The Long War

68

AT THE BEGINNING of September 2040, with the military mission against Valhalla formally abandoned, and the trolls starting to show up in numbers again across the Long Earth, Lobsang and Agnes announced they would be hosting a garden party in the transEarth facility that Lobsang had turned into his reserve for studying trolls: a park spread several West worlds deep around Madison.

At first Monica Jansson demurred, but Agnes came to see her in person in Jansson’s West 5 convalescent facility. ‘Oh, you must come,’ Agnes said. ‘Wouldn’t be the same without you. You were involved in the great adventure with those dog people, weren’t you? And after all, you are Joshua’s oldest friend from outside the Home.’

Jansson laughed at that. ‘Really? I was a gay junior cop busily making screwed-up career choices. Poor kid, if I’m all he had . . . Look, Sister, the journey’s finished me off, with all that stepping, and the drugs.’

‘And the dose of radiation you took in that dinosaur temple, or whatever it was, to spare Sally Linsay,’ Agnes said sternly. ‘She told me all about that. Look, Monica, you won’t have to step anywhere. Not once we’ve got you to West 11 anyhow. I’ve had Lobsang set up a nice little summer house there, and it’s yours as long as you need it.’ She leaned forward, confidentially, and Jansson saw how her skin, supposedly of a thirty-year-old according to Lobsang, was just a little too youthful, a little too free of blemishes, to be convincing. The young engineers who created such receptacles were never good at getting the flaws of age just right, she reflected. Agnes went on, ‘I never could see the appeal of stepping myself, you know. Tried it once. Well, with the famous Joshua Valienté rattling around the Home, I could hardly not, could I? All I saw was a bunch of trees, and my own shoes that I was trying not to puke up all over, and no people, and where’s the fun in that? And now, when I step – well, I don’t feel anything at all. Lobsang designed me that way, the idiot. Anyway I can’t see the point. Give me my Harley and an open road any day. Lieutenant Jansson, you must come, you’re a guest of honour. That’s an order.’

So, came the day: Saturday, September 8, 2040.

About two in the afternoon, and thankfully it was a bright, sunny, early autumn day here in Madison West 11, Jansson emerged somewhat shyly from the summer house Agnes had promised, which had turned out to be a decent little cabin with all mod cons. This location was on a height, and she had a fine view of grassy swards, dense clumps of trees, and patches of prairie flowers rolling down to the lake water. Agnes’s barbecue party was scattered over this landscape, a few dozen people walking to and fro, kids and dogs playing noisily, and a knot of folk centred around a plume of rising white smoke over what was presumably the barbecue grill. A wash of music rose up from a knot of trolls down by the water, an elusive melody she couldn’t quite place . . .

Just for a moment Jansson had a flash of disorientation. As if she saw the people as naked as the trolls, just a bunch of humanoids rolling around on this big lawn, empty-headed as young chimps. Trolls. Elves. Kobolds. She remembered the kobold who had called himself a human name: Finn McCool. Wearing bits of clothing, like a human, a man. And sunglasses! And how he’d gabble when Sally and Jansson were trying to sleep: just nonsense, but he tried to copy the rhythms of their talk . . . Now, sometimes, when she listened to some politician speechify on TV, or a priest yakking about God, all she saw was a kobold up on his hind legs, prattling nonsense just the way McCool used to.

Elves gone wrong – that was what Petra called humans.

She shook her head. Put it aside, she told herself. She walked forward determinedly, her exposed skin slopped with protective cream, a hat covering the increasingly patchy hair on her head, her gait as ramrod straight as she could make it.

She hadn’t gone a dozen yards before Sister Agnes herself caught up with her, trailed by a couple of other nuns, one elderly, one maybe in her late thirties. ‘Monica! Thank you for joining us. These are my colleagues, Sister Georgina, Sister John . . .’

‘Sister John’ looked faintly familiar to Jansson. ‘Don’t I know you?’

The nun smiled. ‘My birth name is Sarah Ann Coates. I was at the Home, I mean a resident. When I grew up – well, I came back.’

Sarah Ann Coates: now Jansson remembered the face of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, scared, self-conscious, staring out of the file she had assembled on the incidents of Step Day in Madison. Sarah, one of the Home children Joshua Valienté had rescued in those frantic hours when the doors of the Long Earth had first creaked open. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Sister.’

‘Come this way.’ Sister Agnes linked her arm through Jansson’s, and they started walking slowly towards the smoke from the grill.

