Terry Pratchett - The Long War

Jansson laughed at that. “Really? I was a gay junior cop busily making screwed-up career choices. Poor kid, if I’m all he had… Look, Sister, the journey’s finished me off, with all that stepping, and the drugs.”

“ And the dose of radiation you took in that dinosaur temple, or whatever it was, to spare Sally Linsay,” Agnes said sternly. “She told me all about that . Look, Monica, you won’t have to step anywhere. Not once we’ve got you to West 11 anyhow. I’ve had Lobsang set up a nice little summer house there, and it’s yours as long as you need it.” She leaned forward, confidentially, and Jansson saw how her skin, supposedly of a thirty-year-old according to Lobsang, was just a little too youthful, a little too free of blemishes, to be convincing. The young engineers who created such receptacles were never good at getting the flaws of age just right, she reflected. Agnes went on, “I never could see the appeal of stepping myself, you know. Tried it once. Well, with the famous Joshua Valienté rattling around the Home, I could hardly not, could I? All I saw was a bunch of trees, and my own shoes that I was trying not to puke up all over, and no people, and where’s the fun in that? And now, when I step—well, I don’t feel anything at all. Lobsang designed me that way, the idiot. Anyway I can’t see the point. Give me my Harley and an open road any day. Lieutenant Jansson, you must come, you’re a guest of honour. That’s an order.”

So, came the day: Saturday, September 8, 2040.

About two in the afternoon, and thankfully it was a bright, sunny, early autumn day here in Madison West 11, Jansson emerged somewhat shyly from the summer house Agnes had promised, which had turned out to be a decent little cabin with all mod cons. This location was on a height, and she had a fine view of grassy swards, dense clumps of trees, and patches of prairie flowers rolling down to the lake water. Agnes’s barbecue party was scattered over this landscape, a few dozen people walking to and fro, kids and dogs playing noisily, and a knot of folk centred around a plume of rising white smoke over what was presumably the barbecue grill. A wash of music rose up from a knot of trolls down by the water, an elusive melody she couldn’t quite place…

Just for a moment Jansson had a flash of disorientation. As if she saw the people as naked as the trolls, just a bunch of humanoids rolling around on this big lawn, empty-headed as young chimps. Trolls. Elves. Kobolds . She remembered the kobold who had called himself a human name: Finn McCool. Wearing bits of clothing, like a human, a man. And sunglasses! And how he’d gabble when Sally and Jansson were trying to sleep: just nonsense, but he tried to copy the rhythms of their talk… Now, sometimes, when she listened to some politician speechify on TV, or a priest yakking about God, all she saw was a kobold up on his hind legs, prattling nonsense just the way McCool used to.

Elves gone wrong—that was what Petra called humans.

She shook her head. Put it aside, she told herself. She walked forward determinedly, her exposed skin slopped with protective cream, a hat covering the increasingly patchy hair on her head, her gait as ramrod straight as she could make it.

She hadn’t gone a dozen yards before Sister Agnes herself caught up with her, trailed by a couple of other nuns, one elderly, one maybe in her late thirties. “Monica! Thank you for joining us. These are my colleagues, Sister Georgina, Sister John…”

“Sister John” looked faintly familiar to Jansson. “Don’t I know you?”

The nun smiled. “My birth name is Sarah Ann Coates. I was at the Home, I mean a resident. When I grew up—well, I came back.”

Sarah Ann Coates: now Jansson remembered the face of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, scared, self-conscious, staring out of the file she had assembled on the incidents of Step Day in Madison. Sarah, one of the Home children Joshua Valienté had rescued in those frantic hours when the doors of the Long Earth had first creaked open. “It’s nice to see you again, Sister.”

“Come this way.” Sister Agnes linked her arm through Jansson’s, and they started walking slowly towards the smoke from the grill.

“You’re a great hostess, Agnes,” Jansson said, only slightly sarcastically. “All these people here and you swoop down on me as soon as I show my face.”

“Call it a gift. But don’t repeat that to Lobsang. He keeps badgering me to have avatars made. Iterations, like him . Copies of myself running around. Imagine how much I’d get done! So he says. Imagine the arguments I’d have, me, myself and I! So I say. I don’t think so. Now then, Monica, I’ve assigned Georgina and John to look after you today, anything you need you just ask them—and any time you feel like disappearing, that’s fine too.”

Jansson suppressed a sigh. Deny it as she might, she knew she needed the help. “Thank you. I appreciate that very much.” The song of the trolls carried on the shifting, gentle breeze: the usual troll music, a human tune simply harmonized and turned into a round, with the melody line repeated and overlapping. “What is that?”

“‘The Wearing of the Green’,” Agnes said. “An old Jacobite marching song. Scottish rebels, you know. You can blame Sister Simplicity for that one. She always was one for her Scottish roots. That and prize fights on TV. It is good to have the trolls back, though, isn’t it? Of course we had to restrict the guest list today to make sure there weren’t too many people for the trolls to cope with. And Senator Starling has promised to put in an appearance later on. Suddenly a supporter of the troll cause, and suddenly he always was, if you know what I mean. Says he sings in a Sunday choir and wants to sing along with the trolls, if he can. Going to bring along a squad of Operation Prodigal Son sailors too, the USS Benjamin Franklin choir, just as a gesture of peace and harmony. Now then, let’s find Joshua for you. It won’t be hard, he’ll be close to little Dan, and Dan will be close to the food…”

Agnes had appointed Lobsang as head chef. Jansson stared, bemused, at a Tibetan monk with a greasy apron over his orange robe and a chef’s hat on his shaven head. A man she didn’t know stood beside him, tall, fifty-ish, black, in a sober charcoal suit, wearing a cleric’s collar.

Lobsang raised a greasy spatula. “Lieutenant Jansson! Good to see you.”

Agnes more or less snarled at him. “ That soya burger is raw, and that quorn sausage is on fire. Less blue-skyin’ and more fat fryin’, Lobsang.”

“Yes, dear,” he said wearily.

“Don’t worry, Lobsang,” said the cleric beside Lobsang. “I’ll help. I’m a dab hand at chopping onions.”

“Thank you, Nelson…”

“Lieutenant Jansson.”

Jansson turned. Joshua Valienté stood before her, looking uncomfortable in a kind of smart-casual get-up: clean shirt, pressed jeans, leather shoes. He held his left arm to his chest, his clenched fist concealed by his shirt cuff. At his side was Helen, his wife, sturdy, pretty, cheerful. And little Dan ran past, dressed in a cut-down twain-pilot uniform, engaged in some noisy game with other kids, as oblivious of the adults and their society as if they were nothing but tall trees.

Jansson and Joshua stood there, facing each other awkwardly. Jansson felt an uncomfortable surge of emotion, having witnessed the dangers to which Joshua had exposed himself so far from home—and now seeing him like this, with his family. With Helen, looking as if she belonged nowhere but at his side. After all she’d been through with this man, Jansson didn’t know what to say.

Joshua smiled, gently. “It’s OK, Lieutenant.”