The Long War

39

SALLY KNEW THE world they had arrived at. Of course she did.

And of course it was new to Jansson. All of this, like the Gap, like every world beyond the Lows, was new to her.

It had taken three weeks of travelling, since the Gap, to get here, with regular stepping and falls through the soft places. Sally could have got here quicker, Jansson suspected, but she had worked to keep them hidden as well as on the move – and you couldn’t move trolls on too quickly; those big frames took a lot of feeding, every day.

They emerged from the latest soft place into a landscape that was almost but not quite desert. They stood in a broad valley, with cliffs on either side pocked by caves. On the valley floor were a few stunted trees, the remnants of a broken stone bridge, and a building, one vast cubical mass of shaped black stone. The air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture out of your flesh, and Jansson instinctively searched for shade. Sally remembered this place well. And the radiation threat, she said. They would be safe enough as long as they stayed well away from that building.

This was the world they had informally called Rectangles, when Sally had found it with Joshua and Lobsang, ten years ago. A world of failed intelligence, it had seemed, and death. The world where Joshua had found a single beautiful artefact, a sapphire ring. A world that seemed unchanged a decade on, save for the detritus of more recent visitors: boot prints in the dirt, campfire scars, archaeologists’ trench-marker flags – even some trash, plastic cartons, ripped bags.

The troll and her cub wandered off, looking for water, food, shade.

Sally got Jansson comfortable in the shade of one of the struggling trees, on a rough bed of their piled-up gear and covered by a single silver emergency blanket. Then she briskly built a fire – they didn’t need the heat, but it might keep any critters away.

Jansson said, ‘So you’ve been here before. With Joshua, all those years ago. And we’re here because the trolls are here . . . or near by. Hiding out. That’s your guess, right? Whatever that’s based on.’

Sally shrugged, non-committal.

Jansson thought she understood, by now. During the journey Sally had kept disappearing, for a few hours at a time, a day, sometimes for longer periods. Plugging herself into whatever network of contacts and information she had built up out here. Jansson suspected Sally herself would find it hard to sum up the various whispers she’d been hearing, from various sources. If she came here she’d find trolls, or trolls would find her; that was the sum of her instincts. Jansson just had to hope Sally’s scraps of information and gut sense added up to a good guide . . .

Jansson gave up thinking about it. It would certainly do no good to ask Sally. Taciturn nature or not, a selective silence was one of Sally’s most irritating habits.

When Jansson had drifted off to sleep, Sally went hunting.

The valley bottom itself was suspiciously flat, Sally thought, just as had been her impression the first time she was here. As if it was all one slab: another artefact, maybe, like the building itself. There were slopes of scree at the base of the canyon walls, and here and there green extremophile-type plants, lovers of heat and dryness, struggling for life. At first glance there was no sign of movement, no animals or birds or even insects. That didn’t bother Sally. Where there was greenery of any kind there were going to be herbivores to browse on that greenery, and carnivores to browse on the herbivores. It was a question of patience. All she had to do was wait. She never carried food – not in the endless larder that was the Long Earth. A lizard or two would do. Something like a naked mole rat, maybe. A deep burrower.

By the steep valley wall, in the shade of a rock face, she settled on her haunches. This was how Sally had lived her life for a quarter of a century now, ever since she’d left Datum Earth for good not long after Step Day, when her father had made his ambiguous gift of Stepper technology to mankind. And of course she’d had plenty of practice out in the Long Earth in the years before that. Living off the land on the move was easy, but it was a fantasy to believe that animals that had never met man were naturally tame. An awful lot of good things to eat were too used to running from anything strange. You had to wait . . .

This place was just as she remembered, save for the more recent boot prints, she saw as she relaxed, and took in her surroundings. Of all the discoveries Joshua and Lobsang had taken back to the Datum from their voyage of exploration a decade ago, this was probably the most sensational: evidence of intelligent dinosaur-like creatures more than a million and a half steps away from the Datum. It had done Lobsang no good to protest that the colony-organism that had called itself First Person Singular was far more interesting and exotic, because nobody understood that. Nor was it any use to point out that the creatures whose remains they’d found here, though reptilian, could not really be dinosaurs in any meaningful sense . . .

