But here came the elves on their swinish mounts. The adult dogs rose up out of their den in a pack, and hurled themselves at the hogs. The fight erupted in a cloud of yelps, barks, grunts, cries, pant-hoots, snapping teeth, screams of pain and sprays of blood, while the elves flashed in and out of existence, as if glimpsed under a strobe lamp.
Joshua climbed out of the den and ran away from the fight, or tried to. But that stubborn pup clung to his leg, and he was still dragging the absurd wreckage of the parrot. He glanced up. The airship was almost overhead. Joshua jumped for the rope ladder, grabbed it, and viciously kicked away the pup. The airship rose immediately.
Below, the dogs had now encircled the huge hogs, which fought back ferociously. Joshua saw one big dog-bear sink its teeth into the neck of a screaming hog, which crashed to the ground. But another hog scooped up a dog in its big tusked jaw and threw it through the air, squealing, its chest ripped open. Meanwhile the elves flickered through the carnage. Joshua saw one elf face a dog that leapt for his throat. The elf flicked away and reappeared beside the dog as it sailed through the air, spun with balletic grace, and swiped at the animal’s torso with a thin stone blade, disembowelling the dog before it hit the ground. The elves were fighting for survival, but Joshua got the impression they were fighting individually, not for each other; it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. It was every man for himself. Or would have been, if they had been men.
And the airship rose up, beyond the reach of the trees, and into the sunlight. The fight was reduced to a dusty, blood-splashed detail in a landscape across which the airship’s shadow drifted serenely. Joshua, still barely able to breathe, climbed the ladder, and spilled into the gondola.
‘You kicked a puppy,’ Lobsang said accusingly.
‘Add it to the charge sheet,’ he gasped. ‘Next time you pick a vacation site, Lobsang, think a bit more Disneyland.’ Then the darkness around his vision that had been there ever since the close encounter with the elf folded over him.
31
HE WAS PRETTY badly hurt, he learned later. Lots of minor injuries, many of which he hadn’t noticed at the time. The damage to his neck, his throat. Scratches, cuts, even a bite mark – not from the puppy at his ankle, this was the imprint of human-like teeth in his shoulder. Lobsang’s ambulant treated the cuts, dosed him with antibiotics, and fed him painkillers.
He drifted away. Sometimes he woke briefly, fuzzily, to see bone-white stars above, or green carpets rolling beneath the airship. The steady swinging rhythm of stepping was comforting. He slept away days, in the end.
But the further they travelled, heading ever West, the more Joshua became aware of that odd pressure in his head, even as he dozed. The kind of stuffy feeling he always got when he had to go back to the Datum: the pressure of all those crowding minds, drowning the Silence. Could it be, as some said, that the Long Earth was a kind of loop that closed back on itself, and he was being brought back to the start, back to the Datum? That would be strange enough. But if not, what lay ahead? And what was driving the trolls across the arc of worlds?
When he finally awoke fully the stepping had stopped once more. He sat up on his couch and looked around.
‘Take it easy, Joshua,’ came Lobsang’s disembodied voice.
‘We’ve stopped.’ His voice was husky, but it worked.
‘You’ve slept deeply. Joshua, I’m glad you’re awake. We must talk. You do realize you were never in any real danger, don’t you?’
He rubbed his throat. ‘It didn’t feel that way at the time.’
‘I could have taken out those elves individually at any time. I have advanced laser sighting on—’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘You’d asked for shore leave. I thought you were enjoying yourself!’
‘As you said before, we need to work on our communication, Lobsang.’
Joshua pushed back the throw, stood up and stretched. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that he couldn’t remember putting on. He didn’t feel like running a marathon, but on the other hand he wasn’t passing out. He went to the head, walking carefully, and briskly washed some of the sweat off his body. His small scars were healing, and his throat no more than twinged. He emerged, and took fresh clothing from the closet.
