The Long War (32 page)

The elf grinned again and said, ‘I wish-sh you a good death-th.’

English. It spoke English! It
was
an elf, obviously, a member of one of the many slim, gracile species of humanoids that had come to be known as elves across the Long Earth. But though he’d never seen one before, Joshua immediately knew what subspecies this must be.

‘He’s a kobold.’

‘Evidently,’ murmured Bill from the radio. ‘Some folks call them ringtails. Or “urban foxes”, according to the fecking English.’

‘I thought they were a comber legend.’

‘Don’t tell him that, he might get the hump. I have him on infrared,’ said Bill. ‘I see his weaponry. He won’t harm you. Well, probably not. Tell me how you’d describe him.’

‘Can you imagine Gandhi meets Peter Pan?’

‘No . . .’

The kobold grinned, showing those sharp teeth. ‘Not worry, little mann. I protect. Be ss-safe. Be friend.’

‘Great. My name’s Joshua.’

He nodded gravely. ‘Know. Lobsang ss-send you.’

‘Lobsang? You know about Lobsang? . . . Why aren’t I surprised?’

Bill said, ‘You’re all over the kobold grapevine, Joshua. Especially since I started putting out feelers about Sally on your behalf.’

‘You got ss-tone that sing-ss?’

‘The stone that sings?’

‘Yah. Stone that eats soul of mann, sings. The holy music. Menn that ss-sing after death.’ The kobold paused, moving his lips as he thought hard, and added, ‘Like Buddy Holly.’

‘Say yes,’ said Bill.

‘Yes.’

‘Flip, Joshua, do I have to spell it out to ye? Give him the cassette.’

‘Oh – the “stone that sings”. I get it.’ Joshua reached for his jacket, which he had been using as a pillow, found the battered old cassette tape in the pocket, and handed it over.

The kobold reached across and took it like a devout worshipper handling a relic. He sniffed at it, held it to his ear and shook it gently. ‘Bill was-ss here before. We talk. He give me mus-ssic. He give cof-ffee. He give machine that drinks-ss sunlight and plays-ss holy mu-ssic.’

‘You mean a cassette machine?’

The kobold turned the tape over in his long fingers. ‘Kinks-ss? . . .’

‘It’s the album you wanted,’ Bill said from the radio. ‘
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
.’

‘Good . . .’ The kobold dug a battered old tape-drive walkman from the pouch at his waist, held up a glittering solar-cell surface to face the sunlight, pulled ancient-looking headphones around his neck, and pushed the tape into a slot. ‘Extra-ss?’

‘You’ve got the twelve-track mono version released in Europe, and then the fifteen-track UK edition in stereo and mono, and some rarities. An alternate mix of “Animal Farm”. An unreleased track called “Mick Avory’s Underpants” . . .’

But the kobold was no longer listening. He backed up against a tree, the worn foam of the headphones pressed against his ears.

Bill said softly, ‘That’s it. He’s out of it for a couple of hours while he checks that out. Joshua, if you need breakfast, now’s a good time.’

‘The Kinks, Bill?’

‘A great 1960s band from the UK, who made it big in the US with—’

‘I don’t care. No disrespect to the Kinks. What’s with the tape?’

‘Trade goods, Joshua. Kobolds like human culture. Some of ’em are big on music. This one was hooked when he first heard “Waterloo Sunset”. He’s a kind of snitch. An informant. I get him the music he wants; he gives me – information.’

‘Yeah, but who uses a cassette machine?’

‘Well, he’s older than he looks, Joshua. He’s been doing trades like this for years. And he’s a humanoid with an evolutionary path that split off from mankind’s millions of years ago. He’s not likely to be a technology early adopter, is he?’

Joshua pushed his way out of his sleeping bag. ‘I need a coffee.’

T
HE FIRST STEPPERS
, exploring the Long Earth, had found no trace of modern man away from the Datum.

