The Long War (21 page)

She had kept on trying, until, grudgingly, he became an ally.

And he had been an ally ever since.

‘Nice story,’ Sally said. ‘And that was really your way of protecting
him
, right?’

‘A friend for life, that’s Joshua. He does seem to surround himself with strong women. You, Helen, Sister Agnes—’

‘And you too, retired Lieutenant Jansson.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment. Must be difficult for Helen sometimes, however. She is his wife.’

Sally looked away. ‘I’m profoundly uninterested in Helen. A gloomy little stay-at-home. Although she did throw a good right hook at that nutjob in immigration.’

‘That she did.’

Sally kept glancing at her watch.

Jansson asked cautiously, ‘So where are you going next?’

‘The Gap.’

‘Really? Because of Mary the troll, I guess.’

‘Yeah.’

Jansson smiled. ‘What will you do, wave a placard?’

‘Why not? It’s better than letting the poor creature be put to death, out of sight and out of mind.’

‘True enough. It was a shocking incident. When I saw it I wrote a few mails myself, you know . . . That was how I got the leverage to have Joshua meet Senator Starling. I wish I could go with you.’

Sally faced her. ‘Are you serious?’

That took Jansson aback; she’d spoken on impulse. ‘What? Well – yes, I guess. If I could. Why do you ask?’

‘Because you’re useful, that’s why. You’re Joshua’s “Spooky” Jansson. You can get things done in the human world where I can’t.’ Sally looked diffident, as if she hated to admit the slightest weakness. ‘Maybe together we could do some good. Or at least scare the spacesuit pants off those dweebs up at the Gap. Joshua said you put things right. That’s your strength. Well, because of this whole business with the trolls, there’s soon going to be something “not right” with the whole of the Long Earth. Come with me. What do you say?’

Jansson smiled weakly. ‘What, just like that? It’s kind of Thelma and Louise, isn’t it? And at my age, and my condition? I’m not supposed to be more than a couple of hours from my hospital. I suppose I could self-medicate. But I’ve never been nearly that far stepwise. It’s two million steps to the Gap, right? I don’t think I’d make it.’

‘Don’t be so hasty.’ Sally winked. ‘Remember who you’re speaking to. I know a couple of short cuts . . .’

‘It’s crazy. It’s impossible. Isn’t it?’

A
S
J
ANSSON AND
Sally were preparing to leave Madison West 5, Maggie Kauffman was just arriving.

‘Find me a troll expert,’ Maggie had told Joe Mackenzie. What the Captain wanted, the Captain got.

It had taken a couple of days. No outernet search was quick, by the nature of its very infrastructure, although the closer you got to the Datum the faster information was swapped around. But Mac soon turned up a number of universities that had investigated trolls in the wild. He showed Maggie some of their reports. Trolls were found to be inquisitive, convivial, and quick learners. It was generally agreed that they were at least pre-sapient, but a minority of scholars declared that they were in fact truly sapient, though their intelligence had a different perspective, a different basis from human minds. Clearly they learned at a phenomenal rate . . .

All this seemed a little dry to Maggie. She asked Mac to find somebody who knew trolls better than as test subjects or specimens. Somebody who lived with them.

Which was why she left her command briefly, and, without letting her superiors know – stuffed shirts like Ed Cutler would have squashed this initiative before it had begun – she dashed on a fast commercial twain back East, ending up on a world five steps West of the Datum, at the new city of Madison, Wisconsin . . .

A few miles outside the city, Dr. Christopher Pagel and his wife Juliet, among other activities, ran a rescue centre for maltreated big cats, animals bought illegally by drug barons and other slimeballs and displayed for the machismo, then abandoned when they were no longer cute. The business pre-dated Step Day – when it was set up the victims had included lions and tigers – but since then, thanks to the opportunities opened up for new kinds of trophies through access to the Long Earth and its kaleidoscope of unspoiled worlds, the roomy cages had also housed such beasts as a sabre-toothed smilodon, and even a cave lion:
Panthera leo atrox
.

And the Pagels were using an extended family of trolls to help with the business.

