The Long Earth

43

THE NEXT DAWN came late, to Joshua’s puzzlement. The daylight revealed a wasteland below, a dried-up dustbowl world with, it seemed, precious little water, and therefore precious little else.

Lobsang joined Joshua on the observation deck. ‘Not a prepossessing place, is it? But it has its curiosities.’

‘Like the sun rising late.’

‘Indeed. Also, both trolls and elves are crossing through here, almost all of them heading East, and I am getting good pictures of both species on the belly cameras.’

The deck tilted slightly. Joshua said, ‘We’re going down?’

‘Yes, and I would like Sally to land with us. I would like to apprehend an elf if possible. I wish to try to communicate with one.’

Joshua snorted sceptically.

‘I don’t expect very much from the encounter, but one never knows. Just in case, I have fabricated helmets and neck armour for you both; anyone trying to strangle you from behind will regret it, stepping or not. I will see you by the elevator in half an hour.’

Sally was fully dressed when Joshua knocked at her door. ‘Helmets!’ she snapped.

‘It was Lobsang’s idea, sorry.’

‘I’ve survived in the Long Earth for years without being nannied by the likes of Lobsang. OK, OK, I’m the passenger here, I know. Any idea what he’s planning?’

‘To catch an elf, I think.’

She blew a raspberry.

Lobsang brought the airship to a halt over a bluff of heavily eroded rock. The landscape was a desert of rust-red dirt. This was a strange Earth, even by the standards of most Jokers. Joshua felt heavy, as if his bones were plated in lead, and his usual pack was a burden. The air was dense, but oddly not satisfying, and his lungs laboured. A wind blew constantly with an empty howl. On the barren plain there was no grass or other vegetation — nothing but a sort of green-purple fuzziness, as if the land hadn’t shaved that morning.

And occasionally, Joshua saw, there was a flicker, more sensed than seen. Something stepping, he thought, and stepping away again so fast it had hardly been there…

Sally asked, ‘What’s with this place, Lobsang? It’s like a cemetery!’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Lobsang. ‘Though a cemetery empty even of bones.’ He stood stock still, like a statue around which the dust swirled. ‘Look up at mid-heaven, slightly to your left. What do you see?’

Joshua squinted and gave up. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.’

‘Something notable for its absence,’ said Lobsang. ‘If you were standing at this exact spot on the Datum, right now, you would be looking at a washed-out moon in a daylight sky. This Earth has no moon to speak of. Just a few orbiting rocks invisible to the naked eye.’

Lobsang said it was a contingency he had anticipated. The cataclysmic impact which had created the moon of Datum Earth and most of its stepwise sisters had evidently never happened here. The moonless Earth that resulted was more massive than the Datum, which was why extra gravity dragged them down. The tilt of the axis was different, and unstable, and the world rotated more quickly, causing a different day — night cycle, and a wind that endlessly scoured the rocky, lifeless continents. It wasn’t a place for life: the lack of tides caused the ocean waters to stagnate, and there were none of the rich intertidal zones that had done so much on the Datum to promote the evolution of complex life.

‘That’s the general theory,’ Lobsang said. ‘On top of that, I suspect this world did not get its share of water during the big soaking towards the end of the creation of the solar system, when comets rained like hailstones. Perhaps this is somehow connected to the big moon-creating impact, or the lack of it. Sadly, this planet is a loser; probably even our Mars got a better deal.’

But there were compensations. When Joshua shielded his eyes from the sun, a band of light was revealed, razor sharp, cutting right across the sky. This Earth was circled by a ring system, like Saturn’s. A spectacular sight from space, probably.

Lobsang said, ‘Right now I am waiting for a troll. I have been ultrasonic-yelling for help in the troll language for fifteen minutes, and I am extruding troll pheromones — quite easy to duplicate.’

‘That explains why my teeth are aching,’ said Sally. ‘And why I thought somebody hadn’t washed today. Do we have to hang around here? This air is crappy, and it stinks.’

She was right about the stench, Joshua thought. This world smelled like the old house at the dirty end of the street that you were told never to go to, the house that had been locked up and nailed shut after the last person in it had died. It offended him, even more so than the quasi-dinosaur world. OK, the Rectangle builders had died out, but at least they had lived, they had had a chance.

