We make it clear we expect something in return, usually a little labour, maybe just interesting news from home. Most people accept that kind of deal easily enough. People, unfettered, know how to live, how to treat each other. I imagine Neanderthal man learned all this. I guess sometimes the lesson doesn’t stick. Sometimes they seem kind of stunned, as if they’ve been staring at the horizon too long, and they find it difficult to sit still in any one Earth. Long Earth Syndrome, it’s called, so I’m told.
We’ve had more formal contact from home. A postman does the rounds! A good man called Bill Lovell. From the mail we learned that some remote federal agency has validated our various land claims. The most important missive for me was a statement from Pioneer Support, the government agency that was set up to handle the affairs of emigrants. My bank accounts and investment funds are still running. I’m providing for Rod, of course, our ‘phobic’ son, our ‘homealone’, as I’m told current Datum slang has it. Tilda feels this is somehow cheating. Not in the pioneer spirit. But my intention was never to have any of us suffer out here. Why should we? This is my solution, my compromise to ensure my family is protected.
There’s been no letter from Rod, not one. We do write to him; he hasn’t written back. For better or worse we don’t discuss this. It breaks my heart slowly, however.
I want to finish this on a joyous note.
It’s now twenty-four hours or more since Cindy Wells went into labour, the colony’s first birth. Cindy called in her friends, and Helen went along, who’s training up on midwifery. She’s only just fifteen, my God. Well, the labour was long, but the birth came without complications. And as I write, it’s not long past dawn, they’re all still with Cindy.
I can’t tell you how proud I am. On Helen’s birthday too. (Thanks, Dad!)
So I have one extra chore to perform today. That town sign of ours needs modifying:
WELCOME TO REBOOT
FOUNDED 2026, A.D.
POP. 117 118
And in a sky on the other side of the world a gaudy airship hovered in the dawn light, listening to such whispered stories, before it vanished into deeper stepwise realities.
26
JOSHUA WOKE UP. The big woollen throw he preferred to sleep under was slightly musty, rather heavy, somehow very reassuring. Outside, he saw through his stateroom window, Earths flickered by. There was the endless Eurasian forest, sometimes burning, occasionally covered in snow. Another morning on the Mark Twain.
He carefully negotiated his way out of bed, had a shower, dried himself off and slipped the monkey bracelet on to his wrist. It was the only thing of his mother’s that he had ever possessed. It was cheap plastic, marginally too tight round his wrist, but in his mind it was worth more than gold could ever be.
The Mark Twain gave that tiny little lurch he had learned to expect when the stepping stopped. In theory, he knew there was no reason why there should be a lurch, but every ship has its idiosyncrasies. He looked out of his window again.
Now, against expectation, the ship was hovering over an ocean that, as far as he could see, went on for ever. They had been crossing the vast landscapes of Eurasia for days. Joshua was a Madisonian who had grown up with the lakes near by. God, he thought, I could do with a swim. He stripped down to trunks.
Then, without consulting Lobsang, he ran to the gondola’s elevator and let it down until the open cage was only a little way above the deep blue sea, an ocean as calm as a lake.
The ambulant unit appeared in the hatch above him. ‘There you are. If you are thinking of a dip in this briny sea, I suggest you think twice. I’ve sent up my usual balloons and sounding-rockets, and I am pretty certain that if there is any dry land on this planet there is little of it. The sea level is very high: we hover over drowned continents, probably.’
‘An ocean world, then.’
‘I have no idea if there is anything so sophisticated as a fish swimming around in there. There appears to be nothing much more than floating seaweed, some of it extremely green. This is a fascinating world, and exploring it would be an excellent undertaking. However, while I cannot forbid you to go swimming, I urgently counsel you against doing so before I have checked for safety.’
The untroubled sea sparkled beguilingly. ‘Oh, come on. It can’t hurt, surely.’ He heard the sound of mechanical activity up above in the ship.
