The Long Cosmos Page 7

  But here, now, the Silence was different. There was a kind of urgency to it. Almost as if some tremendous beast sat beneath his tree trying to lure him down, to teeth and slashing claws . . . An ambiguous invitation.

  Alone in this tree, in this empty world, sleepless, he felt small.

  Despite all his banter with Agnes and Bill, having passed his sixty-eighth birthday since leaving Hell-Knows-Where he was well aware of his increasing frailty, the gradual failure of his senses – yes, he needed those damn glasses of Rod’s – the diminishing of his strength. Aware too of the imminent end of his own spark of existence. The world – all the worlds, the great panorama of the Long Earth that he himself had done so much to open up – seemed overwhelming, crushing, vast. It would all go on whether he was alive or dead. What was the meaning of it all – of what he had done with his own life?

  And why did the Silence, even now, not leave him alone? Such questions had plagued him all his adult life, when he’d let them, and he seemed to be no closer to any answers.

  He said aloud, ‘So, Agnes, Lobsang, Sally, are there going to be answers at the back of the book?’

  But still there was no reply. He tied his ropes tighter, and, alone in the dark, determinedly closed his eyes.

  11

  IN THE MORNING Joshua’s priority was water.

  He left the bulk of his pack in the safety of his tree, and climbed down. Weapons to hand, he made his way towards the bank of the sluggish river that he’d spied out maybe half a mile to the east of his position. He carried plastic fold-out sacks for today’s collection of food and water. He’d spotted that some of the trees bore massive nuts, something like coconuts, and he had a medium-term plan to empty out some of those to use as gourds, as he built up a water store in his stockade. All in good time; right now he just needed to find breakfast.

  As he walked, he kept his eyes open for threats of all kinds – not just the exotic like a dwarf T-Rex bounding out of cover, but more mundane deadliness like snakes and scorpions or their local relatives, even ground traps left by elves or other travellers. His eyes were gritty and sore; he hadn’t slept enough, and he felt irritable, impatient. All the labour he was going to have to put in to create a safe encampment, which had been so much fun in the planning, didn’t seem so appealing now it was morning and he faced the prospect of actually having to do some of it.

  Maybe he was distracted. He didn’t even spot the group of bison until he was within fifty yards of them.

  He stood stock still.

  They were a mass of dusty black bodies, clustered close together, working at a patch of greenish ground. They looked like bison, they were clearly cattle-like mammals. But they were eerily silent, and very closely grouped, and they had elaborate, tough-looking horns. He could see young pushing between the parents’ legs.

  Now they noticed him standing there, watching them.

  A big male raised his head and gave off a rumbling bellow of warning. In a heartbeat they pushed even closer together, the young were head-butted into the middle of the pack, and the adults faced outward, a rough circle bristling with horns, as if they were a single armoured beast, a tremendous, ferociously spined hedgehog, perhaps.

  It looked a pretty drastic reaction to the presence of a single skinny human. The local dangers must be drastic too. Not a reassuring thought.

  Cautiously, Joshua backed away and gave the herd a wide berth.

  He went on to the river, passing south of a low scarp, a dusty, eroded feature. When he reached the river bank he eyed the water cautiously; he’d long ago learned that you could expect to find crocs or alligators or some relative in just about any inland body of water, anywhere in the Long Earth. But the river was broad, flowing slowly, laden with mud and green murk, and he could see it stayed shallow a good way out from the bank. He stepped forward, opening out his carrier sacks.

  And as he reached the murky water, and his view to the north opened up past the rocky scarp, he saw more big beasts.

  Ducking, he moved back to the cover of the scarp and got down on his haunches. Once again he’d got within a few dozen yards of a herd of massive animals without even being aware they were there. But they were upwind – they couldn’t smell him, and showed no signs of reacting to him. He murmured, ‘Just like you always said, Lobsang. You want to see the wildlife, you go where the water is . . .’

