The Long War

by Terry Pratchett

  ‘“The Wearing of the Green”,’ Agnes said. ‘An old Jacobite marching song. Scottish rebels, you know. You can blame Sister Simplicity for that one. She always was one for her Scottish roots. That and prize fights on TV. It is good to have the trolls back, though, isn’t it? Of course we had to restrict the guest list today to make sure there weren’t too many people for the trolls to cope with. And Senator Starling has promised to put in an appearance later on. Suddenly a supporter of the troll cause, and suddenly he always was, if you know what I mean. Says he sings in a Sunday choir and wants to sing along with the trolls, if he can. Going to bring along a squad of Operation Prodigal Son sailors too, the USS Benjamin Franklin choir, just as a gesture of peace and harmony. Now then, let’s find Joshua for you. It won’t be hard, he’ll be close to little Dan, and Dan will be close to the food . . .’

  Agnes had appointed Lobsang as head chef. Jansson stared, bemused, at a Tibetan monk with a greasy apron over his orange robe and a chef’s hat on his shaven head. A man she didn’t know stood beside him, tall, fifty-ish, black, in a sober charcoal suit, wearing a cleric’s collar.

  Lobsang raised a greasy spatula. ‘Lieutenant Jansson! Good to see you.’

  Agnes more or less snarled at him. ‘That soya burger is raw, and that quorn sausage is on fire. Less blue-skyin’ and more fat fryin’, Lobsang.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ he said wearily.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lobsang,’ said the cleric beside Lobsang. ‘I’ll help. I’m a dab hand at chopping onions.’

  ‘Thank you, Nelson . . .’

  ‘Lieutenant Jansson.’

  Jansson turned. Joshua Valienté stood before her, looking uncomfortable in a kind of smart-casual get-up: clean shirt, pressed jeans, leather shoes. He held his left arm to his chest, his clenched fist concealed by his shirt cuff. At his side was Helen, his wife, sturdy, pretty, cheerful. And little Dan ran past, dressed in a cut-down twain-pilot uniform, engaged in some noisy game with other kids, as oblivious of the adults and their society as if they were nothing but tall trees.

  Jansson and Joshua stood there, facing each other awkwardly. Jansson felt an uncomfortable surge of emotion, having witnessed the dangers to which Joshua had exposed himself so far from home – and now seeing him like this, with his family. With Helen, looking as if she belonged nowhere but at his side. After all she’d been through with this man, Jansson didn’t know what to say.

  Joshua smiled, gently. ‘It’s OK, Lieutenant.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Helen snapped. ‘Give each other a hug!’

  They leaned together, and she held him tight. ‘With them, you’re healed,’ she murmured in his ear. ‘Don’t leave them again. Whoever comes calling.’

  ‘Understood, Jansson.’

  And yet she knew that was a promise he could never keep. She felt a stab of heartache for Joshua, the lonely boy she had known, the lonely man he would always be.

  She pulled away. ‘Enough. Squeeze too hard and I might break.’

  ‘Me too.’ Joshua reached forward with his left arm, revealing his artificial hand. It was a clunky, oversized creation with unconvincing pinkish skin; it whirred and whined like a movie prop when he unclenched his fingers. ‘Bill Chambers calls it Thing. Like the Addams Family, you know? Funny guy. He’s around somewhere, incidentally. Getting smashed with Thomas Kyangu.’

  Jansson tried not to laugh. ‘Joshua, surely they could have done better for you than that. Prosthetics these days—’

  Helen said, ‘He insists on wearing that horrible old antique.’

  ‘Sooner this than one of the Black Corporation gadgets Lobsang offered me.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jansson said. ‘With Lobsang inside.’

  ‘You see the problem. I don’t want to walk around with Lobsang in control of any of my extremities. I’d rather wait, thanks. Anyhow it doesn’t bother Dan, so that’s the main thing.’

  Jansson said, ‘Strange to think your own hand is nailed to the wall of that beagle princess’s palace, a million worlds away.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Joshua glanced around, making sure Dan wasn’t close by. ‘You never got to see that, did you, Monica? There’s a bit of the story you never heard.’

  ‘He likes bragging about this,’ Helen said wearily.