Oh, they had found a few stone tools. They had found fossil hearths in the depths of caves. They had even found a few bones. But no great leap forward – no cave paintings, no flower-adorned burials, no cities, no high technology. (Well, none that was human.) The spark of higher intellect must have been lit behind beetling pre-human brows on a million worlds, just as on Datum Earth – but it hadn’t caught anywhere other than on the Datum. Whatever the reason, the alternate universes into which Earth’s pioneers poured out were mostly dark, quiet worlds. Worlds of trees, many of them, Earths like great tumbled forests. The Datum itself was just a clearing in the trees, a spark of civilization, one circle of firelight beyond which the shadows spread to infinity. There were humanoids out there, descendants of lost cousins of humanity, but people knew they would never encounter a humanoid that was anything like as smart as they were. Never a humanoid that could speak English, for example.

The only thing wrong with this generally accepted picture was that it was totally incorrect.

Professor Wotan Ulm of Oxford University, author of the bestselling if controversial book
Moon-Watcher’s Cousins: The Humanoid Radiation Across the Long Earth
, gave the context for the species known as ‘kobolds’ in an interview for the BBC.

‘Of course, such is the patchiness of our exploration of the Long Earth so far that we can come to only tentative conclusions. The evidence for kobolds themselves is little more than legend and anecdote. Nevertheless DNA analysis of samples returned by early expeditions, including a tooth found embedded in the boot of Joshua Valienté, confirms that the humanoids of Long Earth diverged from Datum Earth stock several million years ago, probably at the time of the rise of
Homo habilis
, the first tool-making hominid. This supports my own hypothesis that it was the increased cognitive skills of
H. habilis
that enabled some members of that species to step sideways into the other Earths: the ability to imagine the tool in the stone, perhaps, is related to the ability to imagine another world entirely. And then to reach out for it . . .

‘After this divergence – the departure of the steppers, with the Datum inhabited by the descendants of the residuum who could not step – humanoids radiated into the Long Earth, evolving in a variety of niches. And across four million years natural selection has proved remarkably inventive.

‘One fundamental boundary among the humanoid species is whether they retained their ability to step, or not. Some did, as we know, like the form known as the trolls. Others did not. Having found an Earth of suitable habitability, these groups settled down,
lost
their ability to step, in some cases also lost the intelligence that underpinned that stepping ability, and began to populate their single Earth. This should not surprise us. The juvenile sea squirt is mobile, with a central nervous system and a brain. Once it has found a suitable rock, it settles down, opens its mouth to begin a life of sedentary feeding,
absorbs its brain
, and turns on the TV. Similarly birds having colonized an island free of predators will lose their ability to fly. Flight, like intelligence, is energetically expensive and may be selected out if not used, if no longer necessary for survival. Similarly, presumably, with stepping.

‘A second evolutionary boundary among the nomadic species is whether they have had extended contact with humanity on Datum Earth, or not. If they have
not
had contact they may have evolved into forms quite unfamiliar from experience on the Datum, such as the trolls.

‘If they
have
had contact with mankind, you might think we would know about it. Well, in a sense, we do. It’s remarkable how much human folklore can be explained away if you postulate humanoid races that can move stepwise at will.

‘As for the human-contact humanoids themselves, their subsequent evolution must have been affected. They may grow to look like us, for cover. They may look threatening or cute, to disarm us. Or, most interestingly, they may have evolved speech mechanisms like ours in order to deal with us, in some way. Even intelligence might have been promoted, in competition with us.

‘And so we come to the kobolds. These creatures may indeed be the “kobolds” of myth, the source of German legends of mine spirits, which are also known as types of gnome or dwarf, or
Bergmännlein
, “little mountain men”. They would infest metal mines, and would be heard rather than seen. They could be helpful: their knocking could guide human miners to rich ore seams, or warn them of danger. In Cornwall, England, they became known as “tommy-knockers”. And they would sometimes steal human artefacts, gewgaws like mirrors, combs; they were evidently fascinated by human material culture, though they could not emulate it.

‘It has to be said that the observed kobolds’ robust anatomy, their aversion to bright light, their hands and feet evidently adapted for digging into the earth, are all features consistent with an underground origin. Perhaps they evolved in the subterranean Datum, or at least adapted to it, their ancestors having stepped away and returned. And perhaps in recent centuries the rising human population finally drove them away, leaving them separated from humanity until our own stepping diffusion began. The word “kobold” incidentally is the source of the name “cobalt” . . .

‘Oddly enough, though these creatures are in many ways the most human-like of the humanoid species, and in some ways the most cognitively advanced, they are among the most secretive. Perhaps that’s because of the derogatory names humans tend to give them. Or perhaps it’s just because they know humans.

