Lobsang led Joshua to a small fenced-off garden area. There were a couple of benches, a water fountain. And, under the broken canopy of a scattering of trees, the ground here was covered in moss, not grass, moss that glowed bright green in the low sunlight.
‘Take a seat if you like,’ Lobsang said. ‘Help yourself to water. It’s clean, from a freshwater spring. I should know; I have to clean the pipes.’ He got down stiffly on to his hands and knees and began to work his way across the moss lawn, plucking out stray blades of grass, like removing weeds. ‘“The Rare Old Mountain Dew”,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘The song the trolls are singing. An old Irish folk song. You know, it’s possible to date the first contact with humans of any given troll pack by the songs they sing. In this case, to the late nineteenth century. Do you remember Private Percy? I have carried out such an exercise, tentatively; the result is a kind of map of natural steppers in the pre-Willis Linsay era. Though of course it’s not always possible to track back the trolls’ own wanderings.’
‘What did you mean by your trolls, Lobsang?’
He shuffled forward, working at the lawn patiently. ‘A figure of speech. I found this pack in a Corn Belt world; I invited them to follow me here, as best I could. There are other groups here. Of course they are no more my trolls than Shi-mi was my cat, on the Mark Twain. But I have created a reserve here, and on the neighbouring worlds, many square miles in extent and many worlds deep. I have kept out humanity and done my best to make the trolls, this pack and others, feel welcome. I have been striving to study them, Joshua. Well, you know that I have been pursuing that project for ten years, since our journey on the Twain and our visit to Happy Landings. Here I can watch them in conditions approaching their wild state.’
‘And is that the reason for the humble pose, Lobsang? You, a superhuman entity that spans two million worlds, reduced to this?’
He smiled, not interrupting the rhythm of his work. ‘Actually, yes, it does help with the trolls. I am a constant presence but not an alarming one. But I would not use words like “reduced”. Not around Sister Agnes anyhow. In her eyes I am expanding my personality.’
‘Ah. This was her idea, was it?’
‘I’d got too big for my boots, she says.’
‘That sounds like Agnes.’
‘If I wanted to be part of humanity, I had to become embedded in humanity. Down in the dirt, at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak.’
‘And you went along with it?’
‘Well, there wasn’t much point going to all the trouble of reincarnating the woman if I’m not going to listen to her advice, was there? This is why I felt I needed her, Joshua. Or someone like her. Someone with the sense and moral authority to whisper doubts in my ear.’
‘Is it working?’
‘I’ve certainly learned a lot. Such as, how much less ornamental an ornamental garden seems if you’re the one who has to sweep up the leaves. How to handle a broom, which requires a certain two-handed dexterity and a kind of rolling energy-conservation strategy. And it’s remarkable how many corners you discover there are in the world. Some pan-dimensional paradox, perhaps. But there are chores I particularly enjoy. Feeding the carp. Pruning the cherry trees . . .’
Joshua imagined Agnes laughing her reincarnated head off. But he didn’t feel particularly amused.
Lobsang was aware of his stillness. ‘Ah. The old anger still burns, I see.’
‘What do you expect?’
It had been ten years ago, after he had returned from his journey with a lost avatar of Lobsang to the reaches of the Long Earth, to find Madison a blistered ruin, destroyed by a fanatic’s backpack nuke. He had barely been able to bring himself to speak to Lobsang since.
‘You still believe I could have stopped it,’ Lobsang said gently. ‘But I was not even there. I was with you.’
‘Not all of you . . .’
Lobsang, by nature a distributed personality, had always claimed that the essence of himself had travelled with Joshua into the far stepwise worlds – and that essential core of him had not returned. Whatever Joshua spoke to now was another Lobsang, another personality locus, partially synched with the residual Mark Twain copy thanks to memory stores Joshua had brought back. Another Lobsang – not the same – and not the Lobsang Joshua had known, who presumably still existed far away. But this was the Lobsang who had witnessed the destruction of Madison, and had stood by.
