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as Helen remembered her mother had always been the driving force behind their leaving the Datum in the first place.
    A month, though, which made it more than six months since they had all been fired en masse by the federal government. Gosh, Helen thought now, we’re still here, who’d have thought it?
    They had had to learn fast. They had relied more than they’d realized on various props from the old country. Now they made everything ! They knitted, brewed beer, dipped candles, made soap. You could make a good vinegar from pumpkin rind. Toothpaste! – from ground-up charcoal. It helped a lot when Bill Lovell came round selling his new product: miniaturized sets of encyclopaedias, and copies of Scientific American from pre-1950, full of exploded diagrams of steam engines and practical advice on a whole slew of stuff. They were even rethinking the crops they were growing in the farms and gardens, after the vitamin pill supply dried up and they’d even had a couple of cases of scurvy. Scurvy!
    And they helped each other out: I fetch water for you while your little one’s ill, you feed my chickens when I’m away up country. There was a kind of unwritten price for everything, recorded as ‘favours’, a loosely defined currency based on service and barter and promissory notes. Mom would probably have loved the theory of it all, an emerging, self-organizing local economy.
    Despite dire warnings from some about what would happen when the theoretical protection of the Datum government had been lifted, they hadn’t suddenly been overwhelmed by armies of bandits. Oh, there had been problems, for instance the waves of ‘new’ colonists who sporadically walked out from the Datum or the Low Earths and tried to settle in Reboot’s country. Legally it was a tricky situation, since such claims as the Reboot colonists did have were lodged with a Datum federal government which showed no interest in them any more. But the mayor in New Scarsdale was usually able to buy the newcomers off by signing bits of paper granting them land fifty or a hundred worlds further up West, a deal lubricated with fistfuls of vouchers for drinks in the tavern. There was always room , so much room up here that almost any problem like that could be resolved.
    Of course there was a steady drizzle of thefts, of food, from the fields – even, in this age of stepping, from within houses. Mostly you turned a blind eye. Things got more serious when a boy called Doug Collinson was caught red-handed taking beta blockers from Melissa Harris’s medicine chest, prescribed for her mild heart condition. Doug didn’t need them himself; he was just going to sell them someplace else. Decent drugs were among the most precious commodities they had. Well, Melissa caught him, and she had the presence of mind to swing her stick and smash his Stepper so he couldn’t get away before the neighbours came running in. Right now Doug was in confinement in somebody’s cellar, while the adults debated what to do about it. Slowly, out of the need to react to such incidents, a framework for maintaining law and order was emerging, maybe ultimately based on some kind of court shared with communities like New Scarsdale in the neighbouring worlds.
    The framework of Helen’s own life was slowly emerging too. Dad constantly pointed out that Helen was sixteen years old now and needed to choose a path in life. Well, fine. There was her midwifery. And she was thinking of specializing in medicines: herbs and stuff. A lot of the plants and fungi they found on Earth West 101,754 weren’t familiar from Datum Earth. She could become an itinerant seller, or maybe a tutor, a guru, taking her arts and wares and unique flora across the worlds. Or not. She thought she’d find her way.
    They weren’t in paradise. The Long Earth was a big arena, where you could feel lost, and you could lose yourself. But maybe all this room was going to be the ultimate gift of the Long Earth to mankind. Room that