  ‘You know those two beagles had got me pinned down, Snowy and Li-Li. I saw they were trying to save my life, in their way. But I wasn’t exactly happy at losing a hand, even so. And, as Li-Li got her teeth into my wrist, I made a gesture . . .’ He held up his robot hand, clenching a fist, and the middle finger extended with a whirr of hydraulics. ‘And that is what is up on Petra’s wall right now.’

  Jansson snorted laughter.

  ‘And that,’ Helen said wearily, ‘is what I can’t stop Dan running around doing to all his little friends, every time his father tells that story.’

  Joshua winked at Jansson. ‘He’ll grow out of it. Price worth paying, right?’

  Jansson just smiled neutrally. An experienced cop knew better than to get involved in family arguments.

  They were distracted by the approach of a short, slim, wiry-looking man in his fifties. He looked vaguely familiar to Jansson. Somewhat shyly, he all but stood to attention as he addressed Joshua. ‘Excuse me, sir. You’re Joshua Valienté, right?’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  ‘Sorry to trouble you . . . I don’t know anybody here and I know her.’

  ‘Sure. And you are?’

  The man offered his hand. ‘Wood. Frank Wood. USAF, long retired, once of NASA . . .’ There was a comedy moment; Wood had put forward his left hand to shake, but recoiled when Joshua’s elderly cybernetic claw was produced in response.

  Jansson snapped her fingers. ‘I thought I recognized you, Mr. Wood. I met you at the Gap. I was up there with Sally myself.’

  He seemed startled to see her, then pleased. Evidently he hadn’t recognized her through the increased decrepitude of her illness. ‘Lieutenant Jansson? Good to see you again . . .’

  More handshakes; Wood’s hand was dry, firm. Jansson remembered, awkwardly, how she’d suspected this poor guy had had a crush on her out at the Gap.

  Helen said, a tad reluctantly, ‘I think Sally is down there, near the big group of trolls. With some Happy Landings types.’ She led the way.

  Jansson followed, accompanied by Frank Wood. When he saw how slowly and stiffly she walked now, he discreetly offered her his arm.

  Just as discreetly she smiled her thanks. She said, ‘Frank, just so you know—’

  ‘I heard you were ill.’

  ‘It’s not that. I’m gay, Frank. And ill. Ill and gay.’

  He took that with a self-deprecating grin. ‘So our budding romance is doomed, huh? My radar never was too reliable. Probably why I never married.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Does being ill and gay preclude your being bought dinner, however?’

  ‘It will be a pleasure.’

  They found Sally with a bunch of trolls, and a few people dressed in what struck Jansson as a peculiar style even for colonial folk, kind of alternate eighteenth-century. Sally herself wore her usual sleeveless travel jacket, as if she were about to leave any second for another urgent stepwise jaunt.

  More introductions followed, and Jansson was able to match more names to faces. The oddly dressed types were from Happy Landings. A slim, shy-looking, youngish man turned out to be Jacques Montecute, headmaster of a school at Valhalla. A teenage girl, sober and serious, standing quietly at Montecute’s side, was Roberta Golding, a student at the Valhalla high school who had made the news, along with Montecute, by travelling with the Chinese expedition to Earth East Twenty Million. They were here as guests of Joshua, it turned out; Dan Valienté would be starting at Montecute’s school from next year. The Happy Landings folk seemed to stand a little way away from the rest, as if not quite part of the crowd.

  And there was something particularly odd about Roberta Golding. A watchfulness, a stillness, that Jansson hadn’
t seen in such a young person since Joshua himself was that age. But she didn’t detect Joshua’s eerie calm about Roberta, nor his irreducible survival instinct. She had a look that Jansson, in her duty days, had associated with kids from damaged families. She had seen too much, too young. Jansson wondered uneasily what this flawed child might become, in future.

  The trolls included Mary the runaway, and there was no mistaking the cub, Ham, who even now still wore bits of his silvery spacesuit. As soon as Ham saw Jansson he ran straight at her, making to hug her legs, and would have knocked Jansson clean over if Joshua hadn’t intercepted him first.

  Sally, being Sally, immediately homed in on Frank Wood. ‘Well, well. Buzz Aldrin. What do you want?’