But maybe, he thought, humans could bring this desolate world alive. Why not? He liked to fix things; this place could absorb a lot of fixing. Now there would be something you could tell your grandchildren about. There were still plenty of snowballs out in the Oort cloud, and a fairly small spacecraft on the right trajectory could line itself up to tip one of those and get a bit of water down here. Once you had the water you were home and dry, so to speak… But it was all a pipe dream. Mankind had started turning its back on anything more ambitious than the electronic exploration of space even before the Long Earth was discovered, offering a myriad habitable worlds within walking distance.

This reverie was broken when Lobsang said, ‘Trolls on the way. That didn’t take long. Of course, they step in packs, so expect a large number. I give you fair warning: I intend to sing to them. Join me if you wish.’ He cleared his throat theatrically.

It wasn’t just the ambulant unit that began to sing. The sound of Lobsang’s voice broke in a wave, thundering out of all the speakers on the airship. ‘Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end. Tho’ the way be long, let your heart be strong, Keep right on to the end…’ Echoes were thrown up, quite possibly the first time this dead place had known echoes of a human voice — or nearly human, Joshua thought. ‘Tho’ you are tired and weary still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode, Where all the love you’ve been dreaming of, Will be there at the end of the road…’

Sally just stared, astonished. ‘Joshua — tell me he hasn’t finally crashed his circuits. What the hell’s he singing?’

Quickly and quietly Joshua told her the story of Private Percy Blakeney and his Russian pals in an unfamiliar France, and she looked even more astonished.

But the trolls came. By the end of the song Lobsang was surrounded by trolls, who hooted in harmony with him. ‘Good, aren’t they? Group memory with a vengeance! Now — bear with me while I try to figure out what’s bothering them.’

As the trolls clustered around Lobsang, like big hairy children around a department store Santa, Joshua and Sally backed away, which was something of a relief. The trolls would do anything rather than tread on a human, but after a while their musk, while not really offensive, could simply take control over your sinuses.

But on the other hand this wasn’t a good world for taking a stroll in, while you waited. There was simply nothing here. Joshua knelt down and, at random, levered up a little piece of the green fuzz. There were a couple of small beetles underneath; they weren’t even interestingly iridescent, just mud brown. He let the piece of fuzz fall back again.

Sally said, ‘Do you know, if you took a leak on that patch it would be doing those beetles a favour. Honestly! I won’t look. That bit of soil will have more nutrients than it has seen in a long time. Sorry, was that offensive?’

Joshua shook his head absentmindedly. ‘No. Just a bit incongruous.’

Sally laughed. ‘Incongruous! Lobsang sings Harry Lauder on a desolate planet, and is now surrounded by trolls. Somehow “incongruous” just can’t carry the load, don’t you think? And now my fillings aren’t tingling so much. The trolls are heading out, see?’

Joshua saw. It was as if an invisible hand were picking up pieces on a chessboard, but taking all the queens and pawns first, bishops and rooks next, and knights and kings last of all.

Sally said, ‘The mothers go first, because they would punch the living daylights out of anything that threatened their pups. Elders in the middle, and males last, at the rear of the column… Elves attack from the rear, you see, so you watch your back.’

And then there were none, leaving nothing more than a slight improvement in the air quality.

Lobsang ambled over to them.

‘How does he do that?’ said Sally. ‘Now he’s walking like John Travolta!’

‘Haven’t you heard the fabrication deck working away day and night? He is endlessly bettering himself, endlessly rebuilding. The way you’d go to a gym, maybe?’

‘I have never in my life gone into a gym, sir. When you are by yourself in the Long Earth you are either in shape, or you are dead.’ She grinned. ‘Mind you, I wish I had legs like that.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your legs.’ And he regretted that sentence as soon as he’d uttered it.

She just laughed. ‘Joshua, you are fun to know, and a good companion, reliable and all that, even if you are a little bit weird. Someday we might be friends,’ she said a bit more gently. ‘But please don’t make comments about my legs. You’ve seen very little of my legs since most of the time they are inside premium grade thorn-proof battledress. And it’s naughty to guess, OK?’

To Joshua’s relief Lobsang reached them, smiling. ‘I admit I am rather pleased with myself.’

‘No change there then,’ Sally said.

‘We haven’t caught an elf,’ Joshua pointed out.

‘Oh, that’s no longer necessary. I have achieved my purpose. At Happy Landings I learned the elements of troll communication. But that sedentary population could tell me little about the forces behind the migration. Now these wild trolls have told me more, much more. Don’t you say a word, Sally! I’ll answer all your questions. Let’s get aboard — we have a long journey still ahead of us, perhaps to the end of the Long Earth itself — and won’t that be fun?’