‘Even then, when the Twain returned, ten years ago, you were . . .’ Joshua groped for the old religious word. ‘Immanent. You suffused the world. Or so you claimed. Yet you let those nutjobs walk into the city with a nuke, you let Jansson and the other cops run around trying to find them, while all the time—’
Lobsang nodded. ‘All the time I could have snapped my metaphorical fingers and put an end to it. Is that what you would have wanted?’
‘Well, if you could have, why didn’t you?’
‘You know, throughout the ages people have asked the same question of the Christian God. If He is omniscient and omnipotent, why would He allow the suffering of a single child? I am not God, Joshua.’
Joshua snorted. ‘You like to act that way, broom and sandals or not.’
‘I cannot see into the souls of men and women. I only see the surface. Sometimes I find I have not even imagined what was lying within, when it is eventually revealed through word or action. And even if I could have stopped those bombers – should I have? At what cost? How many would you have had me kill, in order to avert an action that would have remained entirely hypothetical? What would you have thought of me then? Humans have free will, Joshua. God will not, and I cannot, stop them harming each other. I think you should talk to Agnes about this.’
‘Why?’
‘She might help you find it in yourself to forgive me.’
Joshua thought he could never do that. But he had to put it aside, he knew. With an effort he focused on his surroundings. ‘So, the trolls. What have you learned about them?’
‘Oh, a great deal. Such as about their true language. Which has nothing to do with the crude signing and point-at-the-picture pidgin humans have imposed on them when they want to give them orders.’
‘But even that’s pretty powerful, Lobsang. You see clips of Mary saying “I will not” everywhere. On posters, in graffiti, online, even on animated T-shirts.’
‘That’s true, but it’s irresponsible for the tax rebels of Valhalla to mix up their symbols with those of the troll issue – conflating two separate conflicts, each of which spans the whole of the Long Earth.’ Lobsang sat back on his heels, convincingly sweating. ‘You know that their music is the heart of the trolls’ true language, Joshua. Surely that’s no surprise. After contact with humans they pick up our songs, but they make them their own, spinning endless variations . . . Music is a way for them to express the natural rhythms of their bodies, from their heartbeats, their breaths, the periodicity of their strides when they walk, even the sparking of the neurons in their heads, perhaps. And they use the rhythm of the song as a timing device, when they want to step together, or hunt. Galileo did that, you know.’
‘Galileo?’
‘He used music as a kind of clock to time his early experiments in mechanics. Pendulum swings and so on. And of course the trolls’ songs carry information. Even a simple disharmony can carry a warning. But there’s much more to it than that. Watch them now; I think they’re planning a hunt . . .’
The flickering of the stepping trolls, around the core group, was becoming more intense. The returning trolls would add a new line to the ongoing harmonies, loudly or softly, boldly or subtly; the song as a whole was evolving, adapting, and the other steppers seemed to react.
‘I plant food sources around the reservation,’ Lobsang said. ‘Across the stepwise worlds, I mean. Honeycombs, for instance, and animals for them to hunt, deer, rabbits. The pack works as a kind of single organism in seeking out such resources. Stepper scouts spread out
across the worlds, and if one finds a promising resource, a deer herd say, he or she will return and, well, sing about it.’
‘They’re still singing about getting drunk on Irish moonshine as far as I can tell.’
‘The core song is only the carrier wave, Joshua. I’ve done some acoustic analysis; there are variations in pitch, rhythm, even the phasing of the song scraps, that carry information about how far away the find is, how high a quality the food is. Other scouts will pick up on that, go and check it out, and come back with a confirming report, or maybe a contradiction. It’s an efficient way for the pack to explore all the local possibilities, and soon they’ll settle on a selection – often they’ll switch to another key, or another song altogether, to signal unanimity – and then they step away. Honeybees work this way; when they need to find a new location for the hive they send out scouts, who come back and dance out the data.
