The Long Cosmos (10 page)

As he came to his fifth empty snare, a shadow passed over him.

He ducked instinctively into the shade of the trees. Nothing good was going to be moving soundlessly through the sky above.

Peering up warily, he saw a vast form sailing above the forest canopy. At first he thought it was some kind of glider – that wingspan had to be fifty feet – but he soon realized it was too organic a structure for that, the curves of the wings too graceful, the bones clearly visible through flesh stretched so tight it was all but translucent. He saw feet on skinny legs armed with vicious-looking claws, and a beak that must have been as long as he was tall, filled with glinting teeth. No feathers on the wings, but there were splashes of colour on that spindly central body. Some kind of pterosaur, perhaps, the biggest of its kind he'd ever seen, and a tough-looking carnivore even if those wings looked fragile. No wonder there were no birds here – they'd have been easily out-competed by such creatures, the honed products of millions of years of evolution of their own.

And maybe that was another reason why there were so few, if any, small rabbit-like ground-dwelling mammals. Too easy a target for the killers in the sky. He remembered Bill Chambers urging him to spread something bright like his spacesuit-silver emergency blanket on the top of his bluff, in case some disaster befell him and the twains came searching. Now he was glad he'd instinctively rejected that advice and wasn't drawing the attention of the monsters in the sky.

The pterosaur sailed away, off to the west, and Joshua warily watched it go. Whatever was on its menu today didn't include him, at least.

And when he looked down to the ground once more, he saw the troll.

The humanoid was a big older male, a mass of black fur, but with a speckling of grey around his face and on his back: the kind some people called, inaccurately, a silverback. He was squatting, staring at a bare patch of ground before him. The troll was alone. His troop was nowhere to be seen, but Joshua knew they would be around somewhere.

Joshua sighed, and strode forward, emerging from the shadows of the forest clump. There were plenty of times he'd been glad to see a troll, but this wasn't one of them. ‘Well, there goes the neighbourhood—'

The troll glowered at him. He lifted a hand like a steam hammer, and touched one finger to his lips.
Shut up.
The gesture was unmistakeable, and one of the elements of an informal sign language that had evolved across the Long Earth, leaking out from labs and farms and factories and other places where trolls lived and worked alongside people – sometimes, even by choice.

Joshua stood still and shut his mouth. He had learned not to argue with trolls. The troll went back to his earnest inspection of the ground.

An unmeasured time passed. The troll stayed utterly still, apparently relaxed. That was harder for Joshua to manage, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, and he grew thirsty, and his stomach rumbled.

He still saw no sign of this troll's troop, nor heard their calls. It wasn't unknown for trolls to be encountered alone. This one could be a scout, sent out from the pack stepwise to seek out food or water, or spot potential threats. But Joshua didn't think so; scouts were usually a lot younger, their senses still sharp, fleet of foot. Maybe this older male, approaching the end of his life, just wanted some time to himself: he was on a troll sabbatical, just like Joshua's. Even after all these years, and for all the intensive study of their collective behaviour pioneered by the likes of Lobsang, people knew hardly anything about trolls, and certainly not in the wild. If he'd thought to bring a troll-call, Joshua supposed, he could have asked.

Joshua was getting bored, and a little dizzy. Enough of this. He opened his mouth to speak—

Slam.

The troll brought his two great fists down on the ground with a smash, and Joshua was amazed to see the ground crumble under the impact, a thin crust cracking to reveal some kind of earth-walled chamber down there, a couple of feet deep, with rough tunnels leading off into the dark . . .

And animals. They swarmed over each other, things like furless rabbits or rats, pale beasts with claws and teeth shaped for digging, tiny pink eyes clamped shut against the light. Immediately, the creatures began to escape from the central nest, wriggling, scrambling back down the tunnels. Their movements were liquid; they seemed to flow away from the intrusion of daylight.

With a roar the troll jumped down into the hole, his big feet crushing a couple of the animals, and he started grabbing the creatures one at a time in each big fist, shaking them until they went limp, throwing them aside, bending down for more. He glanced up at Joshua, and the invitation on his crumpled, gorilla-like face was unmistakeable.