  Peering around the scarp he tried to make sense of what he saw. These, at least, were nothing like cattle, though the adults were more massive quadrupeds with muscular bodies. The detail that drew his eye was a mask of armour on each beast’s face that flared back from the cheeks and swept around the eyes, and on up to form a gleaming white crest over the brow. At first glance they looked like armoured dinosaurs, like triceratops, like ankylosaurus. He’d devoured reconstructions of such things as a kid, in books and online reference sources, and out in the reaches of the Long Earth he’d seen for himself what might have appeared to be close relations of such beasts, the products of different evolutions. But these creatures had fur coating their hefty bodies, or wool, thick brown layers of it: not the scaly reptilian hide or the feathers he’d come to associate with dinosaur types. Now he made out infants, standing cautiously under the legs of the adults. In them the armour mask wasn’t so obvious, not so developed, and the basic form was much more apparent.

  And as they bent to drink from the river, he saw trunks uncurling and dipping into the water.

  These were elephants, or mammoths. In these creatures the tusks, features always subject to the whims of natural selection, had evidently evolved into that heavy plated mask sweeping back over the face. As to why a beast the size of an elephant should need armour, and should have to creep almost silently in a huddle of its fellows as it dared to sip at the river water—

  The thing that burst from the deeper water was like an alligator, but running upright, on two fat hind legs.

  Joshua cowered in the shadows of the bluff.

  The predator ran like a machine – relentless, purposeful, almost silent – and on each of its stubby forepaws it had one huge claw, long and curved, like Death’s sickle. Those blades must be ideal for disembowelling, even when turned on a beast the size of an elephant. Joshua had seen beasts like this before. He’d run from such beasts before.

  To his huge relief the gator ignored him, evidently intent on the elephants.

  For their size, the elephants responded with remarkable speed. With warning trumpets – they didn’t need to be quiet any more – they got into a kind of formation, just as rapidly as the bison had, with the adults locking their armoured faces together, while the young scrambled back behind the barrier. They were like, Joshua thought, a cohort of Roman soldiers making a shield wall to face the barbarians.

  Then the gator beast leapt. It flew over the shield wall and landed on top of the row of elephants. The gator slashed and tore with its blade-claws, while the elephants bellowed and tried to drive the points of their face-armour into the gator’s belly. Dust filled the air, and there was a stink of blood and dung, and elephants shrilled in pain and fear.

  Joshua, unnoticed, scuttled to the water, filled his sacks hurriedly, and moved away, leaving the crowded battlefield behind.

  He didn’t feel secure until he was back up his tree, and strapped in.

  So maybe this was the pattern here. The big herbivores looked like they came from mammalian stock, but the predators that preyed on them were reptilian.

  This kind of mash-up of ecologies, dinosaurs versus mammals, wasn’t so uncommon in this stretch of the Long Earth, he’d learned long ago. Each world of the chain of the Long Earth differed from its neighbours, a little or a lot, depending, it seemed, on the chance outcome of some set of past events – and every so often a tipping point would be reached and there would be a more dramatic discontinuity. The further out you went across the Long Earth, the more those differences accumulated, and the deeper back in time came those branching points. It was all a fundamentally random
melting pot.

  And this was a world so remote from his own, it seemed, that the huge event that had eliminated the dinosaur lineages on Datum Earth was no more than a rumour, a near miss, a bad dream of the deep past.

  Anyhow he was going to have to be more watchful, that was clear enough. He needed to keep his attention focused on his surroundings, and not the inside of his own sixty-eight-year-old head.

  And, he thought with a kind of grim relish, that was a good thing. Even as a mixed-up thirteen-year-old pioneer stepper, he’d soon learned that no matter how far you travelled, you couldn’t leave behind the fears and regrets and grievances that cluttered up the cargo hold of your mind. But at least, alone, focusing on the essentials of life – of survival itself – you could push all that garbage back into the deeper darkness where it belonged. Which was one reason he needed his sabbaticals.

  He filled a flask with water from his sacks, dropped in a purification pill, and sipped. He found himself spitting out river-bottom grit; he’d need a filter. He grunted, disappointed with himself. He’d been here the best part of twenty-four hours and he hadn’t even secured any drinkable water yet.

