The Long War (25 page)

‘Which one?’

‘You couldn’t even begin to afford to buy the answer to that question,’ she said pleasantly, motioning him to a chair. ‘Just a moment, please, while I process you through the final stages of security . . .’ She tapped at the keypad. ‘That’s our trade, you know, here at transEarth. We buy and sell commercially useful information.’

So this wasn’t
just
a Black-funded playpen for Lobsang, then, Joshua thought cynically. He supposed it would be characteristic of Douglas Black to demand a profit.

‘There: you’re in the system. Please do wear your badge at all times. So are you ready to meet Lobsang?’

Hiroe took him out of the building, and they walked in the grounds. The evening was gathering now, on this world as on all the others. A few streetlights sparked on the local horizon, and the sun hung low in the sky.

But there was a faintly sulphurous smell in the air. The news today was that this world’s copy of Yellowstone was a little more restless than most of its brothers. Reports of trees being poisoned by acid seeps, for instance. Evidently there was ongoing geological unrest at the Yellowstone footprint across most of the Low Earths. On the Datum itself there had been an explosion that had killed a hapless young park ranger called Herb Lewis: not a volcanic eruption, the scientists emphasized, a hydrothermal event, an explosion of trapped, superheated water. All minor events.
Minor
: even from here, a thousand miles away from Yellowstone, Joshua thought he could smell this particular world’s
minor event
, and, remembering the apocalyptic nutjob who had accosted them at the Datum twain station about fire and brimstone at Yellowstone, he felt a prickle of unease.

Hiroe sat down on a slab bench carved out of one great baulk of timber. ‘Please. We will wait here for Lobsang.’

Joshua sat stiffly.

‘You are nervous about meeting him again, aren’t you?’

‘Not nervous, exactly . . . How can you tell?’

‘Oh, the little things. The gritted teeth. The white knuckles. Subtleties like that.’

Joshua laughed. But he glanced around before replying. ‘Can he hear us out here?’

She shook her head. ‘Actually no. In this place he has limits on his capabilities. Sister Agnes says that’s good for him. Not to be omnipotent, in at least one place in the world. Or, the worlds. Why do you think I brought you out here before speaking this way? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.’

‘You’re more than an employee, right?’

‘I do think of myself as a friend. He is everywhere, and yet he is very alone, Mr. Valienté. He does need friends. Especially you, sir . . .’

An old man approached through the afternoon light – that was Joshua’s first impression. He was slender, tall, with a shaven head, and he wore a loose orange robe. His sandalled feet were dirty, and he carried a kind of rake.

Joshua stood up. ‘Hello, Lobsang.’

Hiroe smiled, bowed, and gracefully slipped away.

‘First things first,’ Lobsang said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

The features of this particular ambulant unit reminded Joshua of some of the guises, the bodies Lobsang had donned before. But he had allowed himself to age – or at least, Joshua thought, he had programmed some suite of nano-fabricators to carve wrinkles and inflate jowls and make him look somewhere over sixty. His posture was bent, his movements slow, and the hands that clasped the rake had slightly swollen joints and skin pocked with liver spots. Of course it was all artifice. Everything about Lobsang was artifice, and you had to keep reminding yourself of that. But it was impressive artifice even so; if Lobsang was going to do ‘elderly monk’ he was going to get every detail right, down to the frayed hem of his grubby orange robe.

Joshua, resolutely unimpressed, didn’t feel much like small talk. ‘Why did you want to see me? Because of that stunt Sally pulled?’

Lobsang smiled. ‘In cahoots with your old friend MPD Lieutenant Jansson, I’ll remind you.
Cahoots
.’ He repeated the word, forming the syllables with exaggerated motions of his lips. ‘Lovely word, that. The kind of word that’s necessary to use, purely for the pleasure of saying it. One of the many unexpected joys of incarnation . . . What were we saying? Oh, yes, Sally Linsay. Well, her tunnelling-out with the troll Mary and her cub has made the news across the worlds.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Joshua said ruefully. Thanks to the old footage of the return of the
Mark Twain
, and the liberal use of face-recognition software, Joshua was now famously known as an associate of Sally. He had been badgered by the media, and by groups adopting various positions on the trolls and the issues surrounding them.