‘You’re a great hostess, Agnes,’ Jansson said, only slightly sarcastically. ‘All these people here and you swoop down on me as soon as I show my face.’

‘Call it a gift. But don’t repeat that to Lobsang. He keeps badgering me to have avatars made. Iterations, like him. Copies of myself running around. Imagine how much I’d get done! So he says. Imagine the arguments I’d have, me, myself and I! So I say. I don’t think so. Now then, Monica, I’ve assigned Georgina and John to look after you today, anything you need you just ask them – and any time you feel like disappearing, that’s fine too.’

Jansson suppressed a sigh. Deny it as she might, she knew she needed the help. ‘Thank you. I appreciate that very much.’ The song of the trolls carried on the shifting, gentle breeze: the usual troll music, a human tune simply harmonized and turned into a round, with the melody line repeated and overlapping. ‘What is that?’

‘“The Wearing of the Green”,’ Agnes said. ‘An old Jacobite marching song. Scottish rebels, you know. You can blame Sister Simplicity for that one. She always was one for her Scottish roots. That and prize fights on TV. It is good to have the trolls back, though, isn’t it? Of course we had to restrict the guest list today to make sure there weren’t too many people for the trolls to cope with. And Senator Starling has promised to put in an appearance later on. Suddenly a supporter of the troll cause, and suddenly he always was, if you know what I mean. Says he sings in a Sunday choir and wants to sing along with the trolls, if he can. Going to bring along a squad of Operation Prodigal Son sailors too, the USS Benjamin Franklin choir, just as a gesture of peace and harmony. Now then, let’s find Joshua for you. It won’t be hard, he’ll be close to little Dan, and Dan will be close to the food . . .’

Agnes had appointed Lobsang as head chef. Jansson stared, bemused, at a Tibetan monk with a greasy apron over his orange robe and a chef’s hat on his shaven head. A man she didn’t know stood beside him, tall, fifty-ish, black, in a sober charcoal suit, wearing a cleric’s collar.

Lobsang raised a greasy spatula. ‘Lieutenant Jansson! Good to see you.’

Agnes more or less snarled at him. ‘That soya burger is raw, and that quorn sausage is on fire. Less blue-skyin’ and more fat fryin’, Lobsang.’

‘Yes, dear,’ he said wearily.

‘Don’t worry, Lobsang,’ said the cleric beside Lobsang. ‘I’ll help. I’m a dab hand at chopping onions.’

‘Thank you, Nelson . . .’

‘Lieutenant Jansson.’

Jansson turned. Joshua Valienté stood before her, looking uncomfortable in a kind of smart-casual get-up: clean shirt, pressed jeans, leather shoes. He held his left arm to his chest, his clenched fist concealed by his shirt cuff. At his side was Helen, his wife, sturdy, pretty, cheerful. And little Dan ran past, dressed in a cut-down twain-pilot uniform, engaged in some noisy game with other kids, as oblivious of the adults and their society as if they were nothing but tall trees.

Jansson and Joshua stood there, facing each other awkwardly. Jansson felt an uncomfortable surge of emotion, having witnessed the dangers to which Joshua had exposed himself so far from home – and now seeing him like this, with his family. With Helen, looking as if she belonged nowhere but at his side. After all she’d been through with this man, Jansson didn’t know what to say.

Joshua smiled, gently. ‘It’s OK, Lieutenant.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Helen snapped. ‘Give each other a hug!’

They leaned together, and she held him tight. ‘With them, you’re healed,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘Don’t leave them again. Whoever comes calling.’

‘Understood, Jansson.’

And yet she knew that was a promise he could never keep. She felt a stab of heartache for Joshua, the lonely boy she had known, the lonely man he would always be.

She pulled away. ‘Enough. Squeeze too hard and I might break.’

‘Me too.’ Joshua reached forward with his left arm, revealing his artificial hand. It was a clunky, oversized creation with unconvincing pinkish skin; it whirred and whined like a movie prop when he unclenched his fingers. ‘Bill Chambers calls it Thing. Like the Addams Family, you know? Funny guy. He’s around somewhere, incidentally. Getting smashed with Thomas Kyangu.’

Jansson tried not to laugh. ‘Joshua, surely they could have done better for you than that. Prosthetics these days—’

Helen said, ‘He insists on wearing that horrible old antique.’

‘Sooner this than one of the Black Corporation gadgets Lobsang offered me.’

‘Ah,’ Jansson said. ‘With Lobsang inside.’