  Sister Agnes had told him he was too old. Maybe he should have gone camping in some tamed park of a Low Earth world, in the preserved prairie around Madison West 5, maybe. And if he were a mite less stubborn he might at least move to some world where elephants didn’t need to wear armour. He grinned. Hell, no.

  As soon as his heart had stopped pounding, he climbed down from the tree and began to pace out his stockade.

  12

  IT WAS THE fifth day.

  After a breakfast of small, rather sour local berries, a sliver of hare flesh – or at least it had come from a beast that had looked like a hare – and a strip of what was left of his jerky, Joshua made his rounds. He walked around his traps, checking out the snares he’d set, mostly at the fringes of the forest clumps. He was ever watchful in this deceptively quiet world, and kept his weapons to hand, but he was getting used to the routine now. He was also, unfortunately, getting used to going hungry, and it looked like that streak of bad luck might be continuing. His traps were empty, empty, empty, just like before.

  Maybe he’d have to think about going deeper into the forest clumps. He knew there was game in there, at least up in the canopy. He had managed to snare an unlucky hare at a forest edge. Well, it was unlucky because it looked like it had already been injured when it fell into his trap. The animal was very hare-like, but it had loose flaps of skin trailing between its wings, like a flying squirrel, perhaps adapted to life in the tree tops. And maybe it had suffered an attack by some other aerial creature, for its left ‘wing’ was gashed, and most of one cheek torn away, exposing small teeth in a bloody mouth. It was still alive when he’d found it, and he’d apologized more profoundly than usual as he ended its small life with as much kindness as he could.

  He’d left the hare a while to cool and for the fleas to clear, then he’d taken it home, skinned it, and flame-roasted it with local berries and some wild garlic. The meat had been tender and delicious, but there just wasn’t much of it.

  That had been his sole catch so far, which was why he remembered it in such detail. There seemed to be nothing like regular rabbits or hares running around on the ground of this world, nothing for his snares to trap. Maybe the ground-level predators were just too ferocious here – that, and maybe the grass was too sparse.

  As he came to his fifth empty snare, a shadow passed over him.

  He ducked instinctively into the shade of the trees. Nothing good was going to be moving soundlessly through the sky above.

  Peering up warily, he saw a vast form sailing above the forest canopy. At first he thought it was some kind of glider – that wingspan had to be fifty feet – but he soon realized it was too organic a structure for that, the curves of the wings too graceful, the bones clearly visible through flesh stretched so tight it was all but translucent. He saw feet on skinny legs armed with vicious-looking claws, and a beak that must have been as long as he was tall, filled with glinting teeth. No feathers on the wings, but there were splashes of colour on that spindly central body. Some kind of pterosaur, perhaps, the biggest of its kind he’d ever seen, and a tough-looking carnivore even if those wings looked fragile. No wonder there were no birds here – they’d have been easily out-competed by such creatures, the honed products of millions of years of evolution of their own.

  And maybe that was another reason why there were so few, if any, small rabbit-like ground-dwelling mammals. Too easy a target for the killers in the sky. He remembered Bill Chambers urging him to spread something bright like his spacesuit-silver emergency blanket on the top of his bluff, in case some disaster befell him and the twains came searching. Now he was glad he’d instinctively rejected that advice and wasn’t drawing the attention of the monsters in the sky.

  The pterosaur sailed away, off to the west, and Joshua warily watched it go. Whatever was on its menu today didn’t include him, at least.

  And when he looked down to the ground once more, he saw the troll.

  The humanoid was a big older male, a mass of black fur, but with a speckling of grey around his face and on his back: the kind some people called, inaccurately, a silverback. He was squatting, staring at a bare patch of ground before him. The troll was alone. His troop was nowhere to be seen, but Joshua knew they would be around somewhere.

  Joshua sighed, and strode forward, emerging from the shadows of the forest clump. There were plenty of times he’d been glad to see a troll, but this wasn’t one of them. ‘Well, there goes the neighbourhood—’

  The troll glowered at him. He lifted a hand like a steam hammer, and touched one finger to his lips. Shut up. The gesture was unmistakeable, and one of the elements of an informal sign language that had evolved across the Long Earth, leaking out from labs and farms and factories and other places where trolls lived and worked alongside people – sometimes, even by choice.

