The Long War

had sat-nav – and only Joshua, Helen and a few others knew why the Black Corporation had decided to use this particular world to try out their prototype technology, orbiting twenty-four nanosats from a small portable launcher. Call it a favour from an old friend . . .
    Among those few others in the know was Sally, of course.
    Joshua faced her. ‘Lay off, Sally. The sat-nav and the rest are here because of me. I know it. My friends know it.’
    Helen grinned. ‘One of the engineers who called to fix up that stuff once told Joshua that the Black Corporation sees him as a “valuable long-term investment”. Worth cultivating, I suppose. Worth keeping sweet with little gifts.’
    Sally snorted. ‘Meaning that’s how Lobsang sees you. How demeaning.’
    Joshua ignored that, as he generally ignored any mention of that particular name. ‘And besides, I know that some people are drawn here because of me.’
    ‘The famous Joshua Valienté.’
    ‘Why not? It’s good not to have to advertise for good people. And if they don’t fit, they leave anyhow.’
    Sally opened her mouth, ready for a few more jabs.
    But Helen had evidently had enough. She stood up. ‘Sally, if you want to freshen up we’ve got a guest room down the passage there. Curtain up is in an hour. Dan – that’s our son, maybe you remember him – is already down at the town hall helping out, which is to say bossing the other kids about. Take some of the ice cream when we go over if you like. It’s only a short walk.’
    Joshua forced a smile. ‘Everywhere’s a short walk here.’
    Helen glanced out through the crude glass of the window. ‘And it looks like another perfect evening . . .’

3
    I T WAS INDEED a perfect early spring evening.
    Of course this world was no longer pristine, Joshua thought, as the three of them walked to the town hall for the school show. You could see the clearances nibbling into the forest by the river banks, and the smoke from the forges and workshops, and the tracks cutting through the forest straight and sharp. But still, what caught your eye was the essentials of the landscape, the bend of this stepwise copy of the Mississippi, and the bridges and the wooded expanses beyond the banks. Hell-Knows-Where looked the way its parent town back on the Datum – Hannibal, Missouri – had back in the nineteenth century, maybe, Mark Twain’s day. That was perfection, for his money.
    But right now that perfect sky was marred by a twain hanging in the air.
    The airship was being unloaded by rope chains, trunk by trunk, bale by bale. In the gathering twilight, its hull shining like bronze, it looked like a ship from another world, which in a sense it was. And though the town hall show was about to start, there were a few students outside watching the sky, the boys in particular looking hungry – boys who would give anything in the world to be twain drivers some day.
    The twain was a symbol of many things, Joshua thought. Of the reality of the Long Earth itself, for a start.
    The Long Earth : suddenly, on Step Day, twenty-five years before, mankind had found itself with the ability to step sideways, simply to walk into an infinite corridor of planet Earths, one after the next and the next. No spaceships required: each Earth was just a walk away. And every Earth was like the original, more or less, save for a striking lack of humanity and all its works. There was a world for everybody who wanted one, uncounted billions of worlds, if the leading theories were right.
    There were some people who, faced with such a landscape, bolted the door and hid away. Some people did the same thing inside their heads. But others flourished. And for such people in their scattered settlements across the new worlds, a quarter-century on, the twains were becoming an essential presence.
    After the pioneering exploratory journey ten years back by Joshua and Lobsang in the Mark Twain – that ship had been a prototype, the first cargo- and passenger-carrying craft capable of stepwise motion – Douglas Black, of the Black Corporation who’d built the Twain , and the majority owner of the subsidiary that supported Lobsang and his various activities, had announced that the technology was to be a gift to the world. It had been a typical gesture by Black, greeted with loud cynicism about his motives, welcomed with open arms by all. Now, a decade later, the twains were doing for the colonization of the Long Earth what the Conestoga wagon and Pony