The Long Earth (22 page)

But in amongst the herds, jostling to get to the water, were other animals. One family of tall, spindly beasts were like camels rebuilt to the plan of a giraffe. Their young, with legs like drinking straws, looked heartbreakingly fragile. And there were elephants, with a variety of tusk types. And things like rhinos, things like hippos … These herbivores, temporarily forced together, were skittish, nervous, for there were carnivores too. There were always carnivores. Joshua spotted what looked like a pack of hyenas, and a cat not unlike a leopard. Waiting, watching the throngs of wary drinkers at the lake.

Now a creature looking very much like a beefy ostrich approached. A family of rhino-like beasts backed off nervously. But the bird stretched out its neck, opened its beak wide, and fired out a ball, like a cannonball. This slammed into the ribcage of a big male rhino, that went down bellowing. The family scattered, and the bird closed in to feed on the fallen male.

Lobsang used an anaesthetic rifle mounted on the gondola to bring down the bird, and sent down his ambulant unit to inspect it. The bird had a separate stomach sac which filled up with a mixture of faeces, bones, gravel, bits of wood, other indigestibles. All this was mortared together with guano to make a large ball as hard as teak. The Long Earth truly was full of wonders, and for Joshua the cannonball bird duly took its place in the gallery.

The world was logged, and the airship moved on. That night the movie was Lobsang’s choice:
Galaxy Quest
. Joshua couldn’t concentrate on the action, but, rocking with the stepping, mumbling ‘Never give up! Never surrender!’, he slowly fell asleep.

He woke to bright sunlight. The ship had stopped again, and sounding-rockets soared into an unsuspecting sky.

In this world, that bit warmer than those earlier – Lobsang observed a steadily warming trend as they ploughed ever further West – a string of lakes had been cut into the forest blanket. Lobsang speculated that they were the result of a multiple meteorite strike. Two of the lakes were separated by a narrow strip of land, a striking feature that reminded Joshua of the isthmus between Mendota and Monona at Madison.

Lobsang announced, ‘This is Earth West 139,171. We’re still in the Corn Belt.’

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Look to the north.’

Joshua saw the smoke. It was a thin black column, a few miles away to the north-east.

‘It’s not a campfire,’ said Lobsang. ‘Or a forest fire. A burning township, perhaps.’

‘Human, then.’

‘Oh, yes. And I’m picking up a radio signal.’ Lobsang played a scrap of it, a pleasant recorded female voice broadcasting her presence to a silent world, in English, Russian, French. ‘Spindrift colonizers. The signal claims they are the First Heavenly Church of the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims. We are far from home; there can be few substantial settlements much further out … That fire is from burning buildings. Evidently something has gone wrong here.’

‘Let’s go see.’

‘The danger is unknowable. Unquantifiable.’

Joshua might be a loner, but there was an unwritten rule out in the reaches of the Long Earth that you helped the other, the wanderer, the community in trouble. ‘We’re going.’

The airship’s big rotors started up, and they moved off towards the smoke.

‘Shall I tell you about the Confidence Trick Victims?’

Joshua learned that while the mainstream religions remained concentrated on the Low Earths because of access to the holy sites on the Datum – the Vatican, Mecca – many splinter religious communities had gone out deep into the Long Earth, each seeking freedom of expression, as similar communities had done for millennia on Earth. Such pilgrims would often choose places that (in Datum context) were geographically remote too, like this one: on this distant Earth they were still far to the east of the location of Moscow. And yet, even among these maverick groups, the Cosmic Confidence Trick Victims stood out as somewhat unusual.

‘They consider their religion to reflect the truth about the universe, which is its essential absurdity. True Victims believe that there is one Born Again every minute. And they must be fruitful and multiply, to create more human minds to appreciate the Joke.’

Joshua murmured, ‘I don’t think this Joke has had a good punchline.’

They sailed over a few square miles of cleared forest around a central township, built around a hillock, the only high point on the isthmus. A relatively grand building sat atop the hillock. There were fields, marked by rows of stones. Lobsang pointed out a characteristic tint to some of the crops: marijuana plants, acres of them, which told you a lot about the nature of this community.

