Nelson paused at a prayer wheel, an upright cylinder half as tall as he was, and elaborately decorated. ‘Almost pointlessly beautiful,’ he murmured to Ben.
As they stood there, a very old man came up and grasped Nelson’s hand and shook it vigorously, gabbling something Nelson couldn’t understand. Nelson just smiled back.
Now a man who looked about sixty approached the visitors. He wore what looked like an elaborately coloured robe under his top coat. ‘Mr Azikiwe, Mr Abrahams? My name is Padmasambhava. Please call me Padma – Lobsang always did. We corresponded, Mr Abrahams—’
‘Call me Ben.’
‘And of course, Mr Azikiwe, we met at Lobsang’s funeral – oh, twenty-five years ago? Strange to think of that, in the circumstances.’
Nelson said, ‘That’s what being a friend of Lobsang does to you. I remember it well. And I’d shake your hand if this old fellow ever lets go of me!’
‘He’s one of the oldest residents of the village. He’s guessing you are either African or American. Either way he says you’re welcome here, as a friend and supporter of the Dalai Lama. He is ninety-two years old. And, in case you’re wondering, his avatar is an authentic replica of the real thing, his physical body.’ He said more quietly, ‘About five per cent of the people you see are avatars of living people. The rest are computer-generated simulated personalities. Granted it’s often hard to tell who’s who. And I, in fact, am rather more elderly in reality than the figure you see before you.’
‘In that case I’m impressed. This fellow’s pretty limber.’
‘He prostrates himself before the Buddha in his family shrine one hundred times a day, every day. Excellent way to keep the back supple. Please, come into my home, get out of the cold for a moment . . .’
Padma’s home was a small house at the edge of the village. The walls were decorated with colourful hangings, the floor with a thick carpet. There was an elaborate shrine against one wall, neat, symmetrical, brightly coloured with gilt frames around red panels; the shelves were crowded with tokens and small Buddha statues.
‘Please, sit. I would offer you tea, but Lobsang is not far away. I’m sure you would prefer to meet him soon.’
‘It’s why we came,’ Nelson said.
‘I should say that this is actually a home of my cousin’s, not my own. I am abbot of a monastery in Ladakh – that is, in the real world, the Datum. But, as you know, I have long been a close friend of Lobsang. I have worked with him regarding spiritual matters for many years. When he decided to, ah, immerse himself in this environment, in the latest iteration of his existence, I was happy to devote a proportion of my time to accompany him, to be his spiritual guide as he grows up in this place.’
Nelson imagined he had as close a relationship with Lobsang as anybody in his ‘family’ – by which he meant Agnes, Ben, Selena, and of course Joshua Valienté. For all Lobsang’s claims about his origin – that he was the soul of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated into a gel-substrate supercomputer – none of them, not even Nelson, had ever explored the full implications of that idea. Yet something in that exotic background clawed him back, over and over. And here he was again.
Ben said, ‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’
Padma regarded him. ‘And it is forgiving of you, his adopted son, not to feel resentment at this absenting of himself from your own life. Lobsang has chosen to start again, in a sense, to grow up immersed in the traditions of his ancestral faith. You are so young yourself. Physically and spiritually Lobsang has made himself younger than you. How strange!’
Ben shrugged. ‘I always knew my parents were – different. Even before they told me the truth about their own nature. Even before they told me I was adopted, in fact.’
And even before alien planet-eating monsters showed up in his home town of New Springfield, Nelson thought.
‘Ah,’ said Padma. ‘One can never fool a child.’
‘But I was an orphan – who knows what would have become of me if not for Agnes and Lobsang? I guess I can forgive them for being odd. They were what they were.’
‘You are wise for such a young man. And as for the money that is being expended on this place . . .’
Nelson grinned. ‘I asked around at transEarth. This simulation is consuming the GDP of a small nation.’
‘But Lobsang can afford it. And you are certain that you must disturb him now?’
Nelson glanced at Ben. ‘Ben asked me the same question. I’m afraid so. He’s the only one I can turn to . . . Put it this way, he would never forgive me if I didn’t call on him. But I have a feeling that what’s going on out there is serious enough that he’s going to have to know anyhow, sooner or later. He is, after all, Lobsang.’