Joshua dropped his bits of gear and jumped down into the hole, opposite the troll. He tried to emulate the troll's industry, but
he
needed two hands to get hold of a single rabbit, and when he managed to catch one creature it turned out to be bigger and stronger than it looked, and dug needle-like teeth into the webbing of his thumb until he dropped it.

‘Damn it!'

He bent down and tried again, this time favouring his prosthetic hand. ‘Bite on
this.
' This time he got a rabbit from the hind end, so he kept those teeth away. With a muttered apology, trying to avoid the spiteful claws on its kicking back feet, he slammed its head against the ground, feeling its neck crack. ‘Ha!' Then he tossed the quivering corpse aside, and looked around for more.

But all the surviving rabbits had gone, squirming away into their tunnels. Joshua had that one miserable catch at his side. The troll had two heaps of, count them, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty each. The big old troll looked at Joshua's single specimen, and his own piled-up catch, and back again. ‘Hoo!'

Joshua had heard a troll laugh before. It was a sound you never got used to. Soon he was joining in, laughing until his gut ached.

Then the troll threw over one more rabbit carcass to Joshua, gathered up his haul in his huge arms with effortless ease, laughed once more – ‘Hoo!' – and stepped away.

That evening, before the sun went down, Joshua gutted and cleaned both rabbit-moles and cooked them on spits over his fire. He could barely wait until he could get his teeth into the smooth, lush meat. But after five days hungry he knew not to overeat; he determined to put the produce of the second rabbit aside for salting and curing in the sun.

Of course these little mammals with their big rodent-like incisors and digging claws weren't rabbits, or rats, or moles, all of which they resembled to some degree. Maybe they were like the mole rats he'd heard of in Africa, living underground in big warrens, clambering over each other in the dark . . . Mole rats lived in societies like hives, like social insects, with just a few breeding pairs supported by a mass of sterile siblings, nephews and nieces. Maybe it was that way here.

‘And maybe that's where all the local rabbits and hares went,' he said to the air. ‘Underground, where you're safe from the death-gators and super-pterosaurs and whatever else the elephants here are armoured against. Not safe from a clever enough troll, though. Or from Joshua, the mighty hunter. Ha!'

And just as he said this, he became aware of the troll watching him.

The big silverback male was back. He was sitting just beyond the glow cast by Joshua's fire. Even by the uncertain light of the evening Joshua could see blood smeared around the big humanoid's mouth. Surely he had been drawn here by the scent of the cooking. Trolls loved cooked meat, and would use fires when they came across one such as after a lightning strike, but had never mastered the art of making fire.

‘There never was a King Louie of the trolls, buddy.'

‘Hoo?'

‘Never mind.'

With a pang of regret, Joshua picked up the rabbit he'd half eaten, and the other, cooked but still whole, and carried them both out to the troll. He sat in the dirt before the troll, and laid the intact carcass before him, like a respectful waiter. ‘Your rat, sir, well done just as you ordered . . .'

‘Hoo!'

The troll tore into the meat.

Joshua sat down and ate with the troll, if more slowly, and considered his distant relative.

From Step Day, the archaeologists, including a young Nelson Azikiwe, had tried to understand the absence of mankind in the new worlds. They had found flint tools in the dusty footprints of Olduvai. They had found fossil hearths in the depths of caves in stepwise Europes. But a certain spark had never been lit behind heavy brows on any world save Datum Earth. Perhaps, the comedians said, on every other world the black monolith just mislaid the man-apes' address . . .

But what you did get out in those human-free worlds were other kinds of humanoids, evolved from the same basic root stock as mankind, presumably – they were all thought to be descendants of
Homo habilis
, Handy Man, two million years extinct – but with wildly different natures, some more pleasant to encounter than others. And some had evolved to take full advantage of the extended landscape of the Long Earth.

Of which cousins of mankind, the trolls were the epitome.

