‘Fire,’ said Sancho.
‘Sancho, buddy – thank you.’ ‘Fire! Oops! Fire!’
And now there was a tremendous blast, coming from deep within the body of the tree. The branch they clung to creaked and swayed.
Glancing around, Joshua saw that the troll band had scattered, the individuals clinging wherever they could get a hold. Further away, branches were cracking and breaking, huge chunks, themselves the size of mature trees, falling away into the air. A brilliant glow shone from further down the trunk; there was a rising plume of smoke – and now more explosions, as, Joshua guessed, more natural concentrations of hydrogen were breached.
He stared at Sancho, aghast. ‘What have I done?’
‘Oops!’ Sancho yelled. And he picked up the limp Rod, threw Joshua bodily over his other shoulder, and ran back along the branch of the exploding tree.
As he was jolted along, head hanging upside down, fresh detonations battering his hearing, Joshua muttered, ‘Eat your heart out, Colonel Quaritch.’
As Joshua and Rod figured it out when they talked it over later, you didn’t evolve to be a sky tree, a five-mile-tall reservoir of intensely flammable hydrogen gas – a five-mile-tall Hindenburg – without developing strategies to survive fire. Even to exploit it. For, thanks to lightning strikes and meteor falls and volcanic events and other natural calamities, there would always be fire on any world, even those worlds not yet visited by Joshua Valienté with a box of matches.
For the rogue missile had sparked a cascade of explosions that, with surprising speed, blew the mighty trunk of the tree apart. The tree itself could not survive, and much of its substance was lost to the flames. The colossal pyre created a plume of smoke and ash and water vapour – the product of burning hydrogen in oxygen, Joshua realized, the opposite of electrolysis – that reached for the stratosphere.
But out of that plume sailed significant bodies of reaching-wood, naturally separating from the disintegrating tree: branches, chunks of trunk. Many of these were rather like trees themselves, with slim trunks, branches with clusters of leaves, roots dangling in the air like the tentacles of an octopus. These sailed out of the carnage, slowly settling to the ground. They were seedlings, Joshua guessed, saplings, the descendants of the tree and the repository of its genes, the seeds of the next generation. There even seemed to be two kinds, like pollen, like flowers – male and female, maybe.
And meanwhile, to ensure those seedlings had room to flourish, from out of the dying tree’s central blaze flew sparks of liquid light, trailing smoke plumes that were soon miles long. These were branch-missiles like the ones Joshua had ignited with his matches, but here serving their true purpose. Fired blindly and at random, but in all directions, these splinters of fire sailed into the foliage of the dying tree’s equally mighty neighbours. Not all the missiles reached a target; not all the targets succumbed to the flames. But enough missiles got through, enough neighbours were destroyed, to ensure that the originating tree’s seedlings had at least a fighting chance of finding open ground to root in and sunlight to drink in, away from the shade of more mature competitors.
Of course as each secondary tree was detonated in turn, more missile-branches arced out across the stupendous forest, until a good fraction of it was ablaze. Joshua wondered briefly if the whole damn continent was going to go up in a tremendous firestorm. But he soon saw that the fire was stopping at wide avenues that cut through the forest, natural firebreaks. And, above his head, heavy grey clouds seemed to be gathering: laden with the water vapour rising from the burning trees, maybe they would be a source of rain that would limit the fire further.
Lobsang, on some tree-choked world, had once told Joshua that he believed forests could be seen as living things in themselves: a collective almost like troll bands, sleeping in the cold, drowsy in summer, with the sap rising daily like a single tremendous heartbeat. So it was here – just a different lifecycle, on a different scale. The hydrogen forest was using the fire to spread its seeds, but the blaze itself was self-limiting, it seemed. In a century or two the young trees would grow and the forest would heal, stronger than ever, and it would be as if this inferno had never happened, its only trace a layer of enriching ash in the topsoil.
As the forest turned into a natural if spectacular battlefield, as a flood of animals fled from the bases of the burning trees – things like deer, things like rabbits, even a few troll bands – one seedling gently sailed towards the ground with an elderly troll clinging to the slim trunk, a human being draped over each of his powerful shoulders.
