Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“It’s true, Joshua. And that is what I wanted to speak to you about. Come. Let’s walk. I’m getting stiff from my weeding…”

Across the worlds, June skies remained clear, suns set in unison like synchronized swimmers diving, and dark gathered softly, slowly. On one world an owl hooted, for reasons best known to itself.

And Lobsang spoke further of the trolls.

“They’ve become vital to the economy of the whole of mankind—including the Datum, if only indirectly. So the corporations, including the Black Corporation, are putting on a lot of pressure, wherever they can apply it, to get the trolls back.”

“And back at work.”

“Yes. Also there are security implications. Worse than the trolls disappearing, if they were to be seen to become an active threat to mankind, if a coordinated military response were provoked—we need to avoid that .

“But there are other, more fundamental issues. The more I study trolls the more convinced I am that they are central to the ecology of the wider Long Earth itself. Like the elephants of the African savannah, they’ve been out there for millions of years, and for all that time they’ve been shaping the landscapes they inhabit—if only by eating so much of them. Sally Linsay taught me this; she’s studied them in the wild, in her way, far longer than I have. If you remove the big beasts from an ecology you can cause something called a trophic cascade. Knocking out the top of a food chain causes destabilization all the way down—booms and crashes of populations—and that can even cause a rise in greenhouse gases, and so on. A tremor of extinctions and eco-collapse all across the Long Earth, or at least as far as the trolls reach. And all because of us.”

Joshua grunted. “Makes you proud.”

“The trouble is, Joshua, there’s no particular reason for the trolls to return. Before Step Day they had a long and deep contact with humans, and they were treated decently, and in turn they treated us decently.”

Joshua thought again of the story of Private Percy Blakeney, a veteran of the First World War trenches, lost and bewildered in the stepwise world into which he’d unconsciously tumbled, who had been kept alive by trolls for decades.

“But since Step Day it’s been a different story. The exploitation of that cub for experiments at the Gap was only the tip of the iceberg.”

Joshua said, “Seems to me we’ll only get the trolls to come back if we can somehow persuade them that we will respect them. That we will listen when they say, ‘I will not,’ as Mary did. Not an easy concept to convey to a humanoid…”

“I know you tried to convince Senator Starling to campaign for them to be protected under US Aegis law. Even that’s not an insignificant challenge.”

“Yeah, animal protection legislation is a mess.”

“Not just that, Joshua. For one thing we’d have to decide what the trolls are .”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, they don’t comfortably fit the old categories, do they? Of human versus animal, the distinction through which we believe we have dominion over nature. It’s as if, I think, we’d found a band of Homo habilis —something between us and the animal. In some ways the trolls are animal-like. They don’t wear clothes, they have no writing. They have no language that’s quite analogous to our own. They don’t use fire, as even Homo habilis probably did. And yet they have some very human traits. They make simple tools, out in the wild—poking sticks, stone hand-axes. They have strong family bonds, which is why it’s so easy to trap a troll mother, if you have her cub. They show compassion, even to humans. They do have their own language, in their use of music. And they laugh, Joshua. They laugh.

“The distinction between human and animal is the clincher, you see. You can own an animal; you can kill it with impunity, aside from feeble anti-cruelty legislation. You can’t own a human, not in any civilized society, and killing a human is murder. So should we extend human rights to trolls?”

“We have, kind of, in Hell-Knows-Where.”

“Yes, but you’re more sane there than most. The basic quandary is: should we embrace them in our own category of being?”

“Which is a challenge to our pride. Right?”

“And more,” Lobsang said. “A challenge to our very self-image. Meanwhile, there are others who argue that the trolls can’t be human because they have no sense of God. Well, not as far as we can tell. What would the Catholics, for instance, do about that? If trolls have souls, then they must be fallen, as we are—that is, tainted with original sin. In which case it is the duty of Catholics to go out and baptize them, to save them from limbo when they die. But, you see, if the trolls are actually animals, to baptize them is blasphemous. Apparently the Pope is preparing an encyclical on the subject. But in the short term the religious debates are just stirring everybody up even more.”

“What does Agnes say?”

“‘Trolls like ice cream, and they laugh. Of course they’re bloody human, Lobsang. Now go get your broom, you missed a bit.’”

“That’s Agnes, all right… Let’s get to the point. Sally dragged me out of my home and all the way to the Datum because of this. Of course Sally found us in the first place, ten years ago, because of a disturbance of trolls. When they fled from First Person Singular. Now you want me to go out again, don’t you? Out into the Long Earth, beyond the High Meggers. To do what? Find Sally and Jansson with Mary, I guess. Then what? Find where the trolls are hiding? Persuade them to come out, to join the human world again?”

“That’s pretty much it,” Lobsang said. “Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t help that we’re already in the middle of so much upheaval from the Valhallan independence demands.”

“You want to restore the balance.”

“You and I always did share the same instincts, Joshua.” Lobsang bent to remove a single dead leaf from an otherwise immaculate lawn. Will you do it, Joshua? He didn’t ask the question, but left it hanging in the air.

Joshua thought it over. He was in his late thirties now. He had a young wife, a kid, a role in society at Hell-Knows-Where. He was no longer a mountain man, if he ever had been. And now here was Sally, charging off into the Long Earth through her soft places, as if challenging Joshua to follow. Here was Lobsang, like a ghost from the past, snapping his fingers once more. Was Joshua just going to jump as commanded?

Of course he was. Even if he wasn’t the man he used to be. But then, even Lobsang wasn’t who he once was, quite.

They walked on, stepping occasionally from world to world, from sunset to sunset. The troll songs hung in the richly scented air of each world—but Joshua wondered if they were diminishing, even as he listened.

Tentatively he said, “Having met you now, I can see your instinct was right.”

“What do you mean?”

“You did need Sister Agnes.”

Lobsang sighed. “But I think I need you too, Joshua. I often think back to our days together on the Mark Twain .”

“Watched any old movies recently?”

“That’s another thing about Agnes. She won’t let me show any movies that don’t have nuns in.”

“Wow. That’s brutal.”

“Something else that’s good for me, she says. Of course there aren’t that many movies that qualify, and we watch them over and over.” He shuddered. “Don’t talk to me about Two Mules for Sister Sara . But the musicals are the worst. Although Agnes says that the freezer-raiding scene in Sister Act is an authentic detail from convent life.”

“Well, that’s a consolation. Musicals with nuns in, huh…”