The Long Earth (31 page)

‘Of course, it was rather a shock, you know, and I remember thinking, I don’t even know what
state
I’m in! I’m not in Washington any more, that’s for sure. I wondered if I should have brought a little dog and a pair of red shoes! And then the first person I met here was François Montecute, who really was kind of cute like his name, who really did turn my head, and who really was an artist between the sheets if you get my drift.’ She told them this with the cheerful directness of an elderly lady who is determined to make young people aware that she has had sex, too, and by the sound of it quite a considerable amount.

There was a certain contented aura about Mrs Montecute, and it seemed to Joshua that everyone in Happy Landings shared it, to some extent. It was hard to pin down.

Sally said when he tried to express this, ‘I know what you mean. Everybody seems so, well, sensible. I have come here many times and it’s always the same. You never get complaints, or competitiveness. They don’t need government, not really. You could say that Mayor Spencer is the first among equals. When there is any big project to be undertaken, they just knuckle down and get on with it.’

Joshua said, ‘It all feels a bit Stepford Wives to me.’

Sally laughed. ‘It bothers you, does it? A happy human community
bothers
Joshua Valienté, the great loner who’s barely human himself. Well, it is – odd. But in a positive way. I am not talking about telepathy or any of that kind of shit.’

Joshua grinned. ‘As opposed to the hopping from one world to another at a whim kind of shit?’

Sally said, ‘OK, I get your point, but you know what I mean. It’s
all
so
nice
. I’ve talked to them about it and they say it’s the fresh air; no crowding, plenty to eat, no unfair taxes, yada, yada, yada …’

‘Or maybe it’s the trolls,’ Joshua said bluntly. ‘Trolls and humans, mixed up together.’

‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘Sometimes I wonder …’

‘What do you wonder?’

‘I wonder if there’s something so big going on here that even Lobsang would have to recalibrate his thinking. Just a hunch, for now. I’m just suspicious. But then a stepper who isn’t suspicious is soon a dead stepper.’

39

JOSHUA ROSE EARLY
the next morning and explored further, alone. People were friendly and ready to walk, chat and even hand him pottery mugs of lemonade. He overcame his natural inclination to silence, and talked back, and listened.

The area was pretty well homesteaded by now, he learned, with thriving settlements at the coast and along the river valleys. None of them had many more than a couple of hundred inhabitants, though people would get together on festival days – or when interesting visitors showed up, such as Lobsang with his airship. And in response to the greater influx of newcomers in recent decades, the community had had to expand, new settlements seeding across the countryside.

The reason this rapid expansion had been possible, he learned, was the trolls. Trolls were useful, trolls were friendly, companionable – and, crucially, ever ready to lift a heavy load, an exercise they took much delight in. This donation of muscle power had helped the colonists here overcome their lack of manpower, draught animals and machinery.

But in a sense the reason for all the building work, the growth of the new settlements,
was
the trolls. Trolls, he discovered, were allergic to crowds – that is to say, crowds of humans. No matter how many trolls there were, they would get nervous if there were more than one thousand, eight hundred and ninety humans in the immediate vicinity, apparently a number found by careful experimentation in the past. They didn’t get mad, they just got
going
, not coming back, sheepishly, until a few dozen humans had kindly found somewhere else to be, and the numbers dropped down under the limit. But as the goodwill of trolls was immensely valuable, Happy Landings was spreading southwards as a confederacy of small troll-friendly townships. This was hardly inconvenient, since you could always walk to the next township in a matter of minutes, and there was plenty of room in this riverine landscape for more.

Later that morning Joshua learned that this fact, the size of the townships, was of intense interest to a young man called Henry. He had been raised among Amish until one day he stepped into a soft place and landed, as it were, among a different kind of chosen. It seemed to Joshua that Henry had come to terms with this elevation quite happily. He explained to Joshua that back home his people had always reckoned that around a hundred and fifty people was just the right size for a caring community, and so he felt at home here. He also thought, however, that he had died, and that Happy Landings was, if not heaven, at least a staging post for the journey onwards. Being dead didn’t seem to bother him very much. He had his place in this little society: he was a good husbandman, gentle around animals and particularly fond of trolls.