There were corpses everywhere.

Lobsang took the ship up to five hundred feet and hovered. Rooks, disturbed, flapped and rose, to descend again. The Victims of the Cosmic Confidence Trick apparently preferred to wear green robes, and so the central square and the dirt roads radiating away from it were littered with emerald splashes. Who would come all the way up here to wipe out several hundred peaceful souls, whose only eccentricity lay in believing life was a gold brick?

‘I’m going down,’ Joshua said.

Lobsang said, ‘This happened recently. This crime, this attack. Observe that the bodies have not yet been scavenged. Something,
or
somebody, butchered three hundred people, Joshua. The attackers may still be down there.’

‘And maybe the three-hundred-and-first is still alive.’

‘The big building in the centre of the village, on that hillock.’ The hill was the only high point on the isthmus. ‘That’s the source of the radio beacon.’

‘Put me down a hundred yards away.’ Joshua thought it over. ‘And then jump a few worlds away, shift a little in space, and step back. Maybe if there is somebody still here you can lure them out.’

‘ “Lure them out.” Hardly a reassuring idea.’

‘Just do it, Lobsang.’

The airship descended.

There was a stink of grease, of burning meat.

Joshua, with parrot on his shoulder, walked down a straight-line dirt street. A few rooks, irritated, climbed into the air. It was a surprisingly well-developed community to find so far out. The buildings were wattle and daub on sturdy timber frames, set out in neat rectilinear rows. He supposed the pioneers who had laid out these plots and street had dreamed of the city to be built one day on this plan. Now many of the buildings were burned out; further away, a whole district smoked fitfully.

He came to his first body. She was a middle-aged woman who had had her throat ripped out. No human had done this, surely.

Joshua walked on. He found more people, in a ditch, in the doorways, inside the houses, men, women and children. Some of them looked as if they had been running when they were struck down. None of them seemed to be wearing Steppers, but that wasn’t unusual. They had been at home here, in this world; they thought they were safe.

He reached the big central building on its hillock. If this place followed the pattern of most religion-based colonies, this was most likely the church, the holy building, the first permanent structure to be erected, and as such it would house a lot of the community’s
common
property like the radio station and any power unit. It was also the place of refuge when disaster struck, as churches had been throughout western history. There were certainly a lot of bodies around the building. Maybe the enemy had struck just after morning prayers, or whatever equivalent ceremony the Victims had. Morning Stand-Up, perhaps.

The doors were closed. There could be anything inside. Black clouds of flies flew up as Joshua approached, and rooks watched resentfully from rooftops.

The airship reappeared, right above him.

‘Lobsang, any movement?’

‘No hot spots near you.’

‘I’m going to try the church. Temple, whatever.’

‘Be careful.’

He came to double doors set in a stout wall, of stone faced with some kind of plaster. Joshua tried a kick, and nearly broke his ankle. He braced for another try.

‘Save your fragile endoskeleton,’ Lobsang said dryly. ‘There’s an open door at the back.’

The back door was, in fact, smashed off its hinges and sagged outward into the street. Joshua walked through the broken frame into a little radio room where a transmitter was still sending its innocent message to the universe. Joshua respectfully shut it off. Another door led to a utility room, the kind of combined kitchen and junk store that every church or church hall would have; there was a tea urn, and playgroup toys of crudely carved wood. There were even children’s finger paintings on the walls, and a cleaning rota, written in English. It would have been Sister Anita Dowsett’s turn next week.

A further door led into the main hall. And this was where most of the bodies were. Blood filmed the floor and spattered the walls, and flies buzzed in a cloud over the slumped, still forms.

Moving into the room, Joshua had to step over the bodies, a handkerchief to his mouth. He turned some of them over,
inspecting
wounds. At first he thought they’d fled in here, seeking the safety of thick walls and heavy doors – even these far-flung pioneers would fall back on ancient instincts. But there was something odd about the pattern.

‘Joshua?’

‘I’m here, Lobsang.’ He reached an altar. The centrepiece was a big silver hand thumbing a golden nose. ‘These were comedy atheists. It must have been
fun
living here. They didn’t deserve this. If it’s a crime, if humans did this, we’ll have to report it when we go back.’

