The Long Earth (24 page)

He heard a kind of grunting, like a pig, a big heavy-chested pig, coming from behind him.

‘Joshua. Don’t run. Behind you. Turn very slowly.’

He obeyed. He visualized the weapons he carried, the knife at his
belt
, the air gun in his chest pack. And up above was the airship, Lobsang with a flying arsenal at his command. He tried to feel reassured.

Huge hogs. That was his first impression. Half a dozen of them, each as tall as a man at the shoulder, with powerful-looking legs, and backs that rose in bristling humps, and tiny coal-black eyes, and jaws long and strong. And each of them carried a humanoid – not a troll, a skinny upright figure with a chimp face and rust-brown hair, sitting astride his hog as if riding a huge ugly horse.

Joshua was a long way from the cover of the trees.

‘More elves,’ Lobsang whispered.

‘The same breed that wiped out the Victims?’

‘Or their first cousins. The Long Earth is a big arena, Joshua; there must be many speciation events.’

‘You sent me down here to encounter these creatures, didn’t you? This is what you call a restful break?’

‘You can’t deny it’s interesting, Joshua.’

One elf called out, a pant-hoot cry like a chimp’s, and kicked his mount in the ribs. The six beasts trotted forward at Joshua, with guttural grunts.

‘Lobsang, your advice?’

The hogs were speeding up.

‘Lobsang—’

‘Run!’

Joshua ran, but the pigs ran faster. He had barely closed any ground on the descending airship, or the forest, when a huge body came plummeting past him. Joshua smelled dirt and blood and shit and a kind of greasy musk, and a small fist slammed into his back and sent him sprawling.

The pigs capered around him, oddly playful despite their size and bulk. Their huge random violence was terrifying. He expected to be crushed, or gored on the canine teeth embedded in the tips of their snouts. But instead the pigs kept running by him, and the humanoids, the elves, whooping and hooting, leaned over to make
passes
at him. Blades flashed at him – blades of stone! He cowered and rolled.

At last they pulled back, into a loose circle around him. Shaking, he got to his feet, feeling for his own weapons. He wasn’t cut, he realized, save for nicks on his face, and on his shoulder where a swipe had gone through the cloth of his coverall. But they had cut the supply pack from his chest, even pickpocketed the knife at his waist. He had been expertly stripped, leaving only the parrot on his shoulder, the processor pack on his back.

The elves were toying with him.

Now the elves stood up on the backs of their strange mounts. They weren’t like the trolls, they were much skinnier, more graceful, lithe, strong, their hairy upright bodies like those of child gymnasts. They had long tree-climbing arms, very human legs, and small heads with wizened chimp-like faces. They all seemed to be male. