‘I wish I could say I did,’ she said sadly.
‘It’s a re-engineered S-IVB. That is, a Saturn V third stage. You know, the old moon rockets? Old technology but reliable as hell. This is just a test article; we’re reworking it in steppable materials.
‘Here’s the beauty of the Gap. From the Datum, you needed a thing the size of the Saturn V itself to get to the moon and back. Right? Because of the need to escape Earth’s gravity. In the Gap, all you’d need to get anywhere, Mars even, is no bigger than this. We’ve already launched one test shot, a mission to Venus with a ship we called the Kingfisher. In future we’re looking at nuclear rockets, which will offer a much better delta-vee. That is—’
‘I believe you. I believe you!’
He stared at her, and laughed. ‘I think we’re going to get on, you and I, Lieutenant Jansson. Sorry. I know I get carried away. Look – did you ever read Robert Heinlein? Basically it’s like that here. You really can build a backyard rocket ship and fly to Mars. What’s not to love about that? All these worlds are ours, including Europa . . . Sorry again. Another nerdy reference.
‘Listen, Ms. Jansson. Given the reason you’ve come out all this way – you mustn’t think badly of the young guys here. They are mostly guys, they mostly lack social skills, they’re kind of driven. Many of them have some kind of personality disorder, probably. But their hearts are in the right place, generally speaking. They may be thoughtless to trolls, but they aren’t deliberately cruel.’ He looked distracted. ‘By contrast – have you ever met anybody who was? I mean, a really bad person. I served in the Air Force. I saw some sights, in postings overseas.’
‘I was a cop,’ she said in answer.
He glanced over and grinned. ‘“Was”? So when you flashed your badge at me, Lieutenant Jansson—’
‘OK, you got me. Call me Monica, by the way.’
His grin widened. ‘Monica.’
A guy in a Bart Simpson cap came wandering over. ‘You’re Lieutenant Jansson?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Your friend Sally Linsay sent me to fetch you. Oh, and she had a message.’
‘What message?’
‘“The trolls are gone.”’
‘That’s it?’
The guy shrugged. ‘You coming, or not?’
35
JANSSON WAS ESCORTED over to the big admin block, where Sally waited for her, and – Jansson couldn’t quite figure out how she did it – within thirty seconds Sally had given Bart Simpson the slip.
They hurried through cramped, badly lit, roughly walled corridors. ‘Come on,’ Sally said. ‘There’s things you need to see in this dump.’
They passed what looked like offices, study rooms, labs, even a kind of computer centre. A few people glanced at them, curiously or not, but nobody stopped them or questioned them. They must be used to strangers here. Jansson was getting the impression that this was indeed a loose organization, a bunch of fan types getting together, and no doubt with people coming and going as enthusiasm or other commitments allowed. No security at all.
They came to a staircase that led them down into an underground complex, a warren of roughly walled corridors and rooms. Jansson remembered what Frank had said about safety bunkers. And she remembered, too, the speculation about why Mary the troll hadn’t just stepped away from her tormentors; keeping her underground would be the simplest way, so she couldn’t step at all.
And now, as they hurried along, Jansson started to hear music, of a jagged, discordant kind.
‘So,’ Jansson said. ‘“The trolls are gone.” What does that mean?’
‘Just that,’ said Sally grimly. ‘Not from here, particularly, not yet, but I bet the drift away has started – here like everywhere else – they’re abandoning the Long Earth in general. Look – you know about the long call. All the trolls everywhere sharing information. Well, it seems they’ve reached some kind of tipping point.’
‘Tipping point about what?’
‘About us. About humans. Our relationship with them. All over the Long Earth, they’re leaving – leaving the human colonies anyhow, it seems, any world where there’s a significant human presence. They’re not dumb animals, you see. They learn, and they modify their behaviour. And now, they’ve learned all they need to know about us.’
Jansson barely understood this, couldn’t comprehend an event of such strangeness, of such magnitude. ‘Where are they going?’
‘Nobody knows.’
Jansson didn’t bother asking how Sally knew about any of this. She’d seen herself how Sally could move around the Long Earth, and she was somehow tuned into the trolls too, and their long call. To Jansson Sally was like a homespun embodiment of some all-pervasive intelligence agency, or a ubiquitous corporate presence, like the Black Corporation maybe. Naturally Sally Linsay knew what was going on, across all the worlds.
And Jansson knew Sally held the cause of the trolls close to her heart – well, they wouldn’t be here otherwise. So she was cautious when she asked, ‘Does it really matter?’
Sally winced, but stayed civil. ‘Yes, it matters. The trolls are the Long Earth, as far as I’m concerned. Its soul. They’re also integral to the ecology. Not to mention damn useful. This fall, on a thousand farming worlds, without troll labour they’ll be struggling to bring in the harvest.’
‘So,’ Jansson said, ‘of course we’re going to do something about it.’
‘Of course we are,’ said Sally, grinning fiercely.
‘Starting with what?’
‘Starting with right here. This is the place . . .’
They had come to a door with a jokey hand-painted sign: SPACE JAIL. The discordant music, if you could call it that, leaked out of the room, sharp, unpleasant, and Jansson resisted the temptation to cover her ears. And when Jansson looked through a spyhole in the door she saw, cowering in the corner, a troll, a bulky female. She sat slumped, immobile, yet somehow the misery seeped out of her. She had nothing in there save a bowl of water.
‘Mary,’ Jansson breathed.
‘Our heroine. I will not.’ Sally made the signs as she spoke.
‘Well, we’re underground.’ She thought about what Frank had told her. ‘But we are at the Gap. Solid rock in one stepwise direction but not the other. She could step out into vacuum, I guess, to try to reach the cub. She isn’t stapled, is she?’
