That irritated Joshua. He had never wanted a legend of any kind. All he had ever wanted was to live his own life, on his own terms. Was he supposed to pander to some fan base? He felt like poking back at Bill, but he resisted the temptation. ‘I get the idea. I appreciate you’re doing your best.’
‘I’m doing all there is to do. Unless you can figure out where she’s gone after all . . . Anyhow, enough gabbing, I’m out of me head with the thirst up here. You want to crack a tube? Bring up another six-pack and I’ll tell you the stories of a few more Jokers. Unless you want to watch a fillum. Just like back in the day with yer man Lobsang! Ah, go on, let’s see a fillum . . .’
Joshua was mostly sceptical about Bill’s Joker stories.
Such as what Bill told him of a Joker he called the Cueball. Joshua had actually glimpsed this one; they’d discovered it on his first journey out with Lobsang, nestling in the relatively domesticated Corn Belt. A world like a pool ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep blue sky.
‘I know a fella who knew a fella—’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Who camped out on the Cueball for a bet. Just for a night. All alone. As you would. In the nip too, that was part of the bet.’
‘Sure.’
‘In the morning he woke up with a hangover from hell. Drinking alone, never wise. Now this fella was a natural stepper. So he got his stuff together in a blind daze, and stepped, but he says he sort of stumbled as he stepped.’
‘Stumbled?’
‘He didn’t feel as if he’d stepped the right way.’
‘What? How’s that possible? What do you mean?’
‘Well, we step East, or we step West, don’t we? You have the soft places, the short cuts, if you can find them, but that’s pretty much it. Anyhow this fella felt like he’d stepped a different way. Perpendicular. Like he’d stepped North.’
‘And?’
‘And he emerged on to some kind of other world. It was night, not day. No stars in the clear sky. No stars, sort of. Instead . . .’
‘Your storytelling style really grates sometimes, Bill.’
Bill grinned. ‘But I’ve got ye hooked, haven’t I?’
‘Get on with it. What did he see?’
‘He saw all the stars. All of them. He saw the whole fecking Galaxy, man, the Milky Way. From outside . . . Still in the nip he was, too.’
That was the trouble with combers, Joshua was concluding. They were just expert bullshitters. Maybe they spent too much time alone.
And the search for the trolls, Jansson and Sally went on and on . . .
Sally. Once, when they were tethered for the night at some equable world, he thought he smelled her. As if she had come and gone while he slept. In the light he searched the gondola, and the area on the ground around the twain, but found no sign of her presence. Just a dream, he thought. He resolved never to tell Helen about it.
55
‘ONE OF THOSE troll creatures really messed up a couple of guys here, and folks really don’t like that, but you know what? When it saw me the damn thing rushed up to me, and danced around me like it was a friend! . . .’
So the Benjamin Franklin had got yet another call, to yet another dumb incident concerning trolls. As Mac remarked, ‘You wouldn’t think there’d be enough trolls left around to trigger all this trouble.’
The place was called Cracked Rock. Judging from the transmitted report, there was a mayor, but he was resident at some stepwise companion community, leaving the local sheriff, a Long Earth tyro, in charge. The unfortunately named Charles Kafka was new to the job, a refugee from the big city – hoping for a nice easy ride to pension age, by the sound of it, in some Old-West-nostalgia type small town. Now it had all gone wrong, and he was panicking.
Cracked Rock was a speck on an unprepossessing world some distance beyond the Corn Belt. Not many steps for the Franklin to travel from its last destination, but it seemed to take an age to cross a barren-looking copy of America before coming on the township’s lights, bright in the dusk, by the bank of a river. Now Maggie looked down on a tent city – there was no shame in that, many a flourishing city had started out as tents and shacks – with a church, unfinished by the look of it, dirt roads scraped across the surrounding landscape of sparse scrub. The sheriff’s office looked like the best-finished building in town.
As the twain descended, the sheriff himself came out to meet it, accompanied by a cocky-looking younger man – and a juvenile troll, in chains. Maggie wondered if they’d done something to the troll to stop it stepping away. A few more folk drifted in from the township for a look-see.
