The Long War Read online

  ‘That’s pretty much it,’ Lobsang said. ‘Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t help that we’re already in the middle of so much upheaval from the Valhallan independence demands.’

  ‘You want to restore the balance.’

  ‘You and I always did share the same instincts, Joshua.’ Lobsang bent to remove a single dead leaf from an otherwise immaculate lawn. Will you do it, Joshua? He didn’t ask the question, but left it hanging in the air.

  Joshua thought it over. He was in his late thirties now. He had a young wife, a kid, a role in society at Hell-Knows-Where. He was no longer a mountain man, if he ever had been. And now here was Sally, charging off into the Long Earth through her soft places, as if challenging Joshua to follow. Here was Lobsang, like a ghost from the past, snapping his fingers once more. Was Joshua just going to jump as commanded?

  Of course he was. Even if he wasn’t the man he used to be. But then, even Lobsang wasn’t who he once was, quite.

  They walked on, stepping occasionally from world to world, from sunset to sunset. The troll songs hung in the richly scented air of each world – but Joshua wondered if they were diminishing, even as he listened.

  Tentatively he said, ‘Having met you now, I can see your instinct was right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You did need Sister Agnes.’

  Lobsang sighed. ‘But I think I need you too, Joshua. I often think back to our days together on the Mark Twain.’

  ‘Watched any old movies recently?’

  ‘That’s another thing about Agnes. She won’t let me show any movies that don’t have nuns in.’

  ‘Wow. That’s brutal.’

  ‘Something else that’s good for me, she says. Of course there aren’t that many movies that qualify, and we watch them over and over.’ He shuddered. ‘Don’t talk to me about Two Mules for Sister Sara. But the musicals are the worst. Although Agnes says that the freezer-raiding scene in Sister Act is an authentic detail from convent life.’

  ‘Well, that’s a consolation. Musicals with nuns in, huh . . .’

  A voice rang out across the park, a voice Joshua remembered only too well from his own past. ‘Lobsang? Time to come in now. Your little friend will keep until tomorrow . . .’

  ‘She has loudhailers everywhere.’ Lobsang shouldered his rake and sighed as they trudged across the grass. ‘You see what I’m reduced to? To think I hired forty-nine hundred monks to chant for forty-nine days on forty-nine mountain tops in stepwise Tibets, for this.’

  Joshua clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It’s tough, Lobsang. She’s treating you like you’re a kid. Like you’re sixteen, going on seventeen.’

  Lobsang looked at him sharply. ‘You can pack that in for a start,’ he snapped.

  ‘But I’ve got confidence you can overcome these difficulties, Lobsang. Just face up to every obstacle. Climb every mountain—’

  Lobsang stalked off sulkily.

  Joshua waved cheerfully. ‘So long! Farewell!’

  37

  JOSHUA MADE HIS way out of the transEarth facility through the reception building in Madison West 10. Of course he could have stepped away anywhere, but it seemed polite to go back out that way. Besides, he had to give Hiroe his badge back.

  Bill Chambers was waiting for him in the foyer.

  ‘Bill? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, Lobsang sent for me. He figured you would need a companion for the trip.’

  ‘What trip?’

  ‘To find Sally, and the trolls. What else?’

  ‘But we only just spoke about it . . .’ He sighed. ‘What the hell. That’s Lobsang for you. OK, Bill, thanks.’

  ‘Fair play to him, he says he’ll give us some kind of translation gadget, so we can talk to the trolls.’

  ‘If we can find them at all. If I’m honest I’ve no idea where to start.’

  ‘I do.’ His ruddy face creased in a wide smile. ‘Which is, I guess, why he sent for me. We have to start with Sally. Figure out where she might have gone.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  ‘Well, Joshua, you’re as close to her as any member of the human race, like it or not. There must be something she’s done or said, some clue we can follow.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. OK. What else?’

  ‘Then we need to track down them troll lads. And I’ve an idea about that. Look at this.’ He dug an item out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Joshua.

