The Long Cosmos (31 page)

Sancho stroked its crushed skull, as if comforting it. Then he ripped a sliver of bark from the trunk and used it to slit open the creature's belly. When he offered Joshua a handful of raw meat, still warm and dripping, Joshua demurred. He had salted meat in his pack along with some of the survival rations from the plane. ‘I mean, if we could build a fire up here—'

Even without the troll-call, Sancho seemed to pick up on that word:
fire
. He made urgent sign-language gestures,
no, no
, and grabbed the call. ‘No fire! No fire!'

Joshua held his hands up. ‘It's OK, buddy, just a suggestion. No fire. I get it.'

Sancho seemed pacified, but he kept his eye on Joshua as he chewed on his gator meat, as if Joshua might suddenly whip out a blowtorch.

Once they'd eaten, with the light diminishing, they huddled up together, side by side, troll and human under survival blanket and sleeping bag respectively. Despite the persistent urgency to keep looking for Rod, Joshua felt somewhat relieved to have stopped moving; even as a passenger he felt exhausted.

And he still had that nagging breathlessness. How
high
were they? He thought back to Denver and its footprints: the mile-high city. Whenever he'd flown in there it had always taken him a couple of hours to adjust to the thinner air. Was it possible they were
that
high? Sancho had been climbing steadily and swiftly for hours. And even if they were a mile high, it was clear they were nowhere near the top of this tremendous tree . . .

A
tree
, miles high? And not just one mighty Yggdrasil, there was evidently a forest of them. How was that even physically possible?

But, mile high or not, he was surrounded by life, all around him and high in the unseen canopy that still lay above him. Lying there in the gathering dark he thought he saw some animal moving through the branches, a shadow against shadows – not a squirrel, or squirrel analogue, not a climbing primate type as you might expect – this looked like a
deer
to Joshua, a big quadruped animal skipping lightly along the thick branches. And he heard turbulent ripples in that pond nestling in the crook of the branch, something as big as that alligator Sancho had taken or even larger, hunting in its mile-high domain. This was a vertical landscape.

Trees!

Trees had been Joshua Valienté's companions since Step Day itself, when, as a thirteen-year-old boy, he had found himself stepping across from a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin, into forest. It was the same everywhere, in fact. Most Earths were great tumbled forests. Mankind had only arisen on Datum Earth – and only on the Datum was the world forest gone, the legacy of millennia of patient clearances by smart axe-wielding apes.

But Joshua had learned, with the help of Sister Georgina in the beginning, that trees were more than just background scenery. Their trunks stored much of the world's biological matter, they fed whole ecologies thanks to roots that penetrated water sources hidden deep underground, and just as he'd seen here their crevices and cracks provided homes for animals and insects and even other plants. All this was fed ultimately by the energy of the sunlight falling on the leaves of the canopy. On this world the logic of the tree seemed to have progressed as far as it could, with the ground more or less abandoned save for the world-trees' mighty roots.

But if he was already something like a mile above the ground, how high could the ultimate canopy be? He knew there were limits to the size of trees, on the Datum anyhow. Sequoias, say, could grow no higher than the structure of their wood could sustain the load of the trunk above it, and no higher than it was possible for the tree's internal structures to lift water from the ground up to the leaves. So you were looking at two, three hundred feet. Not a
mile.

Maybe these trees worked by some other logic. They had to.

And
where
was he?

He remembered one Joker he and Lobsang and Sally had found during The Journey, their first pioneering expedition into the High Meggers forty years ago. That had been somewhere between the Rectangles and the Gap, as he recalled the milestones from that tremendous trip: a world where, with the
Mark Twain
high in the clouds, leaf-laden branches had scraped the keel . . . And he had a vague memory of an account of one of Maggie Kauffman's Navytwain expeditions into the unknown reaches of the extreme Long Earth. Somewhere the best part of a quarter of a billion steps out, they'd made a sighting of a world, or a band of worlds, studded by immense trees. Had they been as big as these specimens, though? Of course the wisdom was that trolls and other stepping hominids had not spread further than Gap worlds in either direction, contained by those natural vacuum traps to West and East. So much for that; give trolls a soft-place capability and they could be anywhere. Joshua imagined little clusters of trolls dotted throughout the greater Long Earth, spreading out stepwise from wherever their favoured soft places delivered them . . .

Could Joshua
really
have come that far out with Sancho and his super-stepping? Maybe so. He seemed to have left his usual feeling of location in the Long Earth back on the river bank with Patrick and Matt and the rest, but he
sensed
he was well beyond the High Meggers, wherever he was.

Don't question it, he told himself. Let someone smarter than you figure it out, one day. He wasn't Lobsang; Joshua's way was to experience, to cherish, not to analyse. And besides, nothing mattered save for his search for Rod.

‘It's like Step Day,' he said aloud. ‘Looking for the lost child in the stepwise forest. We're coming, son. You just hang on. We're coming.'

Sancho grumbled and snorted in his sleep.

42

T
HE NEXT DAY
was more of the same. More of the troll's steady climbing.

The
whole
day.

Joshua, clinging to Sancho's back like a child to its father, grew numbed. Out of condition, maybe still suffering the after-effects of the infection, he was barely aware of the world around him. And the troll climbed on and on, with a kind of liquid grace that belied his bulk. The air seemed to grow thinner with every breath, but Sancho was climbing just as vigorously as he had from the start.

The light grew brighter. Looking around, Joshua saw they were out of that bank of mist now – no, he saw, peering down over Sancho's shoulder, they had actually climbed above a
cloud layer
, out of which the mighty trunk of the tree rose up defiantly, reaching for the sky like a space elevator. They had evidently left behind that first layer of canopy too, for the trunks of this tree's companions stood all around, bare and clean, rising from the clouds. He vaguely remembered reading, probably with some Sister or other, that the carbon that went into making all that wood in a tree's trunk came from the air. If so these trees represented one hell of a carbon store. Perhaps, in fact, this was naturally a world high in carbon dioxide, and the trees had evolved in response.

And here he was speculating on evolution while gasping like a beached fish and clinging to a troll's hairy back. ‘Stick to the point, Joshua.'

They seemed also to have clambered above most of the vertical wildlife that the tree nurtured. The few branches they passed were sparse and stubby, and in the crisp light the puddle-lakes like the one where they had spent the night were now scarce. Joshua supposed that they were above much of the weather here too; rainfall would be rare.

But Sancho, without food and water almost since they had woken, seemed indifferent. He just climbed on and on.

Joshua could only endure. He clung to Sancho's back, his face buried in thick black troll hair.

When Sancho next stopped, Joshua groggily saw that the sun was setting again. Below him were more layers of clouds – cirrus clouds this time, Joshua thought, a fine layer through which could be glimpsed deeper cloudscapes below, all of them threaded by the trunks of the trees – and above him, beyond the branches, only an astronaut's sky, deep blue, specked by a handful of brilliant stars, empty of cloud save for only the palest icy streak.

He was dimly aware that Sancho was untying the ropes. He gently unloaded Joshua and settled him in a crook of a branch. Beyond him the curious faces of other trolls hung like moons (
what
other trolls?). Joshua was confused, nauseous, breathless – and cold, and Sancho seemed to realize that, for with rough kindness he tucked the sleeping bag around Joshua's inert body.

Joshua lay back. Above him those branches combined in a canopy draped with huge leaves, like blankets spread out to dry in the sun. A second canopy, then. Why not? Up here in the clear cloudless air the conditions for photosynthesis must be ideal, he thought dimly, ideal for gathering the unending sunlight from a cloud-free sky – a harvest that nourished the growth of all he had seen below him, in the miles of their ascent.

Miles?

Could that really be true? How high were the highest cirrus clouds? Twenty, thirty thousand feet? Rod the pilot would know. He was maybe three, four miles high, then. At least. And he could see, leaning back, that the trunk of this vast tree went on even beyond this canopy layer, on up towards the blue-sky heaven. How tall could this tree grow?
Five
miles?