With Nathan Boss and a couple of midshipmen at her side, Maggie cut short the introductions and asked Sheriff Kafka to sum up what had happened.
‘Well, Captain, some trolls were walking past the township, a band of ’em – they know enough not to go too close – but there were some boys who intercepted them, including Wayne here, just looking for some fun, you know how good ol’ boys are, but they picked on a little one and the trolls fought back, and this one,’ he indicated the beast in the chains, ‘laid out Wayne’s brother. And then—’
Maggie had heard the same dumb story twenty times on this mission. Impatient, infuriated, she held up a hand. ‘You know what? I’ve had enough of this. Midshipman Santorini.’
‘Captain?’
‘Go back to the ship. Bring out Carl.’
Santorini wasn’t the type to argue. ‘Yes, Captain.’
They waited in silence in the gathering dusk, the five minutes it took Santorini to comply. When Carl arrived, accompanied by Santorini, he hooted softly at the young troll in the chains.
Maggie faced the cub. ‘Carl, I hereby appoint you to the crew of the Benjamin Franklin. For now, you’ve the rank of acting ensign. Santorini, make a note. XO, when we get back aboard, make it so.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘And, Nathan – give me your mission patch.’
The emblem of Operation Prodigal Son was an astronaut-type shield showing the dirigible hovering over a stylized chain of worlds. Nathan ripped the patch off his uniform, and Maggie used her own dog-tag chain to fix it to the troll’s arm. Carl hooted, apparently in pleasure.
‘Nathan, try to tell him what we’ve done here. Although I think he knows already.’
Nathan deployed his troll-call – the townsfolk stared curiously at the instrument – and started murmuring to the troll about being part of the Franklin family.
Maggie stared around at the gawking hicks with distaste. ‘That, citizens, is what we think of trolls.’
Sheriff Kafka looked utterly out of his depth. ‘So what now? You want Wayne to give his testimony?’
‘Hell, no. I want to hear the testimony of the troll.’
The hicks goggled as Nathan used the troll-call to converse carefully with the captive.
‘He remembers the incident. Well, of course he does. They know to avoid cultivated fields. They weren’t in the fields. But a couple of the young were lagging, and the band scattered. Then these boys found them. Throwing stones. Trying to trip up the young. The trolls didn’t fight back . . . You understand, Captain, you don’t really get a linear narrative out of a troll. It’s more impressions, bits of emotion. I’m having to interpolate—’
‘That’s OK, Nathan. The picture is clear enough.’
Wayne snorted. ‘What the heck is this? It’s a joke. It’s only a talking animal.’
That got roughly translated through the troll-call. And the speed with which Carl moved, grabbing Wayne’s leg and holding him upside down by one hand, was remarkable.
Maggie smiled. ‘Your point is refuted, I think. And your testimony. Sheriff, it’s not your people who deserve respect from the trolls but the other way around.’ She tilted her head to look at the inverted Wayne. ‘As for you, I’ll leave you in the hands of your parents, in the hope of a better future.’
The boy wriggled in the grasp of the placid troll, all but scraping his scalp on the gro
und. ‘Screw you. Everybody knows about you and your damn ship. It’s all over the outernet. Captain Troll Lover.’
She felt her blood rise. But she said calmly, ‘Drop him, Carl.’
And she turned away, heading back to the ship, before the boy hit the ground with a cry of pain.
56
THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN hovered over the township of Cracked Rock through the night.
Still fuming from the sideswipe from that kid Wayne – how could a slimeball like him in some dump world like this know so much about her? – Maggie called her chief engineer. ‘Harry, who’s the nerdiest geek you have down there? You know the kind—’
‘Ensign Fox,’ Ryan said without hesitation.
‘Fox. Toby, right? Listen – send him up.’
As she waited for Fox she scanned his personnel file. He really was a geek, of the barely tamed variety: a wretched sailor, but an IQ of a zillion. Just what she needed.