Joshua said now, ‘Look at us, buddy. Two old bookends in the wilderness. Here was me thinking I was Crusoe, and all of a sudden you show up. I can't call you Friday. Sancho – how about that?'

‘Ha?'

‘Help me, Sister Georgina. We did get through that book together in the original Spanish, just once . . .
La mejor salsa del mundo es el hambre.'

‘Ha!'

‘Eat well, my friend.'

The wind picked up, and sparks from the fire rose up into the tall dark of the empty sky.

13

I
T WAS ON
the ninth day that Joshua tried hunting for rabbit-moles alone.

Sancho the troll couldn't explain how he tracked down his prey, of course. Joshua could only observe, guess, imitate, learn.

But he slowly began to recognize the outward signs of a rabbit nest. There would be a broad, circular discoloration in the earth, maybe twenty paces across – the piss of thousands upon thousands of rabbits in their dense underground warren seeping into the ground, perhaps. And over the central chamber there could be a slight uplift of the ground, a very shallow dome, only barely visible to Joshua if he lay down and spied it with one eye shut. Even then you had to get to the very middle of the mound, where the central chambers with their comparatively thin roofs were to be found, and once there you had to wait a long time, still as a statue, while the rabbits, alarmed by the fall of your footsteps, returned from the deeper tunnels where they would have fled, and got back to whatever business they conducted in the shallower chambers.
Then
all you had to do was smash open the thin roof – Joshua augmented his small human fists with a rock for that – and dive in among the wriggling packets of meat before they could all run away again.

So, after three successful hunts with Sancho, here was Joshua alone, scouting a suspicious-looking area not far from a forest clump. The faintest of circles on the ground – check. The shallowest of domes, barely visible in the dry drifting dust – check. Joshua spent a tough half-hour standing there in the sun, motionless, still as a statue, holding a rock the size of his head.

It was just as he raised his rock that the baby elephant came bursting from the forest clump.

Joshua could barely believe his eyes. He hadn't even known the elephants used the forests, though there was no reason why the hell they shouldn't. It took a heartbeat for him to take in the fact that the calf, fleeing whatever had alarmed it, was heading straight for his precious rabbit warren. Worse, its mother was coming out of the forest after her calf, trumpeting shrilly.

And Joshua himself, the thoughts in his old brain flowing as slowly as jelly sucked through a straw, was standing right in the way of the parade. The baby elephant was fast, faster than he'd expected.

Suddenly it was on him.

He dropped the rock and, at the very last moment, rolled out of the way. The calf's tusk-armour was immature but still hard as steel and bristling with sharp points; it missed him by inches. Now here came the mother, intent on catching her calf, barely giving Joshua a second glance.

It was sheer bad luck that, as he crawled through the dirt, desperately scrambling to get away, she brought her heavy back foot down on Joshua's leg.

He felt the bone break. He
heard
it, like a twig snapping. And as he rolled away, he felt the raw faces of bone scraping across each other.

‘Stupid!' he yelled. How could he have been so slow? Plus he was Joshua Valienté, the world's most famous stepper. Why had he not just stepped away to safety? Because he'd been distracted by wanting to hold on to his prize rabbit-mole warren?

Because you're too old
, he heard Sister Agnes whisper in his ear.

And then the pain hit him, and he roared, and blacked out.

When he came to, the pain in his leg seemed to have subsided to a kind of dull throb.

He lay in the dirt where he had fallen. He hadn't moved, hadn't so much as rolled over. On the ground, vivid before his face, he could see the scuff marks where the elephants' huge flat feet had passed, and a little trail of dry shit, a panic evacuation by the calf, probably, as it had run from whatever had spooked it in the forest. Strange, he thought, that elephant dung didn't smell so bad. A benefit of a vegetarian diet, he supposed.

And strange, or just dumb luck, that he was still alive, given he was lying here, inert, unprotected, a sack of meat bleeding into the High Meggers ground.

He ran through his options. He'd thought through scenarios like this many times. He could step away in an emergency, if some set of teeth backed by an empty stomach came for him. Otherwise he would be horribly vulnerable to attack.