The Long Cosmos (30 page)

Joshua, his head spinning from his cosmic ride, was struck by the mundanity of it. ‘So where, Sancho? What beach?'

Sancho shrugged. ‘Beach.'

Joshua laughed softly. He was already tiring of standing, so he let himself slide down his crutches to the sand, splaying his bad leg before him, and gazed out as more of that calm sea was revealed to him. ‘Who cares what beach, right? Joshua, you need to think like a troll. A beach is a beach is all one beach, spanning the Long Earth – and a good place to feed . . .'

Sancho tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Climb.' ‘Climb? Climb what, where?'

‘Tree.' The troll pointed inland, and started to march that way.

‘Tree?' Joshua stood again, with difficulty, and turned away from the sea. The fog was lifting rapidly – well, it must be morning here, as it was on the world they'd come from, as it was presumably on all the worlds of the Long Earth. And in the morning light the sea mist burned off to reveal, as he looked inland, above the beach—

Structures. Like towers.

Big ones, each one a central pillar with what looked like buttresses splayed on the ground at its base, and draped in mist above. A whole array of them, still no more than silhouettes against the pearly fog. Buildings? No, they looked too organic for that. In fact even those splayed buttresses looked like tremendous crabs.

He saw the hunched shoulders of the troll disappearing into the mist as he tramped steadily up the beach, towards one of the ‘pillars'. Joshua hastened to follow, fumbling with his crutches. The mist lifted further. And Joshua had a sudden shift of perspective.

He was looking at a
tree
, a big one, with a fat solid trunk and a heavy, massive root system that had fooled him into thinking of a crouching beast, a crab, and branches and a canopy still out of sight in the rising mist above his head. A big tree, but just a tree – with more of the same beyond, he saw, as slim silhouettes congealed out of the mist. Some kind of sparse forest, then, towards which Sancho was leading him at a ground-consuming marching pace.

‘A forest is a forest,' Joshua muttered as he pivoted himself forward on his crutches, over and over. ‘Like a beach is a beach. Except – here we are. Why this forest, why these trees? . . .' Perhaps there would be answers when they reached the forest itself.

But they were still on the damn beach. Joshua's crutches were still sinking annoyingly in the soft sand, his bad leg aching with every move, his armpits sore and chafed already from the crutches. And those trees looked just as far away as ever, despite the troll's steady march towards them.

‘What the hell is this, am I on a treadmill? . . . Ah, quit complaining.' Joshua got his head down, gritted his teeth, and endured. ‘I'm coming, Rod.'

The going got a little easier higher up the beach, where there were scraps of dune grass to bind the surface. That gave way to a grassy, sandy sward, and then rows of dunes that rippled gently across the landscape. ‘Gently', that is, unless, like Joshua, you were trying to walk through them on one leg up a sandy hill and down into a grassy hollow, over and over. But Joshua moved as fast as he dared, not risking a fall, trying to keep Sancho in sight in the still misty air.

The dunes gave way to a plain, a grassy scrub dotted with low bushes. The fog was still thick enough to obscure the horizon – and, Joshua realized with a renewed shock, those big trees themselves were
still
far enough away for their trunks and roots to be greyed by the lingering ground mist, the fog above still cloaking the branches and canopy.

He stopped thinking, and just concentrated on one step after the next, one crutch-pivot after another, following the back of the receding troll. But unease prickled. If he'd been able to make out those root masses from the beach, beyond the bank of dunes, how the hell big must those trees be?

He didn't realize how big they were, in fact, until at last he reached the base of the trunk of the nearest tree, and he found himself walking into the root system. Not around it, or over it –
into
it, like an ant approaching an oak tree. Sculptures of wood lifted out of a mulch-strewn ground around him, soon rising up over his head. And these were just the roots. If he hadn't seen it from further away, from this close Joshua would never have recognized this enormous structure as a tree at all. And yet there was Sancho still fearlessly leading the way into the root mass, even though the troll's own mighty bulk was dwarfed by the giant formations all around him. Joshua felt diminished, and he struggled to keep up.

And he was struck by how quiet it was, not a bird's call to be heard.