When he arrived, Maggie demanded, ‘Ensign Fox. How often do you guys do a serious systems scan? I mean, sweep for bugs, Trojans, all that hacker shit?’
Fox seemed distracted by the presence of Shi-mi, who was watching from a basket on the floor. But he looked hurt to be asked the question. ‘Well, Captain, we in Tech run sweeps more or less all the time. Of course we’re mostly running Black Corporation software; it’s self-policing, though we do have some independent firewalls which—’
‘Black Corporation software. I bet we uploaded even more of it back in Detroit, right? System upgrades, replacements.’
‘Well, yes, Captain. That’s routine.’
‘And I know I had Harry scan the ship from stem to stern after the refit. But still – how much control does Black software have of this ship? Give me a non-technical answer.’
Fox thought for a minute, his small face crumpled. ‘Well, Black is the principal contractor. Their software – it suffuses the Franklin, Captain.’
Maggie said, ‘The ghost in the machine. Seems to me we leak like a damn sieve, Ensign. Even if it is under our level of detection.’
He didn’t seem too perturbed, as if that were known and accepted. ‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Thank you, Fox. By the way, how’s the Aegis census going?’
Fox’s small face worked as he sought a concise answer. She imagined Harry Ryan beating that kind of verbal skill into the head of a boy who must once have suffered from the hyper-volubility of the typical nerd. In the end he said simply, ‘Frustratingly incomplete, Captain.’
‘Well, keep at it. Dismissed, Ensign.’
‘Captain.’
When he’d gone she came around the desk, grabbed the cat, and set her on the desk. ‘That guy George Abrahams and his damn troll-calls.’
‘Captain?’
‘This is supposed to be a military mission. This is my command. I bet every communication we attempt with the trolls is relayed back to him.’
‘I couldn’t say—’
‘You’re probably riddled with bugs too, aren’t you? Listen, kitty litter. I want you to set me up another meeting with Abrahams. Understand? I’ve no doubt you can do it.’
The cat only mewed softly.
The next day, she got through her business at the township as quickly as possible. That mayor from a couple of worlds over, summoned at last, seemed totally in awe of Maggie, promised to do his best to learn the lessons of the event, and offered the Benjamin Franklin crew the freedom of the local stepwise cities, which Maggie politely declined.
She had one more meeting with Sheriff Kafka outside his office. When he tried to apologize for his screw-up, she slapped him on the back. ‘You did your best last night. You’ve got a lot to learn – but then, who hasn’t?’
He nodded gratefully. ‘Godspeed, Captain.’
And now for George Abrahams.
She couldn’t keep her intention to meet him again a secret from her senior officers. So she wasn’t very surprised when Joe Mackenzie showed up in her sea cabin with a couple of coffees, and sat, watching her like an X-ray machine. ‘Patient confidentiality guaranteed.’
Maggie said, ‘You know what the issue is, Mac. Do you trust the Black Corporation? . . .’
‘What’s to trust?’
‘I think someone is up to something.’
Mac grinned. ‘Well, everybody is up to something. And the military have been in bed with Black for years. Which is why he was on the podium with Cowley when our mission was launched.’
‘Yeah, but does that give Black the right to monitor us routinely? This is a military expedition, Mac. I get the impression that everybody from the Pentagon on down is turning a blind eye.’
Mac shrugged. ‘So Black has a lot of power. So have military contractors had all the way back to World War Two. That’s the reality of life, I guess. I mean, there’s no evidence of malice on the part of Black, is there? Or a lack of patriotism.’
‘No, but . . . Now it’s personal, Mac. This is my ship, my mission. Me. It’s just a feeling – but it’s like I have a searchlight on me. Do you think I’m losing my way?’
‘No. I think you’re following your instinct, and it’s never failed you in the past.’
‘What, even about keeping the cat?’
‘Except for that,’ said Mac.
57
THE AIRSHIPS ZHENG He and Liu Yang steadily forged towards their target of twenty million worlds East of the Datum.