‘It may be surprising to a layman that there are any
sedentary
Long Earth humanoids who have been shaped over evolutionary timescales by contact with humans. This can only come about, of course, if that species returned to Datum Earth and
then
lost its stepping ability. Well, there is one Datum species that may fit this category, though the genetic evidence is controversial: the bonobo chimps. In retrospect, who could ever have imagined that these gentle creatures belong on the same planet as the likes of us? Not to mention their cousins the common chimps, who are almost as unpleasant as we are. No wonder the bonobos’ ancestors got out of here as soon as they could steal a car. And bad luck for the present-day bonobos that their more recent ancestors came wandering back.

‘Is that enough, Jocasta? Then perhaps you could tell the long-haired kobold lookalike in the production booth that eating a burger all the way through my interview was
even
more off-putting than you might expect . . .’

‘Y
OU HAVE MORE
Kinks-ss?’

‘Some,’ whispered Bill through the radio.

‘Give.’

‘No.’

‘What is your name?’ Joshua asked at last.

The kobold grinned. At least, his teeth grinned. ‘My name to menn is Finn McCool.’

‘I thought of that,’ Bill said. ‘Seemed to fit.’

‘I give no name for menn. Not
my
name.’

‘Finn McCool will do,’ Joshua said.

‘People of the pathless-ss world stranger than trollen,’ Finn McCool said, studying Joshua and his bits of kit. ‘How live? No weaponn?’

‘Oh, I have a weapon.’

‘But one only. You are pathless-ss. We are many.’

‘Many? Where? Where are the rest of you?’

The kobold held out his hand. ‘You give. This-ss the way, as all know. You give, I talk.’

‘Ignore him,’ Bill said. ‘We’ve given already. He’s just trying to drive a hard bargain.’

Joshua studied the kobold. ‘You trade, right? You trade with other humans?’

‘Other humans-ss. And with other, not-humann, not kobold-ss . . .’

‘With other types of humanoid? Other races?’

‘And
they
trade with others-ss. Others-ss, ff-rom far world-ss.’

‘How far?’

‘Worlds-ss where there iss no moon. S-ssun different colour . . .’

‘Horse shit,’ said Bill. ‘No such worlds. He’s just trying to wheedle more out of you, Joshua. Aren’t you, Finn McCool? You can’t shit a shitter, you little shit. Listen, Joshua, you have to understand what we’re dealing with here. These are slippery little buggers. They get around quick, they seem to be able to use soft places, they talk all the time, and they trade, with us and each other. But
they’re not human
. They don’t do business the way we do, grubbing for wealth, making as much profit as we can. They’re more like—’

‘Collectors?’

‘Something like that, yeah. Like nerds who collect comic books. Or like magpies, fascinated by human stuff, shiny gewgaws that they can steal and stare at but they never understand. There’s no logic to it, Joshua. It’s just about the stuff they want, that’s all. Once you understand that they’re not hard to handle. Big fecking ugly magpies with trousers on. That’s you, Finn McCool.’

The kobold just grinned.

‘Well, I guess you know why we’re here, Finn McCool,’ Joshua said. ‘What we want.
Where are the trolls?
’

‘You give—’

‘Cough up, you little gobshite,’ Bill snapped.

Finn McCool hissed, and said grudgingly, ‘Trollen in
here
. But not
here
.’

Joshua sighed. ‘Textbook enigmatic. Any time you want to jump in, Bill—’

‘Finn McCool. Are you saying the trolls are hiding out in a Joker?’

‘Not
here
.’

‘A Joker, but not this Joker. As I guessed. But which one?’

Finn McCool seemed to Joshua to have no intention of answering.

‘That’s it?’ Joshua said. ‘That’s all we get out of you in return for that magnificent, umm, old tape?’

Suddenly McCool stood straight. He sniffed the air with his flat, chimp-like muzzle, and laughed.

‘Joshua,’ Bill said urgently. ‘I detect nine, correction ten – no, eleven hotspots converging on you. I now have visual confirmation. Hmm.’

Joshua spun around. A morning mist swirled now between the trees, and the stream was lost to view. Anything could be out there. Water dripped off the leaves of the trees. ‘What do you mean,
hmm
? What do they look like?’