The Long Earth

38

THE VISITORS WALKED through smiling crowds.

Joshua thought the layout of the place was unusual, and the architecture. There seemed to be no plan to the road system; it was a tangle of criss-crossing lanes that wandered off into the forest, as if it had just evolved that way. And the buildings were heaped up on often very ancient-looking foundations. This really did have the feel of a place that had grown slowly but continuously for a very long time, and so was layered with structures one on top of the other, like a tree trunk’s rings. But there did seem to be a preponderance of relatively modern buildings overlaying a very ancient core, as if people had arrived in greater numbers in recent times, the last couple of centuries perhaps. Which was just when, he supposed, the population back on Datum Earth had started to grow fast, no doubt sending a larger flood of scatterlings to Happy Landings.

Walking by the river, Joshua began to get a sense of how people lived here. All along the bank there were racks of drying fish — mostly salmon-like fish, big healthy specimens, cleanly filleted — and more hanging inside the dwellings, some smoked. Nobody seemed to be working terribly hard, but he saw weirs in the river, traps, nets, and a few workers mending hooks, lines, harpoons. Though there were in fact a few cultivated fields, he learned, further out from the centre — mostly growing potatoes as an emergency food store, and to power the Steppers of those few visitors who used the boxes — the river provided much of what sustained the people here. During the annual salmon runs, so the friendly locals told him in a variety of bizarre accents, the whole population, human and troll, would come down to the river and harvest migrating fish that swam so thick the river water lapped up over the banks. There were evidently other kinds of fish, and Joshua saw great middens of the shells of clams and oysters. The forest was generous too, as Joshua could tell from baskets of berries, acorns, hazelnuts, as well as haunches of animals he could not identify.

‘This is why nobody farms here,’ Sally murmured to him. ‘Or hardly anybody. Nobody needs to, the country is so generous. Back on the Datum, in this area pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer folk built societies every bit as complex as any farmer’s, with a fraction of the labour. And none of the backache. So it is here.’ She laughed, as rain sprinkled down. ‘Maybe that’s why Happy Landings turned out to be here, one of the most generous places on all the worlds. If only it didn’t rain all the time it would be paradise.’

But there were trolls everywhere, and that was something you would not have seen in Washington State back in the Datum. The humanoids threaded their way through the human rubberneckers with a care and attention that Joshua would not have expected from creatures that looked like the offspring of a bear and an upright pig. The evidently contented relationship between human and troll here, and the uniform welcome they received, gave the place an air of peace.

Paradoxically, this made Joshua uncomfortable. He had no clear idea why. It was just that with the trolls so firmly embedded in the place, the community seemed too calm. Not entirely human… Not for the first time in his life he was conflicted and confused; there was much about this place that he had yet to understand.

And then, in the central square, one of the trolls got down on its haunches and sang. Soon the rest joined in. A troll song was always extraordinary; hearing it seemed to nail you to the spot, in a way that Joshua knew he would for ever be unable to explain. It seemed to go on and on, the mighty chords echoing from the distant forest — although when he looked at his watch when it was over, it had lasted only about ten minutes.

Sally tapped him on the shoulder. ‘That, young man, is what is called the short call of the troll. The long call can last a month. Heart-warming, isn’t it? In a creepy sort of way. Sometimes you will see them in a clearing, hundreds of them, all singing, apparently independently, apparently unaware of each other — until suddenly it ends on one great chord, like Thomas Tallis, you know? Like it’s coming at you in four dimensions at once.’

‘I know Tallis’s entire canon, Sally,’ said Lobsang. ‘It is an apt comparison.’

Joshua decided he was not going to be left out. ‘I’ve heard of Tallis. Sister Agnes said that if he were alive today he would be riding a Harley. Then again most of her heroes would have ridden Harleys, according to her…’

‘I detect patterns in the music,’ said Lobsang. ‘It will take some time to analyse.’

‘Good luck with that, mister,’ Sally said. ‘I have known trolls for years, and I can only guess what they are talking about. But I’m pretty confident that in this case they are discussing us and the airship. And by nightfall, every troll on this continent will be repeating it until they all have it perfect. The songs represent a sort of shared memory — that’s what I believe. There’s even a sort of checksum in the songs, I think, a self-correction mechanism, so that in time all the trolls get the same information reliably. Eventually it will probably go worlds-wide, depending on troll migration patterns. Sooner or later every troll that can be reached will know that we were here today.’

The others absorbed that in silence. It struck Joshua as an astounding, eerie thought, a song-memory that spanned worlds.

They walked on. It was a calm, warm afternoon, though marked by brief, light showers that everybody seemed to ignore. There were no vehicles, no pack animals, just a few handcarts, and the fish racks everywhere.

Joshua said to Sally, ‘Maybe we should cut to the chase. So you know about trolls. In fact you seem very fond of trolls. You know about the humanoid migration. You brought us to this place where there’s a strange human — troll community… You want something from us, that’s obvious. Is it to do with the migration, Sally?’

She said nothing at first. Then: ‘Yes. All right. I’ve had no intention of concealing anything from you. It’s just that it’s better if you work it out for yourselves. Yes, I’m concerned about the migration. It’s a disturbance that’s echoing up and down the Long Earth. And, yes, I don’t think I can, or should, go investigating the cause alone. But somebody has to, right?’

‘Then we have the same goals,’ Lobsang said.

Joshua pressed, ‘Come on, out with it, Sally. Time for an honest trade. We’ll help you but you need to be fully truthful with us. You knew this place was here, and how to find it. How come? And how did you get out so far in the first place?’

Sally looked wary. ‘Can I trust you two? I mean really trust you?’

‘Yes,’ said Joshua.

‘No,’ said Lobsang. ‘Anything you tell me that can be used for the betterment of mankind as a whole will be utilized as I see fit. However, I will not do anything to harm you, or your family. Trust me on that. You know something we don’t about the connectivity of the Long Earth, don’t you?’

A couple walked by, hand in hand; she looked Swedish, he was very nearly midnight black.

Sally took a deep breath. ‘My family calls them soft places.’

Joshua asked, ‘Soft places?’

‘Short cuts. They’re usually, but not always, far inland, at the heart of a continent. They are usually near water and they get stronger around twilight. Can’t exactly tell you what they look like, or how I find them. It’s more of a feeling than anything else.’

‘I don’t think I understand—’

‘They are places that allow you fast travel over multiple Earths at a time.’

‘Seven-league boots—’

Lobsang murmured, ‘I suspect wormholes would be a better metaphor.’

‘But they shift,’ Sally said. ‘They open and close. You have to find the way, and follow it… You have to be taught what to look for. But it isn’t something you learn, it’s like something you remember — something you were told about a long time ago and then when you need it, it pops up. It’s not like Stepper stuttering. It’s more like, well, a helping hand. It’s kind of organic, you know? Like sailors knowing the currents of the sea, the ebb and flow, wind and tide, even the saltiness of the water. And they do drift, they open and close, or reconnect to somewhere new. It’s hit and miss at first, but these days I can get to any destination in three or four steps, if the tide’s flowing right.’

Joshua tried to imagine this. He visualized the Long Earth as a tube of worlds, a hosepipe, along which he plodded one world at a time. These soft places were like — what? Holes in the pipe walls, enabling you to short-cut vast strings of possible Earths? Or maybe it was like a metro network, invisible beneath a city’s roads, connecting point to point, a network with its own topology independent of what went on above ground. And in that network there would be nodes, exchanges…

Lobsang asked bluntly, ‘How do they work? Your soft places.’

‘Well, how would I know? My father had hypotheses, about the structure of the Long Earth. He spoke about solenoids. Chaotic mathematical structures. Don’t ask me. If I ever find him—’

‘How many people do you know have this talent?’

She shrugged. ‘Not even all of my own family. But I know that there are others out there; occasionally I meet people. All I can really say is that I know a soft place when I find one, and then I generally have a good idea of how far it will go and in which direction. My granddad on my mother’s side, he was a real stepper, he could sense a soft place two miles off. Granddad called them the fairy ways. He was Irish by birth, and he said that if you stepped into a soft place you could step lively, as he called it. Mom said that when you stepped lively you were building up a debt which would one day have to be repaid.’

