When he did stop, it would be for a few days. He would send his matter-printer master edition off to the forest to spawn, and wait for the new copy of the works to be produced. Sometimes he would camp out. Other times he would introduce himself locally, and perhaps stop to deliver a talk, a reading of the Bard, teach a class or two. Then, with the gleaming new complete Shakespeare delivered, he’d be sent on his way, generally with gratitude and a pack full of food and a bottle of fresh-squeezed lemonade.
Word began to spread ahead of his arrival. In some worlds he would be greeted by farmers or their children, and offered a ride to the nearest township.
In three years he covered hundreds of worlds in this way. He felt a vast and deepening satisfaction at the success of his project.
Then he came to Earth West 31,415, in the far Ice Belt.
He released his master printer, and after his usual refreshing night’s sleep in a forest glade, went to retrieve this world’s brand-new copy of the Bard. He soon found the master copy, dormant as usual, in a pose that Mr Driscoll, no engineer, always interpreted as resting after a hard night’s work. And beside it was – not another reading copy, with pages still moist, the gall-based ink printing bright – another master copy, another crab-like gadget, a copy of the book on a series of spindly legs. Puzzled, he reached for the new copy – but it scuttled off out of his reach and out of sight.
Mr Driscoll was more irritated than alarmed. He was not a practical man, and was used to machinery of all kinds letting him down. He set the true master copy off on its way to another part of the forest – perhaps there was something peculiar about the trees just here, he wondered, not very scientifically – and waited another night. The next morning there was a fresh reading copy of Shakespeare, sitting there on a pile of leaves, just as specified.
Mr Driscoll picked it up, took it into the nearest town, and spent a pleasant day talking to some vaguely interested farmers’ children in their quaint little school. To Mr Driscoll’s taste this was a particularly pleasing community who, Amish-like, had decided to eschew modern technology as much as possible when shaping their new world.
And the next morning Mr Driscoll stepped on, thinking no more of Earth West 31,415.
Until, ten days later, an agitated farmer pursued him stepwise and demanded that he come back.
When he returned to 31,415, he was taken to the forest glade where he had released the master Shakespeare – only to find the glade had vanished. It was as if a whole bunch of trees had uprooted themselves. ‘Hmm,’ said Mr Driscoll, baffled. ‘“Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane . . .”’
‘What? What? Look at this, man. Look what you’ve done!’
The farmer dragged Mr Driscoll deeper into the forest – and now Mr Driscoll saw that the patch of cleared ground was not empty, but filled with crablike creations that crawled and rustled and clambered up the trunks of the surrounding trees, pages on their backs stirring like ladybird wings. They were Shakespeares: not readers’ copies like the ones he was leaving behind on the worlds he passed through, but more masters, matter printers making replicas of themselves. And those copies were making copies in turn, spreading out through the forest . . .
‘What are you going to do about this?’ cried the farmer.
‘Me? What can I do?’
‘We’ve already lost about a ton of lumber, we reckon. In ten days! And it’s spreading faster all the time.’ He grabbed Mr Driscoll by the lapels. ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you? We came all this way to escape this modern technology bullshit. Now you come here with your stupid books, and you’ve unleashed a nanotech disaster on us. A grey goo! Well, it’s all your fault, peckerwood. What are you going to do about it, eh?’
There was only one thing he could do. ‘I will get back to the Low Earths as fast as a twain will take me.’
‘And then?’
‘And then I’ll ask Wilson.’
‘A ton of lumber in ten days, eh?’ Chet Wilson sucked his teeth and said, ‘Let me give it some thought.’
After an interval Wilson said, ‘What you got, you see, is a mutation.’
‘A mutation?’
‘The master Shakespeare was always capable of doing more than just churn out the pages of the book. Well, I told you as much. It could create spare parts for itself, even for the replicating mechanism. Designed to recover from drastic damage. That backup process has just gone a little too far, that’s all.’
‘A little too far? Are you mad, Wilson?’
‘Now it’s not just fixing itself, it’s making a whole new copy. Don’t blame me. Probably the way you operated it.’
