The Long War (22 page)

Given Nelson’s starting hint, the Quizmasters had been going crazy, speculating, inferring and pattern-matching. Standing in the Winnebago, making an elegant curry from fresh-bought ingredients, Nelson watched messages and tangled hypotheses flicker across his screens, and thought it all over.

When the curry was ready he largely ignored the screens. Nelson had learned to love the manners of the English past, as he’d known them in St. John on the Water, when people used to
address
their food; there was something about the phraseology that made the boy from the townships smile. But while he ate, he saw from the corner of his eye how the Quizmasters were beating themselves up, putting out theories at the rate of one a minute, some of them completely outlandish.

And then up came one trace that drew his attention: thanks to an oddity of TV scheduling, by hopping among various channels, starting just about now it would be possible to watch the classic movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
continuously for the next twenty-four hours.

He murmured, ‘So: Devil’s Tower, Lobsang? It’s been done before, a bit unoriginal. But I’ve never been there, I’ve always wanted to see it. I won’t ask how to find you; I rather believe you will find me . . .’

Nelson finished his curry and cleaned up. His sat-nav told him it was around a thousand miles north-west from Chicago to Wyoming. A dream ride in a vehicle like this. He’d take his time, he decided, and see the sights; he was nobody’s puppet.

Maybe he’d even catch one of those iterations of
Close Encounters
.

T
HEIR FINAL FALL
through the soft places, the longest of all, brought Sally and Jansson to a world only a dozen steps or so from the Gap itself. Soft places transported you geographically as well as stepwise. They landed in England, the north-west, near the Irish Sea coast – a location Sally knew was close to the footprint of GapSpace, home of the new space cadets.

Monica Jansson arrived exhausted, bewildered. Sally had to help her lie down on the soft grass of this latest hillside, wrapped in a cocoon of silvery emergency blankets.

It had taken a week for them to traverse the two million worlds to the Gap through the soft places – a lot faster than any twain, but a gruelling journey even so. Sally had to scry out the soft places, using motions like a kind of tai chi. They seemed to cluster in the continental heartlands, away from the coasts. They were easier to find at dawn or sunset. Sometimes Jansson could even
see
them, a kind of shimmer. Weird stuff. But they would take you wherever you wanted to go, in four or five steps.

Jansson had, for her part, never complained as they travelled, and it had taken a few transitions for Sally to work out just how hard it was for her. A soft place was a flaw in the Long Earth’s quasi-linear pan-dimensional geometry. Finding soft places was the unique skill Sally’s genetic inheritance had given her. And it was a hell of a lot easier than plodding all the way out, step by step, the way that dull little mouse Helen Valienté had once walked through a hundred thousand worlds with her family to set up their pioneer-type log cabin. But nothing came for free, and the soft places did take something out of you. It wasn’t an instantaneous transition, like a regular step; there was a sense of falling, of deep sucking cold, of a passage that lasted a finite time – that was how you remembered it, even if your watch showed that no time had passed at all. It was gruelling, energy-sapping. Plus Jansson was already ill, even before they set off. Jansson wasn’t the type who would complain, whatever you did.

Sally bustled around, collecting wood for a fire, unpacking their food and drink. Then, in this late afternoon, a warm enough late May day in this particular stepwise England, she sat quietly beside her fire, letting Jansson sleep off the journey.

And Sally watched the moon rise.

It wasn’t the moon she was used to. In this world, only a few steps from the Gap itself, Luna was liberally spattered with recent craters. The Mare Imbrium, the man in the moon’s right eye, was almost obliterated, and Copernicus was outdone by a massive new scar, a brilliant splash whose rays stretched across half the visible disc. It must have been something to see, she thought, on this world and its neighbours, when Bellos and its stepwise brothers had made their shuddering close approach – missing this particular Earth, but passing near by – and the ground below would have convulsed from bombardment by random fragments, while the face of the moon above lit up like a battlefield in the sky . . .

Jansson stirred now, and sat up. Sally had set a pot of coffee on the little stand over the fire. Jansson took a tin mug gratefully in gloved hands, and looked up at the sky, in a vague way. ‘What’s wrong with the moon?’

‘We’re too close to the Gap, is what’s wrong with it.’

