The Long Earth

thought. ‘Tho’ you are tired and weary still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode, Where all the love you’ve been dreaming of, Will be there at the end of the road…’

Sally just stared, astonished. ‘Joshua — tell me he hasn’t finally crashed his circuits. What the hell’s he singing?’

Quickly and quietly Joshua told her the story of Private Percy Blakeney and his Russian pals in an unfamiliar France, and she looked even more astonished.

But the trolls came. By the end of the song Lobsang was surrounded by trolls, who hooted in harmony with him. ‘Good, aren’t they? Group memory with a vengeance! Now — bear with me while I try to figure out what’s bothering them.’

As the trolls clustered around Lobsang, like big hairy children around a department store Santa, Joshua and Sally backed away, which was something of a relief. The trolls would do anything rather than tread on a human, but after a while their musk, while not really offensive, could simply take control over your sinuses.

But on the other hand this wasn’t a good world for taking a stroll in, while you waited. There was simply nothing here. Joshua knelt down and, at random, levered up a little piece of the green fuzz. There were a couple of small beetles underneath; they weren’t even interestingly iridescent, just mud brown. He let the piece of fuzz fall back again.

Sally said, ‘Do you know, if you took a leak on that patch it would be doing those beetles a favour. Honestly! I won’t look. That bit of soil will have more nutrients than it has seen in a long time. Sorry, was that offensive?’

Joshua shook his head absentmindedly. ‘No. Just a bit incongruous.’

Sally laughed. ‘Incongruous! Lobsang sings Harry Lauder on a desolate planet, and is now surrounded by trolls. Somehow “incongruous” just can’t carry the load, don’t you think? And now my fillings aren’t tingling so much. The trolls are heading out, see?’

Joshua saw. It was as if an invisible hand were picking up pieces on a chessboard, but taking all the queens and pawns first, bishops and rooks next, and knights and kings last of all.

Sally said, ‘The mothers go first, because they would punch the living daylights out of anything that threatened their pups. Elders in the middle, and males last, at the rear of the column… Elves attack from the rear, you see, so you watch your back.’

And then there were none, leaving nothing more than a slight improvement in the air quality.

Lobsang ambled over to them.

‘How does he do that?’ said Sally. ‘Now he’s walking like John Travolta!’

‘Haven’t you heard the fabrication deck working away day and night? He is endlessly bettering himself, endlessly rebuilding. The way you’d go to a gym, maybe?’

‘I have never in my life gone into a gym, sir. When you are by yourself in the Long Earth you are either in shape, or you are dead.’ She grinned. ‘Mind you, I wish I had legs like that.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your legs.’ And he regretted that sentence as soon as he’d uttered it.

She just laughed. ‘Joshua, you are fun to know, and a good companion, reliable and all that, even if you are a little bit weird. Someday we might be friends,’ she said a bit more gently. ‘But please don’t make comments about my legs. You’ve seen very little of my legs since most of the time they are inside premium grade thorn-proof battledress. And it’s naughty to guess, OK?’

To Joshua’s relief Lobsang reached them, smiling. ‘I admit I am rather pleased with myself.’

‘No change there then,’ Sally said.

‘We haven’t caught an elf,’ Joshua pointed out.

‘Oh, that’s no longer necessary. I have achieved my purpose. At Happy Landings I learned the elements of troll communication. But that sedentary population could tell me little about the forces behind the migration. Now these wild trolls have told me more, much more. Don’t you say a word, Sally! I’ll answer all your questions. Let’s get aboard — we have a long journey still ahead of us, perhaps to the end of the Long Earth itself — and won’t that be fun?’

44

SILENCE REIGNED ON the observation deck. Joshua was alone. Once back on board, Lobsang had immediately retreated through the blue door, and Sally to her stateroom.

Suddenly the Mark Twain began stepping like a tap dancer on speed. Joshua peered out. Outside, skies strobed by, landscapes morphed, rivers writhed like snakes, and Joker worlds popped like flashbulbs. On the ship, everything that could creak was creaking like an ancient tea clipper going around Cape Horn, and the stepping itself was a juddering deep inside Joshua, a hailstorm. And outside, Joshua estimated, they were crossing many worlds with every second.

Sally came on deck spitting feathers. ‘What the hell does he think he’s doing?’

Joshua had no answer. But again he fretted about Lobsang’s strange instability and impulsiveness.

Lobsang’s ambulant unit glided through the blue door. ‘My friends, I am distraught if I have alarmed you. I am now eager to progress our mission. I told you I have learned a great deal from the trolls.’

‘You know what’s disturbing them,’ said Sally.

‘I do know more, at least. In short, the trolls, and probably the elves and other humanoid types too, are indeed fleeing from something, but not something physical — it is something that gets into their heads, so to speak. And this confirms what we learned from the Happy Landings trolls.

‘The feeling is like a plague of pain — like migraine attacks — sweeping over the worlds from West to East. There have been suicides. Creatures throwing themselves off cliffs rather than suffer the anguish of it.’

Joshua and Sally looked at one another.

Sally said, ‘A migraine monster? What is this, Star Trek?’

Lobsang looked puzzled. ‘Do you refer to the original series, or—’

‘This really is plain crazy. Joshua, are there any manual controls on this airship?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that Lobsang has very acute hearing.’

‘Joshua is correct in that respect, Sally…’

‘Do the trolls understand what’s coming? Have any of them seen anything?’

‘So far as I can tell, no. But they imagine it as enormous, physically. To them it is a mix of physical and abstract. Like an approaching forest fire, maybe. A wall of pain.’

The complaints from the fabric of the Mark Twain were beginning to bother Joshua. He had no idea what maximum safe stepping speed the ship was capable of. And to plummet at such a rate into entire unknown worlds, and towards an unknown danger, seemed unwise to him to say the least. The earthometers, he saw, were whirling up ever closer to the two million mark.

But Lobsang was talking and talking, apparently oblivious to such concerns. ‘This is not the time to share all of my thinking with the two of you. Suffice it to say that it is clear we are dealing with some kind of genuine psychic phenomenon.

‘Here is the hypothesis. Humans broadcast their humanity in some way. We sense one another. But we have long evolved to live on a planet absolutely drenched with human thoughts. We don’t even notice it.’

‘Not until it’s gone,’ Joshua said.

Sally looked at him, curious.

‘I suggest that once upon a time some of these creatures, elves and trolls and perhaps other variants, did occasionally step into the Datum, and perhaps occasionally hung around for a spell. Thus giving rise to volumes of myth. But this was in the days of comparatively low human population. Now the planet is knee deep in humans, and for creatures that spend most of their time in the mindless calm of woodlands and prairies, it must be as if all the world’s teenage parties are being thrown at once. So these days they stay away from the Datum. However, the stepping species migrating from the West are fleeing from something that is irrevocably pushing them back towards the Datum. They are caught between the hammer and the anvil. And sometimes they panic. Joshua and I have seen what happens when they panic — even trolls may be capable of harm when roused, and remember the Church of the Cosmic Confidence Trick, Joshua?’

Joshua glanced at Sally. He would have expected nothing but scepticism from her. But, amazingly, she looked