The Long Cosmos (23 page)

‘It's like a Boston New Year's,' Joshua said to himself, watching, bemused.

But though there was obviously a strong element of play here – and flirting, as a few male–female pairings would periodically spin off from the whole – Joshua was sure all this had something to do with the collective, that every gesture, every hoot and cry, was a thought being expressed or received.

In a way there was no such thing as a troll; there were only
the trolls
, the collective – the way no bee was a true individual, separate from the hive. And Joshua knew about bees, having spent many scary hours as a small boy helping Sister Regina maintain the Home's single hive. A troll band saw and sensed as a whole, and remembered through the dances and the long call. And this new behaviour he witnessed seemed to fit in with that. Beekeepers knew that drones from hives miles around would sometimes gather in a kind of congress, and urgently share information in their buzzing aerial dance. In the same way, maybe that was what was happening here – troll bands spread across miles, and across many Earths stepwise, sharing their intelligence of opportunity and threat.

‘Must tell Lobsang,' he said. ‘Always something new in the Long Earth.'

And, when a very young cub died of some condition Joshua could neither identify nor treat, he witnessed behaviours he had heard of before, when the cub was buried in a crude, scraped-out grave, and the band gathered round and scattered flower petals.

It was either his good fortune that the trolls happened to be sticking around during his recuperation, or else his even greater good fortune that they were choosing do so, that they were being kind to this raggedy old human with his busted leg.

More good fortune than he deserved, he thought in his blacker moments.

The trolls hadn't asked for him to show up, after all. And it was his own stupid fault he'd gotten himself injured. Out in the High Meggers there were plenty of humans who would have left him lying in the dirt, after having robbed him of anything worth carrying away. Even Sally Linsay might have abandoned him, he reflected with sour humour, seeing his death by starvation or between the jaws of some predator as a fitting reward for his carelessness. The Long Earth was a tough place, a raw place, a place that didn't owe you a living. In the end the dumb got winnowed out – and even the great Joshua Valienté, the best-known pioneer of them all, wasn't immune to that.

Except it wasn't happening that way. Thanks to the trolls.

He did want to think that he was giving something back to the trolls.

After all, they had a lot in common. Trolls and humans were believed to share a deep common ancestry that dated back to the African savannah on Datum Earth. The ancestors of the trolls had gone off into the Long Earth to become super-stepper hunters, while the ancestors of humans had hung around on the Datum and moved out across the continents, becoming clever survivors, banging rocks and splitting atoms. But, Joshua thought, they must share deep primal memories of those common early days – memories of the teeth of leopards. Here there were no leopards that Joshua had seen, but there were carnivores so ferocious that elephants had needed to evolve armour. Trolls were big, heavy, clever animals, but for all the complexity of their song, for all the power of their muscles, trolls were as naked in the wilderness as
Homo habilis
two million years earlier
.
He'd seen them in the dark, how they huddled together backed up against the rock face of the bluff. How they woke when noises came out of the night, and the parents snuggled their young closer. How a cloud of fear hung over the group.

So Joshua played his part to assuage that fear. He showed the trolls his tools, his knives, his small handguns, and what he could do with them. And he made sure there was a fire blazing at every sunset, a fire he and the trolls kept fed through the night.

‘Call me man-cub, Sancho.'

‘Hoo?'

So they stayed with him while he recovered, and conversely he stayed with them.

But he was not a troll.

The weeks and months wore on, and he was stuck out here on a voluntary sabbatical that had become an enforced exile.

In the end it was Helen he missed the most.

Looking back he felt bemused at the time he'd wasted, the time he'd been away from her. Their years seemed so brief, in the end. He would hold her diary, which had survived the months of his illness. ‘Helen,' he said, ‘if I get out of this fix I will come see you on Datum Madison, where you lie, if I have to hop there on a pogo stick to do it. I swear it.'

It was when he was in this mood that the old troll Sancho would come join him.

It was the middle of the day, and the sun was high. Joshua was sitting on top of the bluff, wearing a battered broad-brimmed hat and his shirt open.