‘Me?!’
‘You should have just turned it off and on again. That usually works. The original master evidently reset itself and recovered. But the little rogue baby it produced—’ He chuckled indulgently. ‘What a rascal!’
‘But – but – I refuse to accept any responsibility for this mess. And even so, I don’t see how a two-pound book could have churned up a ton of lumber in just ten days.’
‘Ah, well, that’s exponential growth for you. Breeding like rabbits once they get started, see? In the first day one becomes two. In the second, two become four. In the third, four become eight . . .’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘After ten days, you’ve got a thousand copies, plus change. And a thousand copies of a two-pound book is a ton, my friend. That’s where your lumber went.’
‘Well, it isn’t my lumber.’ Mr Driscoll’s non-mathematical mind tried to grasp these concepts. ‘But if I understand you right – on the eleventh day, one ton will become two. And then two will become four. And then—’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Where will it end, Wilson? Where will it end? And what should I do?’
‘ “Exit, pursued by a bear,”’ said Wilson.
The following few weeks were a sensation, at least for the inhabitants of Earth West 31,415, and for the Datum federal government agencies called in to help.
The colonists were hastily, resentfully evacuated, as after twenty days a thousand-ton lumber forest had been demolished.
After thirty days, a million tons of trees had been chewed up, leaving a scar visible from space.
And after forty days a billion tons had gone, and the continents’ surviving animals were fleeing the rising Shakespearean sea.
Just fifty days after Mr Driscoll had released his original master copy, almost every tree on Earth West 31,415, indeed the bulk of the planet’s continental biomass, had been converted. The books of the Bard roamed the devastated plains, hungry for more.
Mr Driscoll called Wilson from the penitentiary where he was awaiting trial.
‘It’s terrible, Wilson! They say the books are mutating again. Eating other kinds of vegetable matter: grasses, shrubs. At the ocean shore some are venturing into the water, devouring the seaweed. In the interior some of them are turning on each other. Bard eat Bard! And they blame me! “Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.” Well, the government has declared a quarantine, and is thinking of sending in some kind of clean-up operation . . .’
‘Good idea. Gonna need a code word for that.’ Chet Wilson sucked his teeth and said, ‘Let me give it some thought.’
After an interval Wilson said, ‘How about “The Taming of the Goo”? Whaddya think of that, Driscoll? Driscoll? . . .’
Discovering such stories only made Jan Roderick determined to root out more. And Sister Coleen grew increasingly anxious about him.
24
JOSHUA’S TIME WITH the fever was like being underwater, he thought later. Like he wasn’t truly asleep but immersed in a shallow lake, and looking up through a rippling meniscus at the world of air above, a surface over which he saw day and night flap by, and the big faces of trolls peering down at him, like moons.
Sometimes they moved him. He would be picked up by Patrick, the big younger male, a hairy arm around his back, a hand under his armp
it. His bad leg would send fresh pain shooting through his system, and he would struggle and protest feebly. Later, to his shame, he remembered some of the language; it would have made Bill Chambers blush.
Other times, as he rose out of his reddish murk of sleep towards the daylight, they tried to feed him. He wasn’t hungry but he was always hellish thirsty; he would spit out the food and demand water. Sometimes they let him get away without eating, but other times they forced him. The male would prop him up and let his head dangle back, mouth open, and the female, Sally, would drop in stuff, roots and leaves and the sour juice of some fruit or other, and he would choke and shake his head and try to spit it out. But Patrick clamped his mouth closed, and Sally would stroke his throat, and he would swallow; he had no choice.
Afterwards he figured they had been trying to feed him some kind of herbal medicine, no doubt evolved through chance discoveries over millennia: wisdom stored in the trolls’ strange collective consciousness – their long call. Given that he eventually recovered, he guessed it had worked. Though the modern antibiotics from his pack that he gulped every time he was awake enough to remember no doubt helped too.