There was a shrill whistle, the sound of boys cheering.
‘Ah.’ Padma smiled. ‘Sounds as if somebody has scored a goal.’ ‘A goal?’
‘It may be an opportune time to intervene. If you’ll follow me . . .’
In a rough field behind the village, under the looming mountain, teams of novice monks were playing soccer, a half-dozen per side. All the boys, aged somewhere between twelve and fifteen, were wearing purple robes and had shaven heads. One side was celebrating a goal, while the other was riven by arguments.
‘Now I’ve seen everything,’ Ben said. ‘Novice monks playing football.’
Padma smiled indulgently. ‘Young men cannot study thousand-year-old manuscripts about the nature of consciousness all the time.’
‘What baffles me,’ Nelson said, ‘is how they can tell who’s on which team.’
Padma laughed, a big booming laugh that seemed to echo from the mountain.
Now Nelson heard what looked like the captain of the losing side berating his midfielders. ‘Look – I know it’s not your position, but when the defender goes forward you drop back to cover him. You back him up. You always need back-up!’
Ben and Nelson exchanged a glance. Nelson said dryly, ‘I think we found him.’
Padma beckoned the losing captain over. He came at a jog, young, healthy, breath wreathing pink cheeks. But he stared at Nelson and Ben, and slowed, and his face fell. Nelson felt his heart break, just a little. Already the Himalayan dream was over for this boy.
‘I know these people, master,’ the boy said to Padma.
‘You do. This man is your friend – your good friend of many years. And this fellow – well, he’s your son. Your adopted son.’
The boy’s face worked. ‘Why have they come?’
Nelson stepped forward. ‘It’s my fault. Blame me. I persuaded Ben to bring me here. I felt it was important.’
‘They need you out there,’ Padma said gently.
‘I remember.’ The boy pressed his fists to his eyes. ‘I remember! Why did you come?’ He was weeping, Nelson saw with a shock. The boy crumpled, squatting, the tears leaking from behind his clenched fists.
Padma knelt down with him, stiffly. ‘Remember, Lobsang. Remember your teaching, the texts. To realize one’s true nature is a liberation.’
‘We’re only one goal down! Oh, why did you come? Why?’
30
AS THE WINTER turned to spring, the troll band seemed content to hang around the rock bluff where they’d brought Joshua.
As he got on with his convalescence, and waited for a pickup that might or might not come, Joshua had re-established his own camp at the bluff. He’d set up his small tent, with his aerogel roll-out mattress and his sleeping bag. His radio still worked, pumping out its general-purpose beacon signal: Here I am. And, as a second thought, he spread out the remnants of the spacesuit-silver survival blanket across the top of the bluff so it could be seen from the air, just as Bill Chambers had suggested – at least, when Sancho wasn’t borrowing it. Of course you had to be wary of what kind of attention you attracted to yourself; he hadn’t forgotten those big pterosaurs. But he figured that at this point the advantage he could gain from being picked up by some Good Samaritan and returned to the human worlds far o
utweighed the risk of danger. And besides, the trolls were here with him. They’d provide some warning of, if not protection from, aerial threats.
In the meantime, he lived among trolls.
Their hunting was a beautiful process to watch. Scouts panned out across the landscape, and indeed across the worlds, returning with information about threats, storms, or sources of food and water and shelter, and they would sing out that information to the group. More scouts would go out to check up on these reports, and then return to sing out their findings. Very quickly the band would converge on a solution – to Joshua’s ears it was like a scratch choir suddenly and triumphantly bursting into a perfect rendition of the ‘Ode to Joy’ – and off they would go, in search of goodies. This was the essence of troll collective intelligence, Lobsang had come to believe, adapted for an existence spread across a sheaf of stepwise worlds. A troll band was like a bee swarm, with scouts returning from stepwise worlds to dance out news of food or threats to the main group.
