The Long War (37 page)

Petra looked over at the kobold, who in turn looked – angry? Alarmed? If he had been supplying the weapons, he was being cut out of the deal, Jansson reflected. But she couldn’t read his expression, if he had one.

Petra leaned forward, her great head thrust at Sally’s face. Her nose wrinkled, wet, probing. ‘You l-lie.’

‘That’s for you to decide.’

The moment of judgement hung in the air. Jansson sat still, feeling every ache of her treacherous body. Sally did not yield before Petra’s glare.

At last Petra withdrew with a frustrated growl, and loped from the chamber, her sex-slave dog at her heels.

Sally delivered a noisy mock sigh. ‘We live to fight another day . . .’

As the guards milled around, talking among themselves in growls and yaps, Jansson leaned over to Sally. ‘What are you playing at?’ But even as she asked she was thinking it through. She was a cop; there were clues here; connections formed in her mind. ‘Has this got something to do with that pendant she wore, that was the spitting image of Joshua’s Rectangles ring—’

Sally pressed a forefinger to her lips, but she smiled.

They were taken to a kind of suite at one end of the palace, with a communal area and a central hearth, and small rooms that could be shut off behind flaps of leather.

Finn McCool was put in here with the women. Sally brusquely pushed him inside one of the rooms and told him to stay put. The kobold cringingly deferred, as he tended to when close up and personal with a human. But Jansson wondered what resentment burned in that strange soul, resentment at the treatment he received from these superior creatures that evidently fascinated and repelled him at the same time.

Jansson picked a room at random. A pallet of straw had been set out on the floor, with blankets laid over it. There was no lavatory or wash basin, but a kind of well in the floor contained water that seemed clean. Jansson dumped her travel pack and fingered the blankets curiously. They seemed to be of woven bark. How were they made? She imagined beagles stripping and weaving bark with hands and teeth.

She went back out to the communal area, where beagles were laying out bowls of food on the ground around the hearth.

Sally sat on the floor, comfortably enough, studying the food. She glanced up at Jansson. ‘How’s your en suite?’

‘I’ve been in worse flophouses. Right now I feel like I could sleep on concrete.’

Sally leaned closer and spoke more softly. ‘Listen, Jansson, while we have a minute alone. We need a plan. To get ourselves out of this.’

‘We could always just step away. As you said you could carry me out—’

‘Of course. They’ve been casual about that, haven’t they? They did take your Stepper box. Maybe they think we’re like trolls, who won’t step away if they leave a cub behind. But I suspect they’re imposing their different way of thinking on us.
They don’t use prisons
; that’s not in their mind-set. They spoke about this tradition of the hunt. They’re happy for wrong-doers to escape, right? To run for their lives, rather than be confined. That’s the way they think. So their instinct isn’t to lock us up. I guess they think that even if we do step, they’ll come and hunt us down anyhow, carried on the back of kobolds. We’ll see, if they try.

‘But we’re not going anywhere. Our business isn’t done here. We need to normalize relations between humanity and these sapient dogs. We can’t have the likes of the kobolds playing us off one against the other.’

Janssen glanced over at Finn McCool’s cubbyhole. ‘I agree,’ she said fervently.

‘Also there’s still the issue of the trolls. If they’re all congregating here, everything is—’ Uncharacteristically she seemed to struggle for words. ‘Out of balance, across the Long Earth. Somehow we have to resolve that. First things first, however. We need to cut that kobold out of his grubby trade, and we need some leverage.’

‘You’re talking about the rings. The one the Granddaughter wore, the one you and Joshua brought back from Rectangles.’

‘Right. That’s significant somehow. It all has to be connected, doesn’t it? A ring from a world next door – a world the kobold can reach, but the beagles can’t – high-tech weapons similarly retrieved from a stepwise world . . .’

Jansson tried to think it through. ‘We only know one possible source of non-human high tech around here. The world called Rectangles, that nuclear pile. Right? And that’s where you found the ring, identical to the Granddaughter’s. The simplest theory is that
that
is the source of the weapons.’

‘I agree,’ Sally said. ‘Occam’s razor.’

‘And a cop’s instinct. OK. But for some reason the kobold can’t access more guns right now. If he could, he’d be handing them over already, wouldn’t he?’

‘It must be something to do with the rings. Why else would the Granddaughter have that one on display, around her neck? Maybe McCool needs rings to gain access, for some reason. He can’t use the Granddaughter’s any more—’

Jansson smiled. ‘I see what you’re thinking. Maybe Joshua’s ring would work for him.’

