The Long War

32

SLOWLY THE CREW of the Franklin got used to their troll crewmates.

That didn’t apply to all the colonies they visited, though.

New Melfield was a grubby and unprepossessing farming community in the Corn Belt. The whole township turned out when the Franklin descended – and seemed uniformly astonished when a family of trolls followed the human crew down the lowered gangway.

The trolls and the rest strolled around while Maggie chatted to the local mayor, passed over Datum documentation, and generally engaged the man and put him at his ease. Indeed he evidently needed his ease putting at, for her briefing had pegged this place as yet another nasty little locus of spite towards trolls, not to mention humans and other dumb animals. Well, change had to start by degrees.

So by mid-morning this mayor had three trolls in his office, actually sitting on chairs; trolls just loved chairs, especially if they swivelled. And when Maggie had finished the coffee she’d been offered, she said clearly, ‘Wash up, please, Carl.’

The young troll, holding the mug like an heirloom, looked around the room, spotted the open door to the little coffee station and sink area in the room next door, carefully washed the mug in the sink, and placed it just as carefully in a rack. Then he walked back to Maggie, who gave him a peppermint.

The mayor watched this in blank astonishment.

That was the start of a couple more days at this township, days devoted to seducing hearts and minds, with younger kids being given rides in the Franklin to see their homes from the air for the first time in their lives, and older kids – heavily supervised – playing with the trolls.

But on the second day the crew went on the alert, when a second twain showed up in the sky above New Melfield.

The ship was a merchant vessel. That evening the captain himself, with an aide, crossed to the Franklin and met Maggie in her sea cabin. And they came bearing a package.

Maggie glanced quickly at Nathan Boss, who’d accompanied them aboard. ‘We scanned the parcel,’ Boss said. ‘It’s clean.’

The merchant’s captain, young, overweight, grinned at Maggie. ‘You must be very important, Captain Kauffman, we were detoured a hell of a way to bring you this. You have the assurance of Douglas Black himself—’

‘Douglas Black? Of the Black Corporation? The . . .’ Wow, she thought. Sally Linsay has contacts.

‘Yes, Captain. The Mr. Black assures you that nothing in this package is to the detriment of either you or the Benjamin Franklin. Instructions can be found inside. I know nothing more . . .’

Maggie felt ridiculously like a kid at Christmas, eager to unwrap the gift.

As soon as the guy was gone, at Nathan’s cautious suggestion she took the package outside the ship to open it, just for extra security. And inside she found, carefully wrapped, a curious instrument faintly resembling an ocarina. A troll-call – Sally Linsay had come through. She toyed with the controls; it looked more complex than the gadget Sally had shown her, maybe some kind of upgrade. And there was a brief page of instructions, signed by hand: ‘G. Abrahams’. The name wasn’t familiar.

She couldn’t wait to try it on the trolls.

She dismissed Nathan, who went off grinning and shaking his head. Then, alone, she made for the observation deck, where the trolls preferred to sleep, perhaps because of its cooler temperature. The trolls were huddled together, grooming gently, half-asleep, communicating in their usual soft, barely audible tones.

Maggie quietly switched on the ocarina, pointed it at Jake, and listened carefully.

And was surprised when from the direction of Jake a clear voice said, ‘I am fed / satisfied; this is fun; I yearn to return to /meaning not understood/ . . .’ It emerged as a human male voice, firm, reasonably pleasant, if rather synthetic.

So the troll-call worked, even if it did seem to be more like an exchange of concepts than a true translation. Those nerds at the Black Corporation – or whoever ‘G. Abrahams’ was – must have loved working on the development of this thing.

Now she pointed the troll-call at Marjorie.

‘Female here / watching / no mate female / meaning not understood: tentative translation, a female choosing for her own purposes not to have a mate . . .’

They meant her! ‘Everybody’s a relationship counsellor,’ Maggie grumbled to herself. Plucking up her courage, she raised the troll-call and said clearly into its mouthpiece, ‘My name is Maggie Kauffman. Welcome aboard the Benjamin Franklin.’ A liquid warble accompanied her words.

The trolls seemed to snap to attention. They stared at her, mouths open, eyes wide.

She pointed to herself. ‘Maggie. Maggie . . .’

Marjorie gabbled back, apparently attempting to find a label for her. ‘Friend / grandmother / interesting stranger . . .’

It was ‘grandmother’ that flabbergasted Maggie. Grandmother! How human was that? And was that how they saw her relationship to her crew, that she was the old woman looking after all the little children? Well, they were mostly a lot younger than her . . .

She boldly walked up to the trolls, where they sat huddled in a corner of the cabin, and sat on the carpet with them. ‘I’m Maggie. Maggie . . . Well, you’re right. I have no husband. No mate. The ship is my home . . .’

It seemed to her that Marjorie, the female, was looking at her sorrowfully, with soulful brown eyes. With extreme care, a hand like a leather shovel gently touched Maggie’s. Maggie felt she had no choice but to move closer, and she felt huge arms close around her.

Carl, meanwhile, got hold of the ocarina and experimented until he found a way to say, ‘Peppermint.’

That was how Maggie was found in the morning, coming awake as a crewman very, very gingerly unwound his Captain from the snoring trolls.

Breakfast was somewhat embarrassing. Every last crew member knew how she’d spent the night. But she never had been one for standing on her dignity.

She spent a day letting the crew experiment with the troll-call, under supervision. And she had Gerry Hemingway from Science study its workings, or anyhow its inputs and outputs.

That night she had to order the crew to put the call away, to leave the exhausted trolls to their slumbers on the observation deck.

Then, at breakfast the next day, she called the crew together. She looked carefully around them, and picked out Jennifer Wang, one of the marine detachment, whose grandparents, she knew, had come from China. ‘Jennifer, you spent a long time with Jake yesterday. What did he say to you?’

Wang looked around, somewhat embarrassed. But she cleared her throat and said, ‘A lot I couldn’t understand. But it was along the lines of, “far from home”. It creased me up! I mean, I’m a Chinese American and proud to be a citizen, but it’s in the blood. How did the big guy know?’

‘Because he’s smart,’ Maggie said. ‘He’s intuitive. He’s sapient.

‘You know, people, we were sent out here to find sapience in the Long Earth, among other goals. Right? And now here it is, on this ship, living among us: sapience. And that, by the way, will be my defence at the court-martial.

‘I’m proud of you all for how you’re dealing with your new shipmates. But if this room isn’t cleared and you’re not at your posts in two minutes, you’re all on a charge. Dismissed.’