just like a movie

It was like a movie set for some oldfashioned western. Jack felt utterly out of place. He rubbed his stomach, willing away the stepping nausea. The Prairie Marble Inn turned out to be named after what it was mostly built from prairie marble, sod piled up around a wooden frame. It was gloomy, dank, but a big place, and heavily occupied. The woman behind the counter said the rest of their party was gathering in the ballroom, which was a barn with roughhewn wooden furniture set out on a rag carpet. It was pretty full, with maybe a hundred people, mostly adults, a few ren and infants. One man was speaking, a boisterous fellow with a spectacular mane of greyblond hair. He was delivering some kind of lecture about the need for rotas. A few of the others turned to the newcomers, warily, some halfsmiling. Tilda smiled back. Most of these are people I dealt with online when we set all this up. Never met them in person before These, Jack reflected, might be the people he would be spending the rest of his life with. Total strangers. Jack had left it all to Tilda, but he understood that it took some skill to assemble a viable Company for a trek. You had your professional captains to lead you, along with scouts, guides, porters; they were relatively easy to find and hire. But the core of the party were the people who would be settling together a hundred thousand worlds away. You needed complementary skill types: tailors, carpenters, coopers, smiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, weavers, furniture makers. Doctors, of course a dentist if you could find one. Tilda, after being rejected by the first Companies she had approached, had retrained herself, packaging herself as a teacher and historian. Jack had gone for basic farming skills he felt he was physically fit enough for that and for backup medical competences. It struck Jack, on this first glance at his new companions, that they were mostly like him and Tilda. A mix of ethnicities, but they all looked prosperous enough, earnest, a little anxious middleclass types setting off into the unknown. That was the classic profile of the Long Earth pioneer, just as, according to Tilda, it had been in the Old West. The very rich wouldnt travel, for they were too comfortable back on the Datum to give it all up. And nor would the very poor, at least not in an organized party like this, for they didnt have the means to pay for the trek itself. No, it was the middle classes who were heading off into the far West, especially those distressed in difficult economic times. The blowhard on his feet was called Reese Henry, Jack gathered, some kind of salesman, a survivalist in his spare time. He had moved on from latrine rotas. Once again young Americans are going out into the wild, to places where the streetlights do not shine, where there isnt a cop at the other end of a cellphone connection. Urbanized, online, civilized, pampered and preened and now pitched back into nature in the raw. He grinned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to reality. 17 RICHMOND WEST 10S only bookseller exulted with every sale he made to the wouldbe pioneers who passed through here. Books, printed on paper, every one of them Dead tree technology Information that, if carefully stored, would last for millennia And no batteries required. It ought to be on an ad hoarding, he thought. Yes, hed heard rumours about people like him. And other rumours, about beatings of such people. Like you were a freak, or unnatural. So hed keep himself to himself on the trek, and replace the potato, and fake the nausea, and all the rest. It wasnt so hard when you got the habit. Although you did start to wonder how many of those around you were similarly faking too. He slept well that night, dreaming of hot forges and distant hills.

TRUMP BOMBSHELL: "He doesnt care about you" Published: Jan 4, 2017

TRUMP BOMBSHELL:
"He doesnt care about you"
Published: Jan 4, 2017