Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“Cracker.”

“Good.”

“I just need to concentrate on the piloting. Not my usual occupation, but the Black Corporation lads gave me a decent run-through. It’s simple enough… But not like driving a car, I’ll tell you that. Or even riding a horse. After all the ship has to be sapient, to a degree, and it’s smarter than a damn horse in fact. It’s like you have this constant dialogue with the thing. Y’know, I once rode an elephant on this farm in the African bush, a rescue sanctuary. An African elephant isn’t tamed like the Indian sort; he’s a big strong smart animal that knows where he wants to go, and if you’re lucky that might happen to be the same way you want to go. Otherwise you just have to kind of hang on. This is the same. All a bit mad, isn’t it? But we’ll get there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

“Fair enough.”

And that was that. It was just like the journey of the Mark Twain all those years ago—but at least this time Joshua got on better with his crewmate.

By sunset they had sailed out of the Ice Belt, as it was called, the sheaf of sporadically glaciated worlds around the Datum, and were passing over the more arid worlds of the Mine Belt. The view got even more dull. Joshua made a meal—of field rations warmed on a single gas ring, no gourmet kitchen on this ship—and took a portion to Bill, who was camping out in the wheelhouse.

Then he turned in, looking out through the gondola’s windows as the dying rays of midsummer sunsets glowed on the gasbag.

The dawn brought more of the same.

By mid-morning of the second day they had crossed into the Corn Belt, a hundred thousand steps from Datum Earth, a thick band of warmer worlds lush with forests and prairie, and now studded with human farming communities—including Reboot, at Earth West 101,754, founded by Helen and her family of trekkers, and the place where she and Joshua had married.

Then, in the late afternoon, Joshua sensed the airship slowing. The strobing of the skies slowed, and the more or less identical landscapes below flickered gently, coming to a standstill.

And an angry buzzing filled the air. Suddenly the gondola was dark, the light excluded by a swarm of dark heavy insectile bodies that slammed continually against the clear windows, chitinous wings clattering. Joshua glanced at the gondola’s compact earthometer: this was West 110,719.

He had to yell over the noise. “Hey, Bill!”

“Here.”

“I recognize this place.”

“You should. Classic Joker. In fact you discovered it, during The Journey with Lobsang.”

“Yeah, and we passed straight on through. What are we doing here, Bill? Those bugs are going to choke us if they get in the air vents.”

“Patience, grasshopper.”

The airship lifted now, Joshua could feel it, though the world remained hidden by the swarming, angry bodies of the flying insects—they were like huge locusts, perhaps, an impression he remembered from that first visit.

Abruptly the Shillelagh rose into sunlight. Joshua saw he was still hovering over the flanks of Rainier, or this world’s copy of it. Evidently this world was warmer than the average, for forest rose up almost all the way to an eroded summit—it was oak woodland, mature trees rearing out of a luxuriant tumble of fallen trunks and thickets. He spotted a stream down there, bubbling down the steep slope of the mountain. As he watched, something blundered through the undergrowth and crashed away east, and a few roosting creatures took fright and rose up—they weren’t birds, they were like huge, fat dragonflies—and fluttered noisily away to safety.

When Joshua looked away from the mountain summit, he saw a landscape cloaked by swarming insects, a pulsing, gleaming carpet of them that seemed to extend all the way to the ocean shore, visible in the distance. The land crawled with them, like black rivers coursing between sparse patches of green, and clouds of flyers rose up everywhere. But nothing flew as high as this summit, and not as high as some of the other mountains of the Cascades, whose flanks rose out of the swarms like green-clad islands in an insectile sea.

“They’re altitude limited,” Joshua observed. “The insects.”

“Yeah, most of the larger species. Not all. Enough to make the summits survivable.”

“Survivable by who?”

“By us, Joshua. Well, specifically, by you.”

“We’re stopping here?”

“Yeah. Not long, maybe overnight.”

“Why?”

“We’ve an appointment to keep up here. This is why I wanted to start us off in the Cascades. I’ll drop an anchor, deploy the ladder. The grassy stretch by that stream down there looks a good place to camp. Take the tape. The cassette, you know.”

Somewhat reluctantly Joshua began to pull his kit together: a sleeping bag, food packets, fire-making gear. Bug repellent spray! “I’m going down alone, am I?”

Bill sounded embarrassed. “Look, Joshua, I don’t want to sound like a fan-boy here. Your Journey’s famous—and of course I know the inside story. The idea of you going down into all them unknown worlds all alone, while Lobsang stayed tucked up in the airship. Comedy gold.”

“Well, that’s a consolation for all the scars.”

“But the strategy actually makes sense. You go down, do the exploring thing, make contact.”

And Joshua wondered, contact with what?

“Meanwhile I’ll stay aloft, ready to help out when it all goes tits-up.”

“ When? ”

“If, mate. If. Slip of the tongue.”

Not for the first time in the course of his adventures in the Long Earth, and against his own better judgement, Joshua went with the flow.

Bill insisted that he carry a two-way radio, and a small shoulder unit with TV and sensor links. Joshua agreed, despite unpleasant memories of Lobsang’s shoulder-riding parrots, and for his part packed a handgun.

The climb down into the undergrowth was easy. Immediately he was on the ground the ship rose, taking the ladder with it.

Alone, Joshua turned around slowly. In this open space that the stream had carved between the trees, it was pleasant enough. The air smelled of damp wood and the leaf mould of millennia, and he heard the remote buzz of the lapping ocean of insect swarms below this summit. Over his head squadrons of some insectile equivalent of bats hurtled after things like flies.

He had nothing much to do but wait. He began to make his camp, spreading out his blanket roll and sleeping bag. He thought about a fire, but the air was warm and moist enough without it. With his travel rations he didn’t need to cook. He began to relax. It was almost like he was on sabbatical. He toyed with the idea of doing some fishing, just for fun, if the streams on this summit supported any fish…

The radio clicked into life. “Josh, can you hear me, mate?”

“No.”

“Ha ha. How you doing down there?”

“Making a restaurant reservation.”

“Funny you should say that. If it does all go tits up and you need supplies quickly there’s a cache, only a mile or so downstream.”

“A cache? Of what?”

“Survival stuff. A little shelter, a bit of food, knives, tools. Spare laces for your boots. Left by combers, for combers.”

Joshua sat on his sleeping bag. “Bill, what is this place? Why did we stop here? I mean, in a Joker ? Who the hell stops in Jokers?”

“Combers do. That’s the point, really. You want to know the story of this world? How Earth West 110,719 got its locusts? Our best guess is that pterosaurs never evolved on this world.”

“Pterosaurs?”

“And other flying dinosaurs. Back on the Datum, before the pterosaurs, big insects ruled the skies. Got as big as they could, in fact, exploiting the high oxygenation of the air. Then when the pterosaurs came along the big insects got hunted down, and only the little ones survived, and they never got so big again. After that the skies belonged to the pterosaurs, and later the birds. Here—no pterosaurs, for whatever reason. And later, the birds didn’t have a chance to grow large either. So here it’s not swallows chasing flies; here huge rapacious dragonflies hunt down birds the size of big moths…”