It was the warmest it had been since before the winter, and the air was a flat, oppressive blanket. He could see a good bit of the landscape from up here, and nothing much was moving. Some of the trolls sat lolling in what shade the bluff offered, but most were out of sight, probably off food-gathering on some neighbouring world. Elephants were hanging around the river, further upstream, trumpeting thinly as they splashed water over their armoured faces.

And here came Sancho, carrying his translator troll-call, courtesy of Valhalla U. His ageing body heavy, he climbed the bluff stiffly – though not so stiffly as Joshua with his rigid right leg. Sancho sat down by Joshua, wrapped the spacesuit-silver blanket around his shoulders, and surveyed the landscape with a faint air of old-man disdain.

Then he reached out a hand like a boxing glove, in a silent request. Joshua sighed and handed over his sunglasses. ‘Just don't bend the damn frame again.'

‘Hoo,' said the troll, jamming the glasses on his wide face. Somehow, Joshua had to admit, the glasses suited him.

Sometimes they would sit side by side like this for hours, in silence, each chewing blades of grass. Like two old-fart boatmen by the Mississippi, Joshua mused, silently letting the hours wash by like the waters of the river itself.

And sometimes they spoke.

Sancho spat out a volume of greenish phlegm. ‘Alone.' He handed over the troll-call for Joshua's reply.

‘Who, me? Or you?'

‘Why alone why?'

Joshua shrugged. ‘I like to be alone. Or used to like it.'

The old troll pursed his lips and squinted, listening. Joshua always wondered how much of his meaning was getting through. You had to shout and hope with the troll-call.

‘Kid alone?'

‘Yeah. I was alone as a kid too. I had friends who cared for me. I think I'd bust the troll-call if I tried to explain Sister Agnes.'

‘Hoo.'

‘
You're
alone. I can see that. Where's your family?'

The troll spat again, wrapped his arm over his head like an orang-utan, and scratched a filthy armpit. ‘Family happy healthy hungry, far away. Babies with mom-and-pop. Mom-and-pop with babies. Old trolls, me, wander off. No babies, no mom-and-pop, wander off. This band, this band, this band.'

Joshua imagined a sub-clan of elderly, solitary trolls, their own cubs grown and independent, the females no longer fertile perhaps, wandering the stepwise landscape, not exactly alone – he guessed a true loner wouldn't survive long – but drifting from one band to another. Had humans ever observed this behaviour? They had probably just assumed the old members they saw in any given troll band were grandparents, even great-grandparents, hanging around to help out the younger generations. Even Lobsang might have fallen into that trap, watching the trolls in the restricted environment of his Low Earths reserve, where old folk such as Sancho wouldn't have had their usual freedom of movement.

Now Sancho tapped his skull. ‘Librarian.'

‘Yeah. You said that before. You're a Librarian. Is that what they called you at the college? What does it mean, Sancho?'

‘Big head. Lots of remember.'

‘Memory?'

‘Lots of remember. Remember for trolls. Old time, long time past. Weather. Before people.'

‘Hm. Before Step Day. When the golden age for trolls ended . . .'

‘Head full.'

‘Full of what? Memories, I guess. Stories? So is that how you earn your corn? You take your stories around the population?'

‘Librarian.'

Joshua smiled. ‘Yes, buddy. And I guess all you know is fed into the long call . . .'

He could see how useful such information could be to the trolls, as it would be for any human group. It was always worth cherishing a handful of old folk who could remember what they did the last time the once-a-decade flood came, or the big storm, or the famine, or the bad winter when there was a particular kind of mushroom you could find in the snow to keep you alive . . . Maybe in the case of the trolls there would be information from the deeper past, from generations ago. Memories of volcanic eruptions and quakes and even asteroid strikes, lessons about how trolls had lived through such disasters before. Joshua started to picture Sancho's mind as a cavern, deep and dark and mysterious, crammed with treasure, with information – with
remember
.

Lobsang had been a student of the trolls since the days of The Journey back in '30. Once Lobsang had told Joshua how culture, unlike an instinctive behaviour, was stored outside the genome, outside the body, beyond any one individual's memory. So human culture was stored in artefacts, books, tools, buildings, a whole heap of inventions and discoveries passed down from the past, there for each new generation to access. It was the same for trolls, except that everything
they
knew about the world was in the long call, the song that was outside the head of any one animal. Lobsang had spoken of the long call as analogous to a computing system, a vast, adaptable network of information encoded in the music.

