The Long War (26 page)

‘The core song is only the carrier wave, Joshua. I’ve done some acoustic analysis; there are variations in pitch, rhythm, even the phasing of the song scraps, that carry information about how far away the find is, how high a quality the food is. Other scouts will pick up on that, go and check it out, and come back with a confirming report, or maybe a contradiction. It’s an efficient way for the pack to explore
all
the local possibilities, and soon they’ll settle on a selection – often they’ll switch to another key, or another song altogether, to signal unanimity – and then they step away. Honeybees work this way; when they need to find a new location for the hive they send out scouts, who come back and dance out the data.

‘Trolls individually are not much smarter than chimps, but collectively they have evolved a way for the group to make intelligent, robust decisions. But it isn’t like human decision-making, or democracy. Even the kind of democracy you practise out in the boondocks.’ He smiled at Joshua. ‘I heard they made you a mayor.’

‘Sort of.’

‘Tightly contested election, was it?’

‘Oh, shut up. My main job is to moderate the town meeting. Hell-Knows-Where is still small enough for all the capable adults to gather on the common land, and debate the issues. We use Roberts’s
Rules of Order
.’

‘Very American. But maybe there’s something of the trolls’ collective wisdom in what you’re practising. Sooner that than suffer the errors of a single wrong-headed leader. The trolls almost always get it right, Joshua, even when I set them some pretty intricate puzzles to solve.’

‘Nobody’s observed this before, have they?’

‘Nobody’s had the patience. People always focus on what the trolls can do for them. Not on what the trolls
want
. Not on what they can
do
.’

‘How come
our
chimps don’t work that way? I mean, the ones on the Datum.’

‘I suspect it’s an evolutionary adaptation to stepping. Out in the Long Earth, where your food source may be near by geographically but a few worlds away stepwise, you need different search and cooperation strategies. The scouts have to spot the food, and return quickly with the news; the group must decide to move in on it rapidly, or not . . . It’s an environment which encourages efficient scouting, precise, detailed communication and quick, robust decision-making. Just as we see here.

‘But again, there’s still more to the music of the trolls than the needs of the moment. The long call, the essence of which is spread across the worlds, is a kind of encoded, shared wisdom. The call can last a
month
before it repeats, and is laden with ultrasonics, beyond human hearing altogether. But even more than that, it’s like a smearing out of consciousness – like nothing humans experience. I’ve been making efforts to decode it. You can imagine the challenge. I’m making some progress; I have a kind of translation suite, in various prototypes.’

‘If anybody can achieve that, you can, Lobsang.’

‘That’s true,’ Lobsang said complacently. ‘But right now, Joshua, the long call is vibrating with bad news for the trolls. Bad news because of us. Watch this.’ He stood, stiffly, and held up his hands. ‘I am trying to study the trolls in their natural state. I made of this group one basic request, though: that in return for the sanctuary I offer them – protection from humans – they stay here, until I release them. Verbally, I mean, they aren’t physically restrained in any way. Simple as that.’

‘And?’

‘And now, Joshua, I
will
release them.’ He clapped his hands, once, twice, sharply.

The trolls stopped singing – they stopped stepping, once the scouts had returned – and every head, save for the smallest infants’, turned to Lobsang. After a few heartbeats of silence they broke into a new song, a lilting ballad.

‘“Galway Bay”,’ Lobsang murmured to Joshua.

And then they began to step away, mothers with cubs first, males last for protection from predatory elves. In less than a minute they were gone, leaving only a scuffed patch of ground.

Joshua understood. ‘Gone with the rest, just as the reports say. All over the Long Earth.’

‘It’s true, Joshua. And that is what I wanted to speak to you about. Come. Let’s walk. I’m getting stiff from my weeding . . .’

Across the worlds, June skies remained clear, suns set in unison like synchronized swimmers diving, and dark gathered softly, slowly. On one world an owl hooted, for reasons best known to itself.

And Lobsang spoke further of the trolls.

‘They’ve become vital to the economy of the whole of mankind – including the Datum, if only indirectly. So the corporations, including the Black Corporation, are putting on a lot of pressure, wherever they can apply it, to get the trolls back.’

‘And back at work.’