  Wood nodded, graciously enough. ‘I was hoping for a burger and a beer.’

  Sally spat, ‘Enough with the Right Stuff crap; you don’t charm me. More trouble at the Gap, right?’

  ‘Not at all. I came to thank you, Ms. Linsay. And you, Lieutenant Jansson. For dealing with that business with the trolls the way you did. My colleagues up there are not bad people, but they are somewhat driven. I think we’d lost our moral bearings. Your actions helped us find them again.’ He grinned. ‘And now, on to the stars! We’re already talking about probes to Mars, even a manned jaunt. And some neat visuals . . .’

  He began to speak of something called a planetary alignment, occurring this very day: lots of Earth’s sister worlds were lining up in one part of the sky, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, even the crescent moon. ‘Of course it’s visible from all the worlds of the Long Earth. But we’re taking the opportunity to throw over probes, to get decent images – to showcase the possibilities of the Gap, you see.’

  Joshua said, ‘You’ll probably scare everybody to death. Aren’t they saying this line-up is astrologically ominous?’

  Helen pulled his sleeve. ‘Don’t tease the man.’

  Sally snorted. ‘But it’s not as good from the Gap. You haven’t got a moon!’

  ‘In the way,’ Frank said smoothly, good humoured. ‘We don’t have a moon in the way. All the better for seeing the real spectacle . . .’

  The noise, the clamour, became too much for Jansson, all at once. The words being spoken around her seemed to dissolve into a jabber. She dropped her head and put her hands to her ears.

  Frank Wood put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Here, let’s get you out of this.’

  Agnes was immediately at her side too. She smiled into Jansson’s face, took her arm, nodded to Sisters Georgina and John, and walked her and Frank away from the clamour. ‘Come on,’ Agnes said. ‘Let’s get some air. Then I’ll call you a buggy – we have golf carts here – and get you back to your summer house for a break. How’s that?’

  ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘I remember how it was to be ill, frankly. Lobsang didn’t clean that out of my head, at least.’

  They were heading towards the greater band of trolls down by the river. As they went about their business, eating, grooming, splashing in the water, flickering between the worlds, the trolls sang another gentle melody. A few humans stood by, clapping along, trying to join in.

  Despite all the people present, Jansson felt a kind of peace emanating from the contented troll band. ‘That’s another lovely song.’

  Agnes squeezed her arm. ‘“All My Trials”. Outside of the Steinman canon, one of my own favourites since childhood.’

  ‘Oh, yes. And how appropriate for me. Soon be over . . .’

  Agnes squeezed her arm. ‘That’s enough of that.’

  They had come to a bluff of higher ground, a shallow rise which Jansson climbed painfully, and here they paused. They looked out over the unspoiled lakes of this world, the sun hanging calmly in the blue sky, the young, still-small city rising on the isthmus – a ghost of Datum Madison.

  Agnes said, ‘I used to come up here when I was ill. Look at all this. The wider world that frames us all. The heavens, governed by their own eternal laws, the same on every world. Like Frank’s alignment of planets, right? And the simple things, the play of sunlight on water, a universal across the Long Earth. That’s where I found solace, Monica.’

  ‘But when you’ve been out there, it all seems so fragile,’ Jansson said. ‘Contingent. It might not have been this way. It might not be this way tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ Agnes said thoughtfully. ‘And being close to Lobsang – well, I feel I see the world through his eyes, to some extent. The way he regards people – even his closest associates and friends, Joshua, Sally, that nice cleric Nelson Azikiwe, no doubt others – even me . . . He calls us “valuable long-term investments”. I sometimes think he, or maybe his paymaster Douglas Black, is positioning us all like pieces on a chessboard, ready for the game to begin.’

  ‘But what is the game?’

  ‘No doubt we’ll find out. Now, where’s that buggy?’

  There was a commotion behind them, raised voices. Reluctantly, Jansson, Agnes and Frank turned to look.

  An airship had materialized, right above Lobsang’s position. Lobsang himself seemed to freeze – no, Jansson thought, he had gone from his ambulant unit, gone in an instant, she could tell from his posture.

  All around the grassy sward people’s phones started to chime, and were pulled from pockets and purses. Soon the stepping started, people being simply deleted from the scene.

