The Long War Read Free

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 felt even here, though it was a ghost compared with what he felt on the Datum. And the eerie sense of the other that he’d always called the Silence, like a hint of vast minds, or assemblages of minds, somewhere far off. He’d once met one of those mighty remote minds in the extraordinary First Person Singular. But there were more out there, he knew. He could hear them, like gongs sounding in distant mountains . . . Well, he’d had all that. But this , he’d belatedly discovered, was far more precious: his wife, their son, perhaps a second child some day.
    Nowadays he tried to ignore what was going on beyond the town limits. After all, it wasn’t as though he owed the Long Earth anything. He’d saved lives on stepwise worlds on Step Day itself, and later had opened up half of them with Lobsang. He’d done his duty in this new age, hadn’t he?
    But here was Sally, an incarnation of his past, sitting at his kitchen table, waiting for an answer. Well, he wasn’t going to rush to reply. Generally speaking, Joshua wasn’t a trigger-fast speaker at the best of times. He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.
    They stared it out.
    To his relief, Helen walked in at last, and set out beer and burgers: home-brewed beer, home-raised beef, home-baked bread. She sat with them and began a pleasant enough conversation, asking Sally about her recent ports of call. When they’d eaten, Helen bustled about once more, clearing the plates, again refusing Joshua’s offer of help.
    All the time there was another dialogue going on under the surface. Every marriage had its own private language. Helen knew very well why Sally was here, and after nine years of marriage Joshua could hear the feeling of imminent loss as if it were being broadcast on the radio.
    If Sally heard it, she didn’t care. Once Helen had left them alone at the table once more, she started in again. ‘As you say, it’s not the only case.’
    ‘What