They passed more unprecedented milestones: ten million, twelve, fifteen million steps. Now they were crossing an extraordinary span of the Long Earth, of this great probability tree whose twigs and leaves were whole clusters of worlds; now they were reaching branches of that tree with a very deep divergence from those that led to an Earth anything like the Datum. It became impossible for the crews of the airships Zheng He and Liu Yang even to rely on breathable atmospheres in the worlds they visited. The oxygen levels fluctuated significantly, from, rarely, concentrations so high that spontaneous combustion, even of wet vegetation, must have been a hazard to unwary visitors, to, more often, worlds where the oxygen level was no more than a trace, and the land on the backs of the dancing continents was much less green. A more subtle danger, Roberta learned, was too high a concentration of carbon dioxide, ultimately lethal for humans.
And life had less of a grip on many of these Earths. They found whole bands of worlds where the land was bare altogether, where its colonization by plants from the sea had apparently never happened, let alone its later ‘conquest’ by wheezing lungfish. All but featureless, all but identical, these drab worlds passed, day after day, unchanging even at the airships’ tremendous stepwise speed.
Drab or not, Roberta for one was fascinated by the evolving panoramas of land, sea and sky she glimpsed through the windows of the observation deck, and intrigued by the closer-up glimpses of the worlds they stopped at to sample in more detail – not that she was allowed down to the surface on these hazardous worlds. Yet something in her, something weak and to be despised, recoiled from the bombardment of strangeness. After all, from here, even the whole of the Ice Belt, the band of periodically glaciated worlds of which the Datum seemed to be a reasonably typical member, seemed very small, very narrow, and very far away, spanning much less than one per cent of the monumental distance they had already travelled.
She spent more time alone in her cabin, trying to integrate the sheer flood of data hitting her. Or she would sit with the trolls on the observation deck, listening to their crooning, even though this kept the rest of the crew away from her – even Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, though not the loyal Jacques Montecute.
For his part, Jacques watched Roberta uncomfortably. He even felt a stab of guilt; this expedition might be too much for her after all. The horror of the Long Earth, in the end: Roberta was just fifteen years old, and the very scale of it might overwhelm one so young, no matter how smart.
On July 6, 2040, the Chinese ships reached their nominal target of Earth East 20,000,000 – a world which turned out to be unprepossessing,
barren, ordinary. They planted a stone cairn with a plaque, took a few photographs, and prepared to turn back.
Captain Chen assembled his senior crew and guests on the observation deck of the Zheng He, for a party to celebrate the moment. The trolls sang a new song, playfully taught them by Jacques – ‘China Girl’. Chen even broke out the alcohol, for once. But Jacques advised Roberta not to make this the day she first tried champagne. Without regret, she stuck to her orange juice.
Lieutenant Wu Yue-Sai, in full dress uniform, neat and pretty, linked arms with Roberta. ‘I am so happy to have achieved so much, with you, my partner in discovery.’
Captain Chen strutted over. ‘Indeed. And no doubt we will learn even more during our long return journey to the Datum. So many worlds to revisit and sample. Twenty million of them!’
Roberta considered that carefully. ‘I feel my time would be better spent integrating the data I have already accumulated.’
‘“Integrating the accumulated data”! Is that all you wish to do?’ Captain Chen walked up to Roberta, looked up into her face.
He was an impulsive, somewhat childish man, Jacques judged, and evidently he was angered by Roberta’s humourlessness, her failure to laugh at his jokes, perceiving that his moment of triumph had been spoiled.
‘Clever child, clever child. But what a pompous creature you are. Clever, yes. But do you believe you are better than us mere mortals? Homo superior – is that what you understand yourself to be? Must we make way for you?’
She did not reply.
Chen reached up and wiped a thumb over her cheek; it came away moist. ‘And if it is so, why are you crying?’
Roberta fled.
She didn’t come down to the observation deck the whole of the next day.
A little before midnight, as he was preparing for sleep himself, Jacques went to her cabin door and knocked. ‘Roberta?’
The Long War Page 31