And that was why, this morning, when at Lobsang’s request Joshua brought Henry up to the airship with a few trolls, Henry believed he had ascended to heaven at last, and was speaking to God. There are some things which you don’t put up with when you have been brought up by nuns, even if they are nuns like Sister Agnes. Joshua tried to disabuse Henry of the belief that the impressive saffron-clad personage he met after travelling into the sky was, in fact, God. But given Lobsang’s ego and air of omni-competence there was little to dissuade him.

Lobsang, meanwhile, was burning to learn more about the language of the trolls. And that was why now, on the observation deck, there were already a couple of female trolls flanking
Lobsang’s
ambulant unit, and four or five juveniles having a lot of fun playing with Shi-mi. Henry had been brought along to help calm the trolls – that had actually been Sally’s suggestion – but nothing seemed to faze a Happy Landings troll. They had trotted into the elevator quite happily, and once on board seemed to take everything in their great, flat-footed stride, including an artificial man and a robot cat.

Lobsang said, ‘Trolls are of course mammals. And mammalian creatures love and cherish their offspring – well, for the most part. Mothers teach their children. And so I am learning like a child, with baby steps, as it were. As I myself play the part of a child, I feel I can with care derive a certain elementary vocabulary: good, bad, up, down. And thus we make progress.’

He was enjoying this, Joshua could tell. ‘You’re the troll whisperer, Lobsang.’

But Lobsang took no notice of that and walked among his happy band of trolls. ‘Please note, I offer a nice shiny ball. Good! Joshua, observe the sounds of appreciation and interest. See the pretty shiny thing! And now, I take it away. Ah, the sounds of sadness and privation, very good. But note that the adult female is alert, emitting sounds of uncertainty, with just a subtle hint that were I to try anything really nasty with her favourite bag of woolliness she would quite likely rip off my arm and beat me to death with the wet end. Splendid! Joshua, see, I give the ball back to the pup; now mother is less apprehensive, and all is sweetness and light once more.’

And it was, thought Joshua. The
Mark Twain
, anchored over Happy Landings, moved gently in a sunlit breeze, with just enough creaking from the woodwork to lull you almost as if you were in a hammock. A pleasant place with happy, happy trolls.

The spell was broken when Lobsang asked, ‘Henry, could you provide a dead troll, do you think?’

Henry looked deeply uncomfortable. When he spoke he had an odd, lilting accent. ‘Mister, if one of them dies they scrape out a
very
deep hole and bury the body, scattering flowers upon it beforehand to ensure the resurrection, I do believe.’

‘Ah, then I suppose that a forensic dissection is out of the question? I feared so … I beg your pardon,’ he added, with what struck Joshua as unusual tact for him. ‘I intended no disrespect. But the scientific value would be high. I am confronted with a hitherto unknown species which, despite the lack of what we are pleased to call civilization, and lacking our form of intelligence, has a method of communication of an intricacy and depth unrivalled among humanity until the expansion of the internet. Thanks to this facility I believe that anything interesting and useful that a troll learns very shortly becomes known to every other troll. They
appear
to have expanded frontal lobes, I suspect mostly utilized to store and process memory, both personal and species-wide … Oh, for a body to dissect! Well, lacking that, I will do the best I can, which will be the best that there is.’

Henry laughed. ‘You don’t believe in modesty, do you, Mr Lobsang?’

‘Absolutely not, Henry. Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.’

Joshua threw a ball towards a baby troll. ‘Neanderthals put flowers on the bodies of their dead too. I’m no expert, I saw it on the Discovery Channel. Are the trolls nearly human, then?’ He had the sense to duck as the exuberant return from the pup sailed over his head and splintered the bulkhead.

‘The young will experiment,’ remarked Lobsang. ‘“Nearly human” is right, Joshua. Like the dolphins, orang-utans and, if I am being charitable, the rest of the higher apes. It’s a tiny gap between us and them. And nobody knows how
Homo sapiens
became, well, sapient. Sally, do the trolls use tools?’

She looked up from her playing. ‘Oh, yes. Away from humans I’ve seen them use sticks and stones as improvised tools. And if you bring a fresh band to Happy Landings, and if they see a guy fixing a weir in the river, a troll might pick up a handsaw and help him,
if
he’s shown what to do. By the end of the evening, every troll in that band will know how to do it.’

Lobsang patted a troll. ‘So it’s a case of monkey see, monkey do.’