At last the troll stopped before a wall of wood that rose up sheer from the ground. Fallen branches littered the earth at its foot – branches that looked hefty enough to serve as tree trunks in most forests Joshua had visited. Even Sancho was panting now, but he thumped at the wall with one big fist. ‘Tree,' he said.

‘Well, I can see that.' Joshua let himself slump to the ground, and looked up. The trunk was so vast it showed no obvious curvature, not from this close to. It was a wall that stretched to left and right as far as he could see, and up into the steadily rising bank of mist. At first glance the surface, a blackish bark, had seemed smooth, but now he saw crevices and flaws. Joshua gulped water from a flask, and grabbed the troll-call. ‘Three questions, Sancho.'

‘Hoo?'

‘Why the hell did we have to
walk
all this way from the beach? Couldn't your damn seven-league-boots stepping bring us closer?'

Sancho just shrugged.

‘OK. Second. Why are we here?'

In answer, Sancho started digging in the mulch at the foot of the trunk-wall. He threw aside what looked like huge dead leaves to Joshua – until he perceived that these were only fragments of leaves, shreds of much bigger structures. Now one of those immense fallen branches was exposed in the mulch. Without hesitating, with one hand, Sancho got hold of a thick splinter at the branch's broken end – and with a dismissive gesture flicked the branch into the air, a hefty timber the size of a reasonable tree trunk cartwheeling away, falling slowly, languidly, before coming to rest with a slow-motion clatter some yards away.

Joshua just stared. ‘Wow. I know trolls are strong, but this is ridiculous.' Curious, he got to his feet and hobbled over to the fallen branch. Here was the splinter that Sancho had grabbed hold of, a jagged dagger of torn wood. Experimentally, leaning on his crutches, Joshua got hold of the splinter, and pulled.

And the whole branch lifted up off the ground, a pillar of wood twenty feet long at least. It wasn't quite without weight, but it felt like a papier-mâché mock-up of a tree trunk rather than the real thing. ‘Wow,' Joshua said again. ‘If I had two working legs,
I
could send this thing spinning. Hey, Sancho. What is this stuff?'

‘Reaching-wood,' was all Sancho would say, as he rummaged through the leaf litter, working his way towards the big trunk-wall.

‘Reaching-wood? But—'

‘Hoo!' With that triumphant call Sancho at last produced something from the dirt. A cylinder, Day-Glo scarlet.

Joshua's heart skipped a beat. It was Rod's flare gun. And, Joshua saw, it was sticky with blood.

He wondered how Sancho had known to look just here. Maybe he was guided by scent, or something in the long call. It didn't matter.

‘OK. I get it. This is where the singer beast brought him. What do we do now?'

The troll looked up at the trunk-wall, and grinned. ‘Climb.'

41

T
HERE WAS ONLY
one way Joshua Valienté, sixty-eight years old and with a busted leg, was going to climb this mountainous tree. And that was on the back of a troll.

Joshua found it more than a little embarrassing to be so helpless, but Sancho was brisk and sensible. He let Joshua sort out his pack, folding up his lightweight crutches and stowing them away, hanging the troll-call on a cord around his neck. Then he helped Joshua clamber up on his back, arms around the troll's huge neck, with a couple of loops of rope around their waists for safety. Sancho seemed so practised at this that Joshua wondered if he'd been used as some kind of bearer in the past, maybe for one of the big logging concerns like the Long Earth Trading Company. A humanoid with a big roomy mind and a generous heart, used as a mule by some bunch of money-grubbing lumberjacks? Well, that was people for you.

And then, with his human cargo safely attached, the troll looked up at the immense trunk-wall, spat on his hands, and began to climb.

The bark was marked by knots and pits, and Sancho had no trouble finding handholds. Even the troll's feet were mobile and clever, seeking out holds with almost as much articulation as the big hands. As Sancho climbed, Joshua could feel the immense muscles in the troll's shoulders and back working under his hairy skin, and despite the dead-weight burden of an old man, Sancho seemed not so much to climb as to swarm up the trunk face in a continuous liquid movement. Trolls had often made Joshua think more of orang-utans than of gorillas, and the likeness to the orangs had never seemed more striking, the troll's arms and legs matched in their length and strength and suppleness.

And while Joshua was marvelling at the skill of the troll, they rose steadily into the air.