Through the stateroom window he saw that the airship was anchored over a thick reef of rainforest that stretched to a green-cloaked horizon. Mist banks hung over swathed valleys. The sun was low; Joshua guessed it was early morning. The airship was maybe a hundred feet up.
Lobsang said, ‘We haven’t been stopping every day, but it’s difficult to observe much from up here.’
‘Because of the thickness of the forest?’
‘I’ve been sending down the ambulant unit. We’re far from home, Joshua. We’re over nine hundred thousand steps out. Think of that. You can see how it is here – this is typical, forest blanketing the landscape as far as we can see. Probably covering the whole continent. Difficult to make observations.’
‘But there’s evidently something here you’re interested in, yes?’
‘Look at the live feed,’ Lobsang said.
The image in the wall screen was jittery, uncertain, taken from a camera far away. It showed an opening in the forest, a gash in the canopy evidently caused by the fall of a giant tree, whose trunk lay at the centre of the clearing, coated with lichen and exotic fungi. The access of light had allowed saplings and under-storey shrubs to shoot up.
And the new growth attracted humanoids. Joshua spotted what looked like a pack of trolls. They were sitting in the open in a tight cluster, patiently grooming, each picking insects from the back of the one in front. They sang, all the time, snatches of melody like half-forgotten songs – scraps of harmony in two, three, four parts, improvised on the spot and then forgotten, dimly heard by distant microphones.
‘Trolls?’
‘Apparently,’ Lobsang murmured. ‘It would take musicologists a century to unravel the structure of that singing. Keep watching.’
As Joshua’s eyes became accustomed to the shaky images, he began to see more groups of humanoids, across the clearing and in the forest shadows, some of kinds he didn’t recognize, at play, working, grooming, maybe hunting. They were all humanoids, it seemed, rather than apes; any time one of them stood up you could see the neatness of its bipedal stance. He said, ‘They don’t seem to bother each other. The different kinds.’
‘Evidently not. In fact quite the opposite.’
‘Why have they congregated here? After all, they’re different species.’
‘I suspect, in this particular community, they have become codependent. They use each other. They probably have subtly different sensory ranges, so that one kind may detect a danger before the others: we know that trolls use ultrasonics, for example. Similarly, you get different species of dolphins swimming together. I’m following your advice, you see, Joshua. I’ve been taking more time to inspect Long Earth marvels like this aggregation of humanoids. Remarkable sight, isn’t it? It’s like a dream of humanity’s evolutionary past, many hominid types together.’
‘But what of the future, Lobsang? What happens when human colonists get out here in earnest? How can this survive?’
‘Well, that’s another question. And what happens if they are all driven East in the greater migration? Do you wish to go down?’
‘No.’
Later, as the airship sailed on, they talked it over, the strange uniqueness of mankind in the Long Earth. And Lobsang described how, not long after Step Day, he had initiated searches for human cousins across a thousand Earths, and he told Joshua the story of a man called Nelson Azikiwe.
32
ACCORDING TO THE official family story he was christened Nelson after the famous admiral. However, in reality he was probably named after Nelson Mandela. According to his mother that Nelson now sat on God’s right hand, and Nelson junior, growing up, took the view that this was a good thing, in that Mandela would be in a position to pr
event the vengeful god of the Israelites loading yet more troubles on the backs of humanity.
His mother had raised him in Jesus, as she put it, and for her sake he persevered, and in the end, after a somewhat complicated career, and a still more complicated philosophical journey, he took holy orders. Eventually he was invited to Britain to bring the Good News to the heathen: proof positive that what goes around comes around. He quite liked the English. They tended to say sorry a lot, which was quite understandable given their heritage and the crimes of their ancestors. And for some reason the Archbishop of Canterbury sent him to a rural parish that was so white it glared. Perhaps the Archbishop had a sense of humour, or wanted to make a point, or possibly she just wanted to see what would happen.