Joshua laughed. ‘Sally, you should be here to see this.'

And there were trolls up here.

In the declining light he saw now the shadows of adults and cubs, big heavy trolls with big deep chests, moving cautiously. Maybe they lived up here permanently and their bodies had adapted to the thin air. There were whole families up here. They were eating fruit and grubs and what looked like haunches of meat, and they drank water from cupped leaves. As he watched them feed, he thought they were careful not to consume anything of the tree itself. He'd read somewhere that some trees, oaks for instance, evolved poisons against persistent herbivores.

Silhouetted against the deepening purple of the sky, they looked like heavy fruit, hanging from these impossible branches, miles high. And he could clearly hear, floating on the still air, the trolls' eternal song.

‘Yes, you should be here, Sally. You'd love it.'

He pulled the blanket closer over him, tugged his hat down over his ears, and tried to sleep.

He woke once in the night, growlingly thirsty. He tried to call for Sancho, but his voice was a scrape.

He raised his head. All around him the trolls were visible in the light of the brilliant stars, huge mounds huddled together as they slept. When he called again for Sancho, a heavy hand touched his shoulder. He turned to see Sancho's heavy, rather mournful face.

‘Water . . .'

Joshua expected Sancho to go to the medical pack for one of Joshua's flasks. Instead he held up a kind of greenish sac, an organic object, oddly streamlined – it was like a teardrop, Joshua thought, heavy with liquid within. Sancho expertly ripped a hole in this with thumb and forefinger, held it up over Joshua's mouth, and clear, cold water trickled on to his tongue. When the sac was empty, Sancho just held it up and let it go.

And the empty sac sailed up into the air, up over Sancho's head, until it was lost against the details of the branches above.

Somehow this didn't seem at all surprising to Joshua, in this fantastical place. What else were things supposed to do but float off into the sky? He patted Sancho's shoulder in thanks, and settled down to sleep again.

43

W
HEN HE WOKE
, in deep-blue daylight, his head felt much clearer, his thoughts sharper, the vague nausea that had plagued him receded. Evidently he was adapting to the altitude – adapting suspiciously well, in fact. Maybe this world was more oxygen-rich than the Datum. After all, a planet full of giant trees could well have a messed-up atmosphere. He hoped Maggie Kauffman would get somebody sent back here to study the place properly some day.

In the meantime he badly needed a piss, more water, and food, in that order. He sat up – but too sharply, and his head swam briefly. A strong troll arm wrapped around his shoulders, to save him from falling back: Sancho, of course. And, looking beyond Sancho, Joshua saw that the rest of the trolls seemed to be congregated on one long, fat branch.

Joshua grinned, and gently pushed Sancho's arm away. ‘Thanks, buddy. Let me see if I can water this mule by myself.' He made sure the rope around his waist was tied tight to the branch, then cautiously stood, bracing himself against the rough surface of the trunk wall. Then, facing away from Sancho, he unbuttoned and released the flow. His urine splashed against huge branches and fell in yellow droplets down into the deep air, and Joshua wondered vaguely how deep they would reach before evaporating, or maybe freezing out. Yellow hail!

And how would it be if he did stumble, if his rope failed, if
he
fell from here? He would soon reach terminal velocity even in this thin air. It would surely take many minutes to reach the ground, sailing down past the trunk of this sky tree, crashing through layers of branches and startling the aerial fauna of this strange forest. Or maybe he wouldn't fall at all. Perhaps he would just float up into the sky, like—

The memory came back to him, clear and sharp. And as he stood here on one leg, before the wall of the trunk, he could swear he heard a kind of gurgle, as if from buried pipework, water rising through some kind of plumbing.

He turned, almost falling in the process, grabbed Sancho's shoulders, and reached for the troll-call in his pack. ‘Sancho. Water.'

‘Fire,' said the troll gravely.

‘What? No, Sancho, water. Like the pod you fed me with last night.'

Sancho pursed huge lips, then reached into the crook of a branchlet and produced a green sac, one of a stash, of the kind he'd given Joshua before.