Lobsang said, ‘Can it not? But who knows how evolution might have proceeded on such a world? Joshua, until I check it out, for all we know something might just come up from the depths and you will depart this and all other worlds with a sound that might be accurately described as “clop”, with everything that sound suggests.’
Now Joshua heard a hatch opening on the ship, followed by a splash as something dropped into the water.
Lobsang said, ‘Such a singular person as you has no right to be the guinea pig when there are creatures more qualified – in this case, my underwater ambulant unit. Behold!’
Something like a mechanical dolphin barrelled out of the sea, stood in the air and dived back in again.
Joshua looked up at Lobsang. He continued to wonder whether the expressions on that engineered face were carefully crafted or whether they were reflexes in some way, true expressions of inner feelings. Either way, right now Lobsang was evidently awash with happiness as he watched his new creation. He did like his toys.
But the grin quickly faded. Lobsang said, ‘Various fish noted, water specimens obtained, plankton identified, depth to ocean bed uncertain … something coming up … it might just be an idea to get back on board – hold on tight!’
The elevator suddenly rose, clanging when it hit the stops. Joshua looked down and saw the wonderful aquatic unit spin into the air one last time, before huge jaws closed on it with dreadful finality.
Shaken, he turned to Lobsang. ‘Would you call that a clop?’
‘In fact, I think it might be, actually, when all is considered, a CLOP!!’
‘Consider me chastened. I’m sorry about your toy submarine. Was it expensive?’
‘Astonishingly so, and heavily patented, but, alas, not heavily armoured. However, we have spares. Come on. I’ll make the breakfast, for a change.’
When the meal was done, Lobsang waited for Joshua on the observation deck.
‘I have labelled our hungry visitor a shark for now. Extremely large sharks have certainly existed on Earth, and I got a good picture of it; the ichthyologists can decide. Please enjoy, with my compliments, the continued use of your legs.’
‘All right. I get it. Thank you…’
The Mark Twain was already stepping onwards. Joshua found himself looking down on forests again, the ocean world far behind: no more sea, no more brilliant sunshine. In a manner that was becoming a habit, Lobsang and Joshua sat together in silence. Though their relationship was reasonable now, hours could pass like this, with barely a word spoken between them.
And, as he turned his mind Westward once more, Joshua felt an odd pressure in the head. It was almost as if he were heading home to the Datum, not further outwards.
For the first time, for some reason, he found himself speculating about an end to this journey. ‘Lobsang, how much further are you intending to go? I am with you for the long haul, that’s the deal. But I do have responsibilities at home. Sister Agnes and the rest of them are not so spry as they were…’
‘Interesting reaction from the great loner,’ Lobsang said dryly. ‘It occurs to me that you, Joshua, are very much like the old-time trackers and hunters of the Old West. Like Daniel Boone, to whom I have compared you before, you shun the company of other people, but not all the time. And remember that even Daniel Boone had a Mrs Boone and a lot of little Boones.’
Joshua said, ‘Although some of the little Boones weren’t his Boones, but the Boones of his brother, if I’m to believe what I once read.’
‘I do understand you, Joshua. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’
Joshua bristled. ‘I very much doubt that you
understand anything about me, tin man.’
‘Well, how about this for a deal? If we don’t find anyone for you to talk to in the next two weeks, shall we say, I will turn the ship around and head back. We surely already have enough data to keep my friends at the universities as happy as a bucket of clams. You can get some R&R, and I will start work on plans for the Mark Trine, trusting that the shade of Mr Clemens will forgive me.’ He looked at Joshua’s puzzled expression, and relented. ‘In the dialect that gives us “twain”, meaning the number two, “trine” means three. Just my little joke.’
‘I thought you trashed your airship workshop. A small Tunguska event, you said.’
‘The Black Corporation has many skunk-work facilities, Joshua. Interesting, incidentally, that you’ve suggested turning back just as I’m learning that our singing friends from that frosty world some way back have had the same idea.’