‘It wasn’t people, Joshua. Look around. All the wounds are gouges. Bites. Crushed skulls. This was the work of animals, frightened animals. And that door behind you was broken outwards, not inwards. Whatever did this didn’t come in through the door. It
stepped
in here, and pushed its way
out
through the door.’

Joshua nodded. ‘So maybe the townsfolk didn’t seek shelter in here. They were here already, at their morning service. And whatever it was erupted right in the middle of them. Stepping animals, that were fleeing – something.’

‘The beasts panicked, evidently. But I do wonder what effect the weed fumes I detect in the air had on them …’

Joshua found himself staring down at one broken body. Naked, hair-covered – not human. A body of roughly human proportions, slim, obviously bipedal, of evident wiry strength, on which was set a small head, like a chimp’s, with an ape’s flat nose. Not a troll, but some other kind of humanoid. It had been killed by a knife wound to the throat; the chest was soaked with drying blood. Somebody had had the guts to fight back, then, against the fury of the terrified super-strong ape-men that had stepped into the middle of his or her family.

‘You see this, Lobsang?’

Cameras on the parrot whirred and panned. ‘I see it.’

Joshua stepped back from the corpse and stood, eyes closed, imagining. ‘We’re on a hilltop, the highest point for a good way
around
. A dense forest is a difficult place to step in a hurry. If you wanted to flee with your family across many worlds you’d be forced to congregate in an open place, a high point, because you’d otherwise be blocked by the trees. But in this particular world the townsfolk had built their church on the highest point. Right in the way.’

‘Go on.’

‘I think these creatures were stepping. Gathered on the hilltop, heading East, fleeing away from the worlds further West, like the trolls. Stampeding.’

Lobsang asked, ‘Stampeding from
what
? That’s a question we will have to answer before we can go home, Joshua.’

‘Suddenly they found themselves
here
, in this enclosed space, with all these humans. They panicked. More and more of them piled in … They killed everybody in here, they broke out, they hunted down everybody else.’

‘From what we know of them, Joshua, trolls wouldn’t do that. Consider how they treated Private Percy. They could have killed him easily.’

‘Perhaps not. But these weren’t trolls.’

‘I would like to suggest we label these creatures
elves
. I’m drawing on more mythology, partial records of more tentative, misunderstood encounters, with mysterious, slender, human-like creatures who passed through our world, ghost-like. The existence of a variety of stepping humanoids could justify a large body of mythology, Joshua.’

‘And no doubt you’re drawing on other encounters out in the Long Earth you haven’t told me about,’ Joshua said dryly.

‘That too. By the way,’ Lobsang said more urgently, ‘I’ve spotted something else. Maybe a quarter-mile west of your position.’

‘Humans? Trolls? What?’

‘Go see.’

29

HE HURRIED OUT
of the church, relieved to be in the open air, away from the stink of blood.

A quarter-mile west, Lobsang had said. Joshua glanced at the position of the sun, turned and ran that way. Before he had gone a couple of hundred yards he heard the moaning.

It was a humanoid, lying in the dirt, on her back. Not a troll, perhaps a variant of elf, given Lobsang’s definition based on what he had found in the temple, but not identical to the one he’d inspected there – at any rate another species new to Joshua. Maybe five feet tall, skinny, coated with hair, she was a stretched, upright-posture chimp with a hauntingly human face, despite her flat, chimp-like nose. And, unlike the beast in the temple, her head seemed to bulge, the cranium outsized for her body to Joshua’s eyes – the brain was evidently larger even than a human’s. And she was in trouble. She was heavily pregnant. Barely conscious, she moaned and thrashed, and tore at the fur over her swollen belly, and watery blood leaked out between her legs.

As Joshua bent over her, her eyes opened. She had big slanting eyes, like a cartoon alien’s, but ape-brown, lacking the whites of a human’s. Eyes that widened in alarm, briefly, and looked at him imploringly.

He felt the creature’s stomach. ‘She’s close to term. Something’s wrong. The baby should have been born by now.’

Lobsang murmured, ‘I would have hazarded that the big head of this creature’s baby would make it impossible for her to deliver it.’