Now he had time to watch them more closely – and maybe for longer, in one continuous period, than anybody out in the wild before, he mused – Joshua thought he spotted more novel aspects of their behaviour. Such as when scouts he didn’t recognize showed up – granted it was hard to be sure with all that hair who was who anyhow – and they would join with scouts from ‘his’ band, and maybe others, and go into a different kind of gathering, hooting, jumping and floor-slapping, even mock-wrestling at times, dozens of trolls from several different bands all over each other.
‘It’s like a Boston New Year’s,’ Joshua said to himself, watching, bemused.
But though there was obviously a strong element of play here – and flirting, as a few male–female pairings would periodically spin off from the whole – Joshua was sure all this had something to do with the collective, that every gesture, every hoot and cry, was a thought being expressed or received.
In a way there was no such thing as a troll; there were only the trolls, the collective – the way no bee was a true individual, separate from the hive. And Joshua knew about bees, having spent many scary hours as a small boy helping Sister Regina maintain the Home’s single hive. A troll band saw and sensed as a whole, and remembered through the dances and the long call. And this new behaviour he witnessed seemed to fit in with that. Beekeepers knew that drones from hives miles around would sometimes gather in a kind of congress, and urgently share information in their buzzing aerial dance. In the same way, maybe that was what was happening here – troll bands spread across miles, and across many Earths stepwise, sharing their intelligence of opportunity and threat.
‘Must tell Lobsang,’ he said. ‘Always something new in the Long Earth.’
And, when a very young cub died of some condition Joshua could neither identify nor treat, he witnessed behaviours he had heard of before, when the cub was buried in a crude, scraped-out grave, and the band gathered round and scattered flower petals.
It was either his good fortune that the trolls happened to be sticking around during his recuperation, or else his even greater good fortune that they were choosing do so, that they were being kind to this raggedy old human with his busted leg.
More good fortune than he deserved, he thought in his blacker moments.
The trolls hadn’t asked for him to show up, after all. And it was his own stupid fault he’d gotten himself injured. Out in the High Meggers there were plenty of humans who would have left him lying in the dirt, after having robbed him of anything worth carrying away. Even Sally Linsay might have abandoned him, he reflected with sour humour, seeing his death by starvation or between the jaws of some predator as a fitting reward for his carelessness. The Long Earth was a tough place, a raw place, a place that didn’t owe you a living. In the end the dumb got winnowed out – and even the great Joshua Valienté, the best-known pioneer of them all, wasn’t immune to that.
Except it wasn’t happening that way. Thanks to the trolls.
He did want to think that he was giving something back to the trolls.
After all, they had a lot in common. Trolls and humans were believed to share a deep common ancestry that dated back to the African savannah on Datum Earth. The ancestors of the trolls had gone off into the Long Earth to become super-stepper hunters, while the ancestors of humans had hung around on the Datum and moved out across the continents, becoming clever survivors, banging rocks and splitting atoms. But, Joshua thought, they must share deep primal memories of those common early days – memories of the teeth of leopards. Here there were no leopards that Joshua had seen, but there were carnivores so ferocious that elephants had needed to evolve armour. Trolls were big, heavy, clever animals, but for all the complexity of their song, for all the power of their muscles, trolls were as naked in the wilderness as Homo habilis two million years earlier. He’d seen them in the dark, how they huddled together backed up against the rock face of the bluff. How they woke when noises came out of the night, and the parents snuggled their young closer. How a cloud of fear hung over the group.
So Joshua played his part to assuage that fear. He showed the trolls his tools, his knives, his small handguns, and what he could do with them. And he made sure there was a fire blazing at every sunset, a fire he and the trolls kept fed through the night.
‘Call me man-cub, Sancho.’
‘Hoo?’
So they stayed with him while he recovered, and conversely he stayed with them.
But he was not a troll.
The weeks and months wore on, and he was stuck out here on a voluntary sabbatical that had become an enforced exile.
In the end it was Helen he missed the most.
Looking back he felt bemused at the time he’d wasted, the time he’d been away from her. Their years seemed so brief, in the end. He would hold her diary, which had survived the months of his illness. ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘if I get out of this fix I will come see you on Datum Madison, where you lie, if I have to hop there on a pogo stick to do it. I swear it.’
It was when he was in this mood that the old troll Sancho would come join him.