‘This is all guesswork, but it fits together. My own kobold contact did send me to Rectangles, not straight here. I always thought there might be some more old high tech on that dusty planet – damn it. We need that ring if we’re to make anything of this. I’m going to have to go get it, the ring, off of Valiente’s living room wall.’

‘Go get it? Oh. You mean, step out of here.’

‘I’ll have to leave you here for a while. You’re too ill – you’d only slow me down – I’m sorry. Anyhow one of us at least ought to stay, to prove we’re not escaping.’

Jansson grimaced, trying to hide her alarm at the thought of being left here alone. ‘I’ll cover for you. They won’t even notice you’re gone.’

‘Sure. And I’m hoping that Valienté also won’t even notice when the damn ring has gone. The last thing we want is
him
showing up here . . .’

‘He will come, if he can,’ Jansson said firmly.

Sally seemed to think that over. ‘If he does, maybe we can use him.’

But there was no more time to talk, for in walked the beagle Jansson remembered as the Granddaughter’s adviser, with the human-language name Brian.

‘Pleas-se.’ Brian waved his hand-like paw in a very human gesture of welcome. ‘Dine with me. I hrr-ave selected meal-ss which hrr-kobolds chose befor-rre.’

‘We’re not kobolds,’ Sally snapped.

Jansson went and fetched a blanket, folded it up, and painfully lowered herself down on to it. She glanced over the bowls that had been already laid out. They appeared to be of carved wood. No pottery here?

‘Nothing but meat to eat,’ Sally said brusquely, inspecting the bowls’ contents. ‘Don’t ask where the cuts come from. At least it’s all cooked, more heavily than the beagles prefer, I suspect.’

‘Bur-hhrned,’ growled Brian. ‘Free of all taste . . .’

‘All except that one.’ Sally pointed to a central bowl, filled with fat, pinkish morsels.

‘Those cannot be cooked,’ Brian said.

Jansson summoned up the energy to deal with more strangeness. ‘Thanks for your hospitality.’

‘Thank
you
,’ Brian said.

‘For what?’

‘For being he-hhre. I, I have strange r-hhrole. Fits my st-hhrange mind. My nose follows, hhr, unusual scents. Granddaughter Petra toler-hhrates me, for my sometimes-useful nose. And I, I a slave to he-hhrr scent, just like handsome fool Snowy . . . Females hhr-ule males. Same with hu-manss?’

‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘Some human males know it too.’

‘I, I am st-rrange for beagle. Fo-rrever grow bo-hhred, the same old scents. Same old talk. I hhr-elish strangers and strangeness. Other, other’ – he searched for the phrase – ‘other
points of view
. What more differ-hrrent than beagle and kobold?’

‘We aren’t kobolds,’ snapped Sally again.

‘Sorry, so-hhry. Wrong term. What a shame we have not found each other before. Two types of mind, two ways of scenting the wo-hrrld. How much hhr-icher.

‘Ex-ssample. This city named for our goddess, who is Hunter-rrh. We believe She is the Mother of Mothers. Her pack the Pack of Packs. As-ss Petra is Granddaughter, and there are Daughters over he-hhr, and Mother-hhr of Pack above them. Pack Mother-hrr lives far from here, rules many Dens. Hunter, Mother of Mothers, gave bi-hhrth to world, rules all, even Mother-hhrs. And when we die, our spi-hhrits flee our bodies, to be hunted by the Mother of Mothers, and taken back. What a-hhre your gods?’

Jansson said, ‘We have many gods. Some of us have no god at all.’

‘You see us as ba-hhrbaric. One step f-hhrom the wolf. Is our religion c-hhrude to you?’

Sally looked blank. ‘I have no opinion.’

‘Some of us despise wolf in us. As you pe-hrrhaps despise your ancestor animal, its ma-hrrk in you. We hunt. Kill. Big litters. Life cheap, wa-hrr common. Great slaughters. Cities empty, Dens fall. Then more litters, more little soldie-hhrs.’

‘A cycle,’ Sally said to Jansson, evidently fascinated. ‘Boom and crash. They have big litters, lots of unloved warrior pups running around, lots of Daughters and Granddaughters competing to become this Mother, head of the nation. They fight, they have wars – they kill each other off, and when the population collapses the cycle begins again.’

‘Like inner-city gangs,’ Jansson said.

‘Maybe. It’s got to impede their progress. Technological, social. Maybe it’s no wonder they’re stuck at the Stone Age. And why they’re easy marks for weapons dealers, like the kobold.’