‘Yes. Also there are security implications. Worse than the trolls disappearing, if they were to be seen to become an active threat to mankind, if a coordinated military response were provoked – we need to avoid
that
.

‘But there are other, more fundamental issues. The more I study trolls the more convinced I am that they are central to the ecology of the wider Long Earth itself. Like the elephants of the African savannah, they’ve been out there for millions of years, and for all that time they’ve been shaping the landscapes they inhabit – if only by
eating
so much of them. Sally Linsay taught me this; she’s studied them in the wild, in her way, far longer than I have. If you remove the big beasts from an ecology you can cause something called a trophic cascade. Knocking out the top of a food chain causes destabilization all the way down – booms and crashes of populations – and that can even cause a rise in greenhouse gases, and so on. A tremor of extinctions and eco-collapse all across the Long Earth, or at least as far as the trolls reach. And all because of us.’

Joshua grunted. ‘Makes you proud.’

‘The trouble is, Joshua, there’s no particular reason for the trolls to return. Before Step Day they had a long and deep contact with humans, and they were treated decently, and in turn they treated us decently.’

Joshua thought again of the story of Private Percy Blakeney, a veteran of the First World War trenches, lost and bewildered in the stepwise world into which he’d unconsciously tumbled, who had been kept alive by trolls for decades.

‘But since Step Day it’s been a different story. The exploitation of that cub for experiments at the Gap was only the tip of the iceberg.’

Joshua said, ‘Seems to me we’ll only get the trolls to come back if we can somehow persuade them that we will respect them. That we will listen when they say, “I will not,” as Mary did. Not an easy concept to convey to a humanoid . . .’

‘I know you tried to convince Senator Starling to campaign for them to be protected under US Aegis law. Even that’s not an insignificant challenge.’

‘Yeah, animal protection legislation is a mess.’

‘Not just that, Joshua. For one thing we’d have to decide what the trolls
are
.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, they don’t comfortably fit the old categories, do they? Of human versus animal, the distinction through which we believe we have dominion over nature. It’s as if, I think, we’d found a band of
Homo habilis
– something between us and the animal. In some ways the trolls are animal-like. They don’t wear clothes, they have no writing. They have no language that’s quite analogous to our own. They don’t use fire, as even
Homo habilis
probably did. And yet they have some very human traits. They make simple tools, out in the wild – poking sticks, stone hand-axes. They have strong family bonds, which is why it’s so easy to trap a troll mother, if you have her cub. They show compassion, even to humans. They do have their own language, in their use of music. And they laugh, Joshua. They laugh.

‘The distinction between human and animal is the clincher, you see. You can own an animal; you can kill it with impunity, aside from feeble anti-cruelty legislation. You can’t own a human, not in any civilized society, and killing a human is murder. So should we extend human rights to trolls?’

‘We have, kind of, in Hell-Knows-Where.’

‘Yes, but you’re more sane there than most. The basic quandary is: should we embrace them in our own category of being?’

‘Which is a challenge to our pride. Right?’

‘And more,’ Lobsang said. ‘A challenge to our very self-image. Meanwhile, there are others who argue that the trolls can’t be human because they have no sense of God. Well, not as far as we can tell. What would the Catholics, for instance, do about that? If trolls have souls, then they must be fallen, as we are – that is, tainted with original sin. In which case it is the duty of Catholics to go out and baptize them, to save them from limbo when they die. But, you see, if the trolls are actually animals, to baptize them is blasphemous. Apparently the Pope is preparing an encyclical on the subject. But in the short term the religious debates are just stirring everybody up even more.’

‘What does Agnes say?’

‘“Trolls like ice cream, and they laugh. Of course they’re bloody human, Lobsang. Now go get your broom, you missed a bit.”’

‘That’s Agnes, all right . . . Let’s get to the point. Sally dragged me out of my home and all the way to the Datum because of this. Of course Sally found us in the first place, ten years ago, because of a disturbance of trolls. When they fled from First Person Singular. Now you want me to go out again, don’t you? Out into the Long Earth, beyond the High Meggers. To do what? Find Sally and Jansson with Mary, I guess. Then what? Find where the trolls are hiding? Persuade them to come out, to join the human world again?’

‘That’s pretty much it,’ Lobsang said. ‘Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t help that we’re already in the middle of so much upheaval from the Valhallan independence demands.’