Lobsang said, ‘Sally’s stunt has brought the issue of the trolls and their relationship with humanity to the top of the news agenda, yes. But the whole business has been bubbling up into a crisis for some time. I’m sure you’re aware of that. And now the trolls have started to take action of their own. Action with direct consequences for us all.’

‘I heard. Trolls just clearing off all over, right?’

Lobsang smiled. ‘Let me show you. Or rather, let my trolls show you.’

‘
Your
trolls?’

‘There’s a pack of them a dozen or so steps away. My holding here extends stepwise, across several worlds.’ He held out his hand, as if in invitation. ‘Shall we go see?’

There were perhaps twenty trolls in the group. Females sat lazily grooming in the shade of a sprawling tree – the early evening was warm in this particular world – while cubs played, a few young males wrestled in a desultory way, and at the fringe of the pack adults flickered in and out of existence. And as they worked or played or dozed, they sang, a lively sing-along overlaid with complex hooting harmonies, the melody line repeated in canon to form an unending round.

Lobsang led Joshua to a small fenced-off garden area. There were a couple of benches, a water fountain. And, under the broken canopy of a scattering of trees, the ground here was covered in moss, not grass, moss that glowed bright green in the low sunlight.

‘Take a seat if you like,’ Lobsang said. ‘Help yourself to water. It’s clean, from a freshwater spring. I should know; I have to clean the pipes.’ He got down stiffly on to his hands and knees and began to work his way across the moss lawn, plucking out stray blades of grass, like removing weeds. ‘“The Rare Old Mountain Dew”,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘The song the trolls are singing. An old Irish folk song. You know, it’s possible to date the first contact with humans of any given troll pack by the songs they sing. In this case, to the late nineteenth century. Do you remember Private Percy? I have carried out such an exercise, tentatively; the result is a kind of map of natural steppers in the pre-Willis Linsay era. Though of course it’s not always possible to track back the trolls’ own wanderings.’

‘What did you mean by
your
trolls, Lobsang?’

He shuffled forward, working at the lawn patiently. ‘A figure of speech. I found this pack in a Corn Belt world; I invited them to follow me here, as best I could. There are other groups here. Of course they are no more
my
trolls than Shi-mi was
my
cat, on the
Mark Twain
. But I have created a reserve here, and on the neighbouring worlds, many square miles in extent and many worlds deep. I have kept out humanity and done my best to make the trolls, this pack and others, feel welcome. I have been striving to study them, Joshua. Well, you know that I have been pursuing that project for ten years, since our journey on the
Twain
and our visit to Happy Landings. Here I can watch them in conditions approaching their wild state.’

‘And is that the reason for the humble pose, Lobsang? You, a superhuman entity that spans two million worlds, reduced to this?’

He smiled, not interrupting the rhythm of his work. ‘Actually, yes, it does help with the trolls. I am a constant presence but not an alarming one. But I would not use words like “reduced”. Not around Sister Agnes anyhow. In her eyes I am expanding my personality.’

‘Ah. This was her idea, was it?’

‘I’d got too big for my boots, she says.’

‘That sounds like Agnes.’

‘If I wanted to be part of humanity, I had to become embedded in humanity. Down in the dirt, at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak.’

‘And you went along with it?’

‘Well, there wasn’t much point going to all the trouble of reincarnating the woman if I’m not going to listen to her advice, was there? This is why I felt I needed her, Joshua. Or someone like her. Someone with the sense and moral authority to whisper doubts in my ear.’

‘Is it working?’

‘I’ve certainly learned a lot. Such as, how much less ornamental an ornamental garden seems if you’re the one who has to sweep up the leaves. How to handle a broom, which requires a certain two-handed dexterity and a kind of rolling energy-conservation strategy. And it’s remarkable how many
corners
you discover there are in the world. Some pan-dimensional paradox, perhaps. But there are chores I particularly enjoy. Feeding the carp. Pruning the cherry trees . . .’

Joshua imagined Agnes laughing her reincarnated head off. But he didn’t feel particularly amused.

Lobsang was aware of his stillness. ‘Ah. The old anger still burns, I see.’

‘What do you expect?’