45
AT LAST ROD opened his eyes.
Joshua, sitting by him, tried to hide his relief. He pushed a lock of hair back from his son’s forehead. Rod’s face was ghastly pale, but, Joshua told himself, that could be an effect of the eerie light in this cavern to which Sancho had brought them.
Rod tried to speak, licked his lips, tried again with a voice that was a dry rasp. ‘Dad?’
Joshua could barely hear him over the soft echoes of the unending long call. ‘I’m here. Don’t talk too much.’
Rod was lying on a bed of moss, with survival blankets above and below, his own orange flight suit bundled up under his head for a pillow, the white med pack open on the ground nearby. Now Joshua lifted Rod’s head slightly and held a cup of water for him. Rod drank greedily, to Joshua’s relief.
‘That’s good,’ Rod said, his voice stronger now. ‘Tastes kind of . . . organic. But good.’
‘Are you hungry?’
Rod thought about it. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Good. I’ve been trying to feed you while you slept. Or when you were half-awake, anyhow. A broth your mother would have approved of, with some of the trolls’ patent herbal medicines sprinkled on top.’
‘Yum.’ He glanced around. ‘Where are we?’
‘Somewhere around West 230,000,000. Probably. If the records of the Armstrong II are accurate—’
‘Dad. I don’t care. I mean, this place we’re in. What is it, some kind of cave?’
‘Something like that.’ Joshua looked around, at the complex roof over his head, the mushrooms and ferns the size of small trees themselves, the soft greenish glow that shone from the roof and walls and permeated everything – and the underground lake, its shore a few paces away, tranquil, glimmering, itself so vast it was almost as if it had a horizon at the place where the earthen ‘sky’ of this chamber descended to touch the ground. He tried to remember how he had first struggled to take it all in, when the trolls had brought them both down here two days ago – or was it three? Time was fluid in this unchanging light.
‘Take it easy,’ he advised his son now. ‘Let it all sink in. We’re in no rush. And we’re safe here. As safe as we would be anywhere in the Long Earth, I think. Thanks to the trolls.’
‘I can hear the trolls,’ Rod said now. ‘That song they’re singing.’
The mostly elderly trolls who inhabited this place – evidently ‘Librarians’, like Sancho himself – liked to spend their days sitting in small groups, four or five or six of them singing softly together, and the voices of those groups themselves combined, as if the whole was an ensemble of individual small choirs. The result was music that washed around the cavern in an unending wave, breaking, intensifying, complexifying, every so often coming to a peak as all the ‘choirs’ joined in together.
‘I never heard a song like it,’ Rod said.
‘Get used to it. Down here they sing all the time.’
‘It’s beautiful, though.’
‘It’s part of the long call, I think. And yet there’s something familiar about it. I’m trying to remember . . .’
‘This is a troll place, isn’t it? A refuge. They saved us.’
‘Oh, yes. After you dived into the fire and saved a few of them. I have never put my hope in any other but in you, O Sancho.’
Rod, settling back on his pillow, pulled a face. ‘What, old movie lines even now, Dad?’
Jos
hua frowned. ‘Not a movie line. On the other hand I can’t remember where it does come from.’ He massaged his temples. ‘Something older than any movie. Sister Georgina would have known.’
Rod was looking around. ‘Dad . . . What fire? I don’t remember how I got here.’
‘What do you remember?’
He shook his head. ‘That animal in the river, that seemed to be hypnotizing little Matt.’
‘And you charged in. If you pull a stunt like that again—’
‘Oh, can it, Dad, you’d have done the same. So after that?’
‘You were taken away, by the singing beast from the river. Rod, as best I can figure it, that animal is a humanoid predator that specializes in taking trolls. And it seems to be based here, on this world, which is a kind of locus for the trolls, if not a home world exactly. Good hunting for a troll-killer. Anyhow, the beast brought you here. To its world.’
