The Long Earth

who’d been given an important job to do and wanted to make certain that it was done exactly right. It dropped something moderately heavy into Joshua’s hands. Joshua looked down. He was holding what looked like a large salmon, beautiful and iridescent.

He heard the voice of Lobsang. ‘Excellent! I can’t say that this is what I expected, but it is most certainly what I had hoped for. By the way it would be appropriate if you gave them something of yours.’

The previous keeper of the magnificent fish was beaming encouragingly at Joshua.

‘Well, I’ve got my glass knife, but somehow I don’t think this guy ever needs a knife.’ He hesitated, feeling awkward. ‘And it is my knife, I knapped it myself from a bit of imported obsidian.’ A gift from somebody whose life he had saved. ‘Been with me a long time.’

Lobsang said impatiently, ‘Consider the following. A little while ago you were expecting to be viciously attacked, yes? And now we have the obvious point that it was his fish and he gave it to you. I suspect the act of giving is more important than the gift here. Should you feel naked without a weapon, please do help yourself later to one of the laminated knives in the armoury, OK? But right now, give him the knife.’

Angry, mostly at himself, Joshua said, ‘I didn’t even know we had an armoury!’

‘We live and we learn, my friend, and be grateful that you still have the chance to do both. A gift has a worth that has little to do with any currency. Hand it over with a cheerful smile for the cameras, Joshua, because you are making history: first contact with an alien species, albeit one which has had the decency to have evolved on Earth.’

Joshua presented his beloved knife to the creature. The knife was taken with extravagant care, held up to the light, admired, had its blade gingerly tested. Then there was a cacophony in his headset that sounded like bowling balls in a cement mixer.

After a few seconds this mercifully stopped, to be replaced by Lobsang’s cheerful voice. ‘Interesting! They sing to you using the frequencies that we think of as normal, while among themselves they appear to communicate in ultrasonics. What you heard was my attempt to translate the ultrasound conversation down to a range that a human could perceive, if not understand.’

And then, in an instant, they were gone. There was nothing to show that the creatures had been there, apart from very large footprints in the snow, already being filled in by the blizzard. And, of course, the salmon.

Back on the ship Joshua dutifully put the huge fish in the galley’s refrigerator. Then, cradling a coffee, he sat in the lounge outside the galley, and said to the air: ‘I want to speak to you, Lobsang. Not to a voice in the air. A face I can punch.’

‘I can see you are annoyed. But I can assure you that you were never in any danger. And as you must have guessed you are not the first person to have met these creatures. I have a strong hypothesis that the first person who did meet them thought they were Russians…’

And Lobsang told Joshua the story of Private Percy Blakeney, as reconstructed from notes found in his diary, and comments he made to a very surprised nurse in the hospital in Datum France where he was taken after appearing there suddenly in the 1960s.

21

FOR PRIVATE PERCY, faced by his row of impassive singing strangers in the green of his unsmashed forest, the penny had quickly dropped.

Of course! They had to be Russians! The Russians were in the war now, weren’t they? And hadn’t there been a copy of Punch magazine passed around in the trenches which showed Russians looking, yes, just like bears?

His granddad, who had been a Percy too, had once been taken prisoner in the Crimea, and he was always ready to talk about the Russians to an attentive boy. ‘Stank, they did, lad, dirty sods to a man, savages to my mind, and some of them from God knows where in the wilds, well, I’ve never seen the like! So much fur, and beards a man could keep a goat in, except I would warrant the goat would leap out straight away being particular about the company it kept. But they could sing, lad, stinking though they was, they could sing, better than the Welsh, oh yes, they could sing! But if you hadn’t been told, you would have thought they were animals.’

Now Percy looked at the row of hairy, emotionless, but not particularly hostile faces, and said boldly, ‘Me English Tommy, yes? On your side! Long live the Czar!’

This won some polite attention, with the hairy men looking at one another.

Maybe they wanted another song. After all, hadn’t his mother told him that music was the universal language? And at least they weren’t imprisoning him, or shooting him, or suchlike. So he gave them a resounding chorus of ‘Tipperary’, and finished by saluting and crying, ‘God save the King!’

Whereupon the Russians surprised him by waving their heavy great hands in the air and booming ‘God save the King!’ with considerable enthusiasm, their voices sounding like men shouting into a tunnel. Then they put their shaggy heads together as if reaching a conclusion, and once again broke into ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’.

Only this wasn’t the same kit bag and nor were they the same troubles. Private Percy tried hard to understand what he was listening to. Oh, yes, the song was there, but they sang it like a Sunday choir. Somehow the singers took his song apart so that it gained a strange life of its own, harmonies that broke and twisted into one another like mating eels and then came apart again in another bubble-rush of sound, and yet it was still good old ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. No, it was a better ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, it was more, well, there, more real. Private Percy had never heard music like it, and clapped his hands, and so did the Russians with a sound like heavy artillery. They clapped as enthusiastically as they sang, possibly more so.

And now it occurred to Percy that last night’s crayfish had been more of a snack than a meal. Well, if these Russians were his friends, then maybe they had some Russian rations to share? They looked bulky enough under those furry greatcoats. It had to be worth a try, so Percy rubbed his stomach, poked his finger suggestively in his mouth and looked hopeful.

After their singing, again they huddled amongst themselves, and the only sounds he could make out were whispers as faint as a gnat, that tiny annoying whine that keeps you awake at night. However, once they had reached some sort of accord, they burst into song again. This time it was whistles and trills, very much like impressions of birds, and good impressions at that, a touch of nightingale, a hint of starling, birdsong that flowed like the best dawn chorus he had ever heard. Still, somehow he got the impression that they were talking, or rather singing, about him.

Then one of them walked closer to him, watched carefully by the others, and sang, in the voice of Percy, ‘Tipperary’ perfectly all the way through, and it was his own voice, he was certain, his mother would have known it.

After that a couple of Russians disappeared into the woods, leaving the rest sitting around Percy placidly.

When Percy sat on the ground with the Russians, waves of tiredness suddenly washed over him. He’d had years of war and not even a day of this peaceful green, and maybe he deserved a little nap. So he drank a few scoops of water from the river and, despite the presence of the hairy Russians all around him, lay down on the grass and closed his eyes.

He surfaced only slowly from his nap.

Private Percy was a practical and methodical young man. And therefore, still lying in the grass, he decided, in this waking dream, not to worry about these Russians, as long as the Russians weren’t trying to kill him. Save your worrying for your boots, boys, the veterans always said.

Boots! So his sleepy brain reminded him. They were the thing! Look after your boots and your boots would look after you! He had always spent a lot of time thinking about his boots.

At this point it occurred to Private Percy, waking slowly, still somewhat battered by his war and adrift in time