Terry Pratchett - The Long War

They sat over coffees. Two oddballs thrown accidentally together, Jansson thought. Sally seemed restless, as usual. Her pack was waiting at the door, and she wore the multi-pocketed sleeveless jacket that was the basis of her field gear. They tentatively talked, about life, and what they had in common: the Long Earth, and Joshua.

In an odd way, Joshua had always been at the centre of MPD Lieutenant Monica Jansson’s experience of the Long Earth, as it had opened up on her watch, and ultimately defined her career path, indeed her whole life. Now she told Sally anecdotes about the old days.

Like about the repeated attempts she had made to recruit Joshua.

There was one time, seven months after Step Day, when Jansson had arranged to talk to Joshua at the Home, then still located in Datum Madison. The talk had been chaperoned, and that was fair enough, Jansson had thought, sitting on a sofa with a Sister or two, as the old song went. After all, Joshua was still just fourteen years old.

And his suspicion of her had been so solid it was like an extra person, crowding on the sofa with Jansson and the Sisters.

He’d said, “Do you want to study me?”

“What?”

“Hand me over to the professors at the university. Put me in a cage and study me.”

She felt shocked. “No, Joshua. Never that. Listen. You’ve become notorious. A legend, whether you like it or not. But right from the start, from Step Day, I’ve done my best to keep you off the official record.”

He thought that over. “Why?”

“Because it would be bad for you. You can do as you please. But I want you to think… well, about working with me. Not for me. Put your abilities, and all that positive energy you have, to good use. I can get you assignments. Ways to help people. I’m talking about paid work. Like a Saturday job—it won’t get in the way of your school work. Joshua, I promise that if you work with me I’ll continue to protect you.”

He flinched. “But if I won’t work with you, you won’t protect me.”

“No. No! Joshua, that came out wrong. Look, I’ll protect you come what may—”

But he had just vanished, a pop of displaced air, gone, leaving the two Sisters exasperated.

Jansson had looked on the bright side. He hadn’t actually said no.

She had kept on trying, until, grudgingly, he became an ally.

And he had been an ally ever since.

“Nice story,” Sally said. “And that was really your way of protecting him , right?”

“A friend for life, that’s Joshua. He does seem to surround himself with strong women. You, Helen, Sister Agnes—”

“And you too, retired Lieutenant Jansson.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. Must be difficult for Helen sometimes, however. She is his wife.”

Sally looked away. “I’m profoundly uninterested in Helen. A gloomy little stay-at-home. Although she did throw a good right hook at that nutjob in immigration.”

“That she did.”

Sally kept glancing at her watch.

Jansson asked cautiously, “So where are you going next?”

“The Gap.”

“Really? Because of Mary the troll, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

Jansson smiled. “What will you do, wave a placard?”

“Why not? It’s better than letting the poor creature be put to death, out of sight and out of mind.”

“True enough. It was a shocking incident. When I saw it I wrote a few mails myself, you know… That was how I got the leverage to have Joshua meet Senator Starling. I wish I could go with you.”

Sally faced her. “Are you serious?”

That took Jansson aback; she’d spoken on impulse. “What? Well—yes, I guess. If I could. Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re useful, that’s why. You’re Joshua’s ‘Spooky’ Jansson. You can get things done in the human world where I can’t.” Sally looked diffident, as if she hated to admit the slightest weakness. “Maybe together we could do some good. Or at least scare the spacesuit pants off those dweebs up at the Gap. Joshua said you put things right. That’s your strength. Well, because of this whole business with the trolls, there’s soon going to be something ‘not right’ with the whole of the Long Earth. Come with me. What do you say?”

Jansson smiled weakly. “What, just like that? It’s kind of Thelma and Louise, isn’t it? And at my age, and my condition? I’m not supposed to be more than a couple of hours from my hospital. I suppose I could self-medicate. But I’ve never been nearly that far stepwise. It’s two million steps to the Gap, right? I don’t think I’d make it.”

“Don’t be so hasty.” Sally winked. “Remember who you’re speaking to. I know a couple of short cuts…”

“It’s crazy. It’s impossible. Isn’t it?”

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.