Jansson nodded, sipping the coffee. ‘Listen. Before we get there. Just imagine I’m a dumb cop who knows more about bloodstains and drunks than about cosmology and spaceships. What exactly is the Gap? And what’s it got to do with space cadets?’

‘The Gap is a hole in the Long Earth. Look, the alternate Earths go on for ever, as far as we know, all broadly similar though differing in detail. But the Gap is the only place so far found where the Earth is missing altogether. If you were to step over you’d find yourself floating in vacuum. There was an impact. A big rock – maybe an asteroid, or comet, or something like a rogue moon – came calling. The space cadets call this hypothetical object Bellos.’

‘Why Bellos?’

Sally shrugged. ‘Some dumb old movie reference, I think. Joshua might know. And Lobsang’s probably
got
the movie . . . Everything that can happen must happen somewhere, right? Bellos, or copies of it, came swimming out of the dark, and completely missed uncounted billions of Earths. A few, like
this
one, were close enough to its path to be sideswiped by fragments, and suffered varying amounts of damage.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like splattering new craters over the moon. Like stripping away lots of atmosphere from the Earth. Or changing the pole positions. Or messing with continental shift. Generally making the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a street fight. But not wiping out the planet altogether.’

Jansson nodded. ‘I can see where the story is going. And one Earth—’

‘One Earth was taken out entirely.’

Jansson whistled. The idea seemed to frighten her. ‘It could have hit
us
,’ she said.

‘Datum Earth was way up the other end of the probability curve.’

‘Yes, but if it hadn’t been – even if we’d been living on one of these nearby worlds—’

‘Earthquakes, tidal waves, that kind of fun. Oh, the dust winter would probably have killed us off. Us, or our primate ancestors, more likely, it was that long ago.’

‘Nasty.’

‘No, it’s just statistics. It happened, that’s all.’ Sally poured more coffee. ‘It couldn’t happen
now
, at least. Not that way. The extinction of mankind, I mean. We’ve spread out. The Long Earth is an insurance policy. Even a Bellos couldn’t take out all of us.’

‘OK. And this Gap is useful because—’

‘Because you can just step into space. You see, on world Gap Minus One, you put on a spacesuit, step over – and there you are, gently orbiting the sun. No need to ride a rocket the size of a skyscraper to fight Earth’s gravity, because there ain’t no Earth there. And once you’re out there, you can go anywhere. That’s the dream, anyhow. Access to space.’

Jansson’s head was drooping. ‘Can’t wait to see it. In the morning, yes?’

‘In the morning. You sleep. I’ll put the tent up before it gets dark. Are you hungry?’

‘No, thanks. And I took my meds.’ She lay down again, pulling the blankets over her.

‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight, Sally.’

As Jansson slipped back into sleep Sally sat silently, perhaps the only awake, sapient mind on this planet.

And as the light dimmed, and the battered moon brightened, she felt as if someone had knocked out the walls of her mind. The landscape, a grassy hillside stretching away before her, seemed to acquire depth, otherness in a direction she could almost see. It was bottomless, multi-dimensional, endless. She had once dreamed that she had found out how to fly; it was absurdly easy, all you had to do was jump into the air and
jump again when you were up there
. Now she chased the tantalizing feeling that all she needed was the trick of it and she could step away, not into one world at a time, but spread
across
the Long Earth, a whole thick band of worlds, all at once. The very air around her felt prickly, the land as insubstantial as smoke.

But then Jansson coughed, and moaned softly in her sleep. Sally’s infinity high evaporated as quickly as it had come.

S
LOWLY THE CREW
of the
Franklin
got used to their troll crewmates.

That didn’t apply to all the colonies they visited, though.

New Melfield was a grubby and unprepossessing farming community in the Corn Belt. The whole township turned out when the
Franklin
descended – and seemed uniformly astonished when a family of trolls followed the human crew down the lowered gangway.

The trolls and the rest strolled around while Maggie chatted to the local mayor, passed over Datum documentation, and generally engaged the man and put him at his ease. Indeed he evidently needed his ease putting at, for her briefing had pegged this place as yet another nasty little locus of spite towards trolls, not to mention humans and other dumb animals. Well, change had to start by degrees.