  It was a tape cassette, a bit of technology fifty years obsolete, or more. Its plastic was worn and grubby, and the label unreadable. The cassette smelled strange, Joshua discovered now as he handled it. Half rutting goat, half patchouli, half chemical. It smelled, in fact, of clear nights in the High Meggers. ‘Who the hell plays cassette tapes, outside of a museum? What is this, Bill?’

  ‘A lure.’

  ‘A lure for what? Or who?’

  ‘Somebody who’s going to help us. You’ll see. So – what first?’

  ‘I’m going to see my family. Try to explain all this to Helen.’

  Bill looked squarely at him. ‘Ah, she already knows, man.’

  And Joshua remembered that fragment of poetry Helen had quoted at the very beginning of all this: A woman with the West in her eyes, / And a man with his back to the East. ‘Yeah. Probably.’

  ‘As for me, I’m off to get bladdered while I’ve got the chance. See you in the morning.’

  38

  THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was summoned to the town of New Purity, a hundred thousand worlds East of Valhalla, where there had been an ambiguous report of yet more trouble with trolls.

  Joe Mackenzie stood by Maggie on the observation deck, looking down on the community. From the air it had a look of competence: town hall, neat fields, and, of course, what looked like a large church. ‘New Purity, huh?’ he said. ‘What’s the name of this sect again?’

  Maggie checked her briefing. ‘The Uncut Brethren.’

  ‘Well, you’d expect a church. But there’s no stockade.’

  ‘No. And look over there.’ She pointed at what looked like a charnel pit.

  Even as the twain descended, Maggie’s instincts started pressing alarm buttons. The Uncut Brethren. Maggie had been home-schooled by avowed atheists – actually not that avowed, they had argued that an outright fundamentalist atheist was just as bad as the worst fire-and-brimstone spittle-dribbling Bible-puncher, and as an adolescent Maggie had been fascinated by both extremes. So, as a connoisseur of believers and unbelievers, she thought she recognized the Uncut Brethren’s type on sight, as they gathered before the Franklin party: uniformly dressed, both male and female, in drab woollen smocks, with long queues of hair down their backs.

  Still, they seemed hospitable enough – right up until Jake the troll and his family stepped down the ramp from the hovering twain, after the human crew.

  One young man promptly approached Maggie. ‘We don’t allow these creatures on our premises, our homes, our farms. They are unclean.’

  Maggie looked into his face, irritated. But she saw tension there. Even grief. Something bad had happened here. ‘Unclean how? Also, Jake is not a creature.’

  The man’s face worked. ‘Very well, let him tell me that.’

  Maggie sighed. ‘Actually that’s possible, just. What’s your name, sir?’

  ‘My name is immaterial. I speak for all, it is our way.’

  Maggie felt a gentle but persistent pressure on her arm. It was Jake. She beckoned to Nathan Boss, who carried the troll-call. ‘This alive person / close to dead / gone away / person was and is not / song of sadness.’

  Hearing these scratchy words coming out of the instrument, the Brethren stared at the troll.

  Maggie faced the young spokesman. ‘What happened here? Just show me.’

  For answer, he led her away from the neat buildings to that pit they’d spotted from the air.

  It was indeed a hole in the ground, full of corpses. A dozen bodies in total, she guessed, maybe m
ore. There were no human remains here that she could see, but many humanoids: trolls, and another species Maggie recognized from her pre-mission briefings. Elves – one of the more vicious varieties, if she remembered the detail.

  Maggie turned again to the young man, and said with a note of command, ‘I think you need to tell me your name, son.’

  He blushed and said, ‘Brother Geoffrey. Auditor of the Uncut Brethren. We are a contemplative order; we believe the prepared soul can overcome all hostile circumstances . . .’ His voice faltered.

  The story she extracted from Brother Geoffrey, in between his sobs and mea culpas, had been repeated all over the Long Earth. Every stepwise Earth was a new world, a world for free, a blank slate on which you could write a wonderful life, if you dreamed a strong enough dream and watched your back. Here, the Brethren had built a decent open township, along, according to Geoffrey, Athenian lines. Their philosophy seemed to be a melange of the teaching of figures that Maggie, in her vague theological understanding, generally identified as the good guys, Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius among them. But they had not listened to basic warnings that must have been given them by more experienced hands, even before they left the Datum.