‘How? By stepping?’
‘Kind of. Long story. And we – Sancho and I – had to come get you back. You don’t remember any of that? The big trees?’
‘What big trees? Dad, I must have been out for hours—’
‘Days, actually. The singer had you for days.’
Rod touched the back of his head, wincing. ‘Feels like I’m one big bruise back here.’
‘The singer must have kept tapping you to keep you out.’
‘“Tapping”? Easy for you to say.’
‘Didn’t feed you though, and you’re badly dehydrated. I’ve been pouring water into you. From the lake, which is why it tastes funny, probably.’
‘What lake? . . . Never mind. Why didn’t it just kill me? I was prey.’
Joshua shrugged. ‘Maybe it was planning some game with you. Have its young hunt you, or practise their fake long calls on you. To it, you must have been just a funny-looking troll.’
‘Lucky for me, I guess,’ Rod said doubtfully.
‘And lucky for both of us that Sancho saved us.’
‘Hoo.’
The big troll lumbered up to join them. He squatted down by Rod’s prone body, and fingered the survival blanket regretfully.
Rod, feeble but determined, peeled the blanket off his legs and handed it to Sancho. ‘Have it back, big guy. I’m done borrowing it.’
‘Ha!’ With an expression of satisfaction Sancho pulled the blanket over his shoulders, where it looked like it belonged, Joshua thought.
And when Joshua looked back to Rod, he had slumped back to sleep.
46
AFTER ANOTHER TWENTY-FOUR hours, Rod looked a lot stronger, and was getting restless.
‘Dad, can you help me up?’
Joshua couldn’t, but Sancho could. He wrapped one huge arm around Rod’s shoulders and gently lifted him up to a stand, as easily as a child holding a doll. Rod was a little woozy upright, but he drank more water, and waited until the world stopped spinning, he said. Then he had Joshua help him to a corner where he emptied his bladder.
Rod looked around, in a mildly confused way, at the cave, the high roof, the glimmering underground lake – and the trolls, a band of them. Joshua imagined Rod could see at a glance this was an unusual group, with a kind of inverted age profile: full of oldsters, many of them apparently older than Sancho, with just a handful of young adults and cubs.
‘I have this memory of you going on about big trees, Dad. But here we are in this cave. So, big trees? Like sequoias?’
‘Bigger than that. Trees so high you can’t breathe the air at the top. Trees as tall as mountains, Rod. Trees miles high. All over this planet, as far as I can tell.’
Rod stared at him. ‘You sure that singer beast didn’t tap your noggin a couple of times too?’
‘I’d take you up to see for yourself if it was safe. But I don’t need to do that. Look around. Look at the roof of this place, this cavern. You’re underground, you understand that, yes? What do you see? What’s holding up the roof?’
Rod looked at arching black pillars that came to a dense junction overhead – high enough that there was a faint mist up there, Joshua saw – with rock and earth caked between. ‘Ribs. Like the skeleton of a twain. Are they rock? But I’ve never seen a rock formation like that. It looks artificial – no, organic. Like it grew there.’ He looked around, squinting, trying to follow the detail of the cavern roof where it soared to even greater heights over the water. ‘My God. Are they tree roots?’
Joshua had had time to figure all this out; he felt unfairly smug. ‘You know, some trees have root systems that can extend as far beneath the ground as the tree stretches up above it.’
‘I’m getting it, Dad. Slowly. All this vast space is just a hollow under the root system of one of your Yggdrasils.’
‘Or more than one, yeah.’
Rod held up his hand to create a shadow. ‘And the whole thing is glowing, isn’t it? Glowing with light. But there’s no source. No sun down here.’
‘Some kind of bioluminescence, I think,’ Joshua said. ‘The roof, some of the plants. Like in the sea . . .’
‘It’s kind of gloomy. A lot of green and brown.’
‘You get to miss the blue sky after a day or two.’
‘But there are trees too,’ Rod said. ‘Trees, growing in a cave.’ He pointed to a couple of specimens. ‘Big enough for trolls to sit under.’