Sally said, ‘No, it’s a case of troll see, troll sit down, troll think about things and then, if it’s appropriate, troll make a half-decent lever or whatever and, by the end of that evening, troll tell other trolls about the usefulness of it. Their long chant is a troll Wikipedia, quite apart from anything else. If you want to find out anything like “Am I going to throw up if I eat this purple elephant?” then another troll will tell you.’

Joshua said, ‘Hang on. Are you telling me you’ve seen a purple elephant?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Sally. ‘But out in one of the Africas there is an elephant which, I swear, has the art of camouflage down to a tee. Somewhere out there in the Long Earth you’ll find almost anything you can imagine.’

‘“Anything you can imagine”,’ murmured Lobsang. ‘Interesting choice of phrase. Between ourselves, Sally, I can’t help feeling that the Long Earth as a whole has something approaching what I can only call a meta-organic component. Or perhaps meta-animistic.’

‘Hmph. Maybe,’ said Sally, scratching a troll’s scalp. ‘But the whole set-up irritates me. The Long Earth is too kind to us. It’s too pat! Just as we’ve trashed the Datum, just as we’ve wiped out most of the life we shared it with and are about to succumb to our own resource wars, shazam, an infinity of Earths opens up. What kind of God sets up a stunt like that?’

‘You object to this salvation?’ Lobsang asked. ‘You really are misanthropic, aren’t you, Sally?’

‘I’ve got a lot to be misanthropic about.’

Lobsang stroked his own trolls. ‘But perhaps it’s nothing to do with any kind of god. Sally, we – I mean humanity – are barely at the beginning of our enquiry into the Long Earth. Newton, you know, spoke of himself as a boy playing on a seashore, distracted by a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, while the ocean of truth
lay
undiscovered before him. Newton! We understand so little. Why should the universe open itself up to careful and dedicated enquiry at all? And why should it be so generous, so fecund, so nurturing of life, even intelligence? Perhaps in some way the Long Earth is an expression of that nurturing.’

‘If so, we don’t deserve it.’

‘Well, that’s a debate for another day … You know, my researches
will
be frustrated unless I can obtain the corpse of a troll.’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Sally.

Lobsang snapped back, ‘
Please
don’t tell me what to think. I think, therefore I am; it’s what I do. May I suggest that you two go and enjoy the pleasures of Happy Landings, and leave me in peace to converse with my friends? Whom I promise not to kill and dissect.’

On the access deck below, the elevator hatch slammed open, a clear enough hint that they should leave.

When they were on the ground again, Sally giggled. ‘He can get pretty ratty, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe.’ Joshua was faintly concerned. He’d never heard Lobsang sound quite so unstable.

‘Is there
really
a human being in there somewhere?’

‘Yes,’ said Joshua, flatly. ‘And you know there is, because you said
he
sounded ratty. You didn’t use the word
it
.’

‘Oh, very smart. Come on, let’s look around a few more happy homesteads.’

For Sally that evening, it was like greeting one long-lost friend after another. Joshua was happy to follow in her wake, trying to analyse his feelings about Happy Landings.

He
liked
the place. Why? Because it seemed, well, right somehow. Like it was where all mankind belonged, perhaps. Maybe that was because he too had some sense of the soft places, the soft routes all converging here, in Lobsang’s well of stability. The
maybes
in his mind annoyed him, however, as he walked alone. And the sense that he disliked Happy Landings as much as he liked it. As if he didn’t trust it.

He’d listened to Sally’s arguments with Lobsang – she was more voluble on these issues, if not necessarily any better informed – and he tried to make sense of all he was learning. Where
did
man belong? On the Datum, that was for sure, with ancestral fossils all the way down to bedrock. But now the human race was expanding at speed across the Long Earth, no matter what the governments thought, no matter about aegis; nobody could stop it, and certainly nobody could control it, no matter how many god-bothering spittle-flecked homealone tub-thumpers back on the Datum tried. You would run out of people before you ran out of Earths. But what was the point of it all? Sister Agnes used to tell him that the purpose of life was to be all that you could be – with a side helping, of course, of helping others to do the same. And maybe the Long Earth was a place where, as Lobsang might put it, human potentiality could be maximally expressed … Was there some sense in which that was what the Long Earth was
for
? To allow mankind to make the most of itself? And in the middle of this cosmic conundrum, here was Happy Landings, where the scatterlings of mankind drifted and sifted. What was
that
all about?