Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“For heaven’s sake,” Helen snapped. “Give each other a hug!”

They leaned together, and she held him tight. “With them, you’re healed,” she murmured in his ear. “Don’t leave them again. Whoever comes calling.”

“Understood, Jansson.”

And yet she knew that was a promise he could never keep. She felt a stab of heartache for Joshua, the lonely boy she had known, the lonely man he would always be.

She pulled away. “Enough. Squeeze too hard and I might break.”

“Me too.” Joshua reached forward with his left arm, revealing his artificial hand. It was a clunky, oversized creation with unconvincing pinkish skin; it whirred and whined like a movie prop when he unclenched his fingers. “Bill Chambers calls it Thing. Like the Addams Family, you know? Funny guy. He’s around somewhere, incidentally. Getting smashed with Thomas Kyangu.”

Jansson tried not to laugh. “Joshua, surely they could have done better for you than that. Prosthetics these days—”

Helen said, “He insists on wearing that horrible old antique.”

“Sooner this than one of the Black Corporation gadgets Lobsang offered me.”

“Ah,” Jansson said. “With Lobsang inside.”

“You see the problem. I don’t want to walk around with Lobsang in control of any of my extremities. I’d rather wait, thanks. Anyhow it doesn’t bother Dan, so that’s the main thing.”

Jansson said, “Strange to think your own hand is nailed to the wall of that beagle princess’s palace, a million worlds away.”

“Yeah.” Joshua glanced around, making sure Dan wasn’t close by. “You never got to see that, did you, Monica? There’s a bit of the story you never heard.”

“He likes bragging about this,” Helen said wearily.

“You know those two beagles had got me pinned down, Snowy and Li-Li. I saw they were trying to save my life, in their way. But I wasn’t exactly happy at losing a hand, even so. And, as Li-Li got her teeth into my wrist, I made a gesture…” He held up his robot hand, clenching a fist, and the middle finger extended with a whirr of hydraulics. “And that is what is up on Petra’s wall right now.”

Jansson snorted laughter.

“And that ,” Helen said wearily, “is what I can’t stop Dan running around doing to all his little friends, every time his father tells that story.”

Joshua winked at Jansson. “He’ll grow out of it. Price worth paying, right?”

Jansson just smiled neutrally. An experienced cop knew better than to get involved in family arguments.

They were distracted by the approach of a short, slim, wiry-looking man in his fifties. He looked vaguely familiar to Jansson. Somewhat shyly, he all but stood to attention as he addressed Joshua. “Excuse me, sir. You’re Joshua Valienté, right?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Sorry to trouble you… I don’t know anybody here and I know her.”

“Sure. And you are?”

The man offered his hand. “Wood. Frank Wood. USAF, long retired, once of NASA…” There was a comedy moment; Wood had put forward his left hand to shake, but recoiled when Joshua’s elderly cybernetic claw was produced in response.

Jansson snapped her fingers. “I thought I recognized you, Mr. Wood. I met you at the Gap. I was up there with Sally myself.”

He seemed startled to see her, then pleased. Evidently he hadn’t recognized her through the increased decrepitude of her illness. “Lieutenant Jansson? Good to see you again…”

More handshakes; Wood’s hand was dry, firm. Jansson remembered, awkwardly, how she’d suspected this poor guy had had a crush on her out at the Gap.

Helen said, a tad reluctantly, “I think Sally is down there, near the big group of trolls. With some Happy Landings types.” She led the way.

Jansson followed, accompanied by Frank Wood. When he saw how slowly and stiffly she walked now, he discreetly offered her his arm.

Just as discreetly she smiled her thanks. She said, “Frank, just so you know—”

“I heard you were ill.”

“It’s not that. I’m gay, Frank. And ill. Ill and gay.”

He took that with a self-deprecating grin. “So our budding romance is doomed, huh? My radar never was too reliable. Probably why I never married.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Does being ill and gay preclude your being bought dinner, however?”

“It will be a pleasure.”

They found Sally with a bunch of trolls, and a few people dressed in what struck Jansson as a peculiar style even for colonial folk, kind of alternate eighteenth-century. Sally herself wore her usual sleeveless travel jacket, as if she were about to leave any second for another urgent stepwise jaunt.

More introductions followed, and Jansson was able to match more names to faces. The oddly dressed types were from Happy Landings. A slim, shy-looking, youngish man turned out to be Jacques Montecute, headmaster of a school at Valhalla. A teenage girl, sober and serious, standing quietly at Montecute’s side, was Roberta Golding, a student at the Valhalla high school who had made the news, along with Montecute, by travelling with the Chinese expedition to Earth East Twenty Million. They were here as guests of Joshua, it turned out; Dan Valienté would be starting at Montecute’s school from next year. The Happy Landings folk seemed to stand a little way away from the rest, as if not quite part of the crowd.

And there was something particularly odd about Roberta Golding. A watchfulness, a stillness, that Jansson hadn’t seen in such a young person since Joshua himself was that age. But she didn’t detect Joshua’s eerie calm about Roberta, nor his irreducible survival instinct. She had a look that Jansson, in her duty days, had associated with kids from damaged families. She had seen too much, too young. Jansson wondered uneasily what this flawed child might become, in future.

The trolls included Mary the runaway, and there was no mistaking the cub, Ham, who even now still wore bits of his silvery spacesuit. As soon as Ham saw Jansson he ran straight at her, making to hug her legs, and would have knocked Jansson clean over if Joshua hadn’t intercepted him first.

Sally, being Sally, immediately homed in on Frank Wood. “Well, well. Buzz Aldrin. What do you want?”

Wood nodded, graciously enough. “I was hoping for a burger and a beer.”

Sally spat, “Enough with the Right Stuff crap; you don’t charm me. More trouble at the Gap, right?”

“Not at all. I came to thank you, Ms. Linsay. And you, Lieutenant Jansson. For dealing with that business with the trolls the way you did. My colleagues up there are not bad people, but they are somewhat driven. I think we’d lost our moral bearings. Your actions helped us find them again.” He grinned. “And now, on to the stars! We’re already talking about probes to Mars, even a manned jaunt. And some neat visuals…”

He began to speak of something called a planetary alignment, occurring this very day: lots of Earth’s sister worlds were lining up in one part of the sky, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, even the crescent moon. “Of course it’s visible from all the worlds of the Long Earth. But we’re taking the opportunity to throw over probes, to get decent images—to showcase the possibilities of the Gap, you see.”

Joshua said, “You’ll probably scare everybody to death. Aren’t they saying this line-up is astrologically ominous?”

Helen pulled his sleeve. “Don’t tease the man.”

Sally snorted. “But it’s not as good from the Gap. You haven’t got a moon!”

“ In the way ,” Frank said smoothly, good humoured. “We don’t have a moon in the way. All the better for seeing the real spectacle…”