Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

Spencer looked totally unfazed. ‘Amazing! What a step forward. At my age you do begin to wonder why the universe places intelligence in such fragile receptacles as our human bodies. May I ask if you have any special talents to share with us? That’s what we ask all newcomers, so please don’t be offended.’

Joshua groaned inwardly, anticipating Lobsang’s reaction to that.

‘Special talents? It would be easier to list the exceptions. I am not very good at watercolours, as yet…’ He glanced around curiously. ‘Clearly this is an unusual community, with an unusual background of development. What about industry? You have iron, evidently. Steel? Good. Lead? Copper? Tin? Gold? Wireless radio? You have surely passed the telegraph stage. In addition, printing, if you have the paper—’

Spencer nodded. ‘Yes, but only handmade, I’m afraid. Since arrivals in Elizabethan times. We made improvements, of course, but we haven’t chanced upon an artisan who knows much about paper manufactory for a considerable time. We have to rely on the talents of those who drift here, haphazardly.’

‘If you can provide me with ferrous metals, I will fabricate for you a flatbed printing press utilizing waterpower — if you are familiar with waterpower?’

Spencer smiled. ‘We’ve had water mills since the age of the Romans.’

Again Joshua was struck by the depth of time represented here. Sally looked amused at his reaction.

‘In that case I can construct a robust alternator. Electrical current. Mayor, I can leave you an encyclopaedia of discoveries in medicine and technology to the present day — although I would advise you to take it a bit at a time. Future shock, you see.’

The crowd around them in the hall, drawn by Lobsang’s strangeness, murmured a general approval at this.

But Sally, who had been listening impatiently, said, ‘It’s very kind of you, Lobsang, but all this Robert Heinlein stuff will have to wait. We are here because of the problem — remember?’ She looked at Spencer. ‘And you know all about that.’

‘Ah. The troll migration? Alas, Sally is right. There is clearly cause for concern. It is a slow-burning problem, you might say, but, we believe, it has serious repercussions across the worlds — the Long Earth, as you call it. But even that will wait for tomorrow, Sally. Let us go and enjoy the sunshine.’ He led them out of the building. ‘You are very welcome here, I can’t emphasize that enough. You’ll see that we embrace scatterlings from all the families of mankind. Sally is pleased to call this place Happy Landings, which we find amusing. But to us it is just home. There are always spare sleeping places in City Hall, but if you prefer privacy all the family cabins are roomy. You are welcome, welcome…’

THE VISITORS WALKED through smiling crowds.

Joshua thought the layout of the place was unusual, and the architecture. There seemed to be no plan to the road system; it was a tangle of criss-crossing lanes that wandered off into the forest, as if it had just evolved that way. And the buildings were heaped up on often very ancient-looking foundations. This really did have the feel of a place that had grown slowly but continuously for a very long time, and so was layered with structures one on top of the other, like a tree trunk’s rings. But there did seem to be a preponderance of relatively modern buildings overlaying a very ancient core, as if people had arrived in greater numbers in recent times, the last couple of centuries perhaps. Which was just when, he supposed, the population back on Datum Earth had started to grow fast, no doubt sending a larger flood of scatterlings to Happy Landings.

Walking by the river, Joshua began to get a sense of how people lived here. All along the bank there were racks of drying fish — mostly salmon-like fish, big healthy specimens, cleanly filleted — and more hanging inside the dwellings, some smoked. Nobody seemed to be working terribly hard, but he saw weirs in the river, traps, nets, and a few workers mending hooks, lines, harpoons. Though there were in fact a few cultivated fields, he learned, further out from the centre — mostly growing potatoes as an emergency food store, and to power the Steppers of those few visitors who used the boxes — the river provided much of what sustained the people here. During the annual salmon runs, so the friendly locals told him in a variety of bizarre accents, the whole population, human and troll, would come down to the river and harvest migrating fish that swam so thick the river water lapped up over the banks. There were evidently other kinds of fish, and Joshua saw great middens of the shells of clams and oysters. The forest was generous too, as Joshua could tell from baskets of berries, acorns, hazelnuts, as well as haunches of animals he could not identify.

‘This is why nobody farms here,’ Sally murmured to him. ‘Or hardly anybody. Nobody needs to, the country is so generous. Back on the Datum, in this area pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer folk built societies every bit as complex as any farmer’s, with a fraction of the labour. And none of the backache. So it is here.’ She laughed, as rain sprinkled down. ‘Maybe that’s why Happy Landings turned out to be here , one of the most generous places on all the worlds. If only it didn’t rain all the time it would be paradise.’

But there were trolls everywhere, and that was something you would not have seen in Washington State back in the Datum. The humanoids threaded their way through the human rubberneckers with a care and attention that Joshua would not have expected from creatures that looked like the offspring of a bear and an upright pig. The evidently contented relationship between human and troll here, and the uniform welcome they received, gave the place an air of peace.

Paradoxically, this made Joshua uncomfortable. He had no clear idea why. It was just that with the trolls so firmly embedded in the place, the community seemed too calm. Not entirely human… Not for the first time in his life he was conflicted and confused; there was much about this place that he had yet to understand.

And then, in the central square, one of the trolls got down on its haunches and sang. Soon the rest joined in. A troll song was always extraordinary; hearing it seemed to nail you to the spot, in a way that Joshua knew he would for ever be unable to explain. It seemed to go on and on, the mighty chords echoing from the distant forest — although when he looked at his watch when it was over, it had lasted only about ten minutes.

Sally tapped him on the shoulder. ‘That, young man, is what is called the short call of the troll. The long call can last a month. Heart-warming, isn’t it? In a creepy sort of way. Sometimes you will see them in a clearing, hundreds of them, all singing, apparently independently, apparently unaware of each other — until suddenly it ends on one great chord, like Thomas Tallis, you know? Like it’s coming at you in four dimensions at once.’

‘I know Tallis’s entire canon, Sally,’ said Lobsang. ‘It is an apt comparison.’

Joshua decided he was not going to be left out. ‘I’ve heard of Tallis. Sister Agnes said that if he were alive today he would be riding a Harley. Then again most of her heroes would have ridden Harleys, according to her…’

‘I detect patterns in the music,’ said Lobsang. ‘It will take some time to analyse.’

‘Good luck with that, mister,’ Sally said. ‘I have known trolls for years, and I can only guess what they are talking about. But I’m pretty confident that in this case they are discussing us and the airship. And by nightfall, every troll on this continent will be repeating it until they all have it perfect. The songs represent a sort of shared memory — that’s what I believe. There’s even a sort of checksum in the songs, I think, a self-correction mechanism, so that in time all the trolls get the same information reliably. Eventually it will probably go worlds-wide, depending on troll migration patterns. Sooner or later every troll that can be reached will know that we were here today.’