‘The trolls? What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been observing scattered bands of them, travelling across the worlds. Trolls, and what appear to be other related species, of variant forms. It’s difficult to tell in our brief glimpses; there is much to be studied. But simple demographic tracking suggests that on the whole they are heading back along the line of our journey, quite a number of them, too. Possibly some kind of migration.’
‘Hmm,’ Joshua said, feeling that faint pressure in his head. ‘Or maybe they’re fleeing something.’
‘Either way, it’s interesting, don’t you think? Stepping humanoids! And I wonder what will happen when more of the migrant trolls reach the Datum itself.’
‘More of them? What do you mean by that?’
‘I’ve told you of fragmentary reports from old traditions – glimpses of transitory beings, tales from myth. I believe that trolls and other species have been visiting our Earth for millennia – perhaps simply to pass through, perhaps for other purposes. The frequency of such reports drops in recent centuries, because of the growth of scientific literacy perhaps.’
Or sheer mental pressure, Joshua thought, as the Earth’s population grew, if the trolls and their cousins had the same reaction to crowds as he had.
‘But in recent decades, and even since Step Day, such sightings have been on the increase again. The wavefront of the migration we are witnessing, perhaps. Let me give you an example, of a case that now makes a certain kind of sense…’
27
ACCORDING TO THE report filed by the two students later – filed and briskly covered up under Britain’s Official Secrets Act – the night of the incident had been cloudy, the sky black. This was darkest Oxfordshire, the very centre of England. By the light of their battery-powered storm lantern Gareth unpacked his canvas rucksack and set out the instruments: a cricket bat and stump, a baseball bat, drumsticks filched from the college orchestra’s percussion section, even a croquet mallet. Stuff to hit the standing stones with.
While Lol was thumping his forehead against an oak tree.
The oak, with its fellows, towered over the stones, which were like a ring of broken giants’ teeth stuck in the ground. This was said to be one of the oldest monuments in the country – possibly it even pre-dated the age of the farmers who had produced most of the great stone monuments in Britain. But nobody knew for sure, because there’d been no decent archaeological investigation of the site. There was no nicely laid footpath, no information trail with boards of factoids to guide the visitors who never came. Just the stones, and the forest that had all but overwhelmed them – and a legend, that these stones would sing, to keep elves and other demons out of the world. A legend that had brought Gareth here in the first place.
Lol wrapped his arms around the tree’s gnarly trunk. ‘Trees! Trees root us, Gaz. They nurture us. There have been trees on this planet for three hundred million years. Did you know that? Great huge tree ferns back in the Carboniferous. A tree is defined by its form, not by its species. Once we lived in trees. Trees are at the centre of all our myths! There are stories from all over of world trees, like ladders to the sky.’
They were both science students, twenty-year-old undergraduates, Lol studying quantum physics, Gareth acoustics. Lol looked younger than his age, like a fifteen-year-old in biker fancy dress, and he did live at home with his parents. But for all the green mythology stuff he liked to spout, you had to remind yourself that Lol had a sharp mind. Gareth found the non-linear equations of fluid mechanics that underlay the acoustics he studied pretty challenging, but Lol’s quantum physics was hard…
Gareth heard a pop, like somebody stepping. He turned. He thought he glimpsed movement in the long shadows the stones cast in the lantern light. Some forest creature out foraging?
Lol said now, ‘Give me a beer.’
Gareth stared at him. ‘You were bringing the beers.’
‘You were.’
‘I brought the mallets. Christ. You never do buy your round.’ He threw a kettledrum stick, narrowly missing Lol’s head. ‘If we’ve got no ale let’s get this over with, and get back to the pub before we sober up.’
‘Sorry, man.’ Lol picked up the drumstick.
Gareth dug out his phone and set it to record the sounds they would make when they started to strike the stones.
He was doing this to make a girl notice him.
She was on an arts course, and Gareth sometimes saw her on the bus ride into town, but he had nothing to talk to her about. Certainly not his geeky engineering studies. He’d vaguely thought this archaeo-acoustics experiment of his might impress her.