There had been a clamour to know more. The universities had received a flood of funding to send out follow-up parties. For a few years researchers had crawled over this site, though the radioactivity made the work hazardous, and they had sent out drone planes and balloons equipped with infrared sensors and ground-penetrating radar to take a look at the rest of this world.

It had surprised nobody to learn that the pyramid, this valley, was only the visible tip of a worldwide culture: ancient, long fallen, buried in the sands of this arid world, which Lobsang and the Mark Twain had not been equipped to explore properly, or even detect. In and under the dust there were traces of cities, roads, canals – not human-like in layout, clearly the product of different minds, but otherwise eerily familiar, and all very ancient.

No, these were not dinosaurs, but their ancestors might once have been dinosaurs – just as humans had had ancestors in the dinosaur age, furtive squirrelly quadruped mammals . . . Perhaps in this world the tremendous asteroid impact that had destroyed the dinosaur-dominated ecology of the Datum had worked out differently; here it might have taken out the big beasts and left behind their smaller, smarter, more agile cousins. The Rectangles creatures were remotely descended from raptors, perhaps.

But, much later, they had evidently suffered their own extinction event. Maybe there had been war, or plague, or another asteroid fell unluckily . . . In the aftermath, a community of survivors, or their descendants, their technology lost, their civilization smashed, had been drawn here by the strange phenomena surrounding a nuclear pile, possibly natural, a chance concentration of uranium ore under that building. It had been a god, a temple that had slowly killed them.

That was one theory, at any rate: a chance concentration of the ore. But from the beginning there had also been speculation that this pile was not some natural phenomenon but the ruined and still toxic remnant of a much older and higher technology. The remnant radioactivity came from an abandoned core, or maybe a waste dump. This hypothesis was the subject of much debate, but it fitted Sally’s own first impressions when she’d come upon this place.

It was kind of satisfying that the answers weren’t simple or clear. Like all worlds, this one was no neat, finite theoretical model but the product of its own long and unique evolutionary history. Sally, moreover, had been through college herself in Madison; she understood enough science to know when a house of theorizing started to totter on foundations of inadequate data, and ignored most of the guesswork.

She was pleased that Joshua had never revealed the existence of the one tangible souvenir they had brought back from this place: the exquisite ring – it could almost have been crafted by a human jeweller – that they had found on the fleshless finger of one post-dinosaur. Pleased that Joshua had kept it all these years.

Well, the research money had run out, the Long Earth was always full of other study targets of various kinds, and the archaeologists had long since sealed up their digs and gone away. And Sally, now, in hunting mode, was glad of it. Glad of the solitude. Nobody here but us shadows on the rock . . .

A hot breath on her neck. The hunter hunted, she thought immediately. She hadn’t been paying attention. She whirled, reaching for the knife at her belt.

A wolf: that was her first impression. Huge, fur bristling, mouth open, tongue hanging, eyes like windows into Arctic waste. It looked as heavy as she was, more. And it had got close enough to taste her, practically, before she’d even noticed.

She forced herself not to just step out of here, her first reaction. She wasn’t alone on this trip; she had to think of Jansson. She wondered if she had time to shout a warning to Jansson, and whether it would do any good.

But the animal didn’t attack.

It stepped back, one pace, two, raised itself up – and stood, on its hind legs, not balancing like a dog doing a circus trick, but standing easily, naturally, as if it were designed to stand like that. Now she saw it had a kind of belt around its waist, from which tools hung – including a very technologically advanced-looking pistol made of some kind of metal, that looked like nothing so much as a Buck Rogers sci-fi ray gun, and was totally out of place. When the wolf spread its empty paws to her, she saw that the digits were long, flexible, the paws almost like thumbless hands encased in some leathery glove. Surprise heaped on surprise.

And then it spoke.

‘Sally Linsss-ay.’ Its voice was a growl, a rasp, a kind of crudely shaped whisper, but understandable, and the human words were backed up by subtle posture changes: a raise of the head, a twitch of the snout. ‘Coming he-rrhe, we knew. Kobolds-ss say. Welcome.’ And it lifted its magnificent head and howled.