The Long Cosmos (15 page)

Suddenly there was a hand behind his head, a strong hairy paw, lifting him. Another hand before his face – cupped, with a splash of water in the palm. Joshua reflexively opened his mouth, and the water spilled in, more than he'd expected, gritty and cold. He gagged, but, determined, he swallowed.

Then he was dropped with a thump that sent a fresh wave of pain shooting up from a battered body. ‘Hoo!' An adult troll lumbered across his field of view, and away.

As Joshua lay there, gasping, he started to sense more trolls, moving around him. Of course there would be more trolls. A youngster like that wouldn't be alone. Now he heard their massive movements, their leathery feet scuffing in the dirt – a few snatches of song, like samples of an opera in Klingon.

‘Well,' he said. His own voice sounded odd, very scratchy; his mouth felt Para-Venusian dry. ‘I sure could do with another sip of that water.'

As if in response another troll loomed over him. This was an adult, a big male, not old; it wasn't Sancho. The male peered curiously into Joshua's eyes, and poked his cheek hard enough to hurt.

‘Ow!'

‘Hoo!'

He raised Joshua up, a little more gently this time, to a half-sitting position. Joshua glimpsed the young troll behind the male, and a female, standing there, looking on with what seemed like curiosity, if not concern. Beside her was another cub, what looked like a female to Joshua, though with all that black fur it was hard to tell the sex even with the adults. She clung to the leg of the adult female, as if she was shy. This could be a family. He knew that trolls in the wild could be monogamous, with little family groups sticking together within the larger bands of dozens or more. As far as he knew, nobody was sure if the adult males in each ‘family' actually were the biological fathers of the offspring they cared for.

All this was set against a nondescript background: a dusty plain, a small copse with fruit bushes sprouting at its periphery, what sounded like a stream flowing not far away. Good country, if you were a troll. Joshua could still be in the world where he'd started building his stockade, or he could be far away.

Wham
. Without warning, food was rammed into his mouth – a slab of bloody meat, some kind of vegetable. The adult male was feeding him, roughly, but it felt like he'd been punched, and his mouth was suddenly so full he thought he would choke.

He raised his hand and managed to yank out the bulk of the food. He dropped the meat in the dirt; it could be raw elephant for all he knew. But then, more cautiously, he picked up the vegetables, a broken-up root like raw potato, something green and tangled, something else soft and red – a kind of fruit. As he began to chew on the root he felt ravenously hungry. ‘My compliments on the side salad.' The big male, still supporting him, tried to stuff more food into his mouth. But Joshua blocked the move, and instead picked out manageable chunks from the male's offering with his own hand.

The female, with the two cubs, crept closer, watching him. He was aware too of a wider band, more trolls at the edge of his vision, staring curiously. It struck him that maybe they weren't used to seeing humans as
old
as he was.

‘I'm grateful,' he said around chunks of food, still chewing. ‘I don't know how I got here. I guess my buddy Sancho dumped me on you, and I don't see him around anywhere . . .' He sighed. ‘But I have a feeling I'm going to be imposing on you a while longer. And I can't call you “adult male” or “non-specific-gender cub”. You're Patrick.' He pointed to the adult. ‘You, the mother, you're Sally. I knew a Sally once . . . The boy is Matt, the girl is Liz. Where the hell did I get those names?' He shook his head. He pointed to his own chest. ‘And I'm Joshua Valienté. Look me up in the long call.'

Then he plucked up his courage, and, moving with caution, looked down at his damaged leg for the first time. To his huge relief it looked straight, more or less. His trousers were, however, shredded even worse than he remembered. The leg wasn't splinted, of course, or bandaged, and from the waves of pain he felt as he moved, he evidently hadn't been treated with anything resembling an anaesthetic.

But if he could get the leg healed enough that he could stand unaided – and if he stayed alive – he had a reasonable prospect of stepping back to some inhabited world. And once back at Valhalla or a Low Earth, he could get some decent corrective surgery.

If.

He looked into the faces of the watching trolls. Patrick's face crumpled quizzically. ‘Oh, for a troll-call. Look, I suspect you saved my life. Thank you . . .'