The Pagels, elderly but elegant and remarkably kindly, told Maggie that the trolls helped with more than just heavy labour. Their very presence seemed to calm the cats. Dr. Chris described how the male of the local family of trolls had a very good way of dealing with one potentially troublesome tiger, who after one attempted attack on its keeper was gripped at the neck by a big troll hand and pushed slowly and carefully to the ground, at a speed and pressure that made it clear to the big cat that ending up underground was just a possibility if he didn’t get with the programme . . .

Maggie learned a lot of other details about the trolls from the Pagels. Such as, what they wanted from humans, it seemed, was entertainment: variety, new concepts. Show even a juvenile troll something like a lawn mower, with bolts big enough for troll fingers to work, and he or she would carefully take it apart, keeping all the bits neatly in a line, and then put it back together again, for the sheer joy of it. Juliet Pagel had experimented with human music; a good gospel choir would have trolls sitting in rapturous silence, as would 1960s close-harmony groups like the Beach Boys.

Maggie’s decision about the trolls was slowly solidifying. As far as she was concerned, she had to be mindful of the fact that her command was tasked to be an ever-present symbol of the United States Aegis. As such, it wasn’t enough for the
Benjamin Franklin
to tour these outer worlds like an old-fashioned dreadnought, projecting vague threat and handing out leaflets about how you had to pay your taxes. Her mission had to symbolize the nation’s positive values. And that meant, in this age of the Long Earth, living in harmony with the other inhabitants of the stepwise worlds, in particular with the trolls. Sally Linsay had been right, she’d decided on reflection: how better to show that than by having trolls actually aboard her ship?

As a twain Captain, Maggie had been granted a great deal of latitude in her decision-making out here. Still, she spent time trying to make sure she had got the support of at least a majority of her crew for this experiment. And she had no intention of telling her superiors what she was up to, until she absolutely had to.

So, when she returned to her ship, she brought three trolls with her. They were a family, parents with a juvenile: the Pagels had called them Jake, Marjorie and Carl.

As soon as they boarded, despite all Maggie’s groundwork in advance, the arguments started once more. She let them run; the trolls weren’t going anywhere.

In the event it was only a week before the crew of the
Franklin
, as they drifted through the skies of countless stepwise Americas, became accustomed to stopping work at twilight, when the big loading bay doors were flung open, and the trolls joined in the harmonies and undertones of the long call as it echoed across the reaches of world after world.

‘I mean,’ Maggie said to Mac and Nathan, ‘in
Star Trek
they put a Klingon on the bridge.’

‘And a Borg,’ said Nathan.

‘Well, there you go.’

‘Not a Romulan, though,’ Mac said. ‘Never a Romulan.’

‘The trolls are staying,’ Maggie said firmly.

I
T TOOK
N
ELSON
Azikiwe a couple of months after that talk with Ken, when he’d let the cat out of the bag about his resignation, for him to tidy up his affairs in the parish, dispose of extraneous belongings, and brief his successor – including on the temperamental toilet – before he was ready to depart on the next phase of his life, in search of the Lobsang Project and other mysteries. He took his time. He had always led something of an itinerant life, but believed in making time to say his goodbyes properly.

He decided to travel to America by plane; his generation wasn’t used to the slow-boat nature of twain travel. But there weren’t as many aeroplanes around these days, Nelson discovered, not since the Long Earth had begun to be serviced by the twains. It was the new worlds, of course, for which the twains were so well suited: airships didn’t need airports, they could set you down easily almost anywhere. But even for lateral, cross-Earth travel, even on the Datum, airships had come back into vogue. For one thing helium, a safely non-flammable lift gas, was a whole lot easier to obtain now, the Datum’s natural stock having been badly depleted before the resources of the stepwise worlds had been opened up. And the stately pace of airships certainly worked for cargo: sacks of corn and mineral ore didn’t mind how long it took to get there, and rarely complained about the in-flight movie.

But an industry like the traditional airlines would take some time to die, and for now, on the Datum, the planes still flew – even though for this trip Nelson had to put up with delays, as many US flights were grounded because of ash clouds arising from an event at Yellowstone, some kind of minor eruption there.