‘Some of them are more like fungi, I think. Big mushrooms or toadstools, suited to the light. Not my speciality, unless they’re edible. But there are ferns and shrubs, and some fruiting plants. A thing like a big banana plant. There’s plenty more life down here if you look closer. Big beetles burrowing in the bark, ants building nests in the mulch. Most of them sightless, though.’
‘All feeding off – what, the light from the roof?’
‘I guess. A whole ecosystem fed by a trickle of energy from the sunlight gathered in the big leaves of the canopy, miles above us. And there has to be some kind of flow of air and water through, to keep that lake from stagnating, the air fresh. Well, if you can call a troll’s fart fresh.’
‘There must be some payback,’ Rod said. ‘There always is. Some reason the big tree spends its energy like this. Maybe having all this stuff going on is good for its roots, or something.’
Joshua said, looking out at the lake, ‘You’re right. I bet this is where the tree makes the hydrogen it needs. A natural electrolysis tank. And it’s all maintained by the life forms down here. Lobsang would know.’
‘Hydrogen?’
‘I’ll explain later—’
‘Good to eat,’ Sancho said through the troll-call.
‘He’s right about that,’ Joshua said. ‘No predators, fruit growing out of the walls: it’s paradise for this bunch of old trolls.’
‘More like Fiddler’s Green,’ Rod said.
‘Like in Pirates of the Caribbean?’
‘You and your movies, Dad . . . It’s an old sailors’ legend, and there were enough old sailors serving on the Valhalla-run twains in my day. Fiddler’s Green, where the rum and tobacco never run out, and the fiddlers never stop playing.’
‘Just like this. Where old trolls come when they’re done wandering the Long Earth.’
‘I guess. I can think of worse places to finish up.’
Sancho rumbled through the horn, ‘Not finish up.’
Rod twisted to look up at him. ‘Not the elephants’ graveyard, then. So what do you old fogies do all day down here?’
‘Not all old.’
‘Mostly,’ said Joshua.
The troll tapped his own heavy skull with a forefinger. ‘Librarians. Big roomy heads.’
‘Ah. With the memories of the race stored away in there.’
Rod frowned. ‘I thought the race memory was locked up in the trolls’ singing, the long call.’
‘It is,’ Joshua said. ‘But there’s more to it than that, Rod . . .’
Rod looked dubious as Joshua tried to explain. ‘So all these Librarians from across the Long Earth, all with their heads full of memories, the
y come here and . . . what?’
Joshua smiled. ‘I think Lobsang would say they synch. They put together their memories, they correct them, they lock them together – they share.’
As if on cue, the troll song started to rise to one of its rhythmic peaks all around them.
‘I can even guess how it evolved,’ Joshua said. ‘The scouts from different troll bands get together in congresses, where they share information about the hunt, about predators, about drought. This is a scout congress but on a much grander scale, much more depth.’
Sancho waved a hand. ‘Librarians from all over. Songs from far away. All brought here.’
‘Songs of distant Earths,’ Joshua murmured.
‘Hmm,’ Rod said. ‘Memories going back – how long?’
‘Nobody knows. We do know the trolls have a history that makes ours look like an anecdote.’
‘Just as well your generation didn’t wipe them all out then, Dad . . .’
‘New,’ said Sancho unexpectedly.
Joshua and Rod exchanged a look, and then Joshua faced the troll. ‘New? What’s new?’
‘In song.’ Sancho cocked his head, as if listening, and then made a kind of beckoning gesture. ‘Come, come. Join us.’
Rod looked startled. ‘“Join us.” Dad, that’s—’
‘The Invitation. I know. The radio astronomers, the Carl Sagan SETI thing. It was in the news before I left.’ He smiled. ‘So the trolls are hearing the Invitation too. Well, of course they are. The Invitation is a Long Earth phenomenon. And the trolls are just as important in the Long Earth as we are. More so. Join us . . . It all fits. In a way I think I heard it myself.’
‘Dad?’
The Long Cosmos Page 25