  And the peril that had befallen them, out of many possible out here, had been elves.

  Mac approached her. ‘We’ve done a little forensic analysis on that pit. Captain, it was the elves did the attacking. Defensive wounds only on the trolls. The elves evidently stepped in, targeting the humans . . .’

  In her briefings Maggie had seen records of such bewildering attacks, launched out of nowhere by stepping hunter-killers. ‘A stockade would have been no use against steppers.’

  ‘No, but cellars would, and I don’t think this lot dug those either. The trolls got caught in the crossfire – hell, they may have just been passing through, they may even have been trying to help. Damned unlucky for them, since trolls are getting so thin on the ground. And it didn’t do the trolls themselves any good. These guys don’t know the difference between trolls and elves, I figure.’

  ‘So the colonists turned their guns on trolls and elves indiscriminately.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Thanks, Mac.’

  Geoffrey still stood beside her. ‘My mother – my own mother has been taken. And—’

  ‘I know. But it wasn’t the trolls. Look.’ She pointed at little Carl, playing with kids’ toys, much to the joy of the few children here in their drab smocks. ‘That is what trolls do. You need to understand the reality of the Long Earth if you’re to survive here. And in your case, if there are elves in the stepwise vicinity, that means accepting the trolls. They will help you clear your fields, put up barns, dig wells. And, best of all, they’ll deter the elves.’

  He seemed to struggle to absorb that. But his next response was positive. ‘How do we do that? Bring the trolls here, I mean.’

  A difficult question, or at least bad timing, since the trolls seemed to be withdrawing from the human worlds all over. She shrugged. ‘Be nice to them. To start with, I suggest that with the help of my crew you bury the corpses of those trolls alongside those of your own people. Pretty soon every troll on this world, and all the other worlds, will know about that bit of respect. Oh, and we’ll help you dig some cellars before we go. Anti-step precautions, right? And a stockade for good measure . . .’

  They worked through the rest of the day.

  That evening, as the sun went down, the community gathered to listen to the song of the Franklin’s trolls. Soon the replies started coming, like echoes from beyond the dim horizon, the ones far away eerily mingling with those near by, the calls flowing and floating over the landscape and melding into one great symphony.

  Yet there was a certain emptiness to the sound. This world, like all the human-occupied worlds of the Long Earth, was becoming bereft of trolls, and a silence was falling across all the Long Earth, as if there had been an extinction event, some terrible plague. What a strange phenomenon it was, Maggie thought. She could think of no precedent, nothing like this before – it was as if all the elephants were withdrawing from Africa, maybe. A rejection of mankind by the natural world. Even her own trolls seemed oddly restless, and she was determined to release them if they showed serious signs of wanting away.

  The next thing, she thought with resignation, would be demands on her from various homesteaders to bring back their troll labourers, how it was about time the government did something . . .

  The Benjamin Franklin hovered over New Purity for two more days, before riding high into the air and vanishing stepwise.

  39

  SALLY KNEW THE world they had arrived at. Of course she did.

  And of course it was new to Jansson. All of this, like the Gap, like every world beyond the Lows, was new to her.

  It had taken three weeks of travelling, since the Gap, to get here, with regular stepping and falls through the soft places. Sally could have got here quicker, Jansson suspected, but she had worked to keep them hidden as well as on the move – and you couldn’t move trolls on too quickly; those big frames took a lot of feeding, every day.

  They emerged from the latest soft place into a landscape that was almost but not quite desert. They stood in a broad valley, with cliffs on either side pocked by caves. On the valley floor were a few stunted trees, the remnants of a broken stone bridge, and a building, one vast cubical mass of shaped black stone. The air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture out of your flesh, and Jansson instinctively searched for shade. Sally remembered this place well. And the radiation threat, she said. They would be safe enough as long as they stayed well away from that building.

