The Long War

incidents occurring across the Long Earth, from the Datum to Valhalla and beyond, evidently all the way up to the Gap, judging from recent sensational reports of a lurid case involving a cub in a 1950s-type spacesuit.
    ‘Butchered it, in this case,’ Sally said. ‘I mean, literally. Reported at an Aegis administration office at Plumbline, just inside the Meggers—’
    ‘I know it.’
    ‘It was a young one this time. Body parts taken for some kind of folk medicine. For once the guy’s actually been arrested on a cruelty charge. But his family are kicking up because, what the hell, it was just an animal, wasn’t it?’
    Joshua shook his head. ‘We’re all under the US Aegis. What’s the argument? Aren’t Datum animal cruelty laws supposed to apply?’
    ‘ That’s all a mess, Joshua, with different rulings at federal and state level, and arguments about how such rulings extend to the Long Earth anyhow. Not to mention the lack of resources to police them.’
    ‘I don’t follow Datum politics too closely. You know, here we protect trolls under an extension of our citizenship rights.’
    ‘Really?’
    He smiled. ‘You sound surprised. You’re not the only one with a conscience, you know. Anyhow trolls are too damn useful to have them bothered, or driven away.’
    ‘Well, not everywhere is as civilized, evidently. You must remember, Joshua, that the Aegis is presided over by Datum politicians, which is to say, buttholes. And they really don’t get it! They are not the kind of people to get mud on their shiny shoes anywhere much beyond a park in Earth West 3. They have no idea of how important it is that humanity stays friendly with the trolls. The long call is full of it.’
    Meaning every troll everywhere would soon know all about this.
    Sally said now, ‘You know, the problem is that before Step Day most of what trolls knew and understood about humanity came from their experiences in places like Happy Landings, where they lived closely with humans. Peacefully, constructively . . .’
    ‘If a little creepily.’
    ‘Well, yes. What is happening now is that trolls are encountering ordinary folk. That is, idiots.’
    With a sense of dread he asked, ‘Sally – why have you come here? What do you want me to do about this?’
    ‘Your duty, Joshua.’
    She meant, Joshua knew, that he was to go with her, off into the Long Earth. Saving the worlds once again.
    The hell with that, he thought. Times had changed. He’d changed. His duty was here : to his family, his home, this township which had, foolishly enough, elected him mayor.
    Joshua had fallen in love with the place even before he had seen it, reckoning that the first-footers who had given their home a name like Hell-Knows-Where were very likely to be decent people with a sense of humour, as indeed they’d turned out to be. As for Helen, who had trekked out with her family to found a brand-new township, this way of living was what she had grown up with. And this place they had come to, in a million-step-remote footprint of the Mississippi valley, had turned out to have air that was clean, a river lively with fish, a land rich with game and replete with other resources such as lead and iron ore seams. Thanks to a twain mass-spectrometry scan of nearby formations that Joshua had called in as a favour, they even had the makings of a copper mine. As a bonus, the climate here happened to be just a little cooler than on the Datum, and in the winter the local copy of the Mississippi regularly froze over – a thrilling spectacle, even if it did threaten a couple of careless lives every year.
    When they’d arrived, Joshua, even compared with his new young wife, had been a novice settler, for all his trekking experience in the Long Earth. But now he was recognized as a skilled hunter, butcher, general artificer – and pretty nearly, these days, blacksmith and smelter. Not to mention mayor until the next poll. Helen, meanwhile, was a senior midwife and a top herbalist.
    Of course it was hard work. A pioneer family lived beyond the reach of shopping malls, and bread always needed baking, hams needed curing, tallow had to be made, and beer had to be brewed. Out here, in fact, you worked all the time. But the work was pleasing. And the work was Joshua’s life now . . .
    Sometimes he missed isolation. His sabbaticals, as he called them. The sense of emptiness when he was entirely alone on a world. The absence of the pressure of other minds, a pressure he