The Long Earth

among humanity until the expansion of the internet. Thanks to this facility I believe that anything interesting and useful that a troll learns very shortly becomes known to every other troll. They appear to have expanded frontal lobes, I suspect mostly utilized to store and process memory, both personal and species- wide… Oh, for a body to dissect! Well, lacking that, I will do the best I can, which will be the best that there is.’

Henry laughed. ‘You don’t believe in modesty, do you, Mr Lobsang?’

‘Absolutely not, Henry. Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.’

Joshua threw a ball towards a baby troll. ‘Neanderthals put flowers on the bodies of their dead too. I’m no expert, I saw it on the Discovery Channel. Are the trolls nearly human, then?’ He had the sense to duck as the exuberant return from the pup sailed over his head and splintered the bulkhead.

‘The young will experiment,’ remarked Lobsang. ‘“Nearly human” is right, Joshua. Like the dolphins, orang- utans and, if I am being charitable, the rest of the higher apes. It’s a tiny gap between us and them. And nobody knows how Homo sapiens became, well, sapient. Sally, do the trolls use tools?’

She looked up from her playing. ‘Oh, yes. Away from humans I’ve seen them use sticks and stones as improvised tools. And if you bring a fresh band to Happy Landings, and if they see a guy fixing a weir in the river, a troll might pick up a handsaw and help him, if he’s shown what to do. By the end of the evening, every troll in that band will know how to do it.’

Lobsang patted a troll. ‘So it’s a case of monkey see, monkey do.’

Sally said, ‘No, it’s a case of troll see, troll sit down, troll think about things and then, if it’s appropriate, troll make a half-decent lever or whatever and, by the end of that evening, troll tell other trolls about the usefulness of it. Their long chant is a troll Wikipedia, quite apart from anything else. If you want to find out anything like “Am I going to throw up if I eat this purple elephant?” then another troll will tell you.’

Joshua said, ‘Hang on. Are you telling me you’ve seen a purple elephant?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Sally. ‘But out in one of the Africas there is an elephant which, I swear, has the art of camouflage down to a tee. Somewhere out there in the Long Earth you’ll find almost anything you can imagine.’

‘“Anything you can imagine”,’ murmured Lobsang. ‘Interesting choice of phrase. Between ourselves, Sally, I can’t help feeling that the Long Earth as a whole has something approaching what I can only call a meta-organic component. Or perhaps meta-animistic.’

‘Hmph. Maybe,’ said Sally, scratching a troll’s scalp. ‘But the whole set-up irritates me. The Long Earth is too kind to us. It’s too pat! Just as we’ve trashed the Datum, just as we’ve wiped out most of the life we shared it with and are about to succumb to our own resource wars, shazam, an infinity of Earths opens up. What kind of God sets up a stunt like that?’

‘You object to this salvation?’ Lobsang asked. ‘You really are misanthropic, aren’t you, Sally?’

‘I’ve got a lot to be misanthropic about.’

Lobsang stroked his own trolls. ‘But perhaps it’s nothing to do with any kind of god. Sally, we — I mean humanity — are barely at the beginning of our enquiry into the Long Earth. Newton, you know, spoke of himself as a boy playing on a seashore, distracted by a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. Newton! We understand so little. Why should the universe open itself up to careful and dedicated enquiry at all? And why should it be so generous, so fecund, so nurturing of life, even intelligence? Perhaps in some way the Long Earth is an expression of that nurturing.’

‘If so, we don’t deserve it.’

‘Well, that’s a debate for another day… You know, my researches will be frustrated unless I can obtain the corpse of a troll.’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Sally.

Lobsang snapped back, ‘Please don’t tell me what to think. I think, therefore I am; it’s what I do. May I suggest that you two go and enjoy the pleasures of Happy Landings, and leave me in peace to converse with my friends? Whom I promise not to kill and dissect.’

On the access deck below, the elevator hatch slammed open, a clear enough hint that they should leave.