‘You see the problem. I don’t want to walk around with Lobsang in control of any of my extremities. I’d rather wait, thanks. Anyhow it doesn’t bother Dan, so that’s the main thing.’

Jansson said, ‘Strange to think your own hand is nailed to the wall of that beagle princess’s palace, a million worlds away.’

‘Yeah.’ Joshua glanced around, making sure Dan wasn’t close by. ‘You never got to see that, did you, Monica? There’s a bit of the story you never heard.’

‘He likes bragging about this,’ Helen said wearily.

‘You know those two beagles had got me pinned down, Snowy and Li-Li. I saw they were trying to save my life, in their way. But I wasn’t exactly happy at losing a hand, even so. And, as Li-Li got her teeth into my wrist, I made a gesture . . .’ He held up his robot hand, clenching a fist, and the middle finger extended with a whirr of hydraulics. ‘And that is what is up on Petra’s wall right now.’

Jansson snorted laughter.

‘And that,’ Helen said wearily, ‘is what I can’t stop Dan running around doing to all his little friends, every time his father tells that story.’

Joshua winked at Jansson. ‘He’ll grow out of it. Price worth paying, right?’

Jansson just smiled neutrally. An experienced cop knew better than to get involved in family arguments.

They were distracted by the approach of a short, slim, wiry-looking man in his fifties. He looked vaguely familiar to Jansson. Somewhat shyly, he all but stood to attention as he addressed Joshua. ‘Excuse me, sir. You’re Joshua Valienté, right?’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘Sorry to trouble you . . . I don’t know anybody here and I know her.’

‘Sure. And you are?’

The man offered his hand. ‘Wood. Frank Wood. USAF, long retired, once of NASA . . .’ There was a comedy moment; Wood had put forward his left hand to shake, but recoiled when Joshua’s elderly cybernetic claw was produced in response.

Jansson snapped her fingers. ‘I thought I recognized you, Mr. Wood. I met you at the Gap. I was up there with Sally myself.’

He seemed startled to see her, then pleased. Evidently he hadn’t recognized her through the increased decrepitude of her illness. ‘Lieutenant Jansson? Good to see you again . . .’

More handshakes; Wood’s hand was dry, firm. Jansson remembered, awkwardly, how she’d suspected this poor guy had had a crush on her out at the Gap.

Helen said, a tad reluctantly, ‘I think Sally is down there, near the big group of trolls. With some Happy Landings types.’ She led the way.

Jansson followed, accompanied by Frank Wood. When he saw how slowly and stiffly she walked now, he discreetly offered her his arm.

Just as discreetly she smiled her thanks. She said, ‘Frank, just so you know—’

‘I heard you were ill.’

‘It’s not that. I’m gay, Frank. And ill. Ill and gay.’

He took that with a self-deprecating grin. ‘So our budding romance is doomed, huh? My radar never was too reliable. Probably why I never married.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Does being ill and gay preclude your being bought dinner, however?’

‘It will be a pleasure.’

They found Sally with a bunch of trolls, and a few people dressed in what struck Jansson as a peculiar style even for colonial folk, kind of alternate eighteenth-century. Sally herself wore her usual sleeveless travel jacket, as if she were about to leave any second for another urgent stepwise jaunt.

More introductions followed, and Jansson was able to match more names to faces. The oddly dressed types were from Happy Landings. A slim, shy-looking, youngish man turned out to be Jacques Montecute, headmaster of a school at Valhalla. A teenage girl, sober and serious, standing quietly at Montecute’s side, was Roberta Golding, a student at the Valhalla high school who had made the news, along with Montecute, by travelling with the Chinese expedition to Earth East Twenty Million. They were here as guests of Joshua, it turned out; Dan Valienté would be starting at Montecute’s school from next year. The Happy Landings folk seemed to stand a little way away from the rest, as if not quite part of the crowd.

And there was something particularly odd about Roberta Golding. A watchfulness, a stillness, that Jansson hadn’t seen in such a young person since Joshua himself was that age. But she didn’t detect Joshua’s eerie calm about Roberta, nor his irreducible survival instinct. She had a look that Jansson, in her duty days, had associated with kids from damaged families. She had seen too much, too young. Jansson wondered uneasily what this flawed child might become, in future.

The trolls included Mary the runaway, and there was no mistaking the cub, Ham, who even now still wore bits of his silvery spacesuit. As soon as Ham saw Jansson he ran straight at her, making to hug her legs, and would have knocked Jansson clean over if Joshua hadn’t intercepted him first.