‘You want to restore the balance.’

‘You and I always did share the same instincts, Joshua.’ Lobsang bent to remove a single dead leaf from an otherwise immaculate lawn.
Will you do it, Joshua?
He didn’t ask the question, but left it hanging in the air.

Joshua thought it over. He was in his late thirties now. He had a young wife, a kid, a role in society at Hell-Knows-Where. He was no longer a mountain man, if he ever had been. And now here was Sally, charging off into the Long Earth through her soft places, as if challenging Joshua to follow. Here was Lobsang, like a ghost from the past, snapping his fingers once more. Was Joshua just going to jump as commanded?

Of course he was. Even if he wasn’t the man he used to be. But then, even Lobsang wasn’t who he once was, quite.

They walked on, stepping occasionally from world to world, from sunset to sunset. The troll songs hung in the richly scented air of each world – but Joshua wondered if they were diminishing, even as he listened.

Tentatively he said, ‘Having met you now, I can see your instinct was right.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You did need Sister Agnes.’

Lobsang sighed. ‘But I think I need you too, Joshua. I often think back to our days together on the
Mark Twain
.’

‘Watched any old movies recently?’

‘That’s another thing about Agnes. She won’t let me show any movies that don’t have nuns in.’

‘Wow. That’s brutal.’

‘Something else that’s good for me,
she
says. Of course there aren’t that many movies that qualify, and we watch them over and over.’ He shuddered. ‘Don’t talk to me about
Two Mules for Sister Sara
. But the musicals are the worst. Although Agnes says that the freezer-raiding scene in
Sister Act
is an authentic detail from convent life.’

‘Well, that’s a consolation. Musicals with nuns in, huh . . .’

A voice rang out across the park, a voice Joshua remembered only too well from his own past. ‘Lobsang? Time to come in now. Your little friend will keep until tomorrow . . .’

‘She has loudhailers everywhere.’ Lobsang shouldered his rake and sighed as they trudged across the grass. ‘You see what I’m reduced to? To think I hired forty-nine hundred monks to chant for forty-nine days on forty-nine mountain tops in stepwise Tibets, for
this
.’

Joshua clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It’s tough, Lobsang. She’s treating you like you’re a kid. Like you’re sixteen, going on seventeen.’

Lobsang looked at him sharply. ‘You can pack that in for a start,’ he snapped.

‘But I’ve got confidence you can overcome these difficulties, Lobsang. Just face up to every obstacle. Climb every mountain—’

Lobsang stalked off sulkily.

Joshua waved cheerfully. ‘So long! Farewell!’

J
OSHUA MADE HIS
way out of the transEarth facility through the reception building in Madison West 10. Of course he could have stepped away anywhere, but it seemed polite to go back out that way. Besides, he had to give Hiroe his badge back.

Bill Chambers was waiting for him in the foyer.

‘Bill? What are you doing here?’

‘Well, Lobsang sent for me. He figured you would need a companion for the trip.’

‘What trip?’

‘To find Sally, and the trolls. What else?’

‘But we only just spoke about it . . .’ He sighed. ‘What the hell. That’s Lobsang for you. OK, Bill, thanks.’

‘Fair play to him, he says he’ll give us some kind of translation gadget, so we can talk to the trolls.’

‘If we can find them at all. If I’m honest I’ve no idea where to start.’

‘I do.’ His ruddy face creased in a wide smile. ‘Which is, I guess, why he sent for me. We have to start with Sally. Figure out where she might have gone.’

‘How do we do that?’

‘Well, Joshua, you’re as close to her as any member of the human race, like it or not. There must be
something
she’s done or said, some clue we can follow.’

‘I’ll think about it. OK. What else?’

‘Then we need to track down them troll lads. And I’ve an idea about that. Look at this.’ He dug an item out of his jacket pocket, and handed it to Joshua.

It was a tape cassette, a bit of technology fifty years obsolete, or more. Its plastic was worn and grubby, and the label unreadable. The cassette
smelled
strange, Joshua discovered now as he handled it. Half rutting goat, half patchouli, half chemical. It smelled, in fact, of clear nights in the High Meggers. ‘Who the hell plays cassette tapes, outside of a museum? What is this, Bill?’