  Joshua stood still and shut his mouth. He had learned not to argue with trolls. The troll went back to his earnest inspection of the ground.

  An unmeasured time passed. The troll stayed utterly still, apparently relaxed. That was harder for Joshua to manage, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, and he grew thirsty, and his stomach rumbled.

  He still saw no sign of this troll’s troop, nor heard their calls. It wasn’t unknown for trolls to be encountered alone. This one could be a scout, sent out from the pack stepwise to seek out food or water, or spot potential threats. But Joshua didn’t think so; scouts were usually a lot younger, their senses still sharp, fleet of foot. Maybe this older male, approaching the end of his life, just wanted some time to himself: he was on a troll sabbatical, just like Joshua’s. Even after all these years, and for all the intensive study of their collective behaviour pioneered by the likes of Lobsang, people knew hardly anything about trolls, and certainly not in the wild. If he’d thought to bring a troll-call, Joshua supposed, he could have asked.

  Joshua was getting bored, and a little dizzy. Enough of this. He opened his mouth to speak—

  Slam.

  The troll brought his two great fists down on the ground with a smash, and Joshua was amazed to see the ground crumble under the impact, a thin crust cracking to reveal some kind of earth-walled chamber down there, a couple of feet deep, with rough tunnels leading off into the dark . . .

  And animals. They swarmed over each other, things like furless rabbits or rats, pale beasts with claws and teeth shaped for digging, tiny pink eyes clamped shut against the light. Immediately, the creatures began to escape from the central nest, wriggling, scrambling back down the tunnels. Their movements were liquid; they seemed to flow away from the intrusion of daylight.

  With a roar the troll jumped down into the hole, his big feet crushing a couple of the animals, and he started grabbing the creatures one at a time in each big fist, shaking them until they went limp, throwing them aside, bending down for more. He glanced up
at Joshua, and the invitation on his crumpled, gorilla-like face was unmistakeable.

  Joshua dropped his bits of gear and jumped down into the hole, opposite the troll. He tried to emulate the troll’s industry, but he needed two hands to get hold of a single rabbit, and when he managed to catch one creature it turned out to be bigger and stronger than it looked, and dug needle-like teeth into the webbing of his thumb until he dropped it.

  ‘Damn it!’

  He bent down and tried again, this time favouring his prosthetic hand. ‘Bite on this.’ This time he got a rabbit from the hind end, so he kept those teeth away. With a muttered apology, trying to avoid the spiteful claws on its kicking back feet, he slammed its head against the ground, feeling its neck crack. ‘Ha!’ Then he tossed the quivering corpse aside, and looked around for more.

  But all the surviving rabbits had gone, squirming away into their tunnels. Joshua had that one miserable catch at his side. The troll had two heaps of, count them, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty each. The big old troll looked at Joshua’s single specimen, and his own piled-up catch, and back again. ‘Hoo!’

  Joshua had heard a troll laugh before. It was a sound you never got used to. Soon he was joining in, laughing until his gut ached.

  Then the troll threw over one more rabbit carcass to Joshua, gathered up his haul in his huge arms with effortless ease, laughed once more – ‘Hoo!’ – and stepped away.

  That evening, before the sun went down, Joshua gutted and cleaned both rabbit-moles and cooked them on spits over his fire. He could barely wait until he could get his teeth into the smooth, lush meat. But after five days hungry he knew not to overeat; he determined to put the produce of the second rabbit aside for salting and curing in the sun.

  Of course these little mammals with their big rodent-like incisors and digging claws weren’t rabbits, or rats, or moles, all of which they resembled to some degree. Maybe they were like the mole rats he’d heard of in Africa, living underground in big warrens, clambering over each other in the dark . . . Mole rats lived in societies like hives, like social insects, with just a few breeding pairs supported by a mass of sterile siblings, nephews and nieces. Maybe it was that way here.