The Long Earth

line of our journey, quite a number of them, too. Possibly some kind of migration.’

‘Hmm,’ Joshua said, feeling that faint pressure in his head. ‘Or maybe they’re fleeing something.’

‘Either way, it’s interesting, don’t you think? Stepping humanoids! And I wonder what will happen when more of the migrant trolls reach the Datum itself.’

‘More of them? What do you mean by that?’

‘I’ve told you of fragmentary reports from old traditions — glimpses of transitory beings, tales from myth. I believe that trolls and other species have been visiting our Earth for millennia — perhaps simply to pass through, perhaps for other purposes. The frequency of such reports drops in recent centuries, because of the growth of scientific literacy perhaps.’

Or sheer mental pressure, Joshua thought, as the Earth’s population grew, if the trolls and their cousins had the same reaction to crowds as he had.

‘But in recent decades, and even since Step Day, such sightings have been on the increase again. The wavefront of the migration we are witnessing, perhaps. Let me give you an example, of a case that now makes a certain kind of sense…’

27

ACCORDING TO THE report filed by the two students later — filed and briskly covered up under Britain’s Official Secrets Act — the night of the incident had been cloudy, the sky black. This was darkest Oxfordshire, the very centre of England. By the light of their battery-powered storm lantern Gareth unpacked his canvas rucksack and set out the instruments: a cricket bat and stump, a baseball bat, drumsticks filched from the college orchestra’s percussion section, even a croquet mallet. Stuff to hit the standing stones with.

While Lol was thumping his forehead against an oak tree.

The oak, with its fellows, towered over the stones, which were like a ring of broken giants’ teeth stuck in the ground. This was said to be one of the oldest monuments in the country — possibly it even pre-dated the age of the farmers who had produced most of the great stone monuments in Britain. But nobody knew for sure, because there’d been no decent archaeological investigation of the site. There was no nicely laid footpath, no information trail with boards of factoids to guide the visitors who never came. Just the stones, and the forest that had all but overwhelmed them — and a legend, that these stones would sing, to keep elves and other demons out of the world. A legend that had brought Gareth here in the first place.

Lol wrapped his arms around the tree’s gnarly trunk. ‘Trees! Trees root us, Gaz. They nurture us. There have been trees on this planet for three hundred million years. Did you know that? Great huge tree ferns back in the Carboniferous. A tree is defined by its form, not by its species. Once we lived in trees. Trees are at the centre of all our myths! There are stories from all over of world trees, like ladders to the sky.’

They were both science students, twenty-year-old undergraduates, Lol studying quantum physics, Gareth acoustics. Lol looked younger than his age, like a fifteen-year-old in biker fancy dress, and he did live at home with his parents. But for all the green mythology stuff he liked to spout, you had to remind yourself that Lol had a sharp mind. Gareth found the non-linear equations of fluid mechanics that underlay the acoustics he studied pretty challenging, but Lol’s quantum physics was hard…

Gareth heard a pop, like somebody stepping. He turned. He thought he glimpsed movement in the long shadows the stones cast in the lantern light. Some forest creature out foraging?

Lol said now, ‘Give me a beer.’

Gareth stared at him. ‘You were bringing the beers.’

‘You were.’

‘I brought the mallets. Christ. You never do buy your round.’ He threw a kettledrum stick, narrowly missing Lol’s head. ‘If we’ve got no ale let’s get this over with, and get back to the pub before we sober up.’

‘Sorry, man.’ Lol picked up the drumstick.

Gareth dug out his phone and set it to record the sounds they would make when they started to strike the stones.

He was doing this to make a girl notice him.

She was on an arts course, and Gareth sometimes saw her on the bus ride into town, but he had nothing to talk to her about. Certainly not his geeky engineering studies. He’d vaguely thought this archaeo-acoustics experiment of his might impress her.

For centuries archaeologists had been missing the element of sound in the monuments they studied. Gareth had once heard a barbershop quartet perform in a Neolithic chambered tomb. Awesome; the place had obviously been designed for its acoustics. Now he was trying to play these standing stones to see if they were laid out for their acoustic properties — an idea that came from the obvious lead offered by their traditional local name, the Singing Stones, and the attached legend that the stones would sing to keep out malevolent spirits. And to explore, vaguely, the way legends of ghosts and spirits and other transients had come to have a whole new interpretation in this age of the Long Earth, when reality had suddenly become porous.

Maybe it was all a bit too geeky. And he hadn’t achieved his main objective: here he was with Lol, not her. But at least it was a more imaginative way of thinking about the new worlds than you mostly got in Britain. This was just a few years after Step Day. Gareth had spent a gap year summer in the US where they were talking about treks out to the remote worlds, of building an infinity of stepwise Americas. Whereas in England, it was all a kind of dull nothingness. The Long Earth just hadn’t inspired John Bull. Of course it didn’t help that the stepwise Englands were uniformly choked with forest, but basically, all you saw in England West or East was little rectangular plots cut into the forest, precisely mapping suburban back gardens where middle-class families popped over to grow beans or to catch the sunshine when it rained at home, or, just occasionally, to get savaged by a wild boar. And meanwhile the disadvantaged, young and old, drifted away from the dole and their dead-end jobs and just vanished into the green, and the cities were dying from their empty inner suburbs outward, and the economy slowly crumbled…

Lol had been silent for a long time. A long time for him, anyhow. Gareth looked up.

Lol was staring.

Something stood at the precise centre of the stone ring, a group of squat stumpy shapes, that hadn’t been there before. At first glance the figures looked like more standing stones to Gareth, more monoliths in a rough circle. No, they weren’t monoliths. They had chimp faces, and black, hairy bodies, and they stood upright. Like children in monkey suits. The light of the lantern was uncertain, the shadows deep black.

‘They must have stepped in,’ Lol breathed.

‘Is this some kind of joke? Trick or treat? It’s not Halloween, losers.’ Gareth was nervous; he always was around unsupervised kids. ‘Look, if you lot don’t—’

And, as one, the little people opened their mouths and sang. They went straight into a chord, a multipart harmony. Then, after holding the chord for an unreasonable time, they launched into a kind of song. It was fast- moving, shapeless to Gareth’s ears. But the harmonies were pitch-perfect, and beautiful, so much so they made Gareth’s guts twist.

Lol, on the far side of the ring, looked terrified. He clamped his hands over his ears. ‘Make them stop!’

Gareth had an inspiration. He grabbed his mallets. ‘Hit the stones! Come on!’ He whacked the nearest stone with the baseball bat. It rang.

He and Lol hammered the stones wildly. Dull tones rang out, ugly and discordant. Despite his fear of the ape-things, Gareth felt a stab of triumph, of vindication. He’d been right. These stones were lithophones, shaped for the sound they made, not for the way they looked. So he bashed and thumped the stones, and Lol did the same.

And the ape-things were disturbed. Their tight formation broke up, and those monkey-mask faces crumpled, teeth bared, and their song dissolved into hoots and chatters. One by one they began to wink away, disappearing stepwise. Was this what the Singing Stones were for? To make these ugly discords, to stop these singing ape-things stepping into the world — just as the legend said?