It had been ten years ago, after he had returned from his journey with a lost avatar of Lobsang to the reaches of the Long Earth, to find Madison a blistered ruin, destroyed by a fanatic’s backpack nuke. He had barely been able to bring himself to speak to Lobsang since.

‘You still believe I could have stopped it,’ Lobsang said gently. ‘But I was not even there. I was with you.’

‘Not all of you . . .’

Lobsang, by nature a distributed personality, had always claimed that the essence of himself had travelled with Joshua into the far stepwise worlds – and that essential core of him had not returned. Whatever Joshua spoke to now was
another
Lobsang, another personality locus, partially synched with the residual
Mark Twain
copy thanks to memory stores Joshua had brought back. Another Lobsang – not the same – and not the Lobsang Joshua had known, who presumably still existed far away. But
this
was the Lobsang who had witnessed the destruction of Madison, and had stood by.

‘Even then, when the
Twain
returned, ten years ago, you were . . .’ Joshua groped for the old religious word. ‘
Immanent
. You suffused the world. Or so you claimed. Yet you let those nutjobs walk into the city with a nuke, you let Jansson and the other cops run around trying to find them, while all the time—’

Lobsang nodded. ‘All the time I could have snapped my metaphorical fingers and put an end to it. Is that what you would have wanted?’

‘Well, if you could have, why didn’t you?’

‘You know, throughout the ages people have asked the same question of the Christian God. If He is omniscient and omnipotent, why would He allow the suffering of a single child? I am not God, Joshua.’

Joshua snorted. ‘You like to act that way, broom and sandals or not.’

‘I cannot see into the souls of men and women. I only see the surface. Sometimes I find I have not even imagined what was lying within, when it is eventually revealed through word or action. And even if I could have stopped those bombers –
should
I have? At what cost? How many would you have had me kill, in order to avert an action that would have remained entirely hypothetical? What would you have thought of me then? Humans have free will, Joshua. God will not, and I
can
not, stop them harming each other. I think you should talk to Agnes about this.’

‘Why?’

‘She might help you find it in yourself to forgive me.’

Joshua thought he could never do that. But he had to put it aside, he knew. With an effort he focused on his surroundings. ‘So, the trolls. What have you learned about them?’

‘Oh, a great deal. Such as about their true language. Which has nothing to do with the crude signing and point-at-the-picture pidgin humans have imposed on them when they want to give them orders.’

‘But even that’s pretty powerful, Lobsang. You see clips of Mary saying “I will not” everywhere. On posters, in graffiti, online, even on animated T-shirts.’

‘That’s true, but it’s irresponsible for the tax rebels of Valhalla to mix up their symbols with those of the troll issue – conflating two separate conflicts, each of which spans the whole of the Long Earth.’ Lobsang sat back on his heels, convincingly sweating. ‘You know that their music is the heart of the trolls’ true language, Joshua. Surely that’s no surprise. After contact with humans they pick up our songs, but they make them their own, spinning endless variations . . . Music is a way for them to express the natural rhythms of their bodies, from their heartbeats, their breaths, the periodicity of their strides when they walk, even the sparking of the neurons in their heads, perhaps. And they use the rhythm of the song as a timing device, when they want to step together, or hunt. Galileo did that, you know.’

‘Galileo?’

‘He used music as a kind of clock to time his early experiments in mechanics. Pendulum swings and so on. And of course the trolls’ songs carry information. Even a simple disharmony can carry a warning. But there’s much more to it than that. Watch them now; I think they’re planning a hunt . . .’

The flickering of the stepping trolls, around the core group, was becoming more intense. The returning trolls would add a new line to the ongoing harmonies, loudly or softly, boldly or subtly; the song as a whole was evolving, adapting, and the other steppers seemed to react.

‘I plant food sources around the reservation,’ Lobsang said. ‘Across the stepwise worlds, I mean. Honeycombs, for instance, and animals for them to hunt, deer, rabbits. The pack works as a kind of single organism in seeking out such resources. Stepper scouts spread out across the worlds, and if one finds a promising resource, a deer herd say, he or she will return and, well, sing about it.’

‘They’re still singing about getting drunk on Irish moonshine as far as I can tell.’