The plane Nelson finally caught swung out from England, crossed the north Atlantic, flew down over the Canadian Shield, and at last reached the endless farmland of Datum America, which spread beneath his window like a glowing carpet. If you had the eye for it, he realized, there were occasional gaps to be seen in that grand panorama of cultivation, scraps of recovering wildness in the summer green where a homestead or a farm had been abandoned, almost certainly because the owners had decided to step Westward. (And it
was
West for most Americans, despite the assurances of the experts that the stepping labels ‘West’ and ‘East’ were purely arbitrary.) Off they stepped, in search of more land, a better life. Or, he mused, possibly they went simply because, well, the new worlds were
out there
, and there was something in the genes of an American, and perhaps even a Canadian, that impelled you always to move on. It was a frontier with apparently no end, and while there wasn’t exactly a stepwise stampede these days the Long Earth still drew in the pioneers.

His own destination was more modest: O’Hare. He’d stop in Chicago a while. Then he had plans to visit a new university being built in Madison, Wisconsin, West 5, as part of the city’s post-nuke recovery. He had friends there, and interests. Madison was where Willis Linsay had first posted the plans for a prototype Stepper box on the internet, a glorious, destructive gesture that had changed the world for ever – indeed, the worlds. And Madison had been the boyhood home of Joshua Valienté himself. Nelson, on the track of the Lobsang Project, had an inkling that Madison was a place where he might find some things out, get some questions answered.

As it turned out, this tentative plan didn’t even survive his leaving the airport.

Nelson was always glad to get out of the cramped enclosure of a plane. He was a large man, the kind of man who had trouble fitting into an airline seat, but who could walk through any neighbourhood anywhere without having to worry overmuch about his security. Sometimes the deference accorded to him simply because of his size bothered him. But by and large, he reflected as he patiently queued his way through the landing process, he had to admit it was useful to get your way without even asking.

His size had certainly saved him from all but a few scuffles in the South African townships of his boyhood. All such troubles had however evaporated when he found the local library and discovered a universe of ideas into which his young consciousness rose faster than a Saturn V into the Florida sky. That wasn’t to say he had simply soaked up the lessons of authority; almost from the beginning he was identifying problems to solve, and indeed solving them. One teacher remarked that he had a genius for connectivity.

His life had changed utterly, for better or worse, the day he had first applied his analytical skills to the concept of the Almighty. Even if you dismissed the traditional notion of God, it had always seemed to him that without a First Cause of some kind there was a philosophical void, a space to let. His buddies in the nerdosphere populated that void with the Illuminati, maybe, or the staring eye in the dollar-bill triangle . . . After Step Day, after the opening-up of a universe vast, fecund and accessible to mankind, it seemed to him that the need to fill that void had only deepened. Which was essentially why he had decided to devote the next phase of his life to an exploration of that void, and related mysteries.

Anyhow, this morning at O’Hare, Nelson’s intimidating size, backed up by his problem-solving ability, certainly helped him thread his way through the maze of US immigration.

And at the final customs barrier, after Nelson had cleared through, a clerk chased him and produced a leaflet. ‘Oh – this was left for you, Mr. Azikiwe.’

The leaflet was an ad for a Winnebago. Nelson was planning to fly to Madison; he didn’t need a Winnebago. But when he looked up again, the clerk was gone.

Nelson felt a thrill of connectivity, like solving a Quizmasters puzzle. ‘I get it, Lobsang,’ he said. And he pocketed the leaflet.

By an hour later he had rented a top-of-the-line Winnebago, with plenty of generator capacity for his tech, and a bed, a big one,
just
the size for him.

He drove out of the airport parking area in this home on wheels and, having no further instructions he could discern, picked a direction at random and hit the freeway. Just the experience of driving on such roads was glorious. He wondered if this, in the end, was the ultimate expression of the American dream: to be in transit, all problems left behind like discarded trash, nothing in life but follow-the-horizon movement, motion for the sake of it.

He drove west for the rest of the morning.

Then he parked up in a small town, shopped for fresh food, and logged on for a quick inspection of the latest sweepings of the online world, including the findings of his buddies in the Quizmasters. He’d had them working twenty-four/seven on his problem since he’d tantalized them with the barest hint: ‘Say, we have all seen that clip of the
Mark Twain
being towed into Madison and the girl talking about a cat that spoke Tibetan, haven’t we? Is there a clue there? But a clue about what? Looks like someone is playing with our heads . . .’