Suddenly a wave of nausea caused his stomach to clench. He rolled away from Patrick, the adult male, despite flares of pain from his leg, and painfully vomited the half-chewed meal he'd consumed.

Then he sat back, cradled in Patrick's arms once again. Waves of heat pulsed through his body, his head. ‘Shit. I got infected. No surprise, I guess.'

Beyond Sally, he saw a flash of spacesuit silver in the dirt.

He squinted, cursing elderly eyes, trying to see more clearly, trying to sit up. The silver scrap was an emergency blanket. Heaped in the dirt beside it he made out other gear: his desert-camouflage pack, his outer coat, his aerogel mattress, his sleeping bag, the glint of his knives. It looked like Sancho had had the wit to empty out his stockade and bring his stuff here. Again his chances of living through this had just got incrementally better.

‘Sancho, you're my hero.'

‘Ha?'

‘And spacesuit silver! I knew there had to be a reason that was bugging me. I guess I saw it out of the corner of my half-asleep eye. Patrick. Help me. Please bring over all that stuff . . .'

It took some anxious sign language to get the message across. It was the male cub, Matt, in fact, who got it first, and soon the family were working together to lug over the gear. The human artefacts looked tiny in their big hands.

By now Joshua was starting to feel dizzy, nauseous and seriously thirsty. He tried to prioritize, to do what he needed to do before the incoming tide of delirium rolled over him. First he gathered all the gear under the survival blanket, for protection from the weather. Then he dug a small radio transmitter out of his pack, set it in the sunlight for power, and started it broadcasting short-wave radio pleas for assistance. If anybody happened to come through this world, they ought to hear it – if they were listening, unlike most combers these days, and if they could be bothered to help. A long shot but better than none.

Then he found some antibiotics and gobbled them down dry.

He was almost finished. He found it hard to concentrate. But there was one more big job he needed to get done before he succumbed to the darkness.

Patrick and Matt were still here, father and son, curiously poking at the heap of gear. He grabbed their arms, and made them look at him. ‘I need to fix my leg. If I roll around while I'm ill, I could snap the damn bone again. And with a splint the chances of it healing straight are much better.' He rummaged through his pack. ‘I have this elasticized bandage. I'll show you what to do. But I need you to bring me some planks. Timbers. Straight branches . . .'

He was babbling. They were staring at him entirely without comprehension. He went into a sign-language pantomime, grabbing a couple of twigs from the ground nearby and pressing them against his leg, gesturing at the forest clump.

Again it was Matt who got the idea first, and Joshua wondered if he'd had some exposure to humans before.

It seemed to take for ever for them to find and bring over a couple of suitable branches. Joshua chugged a pep pill to stay conscious a little longer. He considered sacrificing one of his precious ampoules of morphine. No, he'd survived without that so far; he had no idea what was yet to come before he got out of here . . .

When Patrick started wrapping the bandages tight around the splinted leg, the pain was astounding, even compared to what had gone before. It wasn't just the superhuman strength but his careless rough handling that made it so bad. Patrick, Joshua knew, was doing his best. Joshua managed to sit up, and pushed and prodded, trying to make sure the bandages weren't too tight; that way lay a dead leg and gangrene.

At last he lay back, and spat out the bit of wood he'd clamped between his teeth. ‘OK, it's my fault, Agnes! You warned me.' His words dissolved into a scream as Patrick put the big muscles of his back into yanking the bandage. ‘I asked for it. My bad, OK? Just make it stop! Make it stop! . . .'

20

D
URING THAT SUMMER
of 2070, as Joshua Valienté endured a sabbatical that had become a stranding, and Dev Bilaniuk and Lee Malone glimpsed the future of mankind at the Grange, Nelson Azikiwe undertook a long journey of his own. A long stepwise journey, despite the discomfort of stepping itself. But it was worth it, for Nelson. For he went in search of a grandson he had only just discovered existed.

Despite his elderly eyes, Nelson was one of the first to spot the storm approaching this living island, this Traverser.

