Terry Pratchett - The Long War

Lobsang nodded. “All the time I could have snapped my metaphorical fingers and put an end to it. Is that what you would have wanted?”

“Well, if you could have, why didn’t you?”

“You know, throughout the ages people have asked the same question of the Christian God. If He is omniscient and omnipotent, why would He allow the suffering of a single child? I am not God, Joshua.”

Joshua snorted. “You like to act that way, broom and sandals or not.”

“I cannot see into the souls of men and women. I only see the surface. Sometimes I find I have not even imagined what was lying within, when it is eventually revealed through word or action. And even if I could have stopped those bombers— should I have? At what cost? How many would you have had me kill, in order to avert an action that would have remained entirely hypothetical? What would you have thought of me then? Humans have free will, Joshua. God will not, and I can not, stop them harming each other. I think you should talk to Agnes about this.”

“Why?”

“She might help you find it in yourself to forgive me.”

Joshua thought he could never do that. But he had to put it aside, he knew. With an effort he focused on his surroundings. “So, the trolls. What have you learned about them?”

“Oh, a great deal. Such as about their true language. Which has nothing to do with the crude signing and point-at-the-picture pidgin humans have imposed on them when they want to give them orders.”

“But even that’s pretty powerful, Lobsang. You see clips of Mary saying ‘I will not’ everywhere. On posters, in graffiti, online, even on animated T-shirts.”

“That’s true, but it’s irresponsible for the tax rebels of Valhalla to mix up their symbols with those of the troll issue—conflating two separate conflicts, each of which spans the whole of the Long Earth.” Lobsang sat back on his heels, convincingly sweating. “You know that their music is the heart of the trolls’ true language, Joshua. Surely that’s no surprise. After contact with humans they pick up our songs, but they make them their own, spinning endless variations… Music is a way for them to express the natural rhythms of their bodies, from their heartbeats, their breaths, the periodicity of their strides when they walk, even the sparking of the neurons in their heads, perhaps. And they use the rhythm of the song as a timing device, when they want to step together, or hunt. Galileo did that, you know.”

“Galileo?”

“He used music as a kind of clock to time his early experiments in mechanics. Pendulum swings and so on. And of course the trolls’ songs carry information. Even a simple disharmony can carry a warning. But there’s much more to it than that. Watch them now; I think they’re planning a hunt…”

The flickering of the stepping trolls, around the core group, was becoming more intense. The returning trolls would add a new line to the ongoing harmonies, loudly or softly, boldly or subtly; the song as a whole was evolving, adapting, and the other steppers seemed to react.

“I plant food sources around the reservation,” Lobsang said. “Across the stepwise worlds, I mean. Honeycombs, for instance, and animals for them to hunt, deer, rabbits. The pack works as a kind of single organism in seeking out such resources. Stepper scouts spread out across the worlds, and if one finds a promising resource, a deer herd say, he or she will return and, well, sing about it.”

“They’re still singing about getting drunk on Irish moonshine as far as I can tell.”

“The core song is only the carrier wave, Joshua. I’ve done some acoustic analysis; there are variations in pitch, rhythm, even the phasing of the song scraps, that carry information about how far away the find is, how high a quality the food is. Other scouts will pick up on that, go and check it out, and come back with a confirming report, or maybe a contradiction. It’s an efficient way for the pack to explore all the local possibilities, and soon they’ll settle on a selection—often they’ll switch to another key, or another song altogether, to signal unanimity—and then they step away. Honeybees work this way; when they need to find a new location for the hive they send out scouts, who come back and dance out the data.

“Trolls individually are not much smarter than chimps, but collectively they have evolved a way for the group to make intelligent, robust decisions. But it isn’t like human decision-making, or democracy. Even the kind of democracy you practise out in the boondocks.” He smiled at Joshua. “I heard they made you a mayor.”

“Sort of.”

“Tightly contested election, was it?”

“Oh, shut up. My main job is to moderate the town meeting. Hell-Knows-Where is still small enough for all the capable adults to gather on the common land, and debate the issues. We use Roberts’s Rules of Order .”

“Very American. But maybe there’s something of the trolls’ collective wisdom in what you’re practising. Sooner that than suffer the errors of a single wrong-headed leader. The trolls almost always get it right, Joshua, even when I set them some pretty intricate puzzles to solve.”

“Nobody’s observed this before, have they?”

“Nobody’s had the patience. People always focus on what the trolls can do for them. Not on what the trolls want . Not on what they can do .”

“How come our chimps don’t work that way? I mean, the ones on the Datum.”

“I suspect it’s an evolutionary adaptation to stepping. Out in the Long Earth, where your food source may be near by geographically but a few worlds away stepwise, you need different search and cooperation strategies. The scouts have to spot the food, and return quickly with the news; the group must decide to move in on it rapidly, or not… It’s an environment which encourages efficient scouting, precise, detailed communication and quick, robust decision-making. Just as we see here.

“But again, there’s still more to the music of the trolls than the needs of the moment. The long call, the essence of which is spread across the worlds, is a kind of encoded, shared wisdom. The call can last a month before it repeats, and is laden with ultrasonics, beyond human hearing altogether. But even more than that, it’s like a smearing out of consciousness—like nothing humans experience. I’ve been making efforts to decode it. You can imagine the challenge. I’m making some progress; I have a kind of translation suite, in various prototypes.”

“If anybody can achieve that, you can, Lobsang.”

“That’s true,” Lobsang said complacently. “But right now, Joshua, the long call is vibrating with bad news for the trolls. Bad news because of us. Watch this.” He stood, stiffly, and held up his hands. “I am trying to study the trolls in their natural state. I made of this group one basic request, though: that in return for the sanctuary I offer them—protection from humans—they stay here, until I release them. Verbally, I mean, they aren’t physically restrained in any way. Simple as that.”

“And?”

“And now, Joshua, I will release them.” He clapped his hands, once, twice, sharply.

The trolls stopped singing—they stopped stepping, once the scouts had returned—and every head, save for the smallest infants’, turned to Lobsang. After a few heartbeats of silence they broke into a new song, a lilting ballad.

“‘Galway Bay’,” Lobsang murmured to Joshua.

And then they began to step away, mothers with cubs first, males last for protection from predatory elves. In less than a minute they were gone, leaving only a scuffed patch of ground.

Joshua understood. “Gone with the rest, just as the reports say. All over the Long Earth.”