Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“One Earth was taken out entirely.”

Jansson whistled. The idea seemed to frighten her. “It could have hit us ,” she said.

“Datum Earth was way up the other end of the probability curve.”

“Yes, but if it hadn’t been—even if we’d been living on one of these nearby worlds—”

“Earthquakes, tidal waves, that kind of fun. Oh, the dust winter would probably have killed us off. Us, or our primate ancestors, more likely, it was that long ago.”

“Nasty.”

“No, it’s just statistics. It happened, that’s all.” Sally poured more coffee. “It couldn’t happen now , at least. Not that way. The extinction of mankind, I mean. We’ve spread out. The Long Earth is an insurance policy. Even a Bellos couldn’t take out all of us.”

“OK. And this Gap is useful because—”

“Because you can just step into space. You see, on world Gap Minus One, you put on a spacesuit, step over—and there you are, gently orbiting the sun. No need to ride a rocket the size of a skyscraper to fight Earth’s gravity, because there ain’t no Earth there. And once you’re out there, you can go anywhere. That’s the dream, anyhow. Access to space.”

Jansson’s head was drooping. “Can’t wait to see it. In the morning, yes?”

“In the morning. You sleep. I’ll put the tent up before it gets dark. Are you hungry?”

“No, thanks. And I took my meds.” She lay down again, pulling the blankets over her.

“Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight, Sally.”

As Jansson slipped back into sleep Sally sat silently, perhaps the only awake, sapient mind on this planet.

And as the light dimmed, and the battered moon brightened, she felt as if someone had knocked out the walls of her mind. The landscape, a grassy hillside stretching away before her, seemed to acquire depth, otherness in a direction she could almost see. It was bottomless, multi-dimensional, endless. She had once dreamed that she had found out how to fly; it was absurdly easy, all you had to do was jump into the air and jump again when you were up there . Now she chased the tantalizing feeling that all she needed was the trick of it and she could step away, not into one world at a time, but spread across the Long Earth, a whole thick band of worlds, all at once. The very air around her felt prickly, the land as insubstantial as smoke.

But then Jansson coughed, and moaned softly in her sleep. Sally’s infinity high evaporated as quickly as it had come.

Slowly the crew of the Franklin got used to their troll crewmates.

That didn’t apply to all the colonies they visited, though.

New Melfield was a grubby and unprepossessing farming community in the Corn Belt. The whole township turned out when the Franklin descended—and seemed uniformly astonished when a family of trolls followed the human crew down the lowered gangway.

The trolls and the rest strolled around while Maggie chatted to the local mayor, passed over Datum documentation, and generally engaged the man and put him at his ease. Indeed he evidently needed his ease putting at, for her briefing had pegged this place as yet another nasty little locus of spite towards trolls, not to mention humans and other dumb animals. Well, change had to start by degrees.

So by mid-morning this mayor had three trolls in his office, actually sitting on chairs; trolls just loved chairs, especially if they swivelled. And when Maggie had finished the coffee she’d been offered, she said clearly, “Wash up, please, Carl.”

The young troll, holding the mug like an heirloom, looked around the room, spotted the open door to the little coffee station and sink area in the room next door, carefully washed the mug in the sink, and placed it just as carefully in a rack. Then he walked back to Maggie, who gave him a peppermint.

The mayor watched this in blank astonishment.

That was the start of a couple more days at this township, days devoted to seducing hearts and minds, with younger kids being given rides in the Franklin to see their homes from the air for the first time in their lives, and older kids—heavily supervised—playing with the trolls.

But on the second day the crew went on the alert, when a second twain showed up in the sky above New Melfield.

The ship was a merchant vessel. That evening the captain himself, with an aide, crossed to the Franklin and met Maggie in her sea cabin. And they came bearing a package.

Maggie glanced quickly at Nathan Boss, who’d accompanied them aboard. “We scanned the parcel,” Boss said. “It’s clean.”

The merchant’s captain, young, overweight, grinned at Maggie. “You must be very important, Captain Kauffman, we were detoured a hell of a way to bring you this. You have the assurance of Douglas Black himself—”

“Douglas Black? Of the Black Corporation? The …” Wow, she thought. Sally Linsay has contacts.

“Yes, Captain. The Mr. Black assures you that nothing in this package is to the detriment of either you or the Benjamin Franklin . Instructions can be found inside. I know nothing more…”

Maggie felt ridiculously like a kid at Christmas, eager to unwrap the gift.

As soon as the guy was gone, at Nathan’s cautious suggestion she took the package outside the ship to open it, just for extra security. And inside she found, carefully wrapped, a curious instrument faintly resembling an ocarina. A troll-call—Sally Linsay had come through. She toyed with the controls; it looked more complex than the gadget Sally had shown her, maybe some kind of upgrade. And there was a brief page of instructions, signed by hand: “G. Abrahams’. The name wasn’t familiar.

She couldn’t wait to try it on the trolls.

She dismissed Nathan, who went off grinning and shaking his head. Then, alone, she made for the observation deck, where the trolls preferred to sleep, perhaps because of its cooler temperature. The trolls were huddled together, grooming gently, half-asleep, communicating in their usual soft, barely audible tones.

Maggie quietly switched on the ocarina, pointed it at Jake, and listened carefully.

And was surprised when from the direction of Jake a clear voice said, “I am fed / satisfied; this is fun; I yearn to return to /meaning not understood/…” It emerged as a human male voice, firm, reasonably pleasant, if rather synthetic.

So the troll-call worked, even if it did seem to be more like an exchange of concepts than a true translation. Those nerds at the Black Corporation—or whoever “G. Abrahams” was—must have loved working on the development of this thing.

Now she pointed the troll-call at Marjorie.

“Female here / watching / no mate female / meaning not understood: tentative translation, a female choosing for her own purposes not to have a mate…”

They meant her! “Everybody’s a relationship counsellor,” Maggie grumbled to herself. Plucking up her courage, she raised the troll-call and said clearly into its mouthpiece, “My name is Maggie Kauffman. Welcome aboard the Benjamin Franklin .” A liquid warble accompanied her words.

The trolls seemed to snap to attention. They stared at her, mouths open, eyes wide.

She pointed to herself. “Maggie. Maggie…”

Marjorie gabbled back, apparently attempting to find a label for her. “Friend / grandmother / interesting stranger…”

It was “grandmother” that flabbergasted Maggie. Grandmother! How human was that? And was that how they saw her relationship to her crew, that she was the old woman looking after all the little children? Well, they were mostly a lot younger than her…

She boldly walked up to the trolls, where they sat huddled in a corner of the cabin, and sat on the carpet with them. “I’m Maggie. Maggie… Well, you’re right. I have no husband. No mate. The ship is my home…”