So by mid-morning this mayor had three trolls in his office, actually sitting on chairs; trolls just loved chairs, especially if they swivelled. And when Maggie had finished the coffee she’d been offered, she said clearly, ‘Wash up, please, Carl.’

The young troll, holding the mug like an heirloom, looked around the room, spotted the open door to the little coffee station and sink area in the room next door, carefully washed the mug in the sink, and placed it just as carefully in a rack. Then he walked back to Maggie, who gave him a peppermint.

The mayor watched this in blank astonishment.

That was the start of a couple more days at this township, days devoted to seducing hearts and minds, with younger kids being given rides in the
Franklin
to see their homes from the air for the first time in their lives, and older kids – heavily supervised – playing with the trolls.

But on the second day the crew went on the alert, when a second twain showed up in the sky above New Melfield.

The ship was a merchant vessel. That evening the captain himself, with an aide, crossed to the
Franklin
and met Maggie in her sea cabin. And they came bearing a package.

Maggie glanced quickly at Nathan Boss, who’d accompanied them aboard. ‘We scanned the parcel,’ Boss said. ‘It’s clean.’

The merchant’s captain, young, overweight, grinned at Maggie. ‘You must be very important, Captain Kauffman, we were detoured a hell of a way to bring you this. You have the assurance of Douglas Black himself—’

‘Douglas Black? Of the Black Corporation?
The
. . .’ Wow, she thought. Sally Linsay has contacts.

‘Yes, Captain.
The
Mr. Black assures you that nothing in this package is to the detriment of either you or the
Benjamin Franklin
. Instructions can be found inside. I know nothing more . . .’

Maggie felt ridiculously like a kid at Christmas, eager to unwrap the gift.

As soon as the guy was gone, at Nathan’s cautious suggestion she took the package outside the ship to open it, just for extra security. And inside she found, carefully wrapped, a curious instrument faintly resembling an ocarina. A troll-call – Sally Linsay had come through. She toyed with the controls; it looked more complex than the gadget Sally had shown her, maybe some kind of upgrade. And there was a brief page of instructions, signed by hand: ‘G. Abrahams’. The name wasn’t familiar.

She couldn’t wait to try it on the trolls.

She dismissed Nathan, who went off grinning and shaking his head. Then, alone, she made for the observation deck, where the trolls preferred to sleep, perhaps because of its cooler temperature. The trolls were huddled together, grooming gently, half-asleep, communicating in their usual soft, barely audible tones.

Maggie quietly switched on the ocarina, pointed it at Jake, and listened carefully.

And was surprised when from the direction of Jake a clear voice said, ‘I am fed / satisfied; this is fun; I yearn to return to /meaning not understood/ . . .’ It emerged as a human male voice, firm, reasonably pleasant, if rather synthetic.

So the troll-call worked, even if it did seem to be more like an exchange of concepts than a true translation. Those nerds at the Black Corporation – or whoever ‘G. Abrahams’ was – must have
loved
working on the development of this thing.

Now she pointed the troll-call at Marjorie.

‘Female here / watching / no mate female / meaning not understood: tentative translation, a female choosing for her own purposes not to have a mate . . .’

They meant her! ‘Everybody’s a relationship counsellor,’ Maggie grumbled to herself. Plucking up her courage, she raised the troll-call and said clearly into its mouthpiece, ‘My name is Maggie Kauffman. Welcome aboard the
Benjamin Franklin
.’ A liquid warble accompanied her words.

The trolls seemed to snap to attention. They stared at her, mouths open, eyes wide.

She pointed to herself. ‘Maggie. Maggie . . .’

Marjorie gabbled back, apparently attempting to find a label for her. ‘Friend / grandmother / interesting stranger . . .’

It was ‘grandmother’ that flabbergasted Maggie.
Grandmother!
How human was that? And was that how they saw her relationship to her crew, that she was the old woman looking after all the little children? Well, they
were
mostly a lot younger than her . . .

She boldly walked up to the trolls, where they sat huddled in a corner of the cabin, and sat on the carpet with them. ‘I’m Maggie. Maggie . . . Well, you’re right. I have no husband. No mate. The ship is my home . . .’