‘Trolls individually are not much smarter than chimps, but collectively they have evolved a way for the group to make intelligent, robust decisions. But it isn’t like human decision-making, or democracy. Even the kind of democracy you practise out in the boondocks.’ He smiled at Joshua. ‘I heard they made you a mayor.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Tightly contested election, was it?’
‘Oh, shut up. My main job is to moderate the town meeting. Hell-Knows-Where is still small enough for all the capable adults to gather on the common land, and debate the issues. We use Roberts’s Rules of Order.’
‘Very American. But maybe there’s something of the trolls’ collective wisdom in what you’re practising. Sooner that than suffer the errors of a single wrong-headed leader. The trolls almost always get it right, Joshua, even when I set them some pretty intricate puzzles to solve.’
‘Nobody’s observed this before, have they?’
‘Nobody’s had the patience. People always focus on what the trolls can do for them. Not on what the trolls want. Not on what they can do.’
‘How come our chimps don’t work that way? I mean, the ones on the Datum.’
‘I suspect it’s an evolutionary adaptation to stepping. Out in the Long Earth, where your food source may be near by geographically but a few worlds away stepwise, you need different search and cooperation strategies. The scouts have to spot the food, and return quickly with the news; the group must decide to move in on it rapidly, or not . . . It’s an environment which encourages efficient scouting, precise, detailed communication and quick, robust decision-making. Just as we see here.
‘But again, there’s still more to the music of the trolls than the needs of the moment. The long call, the essence of which is spread across the worlds, is a kind of encoded, shared wisdom. The call can last a month before it repeats, and is laden with ultrasonics, beyond human hearing altogether. But even more than that, it’s like a smearing out of consciousness – like nothing humans experience. I’ve been making efforts to decode it. You can imagine the challenge. I’m making some progress; I have a kind of translation suite, in various prototypes.’
‘If anybody can achieve that, you can, Lobsang.’
‘That’s true,’ Lobsang said complacently. ‘But right now, Joshua, the long call is vibrating with bad news for the trolls. Bad news because of us. Watch this.’ He stood, stiffly, and held up his hands. ‘I am trying to study the trolls in their natural state. I made of this group one basic request, though: that in return for the sanctuary I offer them – protection from humans – they stay here, until I release them. Verbally, I mean, they aren’t physically restrained in any way. Simple as that.’
‘And?’
‘And now, Joshua, I will release them.’ He clapped his hands, once, twice, sharply.
The trolls stopped singing – they stopped stepping, once the scouts had returned – and every head, save for the smallest infants’, turned to Lobsang. After a few heartbeats of silence they broke into a new song, a lilting ballad.
‘“Galway Bay”,’ Lobsang murmured to Joshua.
And then they began to step away, mothers with cubs first, males last for protection from predatory elves. In less than a minute they were gone, leaving only a scuffed patch of ground.
Joshua understood. ‘Gone with the rest, just as the reports say. All over the Long Earth.’
‘It’s true, Joshua. And that is what I wanted to speak to you about. Come. Let’s walk. I’m getting stiff from my weeding . . .’
Across the worlds, June skies remained clear, suns set in unison like synchronized swimmers diving, and dark gathered softly, slowly. On one world an owl hooted, for reasons best known to itself.
And Lobsang spoke further of the trolls.
‘They’ve become vital to the economy of the whole of mankind – including the Datum, if only indirectly. So the corporations, including the Black Corporation, are putting on a lot of pressure, wherever they can apply it, to get the trolls back.’
‘And back at work.’
‘Yes. Also there are security implications. Worse than the trolls disappearing, if they were to be seen to become an active threat to mankind, if a coordinated military response were provoked – we need to avoid that.
