The Long War

29

AS JANSSON AND Sally were preparing to leave Madison West 5, Maggie Kauffman was just arriving.

‘Find me a troll expert,’ Maggie had told Joe Mackenzie. What the Captain wanted, the Captain got.

It had taken a couple of days. No outernet search was quick, by the nature of its very infrastructure, although the closer you got to the Datum the faster information was swapped around. But Mac soon turned up a number of universities that had investigated trolls in the wild. He showed Maggie some of their reports. Trolls were found to be inquisitive, convivial, and quick learners. It was generally agreed that they were at least pre-sapient, but a minority of scholars declared that they were in fact truly sapient, though their intelligence had a different perspective, a different basis from human minds. Clearly they learned at a phenomenal rate . . .

All this seemed a little dry to Maggie. She asked Mac to find somebody who knew trolls better than as test subjects or specimens. Somebody who lived with them.

Which was why she left her command briefly, and, without letting her superiors know – stuffed shirts like Ed Cutler would have squashed this initiative before it had begun – she dashed on a fast commercial twain back East, ending up on a world five steps West of the Datum, at the new city of Madison, Wisconsin . . .

A few miles outside the city, Dr. Christopher Pagel and his wife Juliet, among other activities, ran a rescue centre for maltreated big cats, animals bought illegally by drug barons and other slimeballs and displayed for the machismo, then abandoned when they were no longer cute. The business pre-dated Step Day – when it was set up the victims had included lions and tigers – but since then, thanks to the opportunities opened up for new kinds of trophies through access to the Long Earth and its kaleidoscope of unspoiled worlds, the roomy cages had also housed such beasts as a sabre-toothed smilodon, and even a cave lion: Panthera leo atrox.

And the Pagels were using an extended family of trolls to help with the business.

The Pagels, elderly but elegant and remarkably kindly, told Maggie that the trolls helped with more than just heavy labour. Their very presence seemed to calm the cats. Dr. Chris described how the male of the local family of trolls had a very good way of dealing with one potentially troublesome tiger, who after one attempted attack on its keeper was gripped at the neck by a big troll hand and pushed slowly and carefully to the ground, at a speed and pressure that made it clear to the big cat that ending up underground was just a possibility if he didn’t get with the programme . . .

Maggie learned a lot of other details about the trolls from the Pagels. Such as, what they wanted from humans, it seemed, was entertainment: variety, new concepts. Show even a juvenile troll something like a lawn mower, with bolts big enough for troll fingers to work, and he or she would carefully take it apart, keeping all the bits neatly in a line, and then put it back together again, for the sheer joy of it. Juliet Pagel had experimented with human music; a good gospel choir would have trolls sitting in rapturous silence, as would 1960s close-harmony groups like the Beach Boys.

Maggie’s decision about the trolls was slowly solidifying. As far as she was concerned, she had to be mindful of the fact that her command was tasked to be an ever-present symbol of the United States Aegis. As such, it wasn’t enough for the Benjamin Franklin to tour these outer worlds like an old-fashioned dreadnought, projecting vague threat and handing out leaflets about how you had to pay your taxes. Her mission had to symbolize the nation’s positive values. And that meant, in this age of the Long Earth, living in harmony with the other inhabitants of the stepwise worlds, in particular with the trolls. Sally Linsay had been right, she’d decided on reflection: how better to show that than by having trolls actually aboard her ship?

As a twain Captain, Maggie had been granted a great deal of latitude in her decision-making out here. Still, she spent time trying to make sure she had got the support of at least a majority of her crew for this experiment. And she had no intention of telling her superiors what she was up to, until she absolutely had to.

So, when she returned to her ship, she brought three trolls with her. They were a family, parents with a juvenile: the Pagels had called them Jake, Marjorie and Carl.

As soon as they boarded, despite all Maggie’s groundwork in advance, the arguments started once more. She let them run; the trolls weren’t going anywhere.

In the event it was only a week before the crew of the Franklin, as they drifted through the skies of countless stepwise Americas, became accustomed to stopping work at twilight, when the big loading bay doors were flung open, and the trolls joined in the harmonies and undertones of the long call as it echoed across the reaches of world after world.

‘I mean,’ Maggie said to Mac and Nathan, ‘in Star Trek they put a Klingon on the bridge.’

‘And a Borg,’ said Nathan.

‘Well, there you go.’

‘Not a Romulan, though,’ Mac said. ‘Never a Romulan.’

‘The trolls are staying,’ Maggie said firmly.