He was sitting on the soft, pale sand of the island's north beach – or rather, on the sand-covered flank that this island-like creature chose to present to the low northern sun that morning. The Traverser, which Lobsang, its discoverer, had chosen to call Second Person Singular during Nelson's first visit all of thirty years ago, was always in motion, always responding to currents and breezes, to the cycle of the seasons – always underway, following its own imperatives.

The sea stretched before Nelson, small waves lapping at the shore, further out placid and flat and a deep rich blue: placid for now, anyhow. This was the Tasman Sea, and somewhere to the east was New Zealand – or rather an uninhabited footprint of the Datum island group of that name. This balmy world was seven hundred thousand steps West of Datum Earth.

And above the island, patiently station-keeping under the control of its onboard AI, hovered the small two-person twain that had carried Nelson all this way. Sleek, glittering with solar-energy panels, the twain was a reminder that Nelson did not belong here, that his own home was far distant, around the curve of the planet and many steps away along the mysterious chain of the Long Earth. But for now, here he sat, on this beach that wasn't a beach, with his son, Sam. A son he hadn't known existed until a few months ago.

Sam was twenty-nine years old, almost as dark as his father, naked to the waist and looking as fit as a decathlete. Now he squinted up in the air. ‘Your ship moving. Knows storm coming.' He pointed north.

‘
The
storm
is
coming . . . Never mind.' Since he'd arrived at the island, Nelson had learned that as he'd grown up Sam had always been made aware by his mother, an island-born woman called Cassie, that his father was not one of the other men of the island, but had been the ‘han'some clever fella' who had visited all those years ago, and, only once, had walked into the jungle with her . . . Cassie had done her best, with the limited resources available to her, to give Sam enough of an education that he would be able to converse with his father when Nelson returned, as Cassie always had faith that he would. She'd done a good job, and it wasn't Nelson's place to pick holes in the young man's grammar. And besides, Sam's native language was a perfectly respectable creole, dominated by English but laced with many other tongues. It was Nelson's failing that he couldn't speak the local language, not the other way around.

Now Sam pointed, scanning his finger along the northern horizon. ‘See. Black smudge?'

‘It seems so far away. Harmless.'

‘Far, not harmless, here soon. Sky ship turn to face wind?'

‘If it needs to it will fly up above the weather . . . Do we have to shelter?'

‘Oh, island look after us, no worries.'

And Sam meant that literally. Sitting here on this authentic-seeming beach, with the island under Nelson feeling every bit as solid as its geological counterparts, it was almost impossible to believe that the island was no island, no inanimate lump of coral or rock, but a living thing, evidently sentient to some degree, and capable of caring for the cargo of living creatures that dwelt on its back – including generations of human beings. Yet you only had to be here for a few days to observe for yourself that that was true.

He was maundering again. Sam was watching him patiently.

‘I'm sorry, Sam. Off with the fairies.'

‘Show you.'

‘Yes?'

Sam reached into the pocket of his trousers, an elderly pair of jeans long faded to blue-white. He produced a small figurine and passed it to Nelson.

Nelson cradled it, turned it over. It was a slim form carved in ivory – well, there were dwarf elephants, even mammoths, on this island, and when they died they would bequeath plenty of ivory for such purposes. The limbs were mere suggestive scratches, but the face was a more detailed cartoon. And there was a splash of some red pigment in the hair.

Nelson felt a warm shock of recognition. ‘Cassie. And she's smiling.'

‘Yes.'

‘She always did wear red flowers in her hair, I remember that.' It was as if Nelson was back in his study when that avatar of Lobsang had first broken the news to him about his distant family. He was a very old man, he thought, suddenly subject to the most intense emotional experience of his life. ‘I never meant it to happen, you know.' He glanced at Sam. He felt ridiculously embarrassed to be discussing such matters as his son's conception with the man himself.

‘Mother say
she
meant it. As soon as you show up—'

‘Yes, yes, all right. And I was being pushed from the other direction too.'

‘By friend Lobsang? I know story.'

‘That's him. He implied it was almost my
duty
to get someone impregnated, as a donation to the gene pool of the island's human population. Ha! Well, in the end . . . It was love, Sam. Brief as it was, a singular moment as it was. Can you believe that?'