‘L-look-khh.’ Brian leaned forward and picked out a pink blob from the central bowl. ‘Unborn hrr-rabbit. Cut from the womb of its mother, f-hhresh. Deli . . .
delicacy
.’ He rested the embryo between his teeth, bit down, and sluiced the blood into his mouth, like a connoisseur savouring a fine wine. ‘Some of us despise wolf in us-ss. But the tass-te, oh, the tass-te . . .’

Suddenly the stink of the meat disgusted Jansson. She stood, stiffly. ‘I must rest.’

‘You a-hhre ill. Scent on you.’

‘I apologize. Goodnight, sir. And you, Sally.’

‘I’ll look in later.’

‘Not necessary.’

The few paces to her room seemed a long way. She thought she could feel the gaze of the kobold Finn McCool on her, watching from behind his curtain.

She slept badly.

Her head ached, her gut, her very bones. She took an extra dose of the painkillers in her pack, but it did no good.

She dozed.

She woke to find a wolfish face over her, in a dark barely alleviated by the starlight from the window above her pallet. Oddly she felt no fear.

‘I am Li-Li.’ The beagle pressed a finger to her lips. ‘You a-hhre ill. I saw it. In pain?’

Jansson nodded. She saw no point in denying it.

‘Please, let me . . .’

So Li-Li helped her. She arranged bundles of warm cloth around Jansson’s body, and applied poultices of what looked like moss and lichen chewed to softness, to her belly, her back, her head. And Li-Li licked her face with her rough tongue, her neck, her forehead.

Gradually the pain receded, and Jansson slipped into a deeper sleep.

A
BOUT A WEEK
after Maggie’s meeting with George and Agnes Abrahams, the
Benjamin Franklin
approached the Low Earths, heading for the Datum.

Maggie detected relief in the crew of the
Franklin
that, thanks to their wonky turbine, they were heading for some unscheduled home leave. Their tour of the Westward Long Earth was wearying. Day after day they crossed world after world of numbing emptiness – numbing at least for the city kids who made up most of the dirigible’s crew – punctuated by calls to resolve one idiotic situation after another.

And
the trolls were gone
: how strange it continued to be to experience, even as seen from within the walls of a military vessel, a peculiar existential shift that cast a shadow over every world they visited.

Still, as the
Franklin
swam through the increasingly murky skies of the industrializing Low Earths, Maggie – even though she herself was a country girl – felt a warm tug of recognition, and wondered whether city living had some merit after all. The news as they approached home, however, was extraordinary. There was some kind of geological disturbance going on in stepwise versions of Yellowstone, across most of the Low Americas. Maggie found herself staring at images from East 2, of a herd of cattle choked by carbon dioxide emissions, and from West 3, of people being evacuated from threatened townships by twains. Isolated in the reaches of the Long Earth, Maggie and her crew had heard only the vaguest outernet hints that all this was going on.

Strange times, she thought, times of unbalance in the natural world and the human, on Datum Earth itself and far beyond.

Back at the Navy dirigible service’s graving yard at Datum Detroit, the technicians were soon swarming all over the
Franklin
, along with gleaming diagnostics platforms with robot arms like a waltz of praying mantises. XO Nathan Boss and Chief Engineer Harry Ryan watched all this like hawks – along with Carl. The young troll wasn’t allowed off the ship, the presence of trolls being problematic anywhere on the Datum, and the trolls being uncomfortable in this human-crowded world anyhow, but Carl was taking considerable interest in every spanner, wrench and robot test pod.

Even now, looking at Carl, it was hard for Maggie to remember that he wasn’t some kind of chimp or gorilla. He was smarter than that, even if you left out the long call and the trolls’ strange group intelligence. His own communication was more complex than any chimp’s, and he could make and handle tools that would have been beyond the imagination of Cheetah. It was more useful, Mac had advised her, to think of trolls as more like human ancestors. Something between chimp and human. But these beasts, Mac reminded her, weren’t living fossils, but had enjoyed millions of years of natural selection since splitting off from the line that led to humans. They weren’t primitive humans; they were fully evolved trolls. Maggie was just gratified that
her
trolls, for now, had chosen to stick around.

The cat too, Shi-mi, took to stalking around the flayed-open carcass of the dirigible with every air of ownership and inspection. Maggie never
saw
Shi-mi communicating with a worker, or even one of the robots . . . She wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or appalled by the cat’s presence.