The Long War

Express had once done for the Old West. The twains flew and flew, knitting together the burgeoning stepwise worlds . . . They had even stimulated the growth of new industries themselves. Helium for their lift sacs, scarce on Datum Earth, was now being extracted from stepwise copies of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma.
    Nowadays even the news was dispersed across the Long Earth by the airship fleets. A kind of multi-world internet was growing up, known as the ‘outernet’. On each world they passed through the airships would download rapid update packets to local nodes to be spread laterally across that world, and would upload any ongoing messages and mail. And when airships met, away from the big Datum–Valhalla spine route, they would hold a ‘gam’ – a word resurrected from the days of the old whaling fleets – where they would swap news and correspondence. It was all kind of informal, but then so had been the structure of the pre-Step Day internet on the Datum. And being informal it was robust; as long as your message had the right address, it would find its way home.
    Of course there were some in places like Hell-Knows-Where who resented the presence of these interlopers, because the twains, one way or another, represented the reach of the Datum government: a reach that wasn’t always welcome. The administration’s policy towards its Long Earth colonies had swung back and forth with the years, from hostility and even exclusion, to cooperation and legislation. Nowadays the rule was that once a colony had more than one hundred people, it was supposed to report itself back to the federal government on Datum Earth as an ‘official’ presence. Soon you would be on the map, and the twains would come, floating down from the sky to deliver people and livestock, raw materials and medical care, and carry away any produce you wanted to export via local links to the great stepwise transport hubs like Valhalla.
    As they travelled between the old United States and the worlds of its Aegis – all the way out to Valhalla, the best part of a million and a half steps from the Datum – the twains connected the many Americas, comfortably suggesting that they were all marching to the same drum. This despite the fact that many people in the stepwise worlds didn’t know which drum you were talking about or what the hell beat it was playing, their priority being themselves and their neighbours. The Datum and its regulations, politics and taxes seemed an increasingly remote abstraction, twains or not . . .
    And right now two people looked up at this latest twain with suspicious eyes.
    Sally said, ‘Do you think he is up there?’
    Joshua said, ‘An iteration at least. The twains can’t step without some artificial intelligence on board. You know him; he is all iteration. He likes to be where the action is, and right now everywhere is where the action is.’
    They were talking about Lobsang, of course. Even now Joshua would have difficulty in explaining who exactly Lobsang was. Or what. Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else’s computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan . . .
    Joshua said, ‘Incidentally I heard a rumour that he has an iteration headed out of the solar system altogether, on some kind of spaceprobe. You know him, he always takes the long view. And there’s no such thing as too much backup.’
    ‘So now he could survive the sun exploding,’ Sally said dryly. ‘That’s good to know. You have much contact with him?’
    ‘No. Not now. Not for ten years. Not since he, or whichever version of him resides on the Datum, let Madison be flattened by a backpack nuke. That was my home town, Sally. What use is a presence like Lobsang if he couldn’t stop that? And if he could have stopped it, why didn’t he?’
    Sally shrugged. Back then, she’d stepped into the ruins of Madison at his side. Evidently she had no answer.
    He became aware of Helen walking ahead of the two of them, talking to a gaggle of neighbours, wearing what Joshua, a veteran of nine years of marriage, called her ‘polite’ expression. Suitably alarmed, he hurried to catch her up.
    He thought they were all relieved when they got to the town hall. Sally read the title of the show from a hand-painted poster tacked to the wall: