The Long Earth

39

JOSHUA ROSE EARLY the next morning and explored further, alone. People were friendly and ready to walk, chat and even hand him pottery mugs of lemonade. He overcame his natural inclination to silence, and talked back, and listened.

The area was pretty well homesteaded by now, he learned, with thriving settlements at the coast and along the river valleys. None of them had many more than a couple of hundred inhabitants, though people would get together on festival days — or when interesting visitors showed up, such as Lobsang with his airship. And in response to the greater influx of newcomers in recent decades, the community had had to expand, new settlements seeding across the countryside.

The reason this rapid expansion had been possible, he learned, was the trolls. Trolls were useful, trolls were friendly, companionable — and, crucially, ever ready to lift a heavy load, an exercise they took much delight in. This donation of muscle power had helped the colonists here overcome their lack of manpower, draft animals and machinery.

But in a sense the reason for all the building work, the growth of the new settlements, was the trolls. Trolls, he discovered, were allergic to crowds — that is to say, crowds of humans. No matter how many trolls there were, they would get nervous if there were more than one thousand, eight hundred and ninety humans in the immediate vicinity, apparently a number found by careful experimentation in the past. They didn’t get mad, they just got going, not coming back, sheepishly, until a few dozen humans had kindly found somewhere else to be, and the numbers dropped down under the limit. But as the goodwill of trolls was immensely valuable, Happy Landings was spreading southwards as a confederacy of small troll-friendly townships. This was hardly inconvenient, since you could always walk to the next township in a matter of minutes, and there was plenty of room in this riverine landscape for more.

Later that morning Joshua learned that this fact, the size of the townships, was of intense interest to a young man called Henry. He had been raised among Amish until one day he stepped into a soft place and landed, as it were, among a different kind of chosen. It seemed to Joshua that Henry had come to terms with this elevation quite happily. He explained to Joshua that back home his people had always reckoned that around a hundred and fifty people was just the right size for a caring community, and so he felt at home here. He also thought, however, that he had died, and that Happy Landings was, if not heaven, at least a staging post for the journey onwards. Being dead didn’t seem to bother him very much. He had his place in this little society: he was a good husbandman, gentle around animals and particularly fond of trolls.

And that was why, this morning, when at Lobsang’s request Joshua brought Henry up to the airship with a few trolls, Henry believed he had ascended to heaven at last, and was speaking to God. There are some things which you don’t put up with when you have been brought up by nuns, even if they are nuns like Sister Agnes. Joshua tried to disabuse Henry of the belief that the impressive saffron-clad personage he met after travelling into the sky was, in fact, God. But given Lobsang’s ego and air of omnicompetence there was little to dissuade him.

Lobsang, meanwhile, was burning to learn more about the language of the trolls. And that was why now, on the observation deck, there were already a couple of female trolls flanking Lobsang’s ambulant unit, and four or five juveniles having a lot of fun playing with Shi-mi. Henry had been brought along to help calm the trolls — that had actually been Sally’s suggestion — but nothing seemed to faze a Happy Landings troll. They had trotted into the elevator quite happily, and once on board seemed to take everything in their great, flat-footed stride, including an artificial man and a robot cat.

Lobsang said, ‘Trolls are of course mammals. And mammalian creatures love and cherish their offspring — well, for the most part. Mothers teach their children. And so I am learning like a child, with baby steps, as it were. As I myself play the part of a child, I feel I can with care derive a certain elementary vocabulary: good, bad, up, down. And thus we make progress.’

He was enjoying this, Joshua could tell. ‘You’re the troll whisperer, Lobsang.’

But Lobsang took no notice of that and walked among his happy band of trolls. ‘Please note, I offer a nice shiny ball. Good! Joshua, observe the sounds of appreciation and interest. See the pretty shiny thing! And now, I take it away. Ah, the sounds of sadness and privation, very good. But note that the adult female is alert, emitting sounds of uncertainty, with just a subtle hint that were I to try anything really nasty with her favourite bag of woolliness she would quite likely rip off my arm and beat me to death with the wet end. Splendid! Joshua, see, I give the ball back to the pup; now mother is less apprehensive, and all is sweetness and light once more.’

And it was, thought Joshua. The Mark Twain, anchored over Happy Landings, moved gently in a sunlit breeze, with just enough creaking from the woodwork to lull you almost as if you were in a hammock. A pleasant place with happy, happy trolls.

The spell was broken when Lobsang asked, ‘Henry, could you provide a dead troll, do you think?’

Henry looked deeply uncomfortable. When he spoke he had an odd, lilting accent. ‘Mister, if one of them dies they scrape out a very deep hole and bury the body, scattering flowers upon it beforehand to ensure the resurrection, I do believe.’