He knew that the trolls were saving his life. It was just that trolls were always so damn rough. They were big muscular humanoids, and their method of hunting was to gather in a group and wrestle a beast the size of a young elephant to the ground. Mothers even dragged their infants around dangling by one hand or by a scruff.
‘As nurses go, these trolls need to up their bedside manner . . .’
He discovered he’d said that out loud. He was in one of his more lucid intervals, then.
He was lying on his back, peering up at a cloudless sky. And the air was cool, cooler than he remembered before the fever heat cut in. The fall must be coming on this Para-Venus. He wondered how long he’d been lying there. And he still didn’t know how bad the winter would get. You could tell the rough character of a world from the band it was in, but you had to live through a cycle of seasons, or more, before you truly understood it. And before you knew if you could live through it . . .
A troll’s face swam into his blurred vision, peering down at him. He saw a grizzled, crumpled face surrounded by greying black hair. For a moment he was befuddled.
‘Sancho!’
‘Hoo.’
‘Hi, buddy. You saved me. You and your relatives—’
Something soft and pink and bright came sailing in from left field, hit Sancho on the side of the head, and rolled away.
‘What the hell?’
‘Ha!’ Sancho turned that way, glared, and disappeared from his field of view.
Joshua managed to turn his head to the left. He saw Sancho hobbling in pursuit of one of the kids – Liz, maybe. Evidently it was she who had thrown the cheerleader’s pom-pom at him. She ran off, laughing as only a troll could laugh.
A cheerleader’s pom-pom. Where the hell had a troll acquired a cheerleader’s pom-pom? Not only that but Joshua thought he recognized the pinkish colour scheme.
‘Sancho!’ Joshua tried to prop himself up on his elbows, to see more. But the very effort exhausted him, and when he moved it felt like the contents of his head had been liquefied, and he fell back in a faint.
25
CAME THE DAY he was cured.
Well, it felt like it. He woke from what seemed to have been a normal sleep. His vision was clear, there was only a dull ache in his head, but he was still thirsty.
Experimentally, he sat up. He felt shivery-weak in his upper body, and briefly dizzy as he moved his head, but that passed. His right leg, stretched straight out before him, was a sight, the bare flesh filthy and strapped by bloody bandages between two massive branches; the trolls did nothing delicately. But it ached only dully now, a bone-deep throbbing that, he feared, he might have to put up with for the rest of his life.
Glancing around he saw that his kit was close by, in the lee of a nearby rock bluff, still protected by the emergency blanket. Save for his own rummaging for drugs, it seemed undisturbed. He dug into his pack until he found one of his knives, and slipped it into his belt, at the back. Trolls or not, he felt a lot safer with some kind of weapon to hand.
There was no water here, however, and his raging thirst was his first priority. That and maybe the relief of a painfully full bladder. He wasn’t far from the bank of a shallow, sluggish river – a dozen paces, no more. No distance, if he’d had the use of both legs; a heck of a challenge given the state he was in. He looked around again. There was nothing nearby he could use for a crutch. He tried pushing himself up with his arms, and folding his good leg underneath, but his bad leg was an impossible obstacle. Soon his weakened muscles were trembling, and he slumped back to the ground.
A troll face swam before him, a vision from his illness. It was the female cub, Liz. Looking around, he saw a few more trolls grooming in a huddle in the middle distance, a handful by the river. Most of the band seemed to be away.
Liz was a bright youngster, and she could immediately see what he wanted. Without hesitation she got her hands under his armpits and, with effortless strength and the usual troll roughness, boosted him to his feet. He yelled as his gatepost of a leg swung in the air, but Liz was still there, and he stayed upright. He threw his arm over her shoulder, and he was stable, balanced on his left leg.
He managed a grin. ‘Thank you. You’re just the right height for this, you know that? Now – water?’ He pointed at the river, and at his mouth.
She set off that way, but too quickly, and he found himself dragged along, hopping crazily, his bad leg scraping in the dirt behind him. ‘Hey! Slow down, speedy.’ Hop, hop. ‘One step at a time . . .’