This wasn’t the United Kingdom that his mother had talked about when he was young, that was certain. Now, with her long dead, he walked through a London that contained a great multihued population. You hardly saw a news bulletin that wasn’t delivered by a reader whose recent ancestors had walked under African stars. Hell, there were even black men and women to tell you when it was going to rain on the cradle of democracy. This despite the eeriness of an emptying country, a capital city being abandoned suburb by suburb.
He said as much to the retiring incumbent of St John on the Water, the Reverend David Blessed, a man who clearly supported the theory of nominative determinism. And who said, when he saw Nelson Azikiwe for the first time, ‘My son, you won’t be short of a dinner invitation for the next six months at least!’ That turned out to be a successful prophecy on the part of the Reverend Blessed who, with the help of some family money, was retiring early to his own cottage, so that, in his own words, he could ‘watch the fun when you take your first service.’
He left the occupancy of the rectory to Nelson, who had it to himself apart from an elderly woman who cooked him his lunch every day and tidied up around the place. She wasn’t very talkative, and for his part he didn’t know what to talk to her about. Besides he had enough on his plate due to the fact the presbytery had no draft-proofing whatsoever, and a plumbing system that the Lord Himself could surely barely understand; sometimes it flushed itself in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.
This was a part of England miraculously untouched by the Long Earth. Or even, as far as Nelson could see, the twenty-first century. The Middle English were the Zulus of the British, he concluded. It seemed to Nelson that every other man in the village had at some time been a warrior, quite often of high rank. Now retired, they looked after their gardens, drilling potatoes instead of men. But he was taken aback by their courtesy. Their wives baked him so many cakes that he had to share them with the Reverend Blessed (retired), who, Nelson suspected, had been told to hold on and report back on Nelson’s progress to the authorities in Lambeth Palace.
They were talking in David’s cottage while the Reverend Blessed’s wife was at a meeting of the Women’s Institute.
‘Of course there will always be those who are perennially unreconstructed,’ said David. ‘But you won’t find very many of them around here, because the reflexes of the English class system take over, you see? You are tall, handsome, and speak English considerably better than their own children do. And when you quoted passages from W. H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life at the funeral of old Humphrey, after the service – which incidentally you took magnificently – some of them sidled up to me and asked if I had put you up to that. Of course, I told them that I hadn’t. And believe me when that news got around, well, you had passed. They realized that you are not only very fluent in English, but also fluent in England, which means a lot down here.
‘And then, to cap it all, you took an allotment, and are seen digging and planting and in general tilling the soil of the Good Earth, and that got everybody on your side. You see, everybody was a little nervous when they heard about you coming. They were, and how can I put this, expecting you to be a little more … earnest? You seem remarkably well prepared for your mission among us.’
Nelson said, ‘In a way my whole life has prepared me for this, yes. You know, as a child I was lucky, very lucky for a bongani like me, running around in the South Africa of those days. But my parents could see a better future for those prepared to work for it. You might have thought them tough parents, and I suppose you might be right. But they kept me off the streets and made me go to school.
‘And then of course the Black Corporation came up with its “Searching for the Future” programme, and my mother picked it up on her radar and made sure I got myself an interview, and after that it was as if I had been selected by fate. Apparently I hit the mark on every test they set. Suddenly the Corporation found it had got itself a poster boy, a poor African kid with an IQ of 210. They more or less told me to ask for the moon. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Not until Step Day… Where were you on Step Day, David?’
The elderly priest walked over to a large oak desk, produced a large day book, turned the pages, and said, ‘I see that I was getting ready for evensong when I first heard what was going on. What did I think of it? Who had time to think coherently at all?
‘It wasn’t too bad around here. The countryside is different from the town, you see? People don’t panic so easily, and I don’t think many of the kids round here were very much interested in fiddling with electronic components. Well, the closest place with a ready supply would be Swindon. But everyone watched what was happening on television. Around here people were looking at the skies to see if they could see these other worlds – that was how little we understood. But the wind was still blowing in the trees, the cows got milked, and I think we just spent our time listening to the news bulletins, interspersed with The Archers.