‘Ah, then I suppose that a forensic dissection is out of the question? I feared so… I beg your pardon,’ he added, with what struck Joshua as unusual tact for him. ‘I intended no disrespect. But the scientific value would be high. I am confronted with a hitherto unknown species which, despite the lack of what we are pleased to call civilization, and lacking our form of intelligence, has a method of communication of an intricacy and depth unrivalled among humanity until the expansion of the internet. Thanks to this facility I believe that anything interesting and useful that a troll learns very shortly becomes known to every other troll. They appear to have expanded frontal lobes, I suspect mostly utilized to store and process memory, both personal and species-wide… Oh, for a body to dissect! Well, lacking that, I will do the best I can, which will be the best that there is.’

Henry laughed. ‘You don’t believe in modesty, do you, Mr Lobsang?’

‘Absolutely not, Henry. Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.’

Joshua threw a ball towards a baby troll. ‘Neanderthals put flowers on the bodies of their dead too. I’m no expert, I saw it on the Discovery Channel. Are the trolls nearly human, then?’ He had the sense to duck as the exuberant return from the pup sailed over his head and splintered the bulkhead.

‘The young will experiment,’ remarked Lobsang. ‘“Nearly human” is right, Joshua. Like the dolphins, orang-utans and, if I am being charitable, the rest of the higher apes. It’s a tiny gap between us and them. And nobody knows how Homo sapiens became, well, sapient. Sally, do the trolls use tools?’

She looked up from her playing. ‘Oh, yes. Away from humans I’ve seen them use sticks and stones as improvised tools. And if you bring a fresh band to Happy Landings, and if they see a guy fixing a weir in the river, a troll might pick up a handsaw and help him, if he’s shown what to do. By the end of the evening, every troll in that band will know how to do it.’

Lobsang patted a troll. ‘So it’s a case of monkey see, monkey do.’

Sally said, ‘No, it’s a case of troll see, troll sit down, troll think about things and then, if it’s appropriate, troll make a half-decent lever or whatever and, by the end of that evening, troll tell other trolls about the usefulness of it. Their long chant is a troll Wikipedia, quite apart from anything else. If you want to find out anything like “Am I going to throw up if I eat this purple elephant?” then another troll will tell you.’

Joshua said, ‘Hang on. Are you telling me you’ve seen a purple elephant?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Sally. ‘But out in one of the Africas there is an elephant which, I swear, has the art of camouflage down to a tee. Somewhere out there in the Long Earth you’ll find almost anything you can imagine.’

‘“Anything you can imagine”,’ murmured Lobsang. ‘Interesting choice of phrase. Between ourselves, Sally, I can’t help feeling that the Long Earth as a whole has something approaching what I can only call a meta-organic component. Or perhaps meta-animistic.’

‘Hmph. Maybe,’ said Sally, scratching a troll’s scalp. ‘But the whole set-up irritates me. The Long Earth is too kind to us. It’s too pat! Just as we’ve trashed the Datum, just as we’ve wiped out most of the life we shared it with and are about to succumb to our own resource wars, shazam, an infinity of Earths opens up. What kind of God sets up a stunt like that?’

‘You object to this salvation?’ Lobsang asked. ‘You really are misanthropic, aren’t you, Sally?’

‘I’ve got a lot to be misanthropic about.’

Lobsang stroked his own trolls. ‘But perhaps it’s nothing to do with any kind of god. Sally, we — I mean humanity — are barely at the beginning of our enquiry into the Long Earth. Newton, you know, spoke of himself as a boy playing on a seashore, distracted by a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. Newton! We understand so little. Why should the universe open itself up to careful and dedicated enquiry at all? And why should it be so generous, so fecund, so nurturing of life, even intelligence? Perhaps in some way the Long Earth is an expression of that nurturing.’

‘If so, we don’t deserve it.’

‘Well, that’s a debate for another day… You know, my researches will be frustrated unless I can obtain the corpse of a troll.’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Sally.

Lobsang snapped back, ‘Please don’t tell me what to think. I think, therefore I am; it’s what I do. May I suggest that you two go and enjoy the pleasures of Happy Landings, and leave me in peace to converse with my friends? Whom I promise not to kill and dissect.’

On the access deck below, the elevator hatch slammed open, a clear enough hint that they should leave.

When they were on the ground again, Sally giggled. ‘He can get pretty ratty, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe.’ Joshua was faintly concerned. He’d never heard Lobsang sound quite so unstable.

‘Is there really a human being in there somewhere?’

‘Yes,’ said Joshua, flatly. ‘And you know there is, because you said he sounded ratty. You didn’t use the word it.’

‘Oh, very smart. Come on, let’s look around a few more happy homesteads.’

For Sally that evening, it was like greeting one long-lost friend after another. Joshua was happy to follow in her wake, trying to analyse his feelings about Happy Landings.