When they were on the ground again, Sally giggled. ‘He can get pretty ratty, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe.’ Joshua was faintly concerned. He’d never heard Lobsang sound quite so unstable.

‘Is there really a human being in there somewhere?’

‘Yes,’ said Joshua, flatly. ‘And you know there is, because you said he sounded ratty. You didn’t use the word it.’

‘Oh, very smart. Come on, let’s look around a few more happy homesteads.’

For Sally that evening, it was like greeting one long-lost friend after another. Joshua was happy to follow in her wake, trying to analyse his feelings about Happy Landings.

He liked the place. Why? Because it seemed, well, right somehow. Like it was where all mankind belonged, perhaps. Maybe that was because he too had some sense of the soft places, the soft routes all converging here, in Lobsang’s well of stability. The maybes in his mind annoyed him, however, as he walked alone. And the sense that he disliked Happy Landings as much as he liked it. As if he didn’t trust it.

He’d listened to Sally’s arguments with Lobsang — she was more voluble on these issues, if not necessarily any better informed — and he tried to make sense of all he was learning. Where did man belong? On the Datum, that was for sure, with ancestral fossils all the way down to bedrock. But now the human race was expanding at speed across the Long Earth, no matter what the governments thought, no matter about aegis; nobody could stop it, and certainly nobody could control it, no matter how many god-bothering spittle-flecked homealone tub-thumpers back on the Datum tried. You would run out of people before you ran out of Earths. But what was the point of it all? Sister Agnes used to tell him that the purpose of life was to be all that you could be — with a side helping, of course, of helping others to do the same. And maybe the Long Earth was a place where, as Lobsang might put it, human potentiality could be maximally expressed… Was there some sense in which that was what the Long Earth was for? To allow mankind to make the most of itself? And in the middle of this cosmic conundrum, here was Happy Landings, where the scatterlings of mankind drifted and sifted. What was that all about?

Of course there were no answers.

In the gathering twilight Joshua was careful not to walk into trolls. Trolls seldom walked into people. Indeed the general etiquette of Happy Landings was that everybody should try not to walk into anybody. But now, suddenly, Joshua walked into an elephant.

Fortunately, it was neither purple nor camouflaged. It was quite small, about the size of an ox, coated with wiry brown hair, and it had a rider, a stocky, grizzled man, who said cheerfully, ‘Another newcomer! And where did you blow in from, sport? My name’s Wally, been here eleven years. Rum go and no mistake, ain’t it? Bit of a bugger, good thing I wasn’t married! Not for want of opportunity, you understand, before or since.’ The self-confessed Wally slid off the back of his miniature elephant, and held out a leathery hand. ‘Put it there!’

They shook hands, and Joshua introduced himself. ‘I’ve only been here a couple of days. Flew in. In a flying machine,’ he added quickly.

‘You did? Great! When are you flying out? Got a spare seat?’

Joshua had wondered at the fact that so few residents of Happy Landings had asked that question; so few wanted out. ‘I think the jury is out on that one, Wally. We have a kind of mission to achieve.’

‘No worries,’ Wally said, apparently unfazed. ‘I’ve been poling down the river, found Jumbo here. Amiable little fella, ain’t he? Just the job for the long-haul, and pretty bright. They come up from the plains.’ He sighed. ‘I like spaces, me, don’t like forests, too creepy. I like to feel wind on my face.’ As they walked towards City Hall with Jumbo following dutifully behind, he added, ‘We’ve been working on the new road south, clearing the way. Don’t mind trees if I can cut them down! But I reckon I have earned my keep here now, so it’s time to build a boat and go discover Australia. That’s the longest haul of them all, right enough.’

‘That’s halfway around the world, Wally. And it won’t be the Australia you remember.’

‘Fair enough. Any Australia will do for me. Of course, I can’t do it all in one go. But a simple way would be to sail down the coast, staying close to the shore, lots of good eating on the way, and strike