Two years into their New Springfield experience, they were both still learning – just like, Agnes supposed, the Irwins and the Todds and the Bells and the Bambers and all the other folk who’d been here long before they showed up. But that was the plan. Lobsang, who had been observing the pioneering of the Long Earth for years, now wanted to try it out for himself, as ‘George’.
Of course the New Springfielders had already achieved a lot. They knew about hygiene, for instance. They even made their own soap, from animal fat and potash from their charcoal burners. They had started making their own clothes as the stock they had brought from the Datum slowly wore out; they gathered hemp, flax, cotton, and wool from their own sheep and now Lobsang’s, which they were learning to card, spin and weave. They even made foul-smelling candles from the fat of the pigs that had gone wild in the forest. And they were utterly at ease with the stepwise extensions of their world, their landscape – most of the time, in fact, unless there was a barn dance or a town meeting on, much of the population was worlds away from the old core of the founders’ community. It was a way of relaxed, natural living in the Long Earth that Agnes had never witnessed before – and she imagined that the children growing up here, including Ben, would take it all utterly for granted.
In terms of their pioneering, they did cheat, as Agnes had slowly learned.
You saw few old folk, few very sick. They were lucky that one of the community, Bella Sarbrook, had some medical training, but when people got old, or seriously ill – or in one case when a couple had borne a disabled child – they tended to drift off back to the more sophisticated facilities of the Low Earths. Conversely the home-grown medicines and toiletries and stuff were supplemented by a trickle of produce from the Low Earths or Valhalla. Agnes didn’t see anything wrong with that. As long as the Low Earth cities existed, why not use them?
Lobsang meanwhile was running experiments in farming. With the help of the neighbours he’d cleared some of the old fields the first settlers had laid out, and ploughed the land with his horses and cattle and some human labour, and had tried out his first crops: wheat in the lighter soil, oats and potatoes where the ground was heavier. The first wheat harvest, small as it was, had drawn curious volunteers, to reap with handheld sickles, to thresh and winnow. While not primarily here to farm themselves, the adults saw it all as good fun, and ‘George’s’ small farm as a welcome addition to the education of their kids.
Of course it wasn’t all newly invented. Lobsang was very impressed when Oliver Irwin showed ‘George’ a complete set of the Whole Earth Catalog, downloaded on to a wind-up e-reader. Lobsang had copied it into his own library, which was a row of mostly physical books kept in the gondola, including Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Verne’s Mysterious Island, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, Stewart’s When Earth Abides, Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Dartnell’s The Knowledge, and miniaturized bound magazine sets including early volumes of Scientific American, a pre-electronic Encyclopedia Britannica, even a facsimile of the first encyclopedia ever published, by Diderot in the seventeenth century. ‘Encyclopedias are hedges against the fall of civilization,’ Lobsang had said to Agnes, only slightly pompously. He seemed to have a long-term dream of building a civilization from scratch right here in the wilderness, like Verne’s stranded travellers in Mysterious Island, all the way up to electricity generators and copper phone wires – and maybe going further, coming up with a kind of portable ‘civilization kit’ to give to the combers and their kind, to ensure the lessons painfully learned over ten thousand years of human progress weren’t lost as humanity scattered across the Long Earth. Lobsang couldn’t help but think big.
For now, however, he seemed content with the watermill he was planning down by the creek to grind his wheat. One step at a time.