Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

That made him deeply uncomfortable, almost betrayed. ‘I don’t want to be central to anything.’

‘Get used to it. And that’s my problem, you see. When I was a kid, all the Long Earth used to be my playground, and mine alone. I’m jealous . Because all this may be more yours than mine.’

He tried to take all this in. ‘Sally, maybe you and I—’

And at that moment, very precisely the wrong moment, the door opened and Lobsang sauntered in, smiling. ‘Ah! Clam chowder! With bacon, excellent!’

Sally and Joshua shared a glance, parked their conversation, and turned away.

Sally focused on Lobsang. ‘So here you are, the android that eats. Gobbling down clam chowder, again?’

Lobsang sat down and, rather artificially, draped one leg over the other. ‘Yes, of course, why not? The gel substrate that supports my intelligence needs organic components, and why should those components not be of the finest cuisine?’

Sally looked at Joshua. ‘But if he eats, then surely he must eventually…’

Lobsang smiled. ‘Such minimal waste as I produce is expelled as carefully compacted compost in biodegradable wrapping. Why is this amusing? You did ask, Sally. At least your mockery makes a change from your usual disdain for me. And now we have work to do. I need you to identify these creatures, please.’

Behind him a wall panel lowered, to reveal a screen that flickered into life. Joshua stared at a familiar biped, scrawny, dirty, yellowish in colour. It was holding a stick like a club, and it was staring at its unseen observers with malice aforethought, and possibly afterthought as well. Joshua knew what it was all too well.

‘We call them elves,’ said Sally.

‘I know you do,’ said Lobsang.

‘I think in some of the colonies they call them Greys, after the old UFO mythology. You see them everywhere in the High Meggers, and sometimes in the lower worlds. They are generally leery of humans, but they will try their luck if you’re isolated or wounded. Super-fast, super-strong, highly intelligent hunters who use stepping when they go for their prey.’

‘I know,’ Joshua said. ‘We’ve met them before.’

‘Elves. Not a bad name, when you think about it. Elves weren’t always sweet little creatures, were they? Northern European legends portray them as tall and powerful and quite without souls. A nasty name. I can live with that. They need all the bad press we can give them. And in mythology, aren’t elves often afraid of iron? No wonder, I guess; iron could be used to trap them, to stop them stepping.’

Joshua went back to the chowder in the galley, and as he worked Lobsang gave Sally a curt account of Joshua’s battle with the hog-riding assassins.

When he returned, she looked at Joshua with new respect. ‘You did well to survive.’

‘Yes. And that was supposed to be my day off. Long story.’

‘Fun guys to have around, right?’

‘Here’s another variant,’ Lobsang said. The screen displayed an image of the pregnant, big-brained elf Joshua had tried to save.

‘I call this kind lollipops,’ Sally said. ‘Big-brained, you can see that, but not actually all that bright that I’ve observed.’

Lobsang nodded. ‘It makes sense. The stepping-birth procedure has allowed a dramatic expansion of the physical size of the brain, but perhaps that has yet to be matched by an increase in functional capability. They have the hardware; the software is yet to evolve.’

Sally said, ‘In the meantime some of the other elf types farm them. For their brains, I mean. They eat the big brains. I’ve seen it.’

Silence greeted that pronouncement.

Lobsang sighed. ‘Not exactly Rivendell, then, is it, with all these trolls and elves? Tell me, Sally, are there any unicorns in the Long Earth?’

‘Chowder’s done,’ said Joshua. ‘Get it while it’s hot.’

As they sat down to eat, Sally said, ‘Actually there are unicorns. Some not too many steps from Happy Landings. I can show you if you like. Ugly devils, and not the kind that hang out with Barbie. Just bloody great slabs of battering ram, and so dumb they get their horns stuck in tree trunks. Often happens in the mating season…’

Now the screen showed images of elves feeding on some carcass, squabbling, bloody-mouthed.

Sally asked, ‘Why are you showing us all this, Lobsang?’

‘Because this is a live feed from what is below us, on our latest Earth. Hadn’t you noticed we’d stopped stepping? Eat your chowder; the elves will keep until morning.’

THE NEXT DAWN came late, to Joshua’s puzzlement. The daylight revealed a wasteland below, a dried-up dustbowl world with, it seemed, precious little water, and therefore precious little else.

Lobsang joined Joshua on the observation deck. ‘Not a prepossessing place, is it? But it has its curiosities.’

‘Like the sun rising late.’

‘Indeed. Also, both trolls and elves are crossing through here, almost all of them heading East, and I am getting good pictures of both species on the belly cameras.’

The deck tilted slightly. Joshua said, ‘We’re going down?’

‘Yes, and I would like Sally to land with us. I would like to apprehend an elf if possible. I wish to try to communicate with one.’

Joshua snorted sceptically.

‘I don’t expect very much from the encounter, but one never knows. Just in case, I have fabricated helmets and neck armour for you both; anyone trying to strangle you from behind will regret it, stepping or not. I will see you by the elevator in half an hour.’

Sally was fully dressed when Joshua knocked at her door. ‘Helmets!’ she snapped.

‘It was Lobsang’s idea, sorry.’

‘I’ve survived in the Long Earth for years without being nannied by the likes of Lobsang. OK, OK, I’m the passenger here, I know. Any idea what he’s planning?’

‘To catch an elf, I think.’

She blew a raspberry.

Lobsang brought the airship to a halt over a bluff of heavily eroded rock. The landscape was a desert of rust-red dirt. This was a strange Earth, even by the standards of most Jokers. Joshua felt heavy, as if his bones were plated in lead, and his usual pack was a burden. The air was dense, but oddly not satisfying, and his lungs laboured. A wind blew constantly with an empty howl. On the barren plain there was no grass or other vegetation — nothing but a sort of green-purple fuzziness, as if the land hadn’t shaved that morning.

And occasionally, Joshua saw, there was a flicker, more sensed than seen. Something stepping, he thought, and stepping away again so fast it had hardly been there…

Sally asked, ‘What’s with this place, Lobsang? It’s like a cemetery!’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Lobsang. ‘Though a cemetery empty even of bones.’ He stood stock still, like a statue around which the dust swirled. ‘Look up at mid-heaven, slightly to your left. What do you see?’

Joshua squinted and gave up. ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.’

‘Something notable for its absence,’ said Lobsang. ‘If you were standing at this exact spot on the Datum, right now, you would be looking at a washed-out moon in a daylight sky. This Earth has no moon to speak of. Just a few orbiting rocks invisible to the naked eye.’

Lobsang said it was a contingency he had anticipated. The cataclysmic impact which had created the moon of Datum Earth and most of its stepwise sisters had evidently never happened here. The moonless Earth that resulted was more massive than the Datum, which was why extra gravity dragged them down. The tilt of the axis was different, and unstable, and the world rotated more quickly, causing a different day — night cycle, and a wind that endlessly scoured the rocky, lifeless continents. It wasn’t a place for life: the lack of tides caused the ocean waters to stagnate, and there were none of the rich intertidal zones that had done so much on the Datum to promote the evolution of complex life.