He liked the place. Why? Because it seemed, well, right somehow. Like it was where all mankind belonged, perhaps. Maybe that was because he too had some sense of the soft places, the soft routes all converging here, in Lobsang’s well of stability. The maybes in his mind annoyed him, however, as he walked alone. And the sense that he disliked Happy Landings as much as he liked it. As if he didn’t trust it.

He’d listened to Sally’s arguments with Lobsang — she was more voluble on these issues, if not necessarily any better informed — and he tried to make sense of all he was learning. Where did man belong? On the Datum, that was for sure, with ancestral fossils all the way down to bedrock. But now the human race was expanding at speed across the Long Earth, no matter what the governments thought, no matter about aegis; nobody could stop it, and certainly nobody could control it, no matter how many god-bothering spittle-flecked homealone tub-thumpers back on the Datum tried. You would run out of people before you ran out of Earths. But what was the point of it all? Sister Agnes used to tell him that the purpose of life was to be all that you could be — with a side helping, of course, of helping others to do the same. And maybe the Long Earth was a place where, as Lobsang might put it, human potentiality could be maximally expressed… Was there some sense in which that was what the Long Earth was for? To allow mankind to make the most of itself? And in the middle of this cosmic conundrum, here was Happy Landings, where the scatterlings of mankind drifted and sifted. What was that all about?

Of course there were no answers.

In the gathering twilight Joshua was careful not to walk into trolls. Trolls seldom walked into people. Indeed the general etiquette of Happy Landings was that everybody should try not to walk into anybody. But now, suddenly, Joshua walked into an elephant.

Fortunately, it was neither purple nor camouflaged. It was quite small, about the size of an ox, coated with wiry brown hair, and it had a rider, a stocky, grizzled man, who said cheerfully, ‘Another newcomer! And where did you blow in from, sport? My name’s Wally, been here eleven years. Rum go and no mistake, ain’t it? Bit of a bugger, good thing I wasn’t married! Not for want of opportunity, you understand, before or since.’ The self-confessed Wally slid off the back of his miniature elephant, and held out a leathery hand. ‘Put it there!’

They shook hands, and Joshua introduced himself. ‘I’ve only been here a couple of days. Flew in. In a flying machine,’ he added quickly.

‘You did? Great! When are you flying out? Got a spare seat?’

Joshua had wondered at the fact that so few residents of Happy Landings had asked that question; so few wanted out. ‘I think the jury is out on that one, Wally. We have a kind of mission to achieve.’

‘No worries,’ Wally said, apparently unfazed. ‘I’ve been poling down the river, found Jumbo here. Amiable little fella, ain’t he? Just the job for the long-haul, and pretty bright. They come up from the plains.’ He sighed. ‘I like spaces, me, don’t like forests, too creepy. I like to feel wind on my face.’ As they walked towards City Hall with Jumbo following dutifully behind, he added, ‘We’ve been working on the new road south, clearing the way. Don’t mind trees if I can cut them down! But I reckon I have earned my keep here now, so it’s time to build a boat and go discover Australia. That’s the longest haul of them all, right enough.’

‘That’s halfway around the world, Wally. And it won’t be the Australia you remember.’

‘Fair enough. Any Australia will do for me. Of course, I can’t do it all in one go. But a simple way would be to sail down the coast, staying close to the shore, lots of good eating on the way, and strike out for Hawaii. And you can bet your boots that’s one of the first places steppers would want to colonize. And after that, well, we’ll have to see, but where there are people there’s going to be a pub, and where there’s a pub there’s sooner or later going to be Wally!’

Joshua shook hands with Wally, wishing him bon voyage.

He found Sally back in City Hall, surrounded by friendly faces, as ever. She broke away when she saw Joshua. ‘People are starting to notice. Even here.’

‘What?’

‘About the trolls. That more and more of them are stepping off East. Wild bands come passing through, and even the local ones, what you might loosely call domesticated, I suspect some of them want to leave too, but they are being kind of polite. The locals are getting disturbed.’

‘Hmm. Ripples in the tranquil pool of Happy Landings?’

‘Is Lobsang finished playing at Dr Dolittle? It’s time we were airborne and heading West again.’

‘Let’s go see.’

Back on the ship, the observation deck appeared empty save for a pile of trolls, snuggling like puppies. Then the heap moved, and Lobsang poked his head out, beaming.

‘Fur is wonderful against the tactile areas, is it not? I feel like one blessed. And they speak! Extremely high-pitched, minimal vocabulary… Multiple ways of communicating, apparently; it does seem that communicating is what being a troll is all about. But I suspect the real exchange of information takes place in the songs.

‘I believe I now have learned terms for good/bad, approval/refusal, pleasure/pain, night/day, hot/cold, correct/incorrect, and “I wish to suckle now”, although I suspect the last will not be of much use to me. I will learn more when we continue our voyage, which by the way we will be doing with alacrity at first light tomorrow. I intend to take these trolls. I hope my new friends do not mind travelling by air. I believe they like me!’