Well, maybe the Librarians, tough old survivors and full of experience, were like high-density memory stores embedded in that evanescent network, deep caches of the wisdom of a species.

As Joshua reflected on this, Sancho patted his arm with odd tenderness. ‘Mom, pop, little kid alone, boo hoo. Old fart alone, who cares?'

The troll felt sorry for him, Joshua realized suddenly. This
animal
felt sorry for him. Resentment sparked briefly. Joshua had never been comfortable under the scrutiny of others, and certainly didn't welcome pity. But that feeling faded quickly. ‘You saved my life, old buddy. I guess you earned the right to feel that way.'

‘Boo hoo,' the old troll said gently. Then he wrapped his other arm over his head, and got to work cleaning out the opposite armpit.

That was when Joshua heard a dull droning noise, drifting down from the sky. It didn't sound like any kind of insect swarm, or pterosaur.

Sancho didn't seem perturbed.

‘That sounds to me like an aeroplane, old buddy.'

‘Hoo?'

‘Give me those things . . .' Joshua snatched the sunglasses back from the troll, and jammed them on his own face. He struggled to his feet and peered around, leaning on his crutch, hand over his eyes against the sun. The sound seemed to echo around the arid landscape. It took him a few seconds to spot the plane, a gleaming speck in the bone-dry sky. But it was heading his way now, maybe drawn by the silver gleam of the survival blanket.

When it flew over the bluff with a waggle of wings, Joshua could see the aircraft's smooth white hull, unmarked save for a registration number, and the stylized Black Corporation Buddhist-monk logo that marked a capability to fly stepwise. The wings were stubby, the tailplane fat, the main body a squat cylinder.

The trolls were profoundly uninterested.

But Joshua grinned. ‘Only rode in a plane like that once in my life. And I know who that must be.' Leaning precariously on the crutch, he took off his hat and waved it in the air. ‘Rod! Rod Valienté! Down here!'

31

T
HE PLANE LANDED
without fuss maybe a half-mile from the bluff. Joshua set off in that direction, hobbling on his home-made crutch.

Sancho and the other adult trolls displayed a supreme indifference to the miracle of technology that had suddenly appeared out of an empty sky. Matt, though, bounded ahead of Joshua towards the plane, a bundle of curiosity and energy on the dusty ground.

Matt had reached the plane by the time a hatch opened and Rod clambered out. He'd already changed out of his flight suit into a practical if faded shirt, traveller's jacket, jeans and a broad-brimmed hat, and he carried a heavy-looking white pack on his back. Matt jumped up and down before him, slapping himself on the head and rolling in the dust. Joshua could see his son kneel down, grinning, to speak to Matt, and then he took something from his pocket and threw it in the air. Matt caught it one-handed, hooted and rolled, and then scampered back towards the bluff.

Rod walked in and met his hobbling father not a hundred yards from the bluff. He slowed, somewhat warily, as if assessing Joshua's mood. ‘Hi, Dad.'

‘Rod.'

‘Look, Dad, I know I'm breaking your sabbatical. I can also see you're in trouble.' He patted the pack, which Joshua guessed contained medical supplies. ‘Well, I came prepared. You're either going to tell me I took my time getting here, or to piss off. Right?'

‘Rod—'

‘But I didn't come out looking for you on a whim, or just because you're overdue. I have some news for you—'

‘Shut your yap.' Joshua stumbled forward and embraced his son. Rod smelled of the plane, of engine oil and electricity and a new-carpet cabin smell. Joshua dreaded to think what
he
smelled like. ‘I am in trouble. I busted my damn leg. Thanks for coming, son.'

They broke, awkwardly, and began to plod, at Joshua's snail pace, back to the bluff.

If they were shy of each other, Matt was shy of neither of them. He came back, trailed by his sister Liz, and they both rolled and hooted alongside Rod as he walked. Rod dug into his pockets again. ‘Here, you guys, plenty of sugar for both of you.' They snatched the white lumps out of the air and crammed them into their broad mouths.