he going to discover about himself out in all those other worlds that he couldn’t find right here? Rather than travel forward, he kept on being drawn back, in fact, to the same point, the Hunting Man in the cave, the one stable locus in his life, like a nail hammered through his psyche.
    But this time he had come back here with his Stepper. He had an experiment in mind.
    He picked a direction at random, and turned the switch.
    Australia West 1.
    They were farming kangaroos here, as indeed they were in East 1: he saw heaps of carcasses, tethered horses, a stack of bronze-based rifles heaped up like a tepee. A couple of ranchers sat on a log. When they saw Thomas they raised plastic bottles of beer to him. He waved back.
    Roo farming was becoming commonplace, even in the Datum. Kangaroos were efficient as food animals. Pound for pound a roo needed a third the plant material a sheep did, a sixth the water, and produced almost no methane; roo farts were parsimonious. Thomas didn’t object for any rational reasons. It just didn’t feel right. Anyhow this new world was an annexe to the old, and nothing to do with him.
    He stepped away, to West 2. And 3. And 4. Each step was a wrench to the stomach, and he needed time to recover.
    It took him two hours to get to West 10, where he stopped. He sat on an eroded shelf at the edge of the rocky outcrop, which appeared unchanged from the ‘original’ in the Datum. He looked around, taking his time, absorbing the new world.
    And off in the distance he saw movement. A herd of some huge, slow-moving, rather lumbering creatures, seen in silhouette against a pale blue sky. Walking on all fours, they looked like rhinos to his untutored eye. Presumably they were some marsupial equivalent, perhaps hunted by a local version of a lion. There were kangaroos here too, standing up, plucking at the lowest leaves of some tree, but these were big animals, bigger than any roo in the Datum, big and muscular. And there, scampering in the distance, a thing like a dinosaur, a raptor, that was probably a flightless bird. The world was intensely silent, save for the distant bellow of one giant herbivore or another.
    He drank water from a plastic bottle. Some of the nearer worlds had been visited by hunters unable to resist the lure of going after the native megafauna, but here, ten steps out, there was no sign of humanity, not so much as a footprint.
    And it was a different sort of world, without humans. Naively you’d think that one copy of the Western Desert was going to be much the same as any other. Not so. This country was always going to be arid, but Thomas could see at a glance that it was greener than he was used to, with patches of tough-looking grass, scrubby trees. On the Datum his mother’s people had shaped the land with fire for sixty thousand years; this was a land without Europeans, but without the Martu and their ancestors too.
    Thomas wasn’t here for the flora and fauna, however.
    When he felt well enough to stand he walked around the bluff to the cave – it was here just as in the Datum – and knelt down, the Stepper box awkward at his waist. He had to shield his eyes against the light of a descending sun to see inside.
    And there it was, in the cave. Somehow he had known it would be. Not his Hunting Man, not exactly. Another human figure chasing another crudely sketched animal. Around it, a different array of spirals and starbursts and hatchings and zigzags. And when he touched the drawing, cautiously, he could feel the patina that covered it. It was every bit as ancient as the one in the Datum. Put there by some scrawny guy who had figured out how to step, all by himself, millennia ago.
    He sat with his back to the rock. He would have laughed, save he didn’t want to disrespect the silence, or indeed draw the attention of any nearby marsupial lions. Of course there must have been Aboriginal steppers. Where would an ability to step have been of more use than in the arid heart of Australia? If his ancestors had been able to exploit a sheaf of worlds, even just in emergencies, the resources available to them would have been multiplied hugely. And they had had sixty thousand years to discover how.
    But even so, surely not in such numbers as today. Maybe this was a new