‘I don’t think so. But she must recoil from the vacuum instinctively. Also they’re using that noise to keep her confused and unhappy. You should meet Gareth Eames, the supervisor here. A Brit. What a slimeball. For some reason he hates the trolls with a passion. He has a background in acoustics, and he said he started his own interaction with them when he found out how to drive them away with discords. Now he’s developed that into a weapon, a trap, a cage. But the other thing that’s holding her here . . . Come see.’
A little further along the corridor was another locked door, this one with a small window. When she looked through this time, Jansson saw something like a crude nursery, or maybe a chimp enclosure at a zoo, with climbing bars, ropes, big chunky toys. There was a solitary troll in there, a cub, playing in a desultory fashion with a big plastic truck. He wore an odd silvery suit, with his head, hands and feet bare.
‘Mary’s infant.’
‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘The handlers call him Ham. You can see what they’re doing. That’s some kind of experimental pressure suit he’s wearing. You saw the images. They wanted to use him as a test subject.’
‘They didn’t mean to harm him—’
‘No. But Mary must have had some sense of the danger they were taking him into – the Gap is surely a place a troll would avoid – which is why she protested.’
Jansson knew Sally well enough by now. ‘You have a plan, don’t you?’
‘We’re only going to get one chance.’
Expecting the answer, dreading it, Jansson asked, ‘To do what?’
‘To bust them out of here. We take this kid to his mother, we
all step away—’
‘And then what?’
‘We go on the run. Hide out somewhere, until we can find a proper sanctuary. Maybe wherever the rest of the trolls are going.’
‘I knew you were going to say something like that.’
Sally grinned. ‘And I know you’re going to help me. All cops want to cross over to the dark side once in their lives, don’t they?’
‘No.’
‘Anyhow I need you, Jansson.’
‘To do what?’
‘To begin with, to get these doors open. You were a cop; you can do that. Look, I don’t know how much time we have. Can you open this door, or not?’
Jansson could, and she did, and she was committed.
36
THREE WEEKS AFTER Sally’s stunt, when the news of it percolated back through the outernet to Datum Earth, Lobsang summoned Joshua for a face-to-face meeting. Their first for years, the first since Agnes’s funeral, in fact.
Lobsang.
As was his way, Joshua spent twenty-four hours thinking about it.
Then, reluctantly, he went along.
The transEarth Institute facility to which Joshua was directed, a couple of miles from the footprint of Madison on Earth West 10, turned out to be a low, blocky, sprawling structure of the ubiquitous Low-Earth-architecture stone and timber, standing alone on a deserted stretch of road that cut through banks of prairie flowers. Of course Lobsang would have set up this office of his own part-owned subsidiary of the Black Corporation at a stepwise Madison, to be close to Agnes and the Home. A Low Earth it might be, but this was still a different world, with a subtly different late-afternoon sky. Back on the Datum, on a June day like this, the horizon would have been tinted orange-grey, the beautiful and deadly colours of combustion. Not here; this sky was a deep, flawless blue. In a way such comparative emptiness, such cleanliness, even so close to the Datum, gave Joshua a renewed sense of the sheer immensity of the corridor of worlds that was the Long Earth.
Inside the facility, Joshua encountered the usual office clutter: deceptively uncomfortable chairs, stricken rubber plants, and a determinedly pleasant young lady who did everything but check his chest X-rays before allowing him to pass on. There seemed to be a camera in every angle of the walls, each watching him steadily.
At last he was directed through a self-opening door into a white-walled corridor. As Joshua followed the corridor another camera swivelled, following him, its lens glittering with paranoia.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened and a woman stepped out. ‘Mr. Valienté? So glad you could make it.’ She was small and dark, Asiatic, and wore the largest spectacles Joshua had ever seen. She held out her hand. ‘My name is Hiroe. Welcome to transEarth. You need to wear this badge.’ She handed him a badge on a lanyard, with the transEarth name and chessboard-knight logo, and his name, mugshot, and a scrambled code that could represent anything from his shoe-size to his DNA sequence. ‘Wear that at all times, or our security killer-robots will zap you with their laser-beam eyes. Just kidding!’
‘Really.’
‘Oh, sure. You may be interested to know that you’ve already cost Selena Jones a dollar. You remember Selena?’
‘I remember Selena. Is she still Lobsang’s legal guardian?’
‘Under some jurisdictions, yes. She wagered me you wouldn’t come, that you wouldn’t respond to Lobsang’s call for help.’
‘Did she now?’
‘But curiosity is a wonderful thing, is it not?’
That and a fool’s residual loyalty, he thought.
‘This way, please.’
Hiroe led Joshua now into a big, low-ceilinged room, with picture windows looking out over a stretch of prairie. There were monitor screens all around the place, and a worn keypad on the desk, which was a slab of oak six inches thick. It was the kind of office that might belong to someone who enjoyed their work, and didn’t do much else but work.
More interesting was the stone trough in front of one window. The plants in it were trumpets fully five feet high, a pale green with red and white ribbing. They clustered together as though they shared a secret, and gave Joshua an uneasy feeling that it wasn’t just the air currents that were making them move.
‘Sarracinea gigantica,’ said Hiroe. ‘They’re carnivorous, you know.’
‘They look it. When’s feeding time?’
She laughed prettily. ‘They’re only interested in insects. They secrete a nectar, a drugged bait, that’s got interesting commercial possibilities. We got the original seeds from one of the stepwise alternates, of course.’
‘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 jo
ints 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.
The Long War Page 19