It was the middle of the day, and the sun was high. Joshua was sitting on top of the bluff, wearing a battered broad-brimmed hat and his shirt open.
It was the warmest it had been since before the winter, and the air was a flat, oppressive blanket. He could see a good bit of the landscape from up here, and nothing much was moving. Some of the trolls sat lolling in what shade the bluff offered, but most were out of sight, probably off food-gathering on some neighbouring world. Elephants were hanging around the river, further upstream, trumpeting thinly as they splashed water over their armoured faces.
And here came Sancho, carrying his translator troll-call, courtesy of Valhalla U. His ageing body heavy, he climbed the bluff stiffly – though not so stiffly as Joshua with his rigid right leg. Sancho sat down by Joshua, wrapped the spacesuit-silver blanket around his shoulders, and surveyed the landscape with a faint air of old-man disdain.
Then he reached out a hand like a boxing glove, in a silent request. Joshua sighed and handed over his sunglasses. ‘Just don’t bend the damn frame again.’
‘Hoo,’ said the troll, jamming the glasses on his wide face. Somehow, Joshua had to admit, the glasses suited him.
Sometimes they would sit side by side like this for hours, in silence, each chewing blades of grass. Like two old-fart boatmen by the Mississippi, Joshua mused, silently letting the hours wash by like the waters of the river itself.
And sometimes they spoke.
Sancho spat out a volume of greenish phlegm. ‘Alone.’ He handed over the troll-call for Joshua’s reply.
‘Who, me? Or you?’
‘Why alone why?’
Joshua shrugged. ‘I like to be alone. Or used to like it.’
The old troll pursed his lips and squinted, listening. Joshua always wondered how much of his meaning was getting through. You had to shout and hope with the troll-call.
‘Kid alone?’
‘Yeah. I was alone as a kid too. I had friends who cared for me. I think I’d bust the troll-call if I tried to explain Sister Agnes.’
‘Hoo.’
‘You’re alone. I can see that. Where’s your family?’
The troll spat again, wrapped his arm over his head like an orang-utan, and scratched a filthy armpit. ‘Family happy healthy hungry, far away. Babies with mom-and-pop. Mom-and-pop with babies. Old trolls, me, wander off. No babies, no mom-and-pop, wander off. This band, this band, this band.’
Joshua imagined a sub-clan of elderly, solitary trolls, their own cubs grown and independent, the females no longer fertile perhaps, wandering the stepwise landscape, not exactly alone – he guessed a true loner wouldn’t survive long – but drifting from one band to another. Had humans ever observed this behaviour? They had probably just assumed the old members they saw in any given troll band were grandparents, even great-grandparents, hanging around to help out the younger generations. Even Lobsang might have fallen into that trap, watching the trolls in the restricted environment of his Low Earths reserve, where old folk such as Sancho wouldn’t have had their usual freedom of movement.
Now Sancho tapped his skull. ‘Librarian.’
‘Yeah. You said that before. You’re a Librarian. Is that what they called you at the college? What does it mean, Sancho?’
‘Big head. Lots of remember.’
‘Memory?’
‘Lots of remember. Remember for trolls. Old time, long time past. Weather. Before people.’
‘Hm. Before Step Day. When the golden age for trolls ended . . .’
‘Head full.’
‘Full of what? Memories, I guess. Stories? So is that how you earn your corn? You take your stories around the population?’
‘Librarian.’
Joshua smiled. ‘Yes, buddy. And I guess all you know is fed into the long call . . .’
He could see how useful such information could be to the trolls, as it would be for any human group. It was always worth cherishing a handful of old folk who could remember what they did the last time the once-a-decade flood came, or the big storm, or the famine, or the bad winter when there was a particular kind of mushroom you could find in the snow to keep you alive . . . Maybe in the case of the trolls there would be information from the deeper past, from generations ago. Memories of volcanic eruptions and quakes and even asteroid strikes, lessons about how trolls had lived through such disasters before. Joshua started to picture Sancho’s mind as a cavern, deep and dark and mysterious, crammed with treasure, with information – with remember.
The Long Cosmos Page 17