The Long War

course you do.’ Chen pressed his button, and they stepped once again. Jacques noticed a counter on the wall: flickering digits that would count the worlds.
    In East 2 the sky was bright, the sun high, and the land was carpeted with green, with forest. The contrast with the Datum, and even East 1 – the sudden flood of colour, the light illuminating the observation deck – was breathtaking.
    Chen said, ‘You can see why a sudden access to all this so startled people. Our nation is older than yours, older than Europe. China has been cultivated, built on, fought over, mined, for five thousand years. It was a shock for us to walk into this primordial green. There were immediate cultural responses. An upsurge in support for environmental protection. Songs, poems, paintings, most of them bad. Ha! Well, there was nothing much we could do about East 1, or West 1. Quickly ruined by the first flood of travellers, the first helpless and hapless migrants. Each footprint became one big shanty town. But the government organized quickly, and we kept East 2 as a kind of national park, a memorial of Step Day, of our sudden access to our country’s own past – as best we could, anyhow; even here we are harmed by pollution from the heavy industrialization of this Low Earth in such places as the United States footprint, and there are ongoing negotiations in the United Nations about that. We also store some of our treasures here – the heritage of our deep culture. Even a few buildings, temples dismantled and rebuilt. Just as humanity is preserved from extinction by the existence of the Long Earth, should any calamity befall our home world, so now is our cultural past.’
    Roberta pressed her forehead against the window, gawping, briefly looking like any curious teenager. ‘I see animals, moving through the forest. Elephants? Heading towards that river over there, to the north.’
    Chen smiled. ‘Elephants, which roam as far north as Beijing in some worlds. And camels, bears, lions, tigers, black swans, even river dolphins. Tapirs! Deer! Pangolins! On Step Day, our children choked in the smog-free air, were frightened by the brightness of the sun, and goggled at the animals.’
    The Captain pressed his control button again.
    In East 3 the forest had been cleared, and the river dammed to flood the ground. In the resulting paddy fields, people laboured, bent over, not looking up as the shadows of the airships passed. It was the same in East 4, 5, 6 and beyond, though the methods of farming differed. In some worlds there was industrialization, with smoke rising from distant power stations and foundries, and crude-looking machines rolling across vast fields; in others, just the people and their animals.
    ‘Very organized,’ Jacques said.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Yue-Sai said brightly. ‘We Chinese were able to move out into the stepwise worlds in a disciplined and industrious way, matched, I would suggest, nowhere else in the world. Under the Communists we were a one-party state equipped with the tools of late capitalism – capable of very large-scale feats. In recent decades we had already had experience of massive projects on the Datum: infrastructure like dams and bridges and rail lines, even a space programme. Now the Long Earth offered a blank canvas. Since the regime change, despite a revision of ideology, we have lost none of those skills. That’s China for you!’
    Roberta said, ‘Could we pause here?’
    ‘Of course.’ Chen pressed his buttons.
    Jacques looked down. The airship was hovering over a waterlogged field, where a peasant stood patiently, holding a piece of rope tied around the neck of what looked like a buffalo. ‘That’s a scene that could be two thousand years old,’ he said.
    Roberta said, ‘Captain Chen, in some of these agricultural worlds there are factories. Producing artificial nutrients?’
    ‘Also genetically engineered crops. Modern farming machinery—’
    ‘Yet here, you are evidently manuring the soil. It seems a contradiction.’
    Yue-Sai said, ‘We use both ways. This is an expression of an old tension in Chinese philosophy.’
    ‘The Dao versus Confucianism,’ Roberta said.
    Chen looked impressed.
    Yue-Sai nodded. ‘Essentially correct. The Dao is the way – to follow the way means a harmonization with nature. The Confucians by contrast argue that man must master nature, for the betterment of nature as well as the benefit of mankind. Wars have been fought over these ideas. The