‘But there are other, more fundamental issues. The more I study trolls the more convinced I am that they are central to the ecology of the wider Long Earth itself. Like the elephants of the African savannah, they’ve been out there for millions of years, and for all that time they’ve been shaping the landscapes they inhabit – if only by eating so much of them. Sally Linsay taught me this; she’s studied them in the wild, in her way, far longer than I have. If you remove the big beasts from an ecology you can cause something called a trophic cascade. Knocking out the top of a food chain causes destabilization all the way down – booms and crashes of populations – and that can even cause a rise in greenhouse gases, and so on. A tremor of extinctions and eco-collapse all across the Long Earth, or at least as far as the trolls reach. And all because of us.’
Joshua grunted. ‘Makes you proud.’
‘The trouble is, Joshua, there’s no particular reason for the trolls to return. Before Step Day they had a long and deep contact with humans, and they were treated decently, and in turn they treated us decently.’
Joshua thought again of the story of Private Percy Blakeney, a veteran of the First World War trenches, lost and bewildered in the stepwise world into which he’d unconsciously tumbled, who had been kept alive by trolls for decades.
‘But since Step Day it’s been a different story. The exploitation of that cub for experiments at the Gap was only the tip of the iceberg.’
Joshua said, ‘Seems to me we’ll only get the trolls to come back if we can somehow persuade them that we will respect them. That we will listen when they say, “I will not,” as Mary did. Not an easy concept to convey to a humanoid . . .’
‘I know you tried to convince Senator Starling to campaign for them to be protected under US Aegis law. Even that’s not an insignificant challenge.’
‘Yeah, animal protection legislation is a mess.’
‘Not just that, Joshua. For one thing we’d have to decide what the trolls are.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, they don’t comfortably fit the old categories, do they? Of human versus animal, the distinction through which we believe we have dominion over nature. It’s as if, I think, we’d found a band of Homo habilis – something between us and the animal. In some ways the trolls are animal-like. They don’t wear clothes, they have no writing. They have no language that’s quite analogous to our own. They don’t use fire, as even Homo habilis probably did. And yet they have some very human traits. They make simple tools, out in the wild – poking sticks, stone hand-axes. They have strong family bonds, which is why it’s so easy to trap a troll mother, if you have her cub. They show compassion, even to humans. They do have their own language, in their use of music. And they laugh, Joshua. They laugh.
‘The distinction between human and animal is the c
lincher, you see. You can own an animal; you can kill it with impunity, aside from feeble anti-cruelty legislation. You can’t own a human, not in any civilized society, and killing a human is murder. So should we extend human rights to trolls?’
‘We have, kind of, in Hell-Knows-Where.’
‘Yes, but you’re more sane there than most. The basic quandary is: should we embrace them in our own category of being?’
‘Which is a challenge to our pride. Right?’
‘And more,’ Lobsang said. ‘A challenge to our very self-image. Meanwhile, there are others who argue that the trolls can’t be human because they have no sense of God. Well, not as far as we can tell. What would the Catholics, for instance, do about that? If trolls have souls, then they must be fallen, as we are – that is, tainted with original sin. In which case it is the duty of Catholics to go out and baptize them, to save them from limbo when they die. But, you see, if the trolls are actually animals, to baptize them is blasphemous. Apparently the Pope is preparing an encyclical on the subject. But in the short term the religious debates are just stirring everybody up even more.’
‘What does Agnes say?’
‘“Trolls like ice cream, and they laugh. Of course they’re bloody human, Lobsang. Now go get your broom, you missed a bit.”’
‘That’s Agnes, all right . . . Let’s get to the point. Sally dragged me out of my home and all the way to the Datum because of this. Of course Sally found us in the first place, ten years ago, because of a disturbance of trolls. When they fled from First Person Singular. Now you want me to go out again, don’t you? Out into the Long Earth, beyond the High Meggers. To do what? Find Sally and Jansson with Mary, I guess. Then what? Find where the trolls are hiding? Persuade them to come out, to join the human world again?’
The Long War Page 20