The Long Earth

31

HE WAS PRETTY badly hurt, he learned later. Lots of minor injuries, many of which he hadn’t noticed at the time. The damage to his neck, his throat. Scratches, cuts, even a bite mark — not from the puppy at his ankle, this was the imprint of human-like teeth in his shoulder. Lobsang’s ambulant treated the cuts, dosed him with antibiotics, and fed him painkillers.

He drifted away. Sometimes he woke briefly, fuzzily, to see bone-white stars above, or green carpets rolling beneath the airship. The steady swinging rhythm of stepping was comforting. He slept away days, in the end.

But the further they travelled, heading ever West, the more Joshua became aware of that odd pressure in his head, even as he dozed. The kind of stuffy feeling he always got when he had to go back to the Datum: the pressure of all those crowding minds, drowning the Silence. Could it be, as some said, that the Long Earth was a kind of loop that closed back on itself, and he was being brought back to the start, back to the Datum? That would be strange enough. But if not, what lay ahead? And what was driving the trolls across the arc of worlds?

When he finally awoke fully the stepping had stopped once more. He sat up on his couch and looked around.

‘Take it easy, Joshua,’ came Lobsang’s disembodied voice.

‘We’ve stopped.’ His voice was husky, but it worked.

‘You’ve slept deeply. Joshua, I’m glad you’re awake. We must talk. You do realize you were never in any real danger, don’t you?’

He rubbed his throat. ‘It didn’t feel that way at the time.’

‘I could have taken out those elves individually at any time. I have advanced laser sighting on—’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘You’d asked for shore leave. I thought you were enjoying yourself!’

‘As you said before, we need to work on our communication, Lobsang.’

Joshua pushed back the throw, stood up and stretched. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that he couldn’t remember putting on. He didn’t feel like running a marathon, but on the other hand he wasn’t passing out. He went to the head, walking carefully, and briskly washed some of the sweat off his body. His small scars were healing, and his throat no more than twinged. He emerged, and took fresh clothing from the closet.

Through the stateroom window he saw that the airship was anchored over a thick reef of rainforest that stretched to a green-cloaked horizon. Mist banks hung over swathed valleys. The sun was low; Joshua guessed it was early morning. The airship was maybe a hundred feet up.

Lobsang said, ‘We haven’t been stopping every day, but it’s difficult to observe much from up here.’

‘Because of the thickness of the forest?’

‘I’ve been sending down the ambulant unit. We’re far from home, Joshua. We’re over nine hundred thousand steps out. Think of that. You can see how it is here — this is typical, forest blanketing the landscape as far as we can see. Probably covering the whole continent. Difficult to make observations.’

‘But there’s evidently something here you’re interested in, yes?’

‘Look at the live feed,’ Lobsang said.

The image in the wall screen was jittery, uncertain, taken from a camera far away. It showed an opening in the forest, a gash in the canopy evidently caused by the fall of a giant tree, whose trunk lay at the centre of the clearing, coated with lichen and exotic fungi. The access of light had allowed saplings and under-storey shrubs to shoot up.

And the new growth attracted humanoids. Joshua spotted what looked like a pack of trolls. They were sitting in the open in a tight cluster, patiently grooming, each picking insects from the back of the one in front. They sang, all the time, snatches of melody like half-forgotten songs — scraps of harmony in two, three, four parts, improvised on the spot and then forgotten, dimly heard by distant microphones.

‘Trolls?’

‘Apparently,’ Lobsang murmured. ‘It would take musicologists a century to unravel the structure of that singing. Keep watching.’

As Joshua’s eyes became accustomed to the shaky images, he began to see more groups of humanoids, across the clearing and in the forest shadows, some of kinds he didn’t recognize, at play, working, grooming, maybe hunting. They were all humanoids, it seemed, rather than apes; any time one of them stood up you could see the neatness of its bipedal stance. He said, ‘They don’t seem to bother each other. The different kinds.’

‘Evidently not. In fact quite the opposite.’

‘Why have they congregated here? After all, they’re different species.’

‘I suspect, in this particular community, they have become codependent. They use each other. They probably have subtly different sensory ranges, so that one kind may detect a danger before the others: we know that trolls use ultrasonics, for example. Similarly, you get different species of dolphins swimming together. I’m following your advice, you see, Joshua. I’ve been taking more time to inspect Long Earth marvels like this aggregation of humanoids. Remarkable sight, isn’t it? It’s like a dream of humanity’s evolutionary past, many hominid types together.’

‘But what of the future, Lobsang? What happens when human colonists get out here in earnest? How can this survive?’

‘Well, that’s another question. And what happens if they are all driven East in the greater migration? Do you wish to go down?’

‘No.’

Later, as the airship sailed on, they talked it over, the strange uniqueness of mankind in the Long Earth. And Lobsang described how, not long after Step Day, he had initiated searches for human cousins across a thousand Earths, and he told Joshua the story of a man called Nelson Azikiwe.