Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“What the hell happened here?”

“A gamma-ray burster. Well, that’s our best guess. Probably caused by a kind of massive supernova, the collapse of a supermassive star into a black hole. Could have happened anywhere within thousands of light years. A storm of gamma rays would have stripped away the ozone layers and then fried the surface life.”

“ Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away .”

“What’s that, Josh?”

“Just a stray memory of Sister Georgina.”

“In the long term life always bounces back one way or another. But there’s always the chance,” Bill said with gruesome relish, “that we might step over on to some world just at the moment the big rock falls, or whatever. What’s that in the sky? Is it a bird, is it a plane—d’oh!”

Joshua, oppressed by these charnel-house worlds, didn’t feel much like laughing. “We’re still searching for Sally, right?”

“We’re doing our best,” Bill said. “That kobold did say he believed the trolls were hiding out in some Joker or other. The bad news is there are a lot of Jokers. The good news is there are a lot of combers out in those Jokers already.”

“Hiding from the man. Just like Sally.”

“That’s the idea. Before we set off I sent word on ahead. I’m still hoping that if she’s spotted, somebody will put the word out. There are a lot of radio hams out here; it’s a good way to keep in touch across an undeveloped world. We’d hear them as we pass through. Of course some worlds are so badly beat up there is no ionosphere, and that theory breaks down.

“You really can’t plan too definitely when it comes to combers. It’s the nature of the beast. Combers! Some call them ridge runners or jackpine savages or mountain men, or hoboes or okies. In Oz they call ’em bushwhackers, the Brits say travellers. Once, in some parts, they were called wanderers. And you were the Wanderer, back then. Though not any more, buddy, you betrayed your own legend when you settled down to bake bread with the missus.”

That irritated Joshua. He had never wanted a legend of any kind. All he had ever wanted was to live his own life, on his own terms. Was he supposed to pander to some fan base? He felt like poking back at Bill, but he resisted the temptation. “I get the idea. I appreciate you’re doing your best.”

“I’m doing all there is to do. Unless you can figure out where she’s gone after all… Anyhow, enough gabbing, I’m out of me head with the thirst up here. You want to crack a tube? Bring up another six-pack and I’ll tell you the stories of a few more Jokers. Unless you want to watch a fillum. Just like back in the day with yer man Lobsang! Ah, go on, let’s see a fillum…”

Joshua was mostly sceptical about Bill’s Joker stories.

Such as what Bill told him of a Joker he called the Cueball. Joshua had actually glimpsed this one; they’d discovered it on his first journey out with Lobsang, nestling in the relatively domesticated Corn Belt. A world like a pool ball, utterly smooth, under a cloudless deep blue sky.

“I know a fella who knew a fella—”

“Oh, yes.”

“Who camped out on the Cueball for a bet. Just for a night. All alone. As you would. In the nip too, that was part of the bet.”

“Sure.”

“In the morning he woke up with a hangover from hell. Drinking alone, never wise. Now this fella was a natural stepper. So he got his stuff together in a blind daze, and stepped, but he says he sort of stumbled as he stepped.”

“Stumbled?”

“He didn’t feel as if he’d stepped the right way.”

“What? How’s that possible? What do you mean?”

“Well, we step East, or we step West, don’t we? You have the soft places, the short cuts, if you can find them, but that’s pretty much it. Anyhow this fella felt like he’d stepped a different way. Perpendicular. Like he’d stepped North .”

“And?”

“And he emerged on to some kind of other world. It was night, not day. No stars in the clear sky. No stars, sort of . Instead…”

“Your storytelling style really grates sometimes, Bill.”

Bill grinned. “But I’ve got ye hooked, haven’t I?”

“Get on with it. What did he see?”

“He saw all the stars. All of them. He saw the whole fecking Galaxy, man, the Milky Way. From outside … Still in the nip he was, too.”

That was the trouble with combers, Joshua was concluding. They were just expert bullshitters. Maybe they spent too much time alone.

And the search for the trolls, Jansson and Sally went on and on…

Sally . Once, when they were tethered for the night at some equable world, he thought he smelled her. As if she had come and gone while he slept. In the light he searched the gondola, and the area on the ground around the twain, but found no sign of her presence. Just a dream, he thought. He resolved never to tell Helen about it.

“One of those troll creatures really messed up a couple of guys here, and folks really don’t like that, but you know what? When it saw me the damn thing rushed up to me, and danced around me like it was a friend!…”

So the Benjamin Franklin had got yet another call, to yet another dumb incident concerning trolls. As Mac remarked, “You wouldn’t think there’d be enough trolls left around to trigger all this trouble.”

The place was called Cracked Rock. Judging from the transmitted report, there was a mayor, but he was resident at some stepwise companion community, leaving the local sheriff, a Long Earth tyro, in charge. The unfortunately named Charles Kafka was new to the job, a refugee from the big city—hoping for a nice easy ride to pension age, by the sound of it, in some Old-West-nostalgia type small town. Now it had all gone wrong, and he was panicking.

Cracked Rock was a speck on an unprepossessing world some distance beyond the Corn Belt. Not many steps for the Franklin to travel from its last destination, but it seemed to take an age to cross a barren-looking copy of America before coming on the township’s lights, bright in the dusk, by the bank of a river. Now Maggie looked down on a tent city—there was no shame in that, many a flourishing city had started out as tents and shacks—with a church, unfinished by the look of it, dirt roads scraped across the surrounding landscape of sparse scrub. The sheriff’s office looked like the best-finished building in town.

As the twain descended, the sheriff himself came out to meet it, accompanied by a cocky-looking younger man—and a juvenile troll, in chains. Maggie wondered if they’d done something to the troll to stop it stepping away. A few more folk drifted in from the township for a look-see.

With Nathan Boss and a couple of midshipmen at her side, Maggie cut short the introductions and asked Sheriff Kafka to sum up what had happened.

“Well, Captain, some trolls were walking past the township, a band of ’em—they know enough not to go too close—but there were some boys who intercepted them, including Wayne here, just looking for some fun, you know how good ol’ boys are, but they picked on a little one and the trolls fought back, and this one,” he indicated the beast in the chains, “laid out Wayne’s brother. And then—”

Maggie had heard the same dumb story twenty times on this mission. Impatient, infuriated, she held up a hand. “You know what? I’ve had enough of this. Midshipman Santorini.”

“Captain?”

“Go back to the ship. Bring out Carl.”

Santorini wasn’t the type to argue. “Yes, Captain.”

They waited in silence in the gathering dusk, the five minutes it took Santorini to comply. When Carl arrived, accompanied by Santorini, he hooted softly at the young troll in the chains.