Soon the ground was far behind, littered with fallen leaves and branches that looked, from a height, almost normal scale. But when Joshua looked up, this wall of bark receded up into the still rising mist, and if there were any branches they weren't visible yet.

And, looking around, leaning back as he clung to Sancho's muscular neck, Joshua could see those other trees now, their trunks tremendous vertical shadows off in the mist. Some of the trees seemed to be wrapped in cables – huge vines or lianas perhaps, dimly visible in the mist, maybe some kind of parasite. This was a true forest, of many trees, but the individual specimens were so vast, and, presumably, necessarily spaced so far apart, that it didn't
feel
like a forest. The trees were more like immense buildings, like skyscrapers. This was Datum Manhattan rendered in wood.

The troll moved steadily, but not quite tirelessly. Every so often he stopped, and Joshua could hear the rumbling of his huge lungs as he took deep breaths.

And as he climbed Sancho picked at the surface of the bark before him. He was careful not to damage the bark itself, but plants grew here, things like ferns and orchids and bromeliads, taking their sustenance directly from the air. Some of these epiphytes bore fruit that Sancho stuffed into his mouth. And he dug bugs and beetles from crevices in the bark – more crunchy snacks. Joshua himself stuck to his bottled water and energy bars from Rod's pack, but he was impressed. Life everywhere, living on or in this great tree. Once Sancho disturbed a bird like a huge woodpecker, the size of an eagle but gaudily coloured, which flapped away, cawing in disapproval, while Joshua ducked for cover. Maybe this was why he'd heard no bird call on the ground. The birds lived just too damn high.

And still they climbed. Warm, comfortable, lulled by the steady rhythm of the climb – and feeling as safe as he ever had, in the care of this remarkable troll – Joshua slept.

He was woken when Sancho stopped once more and, gently, began to disengage Joshua's ropes.

Joshua saw that they had reached branches, at last.

The sun was going down on this world, the world of these immense trees, and the low light cast milky shadows through the still lingering mist. They must have climbed nearly all day. And Sancho and Joshua were dwarfed by an immense three-dimensional tangle all around them: the trunk, the vast branches, leaves like green flags. The branches were themselves immense structures, the size of mature Datum oak trees – branches that seemed too massive to support themselves, but if they were made of that anomalously light ‘reaching-wood' then Joshua supposed it was feasible. Now, Joshua realized, there was noise, the calls of birds – or something like birds – and the squeaks and cries of animals of some kind, echoing in this vast roomy structure in the sky. This was where the life was, then, on this world: high above the ground. And presumably this was only the lower level of the canopy of this giant forest.

Sancho looked up suddenly, nostrils flaring, intent. Joshua thought he could hear a snatch of long call, drifting from the mist above.

Looking around, Joshua saw that Sancho had evidently stopped here because he had found a kind of pond, water collected in a junction of branch and trunk. A little way from the pond, Sancho gently let Joshua down and wrapped the safety rope around a side-branch, massive in itself. Then he worked his way back to the pond for a drink.

Guessing they were here for the night, Joshua reinforced the rope attachment with a couple of knots of his own. Then he dumped his pack, carefully tying that to the branch also. He dug out Sancho's survival blanket, and a lightweight sleeping bag for himself. The branch surface was tricky to work on, every square inch infested with mosses and lichen and fungi, and slippery, treacherous under hand and foot. He felt oddly breathless as he moved around, as if it was he who had been exercising hard, not the troll – and by comparison the troll barely seemed fatigued at all, though his big chest heaved at the air.

He joined Sancho by the tree pond. Sancho was using his hands to guzzle down the water. Joshua filled an empty flask, but he strained the water first and dropped in a purification tablet.

After that, Sancho sat over the pond, in the patient posture he'd had when hunting those rabbits in their underground lairs. Joshua sat beside him, still and soundless. But he could see nothing in the pond, nothing but some kind of lily-like plant spread on the surface, and the gentlest of ripples—

Sancho plunged in one huge hand, creating a vigorous splash, and in a single motion drew out a fist containing a kind of alligator, struggling and snapping. The gator was dwarfed and pale, but Joshua thought it was nevertheless more than capable of taking off a finger. But Sancho slammed its head against the trunk surface, and the gator's struggles ceased immediately.