For centuries archaeologists had been missing the element of sound in the monuments they studied. Gareth had once heard a barbershop quartet perform in a Neolithic chambered tomb. Awesome; the place had obviously been designed for its acoustics. Now he was trying to play these standing stones to see if they were laid out for their acoustic properties – an idea that came from the obvious lead offered by their traditional local name, the Singing Stones, and the attached legend that the stones would sing to keep out malevolent spirits. And to explore, vaguely, the way legends of ghosts and spirits and other transients had come to have a whole new interpretation in this age of the Long Earth, when reality had suddenly become porous.
Maybe it was all a bit too geeky. And he hadn’t achieved his main objective: here he was with Lol, not her. But at least it was a more imaginative way of thinking about the new worlds than you mostly got in Britain. This was just a few years after Step Day. Gareth had spent a gap year summer in the US where they were talking about treks out to the remote worlds, of building an infinity of stepwise Americas. Whereas in England, it was all a kind of dull nothingness. The Long Earth just hadn’t inspired John Bull. Of course it didn’t help that the stepwise Englands were uniformly choked with forest, but basically, all you saw in England West or East was little rectangular plots cut into the forest, precisely mapping suburban back gardens where middle-class families popped over to grow beans or to catch the sunshine when it rained at home, or, just occasionally, to get savaged by a wild boar. And meanwhile the disadvantaged, young and old, drifted away from the dole and their dead-end jobs and just vanished into the green, and the cities were dying from their empty inner suburbs outward, and the economy slowly crumbled…
Lol had been silent for a long time. A long time for him, anyhow. Gareth looked up.
Lol was staring.
Something stood at the precise centre of the stone ring, a group of squat stumpy shapes, that hadn’t been there before. At first glance the figures looked like more standing stones to Gareth, more monoliths in a rough circle. No, they weren’t monoliths. They had chimp faces, and black, hairy bodies, and they stood upright. Like children in monkey suits. The light of the lantern was uncertain, the shadows deep black.
‘They must have stepped in,’ Lol breathed.
‘Is this some kind of joke? Trick or treat? It’s not Halloween, losers.’ Gareth was nervous; he always was around unsupervised kids. ‘Look, if you lot don’t—’
And, as one,
the little people opened their mouths and sang. They went straight into a chord, a multipart harmony. Then, after holding the chord for an unreasonable time, they launched into a kind of song. It was fast-moving, shapeless to Gareth’s ears. But the harmonies were pitch-perfect, and beautiful, so much so they made Gareth’s guts twist.
Lol, on the far side of the ring, looked terrified. He clamped his hands over his ears. ‘Make them stop!’
Gareth had an inspiration. He grabbed his mallets. ‘Hit the stones! Come on!’ He whacked the nearest stone with the baseball bat. It rang.
He and Lol hammered the stones wildly. Dull tones rang out, ugly and discordant. Despite his fear of the ape-things, Gareth felt a stab of triumph, of vindication. He’d been right. These stones were lithophones, shaped for the sound they made, not for the way they looked. So he bashed and thumped the stones, and Lol did the same.
And the ape-things were disturbed. Their tight formation broke up, and those monkey-mask faces crumpled, teeth bared, and their song dissolved into hoots and chatters. One by one they began to wink away, disappearing stepwise. Was this what the Singing Stones were for? To make these ugly discords, to stop these singing ape-things stepping into the world – just as the legend said?
Soon the clearing between the stones was empty once more. Gareth stared around at the stones, at the long shadows. The walls of the world seemed very thin.
All of which was how Lobsang and Joshua, on the Mark Twain, learned, on considering records of such incidents, that the pioneers of the trolls’ enforced migration had already penetrated further than anybody had dreamed.
28
JOSHUA AND LOBSANG pressed deeper into the Long Earth, extending their tentative survey.
The Long Earth Page 16