  This was the world they had informally called Rectangles, when Sally had found it with Joshua and Lobsang, ten years ago. A world of failed intelligence, it had seemed, and death. The world where Joshua had found a single beautiful artefact, a sapphire ring. A world that seemed unchanged a decade on, save for the detritus of more recent visitors: boot prints in the dirt, campfire scars, archaeologists’ trench-marker flags – even some trash, plastic cartons, ripped bags.

  The troll and her cub wandered off, looking for water, food, shade.

  Sally got Jansson comfortable in the shade of one of the struggling trees, on a rough bed of their piled-up gear and covered by a single silver emergency blanket. Then she briskly built a fire – they didn’t need the heat, but it might keep any critters away.

  Jansson said, ‘So you’ve been here before. With Joshua, all those years ago. And we’re here because the trolls are here . . . or near by. Hiding out. That’s your guess, right? Whatever that’s based on.’

  Sally shrugged, non-committal.

  Jansson thought she understood, by now. During the journey Sally had kept disappearing, for a few hours at a time, a day, sometimes for longer periods. Plugging herself into whatever network of contacts and information she had built up out here. Jansson suspected Sally herself would find it hard to sum up the various whispers she’d been hearing, from various sources. If she came here she’d find trolls, or trolls would find her; that was the sum of her instincts. Jansson just had to hope Sally’s scraps of information and gut sense added up to a good guide . . .

  Jansson gave up thinking about it. It would certainly do no good to ask Sally. Taciturn nature or not, a selective silence was one of Sally’s most irritating habits.

  When Jansson had drifted off to sleep, Sally went hunting.

  The valley bottom itself was suspiciously flat, Sally thought, just as had been her impression the first time she was here. As if it was all one slab: another artefact, maybe, like the building itself. There were slopes of scree at the base of the canyon walls, and here and there green extremophile-type plants, lovers of heat and dryness, struggling for life. At first glance there was no sign of movement, no animals or birds or even insects. That didn’t bother Sally. Where there was greenery of any kind there were going to be herbivores to browse on that greenery, and carnivores to browse on
the herbivores. It was a question of patience. All she had to do was wait. She never carried food – not in the endless larder that was the Long Earth. A lizard or two would do. Something like a naked mole rat, maybe. A deep burrower.

  By the steep valley wall, in the shade of a rock face, she settled on her haunches. This was how Sally had lived her life for a quarter of a century now, ever since she’d left Datum Earth for good not long after Step Day, when her father had made his ambiguous gift of Stepper technology to mankind. And of course she’d had plenty of practice out in the Long Earth in the years before that. Living off the land on the move was easy, but it was a fantasy to believe that animals that had never met man were naturally tame. An awful lot of good things to eat were too used to running from anything strange. You had to wait . . .

  This place was just as she remembered, save for the more recent boot prints, she saw as she relaxed, and took in her surroundings. Of all the discoveries Joshua and Lobsang had taken back to the Datum from their voyage of exploration a decade ago, this was probably the most sensational: evidence of intelligent dinosaur-like creatures more than a million and a half steps away from the Datum. It had done Lobsang no good to protest that the colony-organism that had called itself First Person Singular was far more interesting and exotic, because nobody understood that. Nor was it any use to point out that the creatures whose remains they’d found here, though reptilian, could not really be dinosaurs in any meaningful sense . . .

  There had been a clamour to know more. The universities had received a flood of funding to send out follow-up parties. For a few years researchers had crawled over this site, though the radioactivity made the work hazardous, and they had sent out drone planes and balloons equipped with infrared sensors and ground-penetrating radar to take a look at the rest of this world.

  It had surprised nobody to learn that the pyramid, this valley, was only the visible tip of a worldwide culture: ancient, long fallen, buried in the sands of this arid world, which Lobsang and the Mark Twain had not been equipped to explore properly, or even detect. In and under the dust there were traces of cities, roads, canals – not human-like in layout, clearly the product of different minds, but otherwise eerily familiar, and all very ancient.