Sally’s face was a carefully controlled mask. ‘Well, that’s just peachy, Lobsang. But are you doing any actual work in there?’

‘I am coming to tentative conclusions. These are evidently very flexible omnivores. No wonder they’re so widespread, across the Long Earth. They’re ideal nomads. And the product of a couple of million years’ evolution, probably, since the root habiline stock learned to step.’

Joshua asked, ‘Habiline?’

‘Homo habilis. Handy Man. The first toolmakers in the human evolutionary line. You see, I’m speculating that maybe the stepping ability evolved alongside the ability to make tools. One surely needs a similar imaginative capacity: to imagine how a bit of stone might become an axe; to imagine how one world might differ from another, and then to step into it. Or perhaps it is related to the ability to imagine alternative futures depending on one’s choices: to go hunting today, or to go back to that rich hazel clump again… Either way, once such an ability developed the species would split, between increasingly adept steppers who would drift away, and those less adept or unable to step at all, who would stay at home, and perhaps become actively resistant to the steppers, who would have a competitive advantage.’

‘A stay-at-home strand that gave rise to humanity on Datum Earth,’ Joshua guessed.

‘Possibly. My colleague Nelson’s archaeological searches would seem to indicate that. But this is just my guess. It may be the stepping ability evolved even earlier, during the age of the pre-human apes. One must describe these creatures as humanoid rather than hominid, until a proper study is concluded, evolutionary relationships established.’

Sally asked, ‘Have they told you why they are migrating?’

‘I have an idea… My conclusion has to be tentative, even though the alpha female is remarkably good at pantomime. Imagine a pressure in your head. Storms in the mind.’

And Joshua was aware of the gathering storm in his own head, that sense of pressure as they headed West, just as if the Datum itself with its billions of souls was up ahead of him. Yes, he thought. Bad weather for the psyche, coming this way. But what’s driving it?

Lobsang said no more. Amid the mewings of the troll pups, once again he was submerged in his heap of fur. ‘Ah. Tactile surfaces…’

And suddenly there was no more Lobsang. The physical presence of the ambulant unit was still here, but some subtle aspect of the ship had dissipated.

Joshua looked at Sally.

Sally said, ‘You feel that too? Is it something we can’t hear, or see any more? Where’s he gone? He can’t die, can he? Or — break?’

Joshua didn’t know what to say. The ship remained subtly busy, its myriad mechanisms whirring and clicking away as if nothing had happened. But inside this brightly lit complex Joshua could not detect the controlling element, could not detect Lobsang. Something essential was missing. It had been like this when old Sister Regina had died. She had been bed-bound for years, but she liked to see the children, and still, despite everything, had known all their names. They had filed in to see her, nervous of the smell, her papery skin. And then suddenly it had seemed that something that they hadn’t known was there … wasn’t any more.

‘I have been thinking he might be ill,’ he said, uncertain. ‘He hasn’t been himself since he got buried under troll cubs.’

The voice of Lobsang came over the loudspeaker: ‘Do not be unduly worried.’

Sally was startled, and laughed nervously. ‘Should we be duly worried?’

‘Sally, please bear with us. There has been no malfunction. You are being addressed by an emergency subsystem. Right now Lobsang is recompiling: that is, integrating vast volumes of new information. This will take a few hours. However, we subsystems are fully capable of fulfilling all necessary functions during the period stated. Lobsang needs his time offline; sooner or later every sufficiently sapient creature needs time to take stock, as we are sure you will understand. You are quite safe. Lobsang looks forward to the pleasure of your company around dawn.’

Sally snorted. ‘Somehow I was expecting him to add “Have a nice day”, but I suppose you can’t have everything. How much of that was true, do you think?’

Joshua shrugged. ‘He is learning a lot, I guess, and very fast, from the trolls.’

‘And now he’s absorbing their nightmares. So we have a free evening. How about one more trip down to the bar?’

‘Which bar?…’

At the end of a long round of farewell drinks, all of them free, he had to carry her back to the ship. He laid her gently on the bed in her stateroom. She looked younger when she slept. He felt an unreasonable stab of protectiveness, and was glad she wasn’t awake to notice it.

There was no sign of Lobsang, no sound of his voice.

And the trolls, it turned out, had left of their own accord. Joshua thought, troll see elevator button. Troll think about button. Troll press button. Goodbye troll… Lobsang had wanted to get more out of his contact with the trolls. But evidently the trolls had got all they wanted out of him.

Alone, Joshua lay down on his couch on the observation deck, looking at the stars.

At dawn, with all its passengers asleep, the ship rose gently, gaining height until it was above the tops of the highest forest giants, and then stepped, disappearing with a small thunderclap.