Joshua asked, ‘So what about Happy Landings? How come people come unstuck and drift here, like the mayor says?… Maybe it’s something to do with the network of soft places. People drift and gather, like snowflakes collecting in a hollow, maybe.’

‘Yes, perhaps it’s something like that,’ Lobsang said. ‘We know that stability is somehow a key to the Long Earth. Maybe Happy Landings is something like a potential well. And it’s clearly been operating long before Step Day, deep into the past.’

‘Yeah,’ Sally said sceptically. ‘Look, all this isn’t the point. The trolls are nervous — even here; I can tell if you can’t. That’s what we need to focus on. That’s why I’m sticking with you two clowns and your ridiculous aerial barge. Because in your dim way you’ve seen what I’ve seen. That all across the Long Earth something is scaring the trolls and the other humanoids. And that scares me. And, like you, I need to figure out what’s going on.’

Joshua asked, ‘But what concerns you most, Sally? The threat to people, or to the trolls?’

‘What do you think?’ she snapped back.

At twilight there was evensong, courtesy of the trolls. Troll song was the trolls; they lived in a world of constant chatter.

But then so did the people of Happy Landings. Even at dusk they were still out and about, strolling, waving, laughing, generally finding pleasure in one another’s company. Fires were lit everywhere; in the Pacific North-west on most worlds there was no shortage of firewood. And, Joshua noticed, as evening drew in more people were pouring in from neighbouring communities, on foot, some drawing small carts bearing children and old folk. The Humptulips core of Happy Landings wasn’t isolated, then.

Some, they learned, came from as far away as this world’s footprint of Seattle. And that district on this Earth had been called Seattle since 1954, when a lady called Kitty Hartman, minding her own business on her way home from Pike Place Market, stepped without knowing, and was amazed by the disappearance of the buildings around her. The travellers from the Mark Twain were introduced to Mrs Montecute, as she was now known: white-haired, exceptionally spry, very happy to talk.

‘Of course, it was rather a shock, you know, and I remember thinking, I don’t even know what state I’m in! I’m not in Washington any more, that’s for sure. I wondered if I should have brought a little dog and a pair of red shoes! And then the first person I met here was François Montecute, who really was kind of cute like his name, who really did turn my head, and who really was an artist between the sheets if you get my drift.’ She told them this with the cheerful directness of an elderly lady who is determined to make young people aware that she has had sex, too, and by the sound of it quite a considerable amount.

There was a certain contented aura about Mrs Montecute, and it seemed to Joshua that everyone in Happy Landings shared it, to some extent. It was hard to pin down.

Sally said when he tried to express this, ‘I know what you mean. Everybody seems so, well, sensible. I have come here many times and it’s always the same. You never get complaints, or competitiveness. They don’t need government, not really. You could say that Mayor Spencer is the first among equals. When there is any big project to be undertaken, they just knuckle down and get on with it.’

Joshua said, ‘It all feels a bit Stepford Wives to me.’

Sally laughed. ‘It bothers you, does it? A happy human community bothers Joshua Valienté, the great loner who’s barely human himself. Well, it is — odd. But in a positive way. I am not talking about telepathy or any of that kind of shit.’

Joshua grinned. ‘As opposed to the hopping from one world to another at a whim kind of shit?’

Sally said, ‘OK, I get your point, but you know what I mean. It’s all so nice. I’ve talked to them about it and they say it’s the fresh air; no crowding, plenty to eat, no unfair taxes, yada, yada, yada…’

‘Or maybe it’s the trolls,’ Joshua said bluntly. ‘Trolls and humans, mixed up together.’

‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘Sometimes I wonder…’

‘What do you wonder?’

‘I wonder if there’s something so big going on here that even Lobsang would have to recalibrate his thinking. Just a hunch, for now. I’m just suspicious. But then a stepper who isn’t suspicious is soon a dead stepper.’