Sally, being Sally, immediately homed in on Frank Wood. ‘Well, well. Buzz Aldrin. What do you want?’

Wood nodded, graciously enough. ‘I was hoping for a burger and a beer.’

Sally spat, ‘Enough with the Right Stuff crap; you don’t charm me. More trouble at the Gap, right?’

‘Not at all. I came to thank you, Ms. Linsay. And you, Lieutenant Jansson. For dealing with that business with the trolls the way you did. My colleagues up there are not bad people, but they are somewhat driven. I think we’d lost our moral bearings. Your actions helped us find them again.’ He grinned. ‘And now, on to the stars! We’re already talking about probes to Mars, even a manned jaunt. And some neat visuals . . .’

He began to speak of something called a planetary alignment, occurring this very day: lots of Earth’s sister worlds were lining up in one part of the sky, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, even the crescent moon. ‘Of course it’s visible from all the worlds of the Long Earth. But we’re taking the opportunity to throw over probes, to get decent images – to showcase the possibilities of the Gap, you see.’

Joshua said, ‘You’ll probably scare everybody to death. Aren’t they saying this line-up is astrologically ominous?’

Helen pulled his sleeve. ‘Don’t tease the man.’

Sally snorted. ‘But it’s not as good from the Gap. You haven’t got a moon!’

‘In the way,’ Frank said smoothly, good humoured. ‘We don’t have a moon in the way. All the better for seeing the real spectacle . . .’

The noise, the clamour, became too much for Jansson, all at once. The words being spoken around her seemed to dissolve into a jabber. She dropped her head and put her hands to her ears.

Frank Wood put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Here, let’s get you out of this.’

Agnes was immediately at her side too. She smiled into Jansson’s face, took her arm, nodded to Sisters Georgina and John, and walked her and Frank away from the clamour. ‘Come on,’ Agnes said. ‘Let’s get some air. Then I’ll call you a buggy – we have golf carts here – and get you back to your summer house for a break. How’s that?’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘I remember how it was to be ill, frankly. Lobsang didn’t clean that out of my head, at least.’

They were heading towards the greater band of trolls down by the river. As they went about their business, eating, grooming, splashing in the water, flickering between the worlds, the trolls sang another gentle melody. A few humans stood by, clapping along, trying to join in.

Despite all the people present, Jansson felt a kind of peace emanating from the contented troll band. ‘That’s another lovely song.’

Agnes squeezed her arm. ‘“All My Trials”. Outside of the Steinman canon, one of my own favourites since childhood.’

‘Oh, yes. And how appropriate for me. Soon be over . . .’

Agnes squeezed her arm. ‘That’s enough of that.’

They had come to a bluff of higher ground, a shallow rise which Jansson climbed painfully, and here they paused. They looked out over the unspoiled lakes of this world, the sun hanging calmly in the blue sky, the young, still-small city rising on the isthmus – a ghost of Datum Madison.

Agnes said, ‘I used to come up here when I was ill. Look at all this. The wider world that frames us all. The heavens, governed by their own eternal laws, the same on every world. Like Frank’s alignment of planets, right? And the simple things, the play of sunlight on water, a universal across the Long Earth. That’s where I found solace, Monica.’

‘But when you’ve been out there, it all seems so fragile,’ Jansson said. ‘Contingent. It might not have been this way. It might not be this way tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ Agnes said thoughtfully. ‘And being close to Lobsang – well, I feel I see the world through his eyes, to some extent. The way he regards people – even his closest associates and friends, Joshua, Sally, that nice cleric Nelson Azikiwe, no doubt others – even me . . . He calls us “valuable long-term investments”. I sometimes think he, or maybe his paymaster Douglas Black, is positioning us all like pieces on a chessboard, ready for the game to begin.’

‘But what is the game?’

‘No doubt we’ll find out. Now, where’s that buggy?’

There was a commotion behind them, raised voices. Reluctantly, Jansson, Agnes and Frank turned to look.

An airship had materialized, right above Lobsang’s position. Lobsang himself seemed to freeze – no, Jansson thought, he had gone from his ambulant unit, gone in an instant, she could tell from his posture.

All around the grassy sward people’s phones started to chime, and were pulled from pockets and purses. Soon the stepping started, people being simply deleted from the scene.

And Jansson heard two words on all their lips. The first, Yellowstone. The second, Datum.

Frank said grimly, ‘Maybe Joshua was right about the planet alignment.’