The Long War

worked in chains to get the twains’ gaping holds loaded up. The stations had inns and the like for rest and recreation. These weren’t polite places, Helen observed. Many of them had a calaboose, a little jailhouse.
    One waystation they stopped at, however, was in a world that happened to be a little warmer than the rest, and the owners had taken the opportunity to establish sprawling sugar plantations and orange groves and palmettos, rare this far north in any America. The sugar-house where they processed their cane was a huge clanking factory. The owners’ house was like a colonial mansion constructed of the local timber, with verandas and carved pillars draped with magnolias, and the Captain, the Valienté family, and a few other guests were invited down to drink orange liqueur. In the fields you could see the bent backs of the troll workers, and their song floated on the hot breeze.
    The real tourist spectacle in the Corn Belt was the timber trade. Rafts of the stuff from the forests to the north were floated downstream on one Mississippi or another. At a waystation the rafts would be lifted out of the water by a twain or two, and then ganged together by trolls and human workers. The end result was one tremendous platform that might be an acre in size, suspended in the air, constructed of long straight trunks stripped and roped together, each held up by a squadron of airships. And off the twains would go, stepping across the worlds with their vast dangling freight, with parties of trolls and their human supervisors riding in huts and tents on the timber platforms. Just an astounding sight.
    What was even more remarkable was what they saw going the other way. One of the principal exports of the Low Earths to the outer worlds was horses. So you’d see a twain descend, and the great ramps from the hold fold down, and out would trot a herd of young horses, supervised by cowboys on horseback.
    Occasionally they passed over relics of what used to be an old trekking trail, like the one Helen’s family followed to get out to Reboot, on Earth West 101,754: information flags or warning posts, abandoned halfway houses. Thanks to the twains the days of pioneer trekking, of footslogging across a hundred thousand worlds, were gone, a phase of history that had only lasted a few years but was already passing into legend. Helen wondered what the likes of Captain Batson, who had led her particular trek, were doing now. Yet the trails were still in use, by gangs of humans driving troll bands one direction or the other across the Long Earth. Helen could never tell if the trolls were singing, or not.
    These sights were mostly just glimpses, gone in a second or two as they travelled on.

17
    T EN YEARS AFTER the epic journey of Joshua Valienté and Lobsang, twain technology, offered as open source by the Black Corporation, had become the standard way of moving groups of people and large cargoes around the Long Earth. But, Jacques Montecute reflected gleefully as he prepared for his mission into deep stepwise China, some twain journeys were more spectacular than others.
    This particular journey, with Roberta Golding, was to begin from Datum China. Once the rather lengthy preliminaries were complete, the sister ships Zheng He and Liu Yang lifted into the dome of smog that hung over Xiangcheng, Henan province. Standing in the Zheng He gondola’s main observation lounge, Jacques was able to look up through the window to see the ship’s great silvery hull overhead, the skin flexing like the hide of some muscular animal, as the twain began, literally, to swim through the air. The ship’s mobile hull would have been a remarkable sight even if it hadn’t been adorned with the clasped-hands symbol of the eight-year-old Federated Republic of China.
    They soon left the airfield behind, and drifted over the factories and car parks and rubbish tips of a grimy industrial zone. Roberta Golding, Jacques’s charge, fifteen years old, stood by the big floor-to-ceiling windows, impassively inspecting the landscape drifting below.
    And a dozen trolls, here in the observation lounge, began to sing ‘Slow Boat to China’, the song strung out into a round and layered with harmony like honey piled on a piece of toast, in the trolls’ usual fashion.
    Around Jacques a scattered handful of crew, along with a few more informally dressed types who looked like scientists, glanced out of the windows and laughed at jokes Jacques couldn’t catch, and