  And Jansson heard two words on all their lips. The first, Yellowstone. The second, Datum.

  Frank said grimly, ‘Maybe Joshua was right about the planet alignment.’

  69

  JANSSON INSISTED ON being taken back to Madison West 5, no matter what pills she had to force down her throat to withstand the nausea. And once back at 5, she demanded to be taken, not to the convalescent home where she’d been staying, but to the new city’s central police station.

  The current chief, Mike Christopher, had been a junior officer in Jansson’s time; he recognized her, let her in, and told her to sit tight in a corner of one of the offices. ‘We’re on alert, Spooky. There are already trickles of refugees showing up here, I mean in the Datum city.’

  Jansson gripped Frank’s hand. ‘Refugees, Mike? In Madison? How far is Madison from Yellowstone?’

  Mike shrugged. ‘Over a thousand miles, I guess.’

  ‘We’re talking about an eruption. It must be an eruption, right? Will the effects of this really reach that far?’

  He had no reply.

  As she sat with Sister John, and Frank went to find coffee, Jansson tried to take in the images unfolding across the screens that plastered the walls of this office. Images taken from civilian news, police, military sources; images gathered on the ground, and from planes and twains, copters and satellites – all of them images from Datum Earth, downloaded on to memory chips and then hastily transferred by hand through the walls between the worlds, and retransmitted with only a slight delay.

  After false alarms across the Low Earths, there had indeed been a significant eruption in the Yellowstone footprint – and it had been at Datum Yellowstone itself, she soon learned.

  It had begun about one in the afternoon, Madison time. The evacuation of the Park had been going on since just before the eruption. About an hour later the great tower of ash and gas had started to collapse, all around the vent, a mass of superheated rock fragments and gases washing across the Yellowstone ground as fast as a jet airliner, smashing, flash-burning, crushing . . . As excited geologists talked, unwelcome records started to tumble: this was already a worse eruption than Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Tambora.

  Sleep seemed to be rising in Jansson’s head, like her own pod of deep hot magma. She couldn’t take in the words any more, the images. And those damn pills didn’t seem to be helping with the pain.

  She quickly lost track of time.

  At one point she was faintly aware of a kind of conference going on over her head, involving Mike, the Sisters, Frank Wood, and somebody who had the air of a doctor, though she didn’t know him. She gathe
red that they’d decided to move her, over her feeble protests, into a room at Agnes’s Home for a couple of days.

  Mike Christopher organized this briskly, a wheelchair, an ambulance. He winked at her. ‘You get an astronaut to hold your hand, Spooky.’

  She pulled her tongue at him.

  And still the bad news came. Even before she was taken out of the police station new images were filling the wall screens, the tablets, the glowing smartphones.

  A second eruption vent had opened up.

  And then a third.

  By the time they got her out of there, Yellowstone, imaged by brave USAF pilots in fast aircraft, looked like Dante’s hell.

  The next time she woke she was in a cosy but unfamiliar room, attended by Sister John. With brisk compassion the Sister helped her to the bathroom, and brought her breakfast in bed. She was in an adjustable bed, she discovered, like the one she’d been using in her convalescent home, there was a drip stand alongside, and her medications on a shelf by the door. Everything looked to have been moved over from the convalescent home. She felt a warm surge of gratitude for this kindness.

  Then Sister John showed in yet another doctor. He tried to talk to her about the nature of her care: palliative only, and so forth. She waved that away and asked him about the news. ‘No TV before meds,’ he said sternly, as he began to treat her.

  Only after he’d gone was Frank Wood allowed in, who looked like he’d been sleeping in his suit. Then, at last, they turned on the TV.

  The whole caldera was opened up now. The towering cloud it produced was tall enough to be seen from as far away as Denver or Salt Lake City, as evidenced by shaky handheld camera footage from those places. But the images were strange, a yellow-brown light, a shrunken sun. Like daylight on Mars, Frank Wood suggested.

  By now that cloud of ash and gas and lumps of pumice was spreading fast and far through the high air. Cars wouldn’t drive far before their filters clogged, and so there were eerie shots of freeways full of shuffling people, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, tramping through the grey snow-like fall like starving Russian peasants, all heading away from Yellowstone.