The Long War

38

THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was summoned to the town of New Purity, a hundred thousand worlds East of Valhalla, where there had been an ambiguous report of yet more trouble with trolls.

Joe Mackenzie stood by Maggie on the observation deck, looking down on the community. From the air it had a look of competence: town hall, neat fields, and, of course, what looked like a large church. ‘New Purity, huh?’ he said. ‘What’s the name of this sect again?’

Maggie checked her briefing. ‘The Uncut Brethren.’

‘Well, you’d expect a church. But there’s no stockade.’

‘No. And look over there.’ She pointed at what looked like a charnel pit.

Even as the twain descended, Maggie’s instincts started pressing alarm buttons. The Uncut Brethren. Maggie had been home-schooled by avowed atheists – actually not that avowed, they had argued that an outright fundamentalist atheist was just as bad as the worst fire-and-brimstone spittle-dribbling Bible-puncher, and as an adolescent Maggie had been fascinated by both extremes. So, as a connoisseur of believers and unbelievers, she thought she recognized the Uncut Brethren’s type on sight, as they gathered before the Franklin party: uniformly dressed, both male and female, in drab woollen smocks, with long queues of hair down their backs.

Still, they seemed hospitable enough – right up until Jake the troll and his family stepped down the ramp from the hovering twain, after the human crew.

One young man promptly approached Maggie. ‘We don’t allow these creatures on our premises, our homes, our farms. They are unclean.’

Maggie looked into his face, irritated. But she saw tension there. Even grief. Something bad had happened here. ‘Unclean how? Also, Jake is not a creature.’

The man’s face worked. ‘Very well, let him tell me that.’

Maggie sighed. ‘Actually that’s possible, just. What’s your name, sir?’

‘My name is immaterial. I speak for all, it is our way.’

Maggie felt a gentle but persistent pressure on her arm. It was Jake. She beckoned to Nathan Boss, who carried the troll-call. ‘This alive person / close to dead / gone away / person was and is not / song of sadness.’

Hearing these scratchy words coming out of the instrument, the Brethren stared at the troll.

Maggie faced the young spokesman. ‘What happened here? Just show me.’

For answer, he led her away from the neat buildings to that pit they’d spotted from the air.

It was indeed a hole in the ground, full of corpses. A dozen bodies in total, she guessed, maybe more. There were no human remains here that she could see, but many humanoids: trolls, and another species Maggie recognized from her pre-mission briefings. Elves – one of the more vicious varieties, if she remembered the detail.

Maggie turned again to the young man, and said with a note of command, ‘I think you need to tell me your name, son.’

He blushed and said, ‘Brother Geoffrey. Auditor of the Uncut Brethren. We are a contemplative order; we believe the prepared soul can overcome all hostile circumstances . . .’ His voice faltered.

The story she extracted from Brother Geoffrey, in between his sobs and mea culpas, had been repeated all over the Long Earth. Every stepwise Earth was a new world, a world for free, a blank slate on which you could write a wonderful life, if you dreamed a strong enough dream and watched your back. Here, the Brethren had built a decent open township, along, according to Geoffrey, Athenian lines. Their philosophy seemed to be a melange of the teaching of figures that Maggie, in her vague theological understanding, generally identified as the good guys, Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius among them. But they had not listened to basic warnings that must have been given them by more experienced hands, even before they left the Datum.

And the peril that had befallen them, out of many possible out here, had been elves.

Mac approached her. ‘We’ve done a little forensic analysis on that pit. Captain, it was the elves did the attacking. Defensive wounds only on the trolls. The elves evidently stepped in, targeting the humans . . .’

In her briefings Maggie had seen records of such bewildering attacks, launched out of nowhere by stepping hunter-killers. ‘A stockade would have been no use against steppers.’

‘No, but cellars would, and I don’t think this lot dug those either. The trolls got caught in the crossfire – hell, they may have just been passing through, they may even have been trying to help. Damned unlucky for them, since trolls are getting so thin on the ground. And it didn’t do the trolls themselves any good. These guys don’t know the difference between trolls and elves, I figure.’

‘So the colonists turned their guns on trolls and elves indiscriminately.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Thanks, Mac.’

Geoffrey still stood beside her. ‘My mother – my own mother has been taken. And—’

‘I know. But it wasn’t the trolls. Look.’ She pointed at little Carl, playing with kids’ toys, much to the joy of the few children here in their drab smocks. ‘That is what trolls do. You need to understand the reality of the Long Earth if you’re to survive here. And in your case, if there are elves in the stepwise vicinity, that means accepting the trolls. They will help you clear your fields, put up barns, dig wells. And, best of all, they’ll deter the elves.’

He seemed to struggle to absorb that. But his next response was positive. ‘How do we do that? Bring the trolls here, I mean.’

A difficult question, or at least bad timing, since the trolls seemed to be withdrawing from the human worlds all over. She shrugged. ‘Be nice to them. To start with, I suggest that with the help of my crew you bury the corpses of those trolls alongside those of your own people. Pretty soon every troll on this world, and all the other worlds, will know about that bit of respect. Oh, and we’ll help you dig some cellars before we go. Anti-step precautions, right? And a stockade for good measure . . .’

They worked through the rest of the day.

That evening, as the sun went down, the community gathered to listen to the song of the Franklin’s trolls. Soon the replies started coming, like echoes from beyond the dim horizon, the ones far away eerily mingling with those near by, the calls flowing and floating over the landscape and melding into one great symphony.

Yet there was a certain emptiness to the sound. This world, like all the human-occupied worlds of the Long Earth, was becoming bereft of trolls, and a silence was falling across all the Long Earth, as if there had been an extinction event, some terrible plague. What a strange phenomenon it was, Maggie thought. She could think of no precedent, nothing like this before – it was as if all the elephants were withdrawing from Africa, maybe. A rejection of mankind by the natural world. Even her own trolls seemed oddly restless, and she was determined to release them if they showed serious signs of wanting away.

The next thing, she thought with resignation, would be demands on her from various homesteaders to bring back their troll labourers, how it was about time the government did something . . .

The Benjamin Franklin hovered over New Purity for two more days, before riding high into the air and vanishing stepwise.