As they moved away from where he had been lying, he saw the ground was scuffed and stained for some distance around his gear. He remembered, dimly, how they had been moving him around. They must have cleaned him up after he soiled himself, or at least moved him out of the mess, over and over. Trolls had been observed to care for their sick and elderly; maybe they knew to move the immobile, to avoid such problems. Even so he badly needed to clean up properly, and he ought to strip off and inspect himself for bed sores and such – not to mention a good look at that leg.
He felt a sudden surge of shame that he had been so helpless before these trolls, and was flooded with gratitude for what they had done. He hugged Liz’s massive football-player shoulders. ‘Kid, you’re the best nurse I could have found.’
‘Hoo?’
He got to a rock where he pissed like Austin Powers.
Then Liz helped him to the river. The big old troll he called Sancho was sitting by the bank, picking fleas from the long, muddy hairs on his legs. He looked up incuriously as Joshua approached. At his side was a fuzzy pink ball, splashed with mud: the cheerleader’s pom-pom.
Joshua nodded to Sancho as, with Liz’s help, he struggled to sit on the muddy earth by the water. ‘Like I said before, I reckon I owe you a big thank-you too, old buddy. My first responder.’
Sancho shrugged – a very human gesture. Then he went back to his assiduous hunt for fleas.
Joshua was distracted by that brilliant pink pom-pom. Since when did a troll carry any possessions around at all? Let alone a cheerleader’s pom-pom. ‘But it’s none of my business, buddy. You carry that pom-pom, you do what you like.’
Sancho didn’t even glance around.
Joshua turned back to his own concerns. Gingerly, sitting on his backside, he pushed himself closer to the river, dipped in his hand, and splashed water into his mouth, over his face. Then he poured it over the encrusted filth on his bad leg. He longed to immerse himself completely, but he was wary of whatever must inevitably be lurking in the water. He made a mental note to start using purifying pills for drinking water – but then he’d survived up to now, for the unspecified period while he was ill, with his only serving vessel being the cupped palm of a troll. Maybe he’d developed some kind of immunity over his years in the Long Earth.
Clouds crossed the sun, and
that deep ache in the leg intensified. Great, he thought; he was going to become one of those old farts who felt the weather in his bones.
He peeled back bandages and the remnants of his trouser leg. On the exposed skin of his leg there was mud and blood and what looked like dried pus, and as the layers of filth washed away there was a stink of rot. But he also found some kind of vegetable matter tucked away in there: leaves, roots, a kind of greenish scrape on his skin. More troll medication? If so, it seemed to have worked. The place where the skin had broken had never been stitched up, but it had healed reasonably well. He’d have one hell of a scar to scare his grand-nieces with, back in Reboot. But, he saw with relief, there was no sign of infection, no evidence of gangrene – and if that had developed, for all the trolls could have done, he’d have lost his leg, and probably his life, in short order.
He felt his way along his shin, cautiously, slowly, to the break itself. He found a hard knob of bone in there. It ached when he prodded at it. So he stopped prodding. Not a perfect match-up, then. But he had been able to walk, supported by Liz. If he could make himself crutches of some kind, he’d be mobile. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.
And, as he gingerly peeled back more of his elasticized bandages, he found something else unexpected. The rough-and-ready splints had been tied in place, not just by his bandages, but by lengths of cord, evidently taken from his pack, that had been neatly knotted.
‘Will you look at that?’ he said aloud. ‘Trolls with pom-poms. Now trolls tying knots. I bet you never observed that, Lobsang, did you?’
‘Trolls tie knots.’
The words sounded like they came from a small bullhorn. Joshua, startled, sprawled comically in the river-bank mud. Words in English! It was totally unexpected.
The laughter of a troll billowed over him. It was Sancho, of course, watching his antics. Sancho, holding a troll-call.
Joshua faced him. ‘That was you!’
Sancho lifted the troll-call again. It was the size and shape of a clarinet, a tube encrusted with a kind of circuitry, and worked when held close to the mouth. ‘Trolls tie knots! Good knots big knots tight knots.’
The Long Cosmos Page 14