The Long Earth

‘Yes. And that was supposed to be my day off. Long story.’

‘Fun guys to have around, right?’

‘Here’s another variant,’ Lobsang said. The screen displayed an image of the pregnant, big-brained elf Joshua had tried to save.

‘I call this kind lollipops,’ Sally said. ‘Big-brained, you can see that, but not actually all that bright that I’ve observed.’

Lobsang nodded. ‘It makes sense. The stepping-birth procedure has allowed a dramatic expansion of the physical size of the brain, but perhaps that has yet to be matched by an increase in functional capability. They have the hardware; the software is yet to evolve.’

Sally said, ‘In the meantime some of the other elf types farm them. For their brains, I mean. They eat the big brains. I’ve seen it.’

Silence greeted that pronouncement.

Lobsang sighed. ‘Not exactly Rivendell, then, is it, with all these trolls and elves? Tell me, Sally, are there any unicorns in the Long Earth?’

‘Chowder’s done,’ said Joshua. ‘Get it while it’s hot.’

As they sat down to eat, Sally said, ‘Actually there are unicorns. Some not too many steps from Happy Landings. I can show you if you like. Ugly devils, and not the kind that hang out with Barbie. Just bloody great slabs of battering ram, and so dumb they get their horns stuck in tree trunks. Often happens in the mating season…’

Now the screen showed images of elves feeding on some carcass, squabbling, bloody-mouthed.

Sally asked, ‘Why are you showing us all this, Lobsang?’

‘Because this is a live feed from what is below us, on our latest Earth. Hadn’t you noticed we’d stopped stepping? Eat your chowder; the elves will keep until morning.’

43

THE NEXT DAWN came late, to Joshua’s puzzlement. The daylight revealed a wasteland below, a dried-up dustbowl world with, it seemed, precious little water, and therefore precious little else.

Lobsang joined Joshua on the observation deck. ‘Not a prepossessing place, is it? But it has its curiosities.’

‘Like the sun rising late.’

‘Indeed. Also, both trolls and elves are crossing through here, almost all of them heading East, and I am getting good pictures of both species on the belly cameras.’

The deck tilted slightly. Joshua said, ‘We’re going down?’

‘Yes, and I would like Sally to land with us. I would like to apprehend an elf if possible. I wish to try to communicate with one.’

Joshua snorted sceptically.

‘I don’t expect very much from the encounter, but one never knows. Just in case, I have fabricated helmets and neck armour for you both; anyone trying to strangle you from behind will regret it, stepping or not. I will see you by the elevator in half an hour.’

Sally was fully dressed when Joshua knocked at her door. ‘Helmets!’ she snapped.

‘It was Lobsang’s idea, sorry.’

‘I’ve survived in the Long Earth for years without being nannied by the likes of Lobsang. OK, OK, I’m the passenger here, I know. Any idea what he’s planning?’

‘To catch an elf, I think.’

She blew a raspberry.

Lobsang brought the airship to a halt over a bluff of heavily eroded rock. The landscape was a desert of rust- red dirt. This was a strange Earth, even by the standards of most Jokers. Joshua felt heavy, as if his bones were plated in lead, and his usual pack was a burden. The air was dense, but oddly not satisfying, and his lungs laboured. A wind blew constantly with an empty howl. On the barren plain there was no grass or other vegetation — nothing but a sort of green-purple fuzziness, as if the land hadn’t shaved that morning.

And occasionally, Joshua saw, there was a flicker, more sensed than seen. Something stepping, he thought, and stepping away again so fast it had hardly been there…

Sally asked, ‘What’s with this place, Lobsang? It’s like a cemetery!’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Lobsang. ‘Though a cemetery empty even of bones.’ He stood stock still, like a statue around which the dust swirled. ‘Look up at mid-heaven, slightly to your left. What do you see?’

Joshua squinted and gave up. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.’

‘Something notable for its absence,’ said Lobsang. ‘If you were standing at this exact spot on the Datum, right now, you would be looking at a washed-out moon in a daylight sky. This Earth has no moon to speak of. Just a few orbiting rocks invisible to the naked eye.’

Lobsang said it was a contingency he had anticipated. The cataclysmic impact which had created the moon of Datum Earth and most of its stepwise sisters had evidently never happened here. The moonless Earth that resulted was more massive than the Datum, which was why extra gravity dragged them down. The tilt of the axis was different, and unstable, and the world rotated more quickly, causing a different day — night cycle, and a wind that endlessly scoured the rocky, lifeless continents. It wasn’t a place for life: the lack of tides caused the ocean waters to stagnate, and there were none of the rich intertidal zones that had done so much on the Datum to promote the evolution of complex life.

‘That’s the general theory,’ Lobsang said. ‘On top of that, I suspect this world did not get its share of water during the big soaking towards the end of the creation of the solar system, when comets rained like hailstones. Perhaps this is somehow connected to the big moon-creating impact, or the lack of it. Sadly, this planet is a loser; probably even our Mars got a better deal.’

But there were compensations. When Joshua shielded his eyes from the sun, a band of light was revealed, razor sharp, cutting right across the sky. This Earth was circled by a ring system, like Saturn’s. A spectacular sight from space, probably.

Lobsang said, ‘Right now I am waiting for a troll. I have been ultrasonic-yelling for help in the troll language for fifteen minutes, and I am extruding troll pheromones — quite easy to duplicate.’

‘That explains why my teeth are aching,’ said Sally. ‘And why I thought somebody hadn’t washed today. Do we have to hang around here? This air is crappy, and it stinks.’

She was right about the stench, Joshua thought. This world smelled like the old house at the dirty end of the street that you were told never to go to, the house that had been locked up and nailed shut after the last person in it had died. It offended him, even more so than the quasi-dinosaur world. OK, the Rectangle builders had died out, but at least they had lived, they had had a chance.

But maybe, he thought, humans could bring this desolate world alive. Why not? He liked to fix things; this place could absorb a lot of fixing. Now there would be something you could tell your grandchildren about. There were still plenty of snowballs out in the Oort cloud, and a fairly small spacecraft on the right trajectory could line itself up to tip one of those and get a bit of water down here. Once you had the water you were home and dry, so to speak… But it was all a pipe dream. Mankind had started turning its back on anything more ambitious than the electronic exploration of space even before the Long Earth was discovered, offering a myriad habitable worlds within walking distance.

This reverie was broken when Lobsang said, ‘Trolls on the way. That didn’t take long. Of course, they step in packs, so expect a large number. I give you fair warning: I intend to sing to them. Join me if you wish.’ He cleared his throat theatrically.

It wasn’t just the ambulant unit that began to sing. The sound of Lobsang’s voice broke in a wave, thundering out of all the speakers on the airship. ‘Keep right on to the end of the road, Keep right on to the end. Tho’ the way be long, let your heart be strong, Keep right on to the end…’ Echoes were thrown up, quite possibly the first time this dead place had known echoes of a human voice — or nearly human, Joshua