‘I don’t really remember formulating any sort of position whatsoever until it was definitively announced that there were indeed other Earths, millions of them, as close to us as a thought and, apparently, ours for the taking. Now that made ears prick up around here. It was about land! In the countryside land gets attention.’ He looked into his brandy glass, saw that it was empty and shrugged. ‘In short, I must say I found myself wondering “What hath God wrought?”’
‘Book of Numbers,’ said Nelson, instinctively.
‘Well done, Nelson! And also, rather pleasingly, they were the first official words sent by Samuel Morse over the electric telegraph in 1838.’ He topped up his brandy glass, and made a complex little sign to enquire of Nelson if he might like another.
But the younger man seemed distracted. ‘What hath God wrought? Let me tell you what God wrought, David, oh, indeed. Step Day came, and we found out about the Long Earth, and suddenly the world was full of new questions. By this time I had read all about Louis Leakey, and the work he and his wife did in Olduvai Gorge. I was thrilled at the thought that everyone in the world was an African at the core. So I said to the Corporation that I wanted to know how man had become man. I wanted to learn why. Most of all, I wanted to know what it was that we were supposed to be doing here, in the new context of the Long Earth. In short, I wanted to know what we were for.
‘Of course, my mother and her faith had lost me by then. I was too smart for my own God, so to speak. I had found time to read up about the affairs of the four centuries following the birth of the infant Jesus, and indeed to look at the erratic progress of Christianity since then. It seemed to me that whatever the truth of the universe was, it certainly wasn’t something that could have been discerned by a quarrelsome bunch of antique ecclesiasticals.’
David barked a laugh.
‘And I loved palaeontology. I was fascinated by the bones and what they could tell us. Especially now that we have tools that researchers even twenty years ago couldn’t have dreamed of. That was the way to the truth. And I was good at it. Extremely good, it was as if the bones sang to me…’
The Reverend Blessed wisely stayed silent.
‘So, it was not long after Step Day, I got a call from the people at the Black Corporation, who said they had fixed it for me
to set up and lead expeditions to as many iterations of Olduvai Gorge as funds would allow. To the birthplace of mankind, on the new worlds.
‘Now when you are dealing with the Black Corporation, funds are essentially without limit. The problem we had was a shortage of skilled people. It was a very good time to be a palaeontologist, and we trained up many youngsters. Anyone with a suitable degree and a trowel could have a gorge of his or her very own to work. Whatever else was happening, the bone-hunters had found their Eldorado.
‘Well, something like the African Rift Valley persists across much of the Long Earth; geology is relatively fixed. And, as hoped, we did find on many occasions bones in the target area that were definitely hominid. I worked on the project for four years. We extended our fields of work, and it was always the same: oh yes, there were bones, there were always bones. I selected other likely sites around the world which might possibly have been the home of a different Lucy – a Chinese branch, for example, the result of an early diffusion out of Africa.
‘But after more than two thousand excavations in contiguous Earths, by Black Corporation-funded expeditions and others, we never found any sign of the development of nascent humanity beyond those very early bones, some deformed, some mauled by animals, most of them very small. There was nothing past the australopithecines, the Lucies. The cradles of mankind were empty.
‘There are still workers out there, still searching, and until last year I was still running the programme. But in the end the emptiness of the Long Earth – empty of humanity at least – disturbed me so much that I resigned. I took the generous amount that the Black Corporation gave me as a farewell present, although I know they hope that one day I will return to the fold.
‘I’d had enough, you see, enough of those empty skulls. Enough of those little bones. You could see the striving, but not the arriving. And one day I suddenly found myself wondering where it had all gone wrong, in all those other worlds. Or maybe it went wrong here? Maybe the evolution of mankind is some ghastly cosmic mistake.’
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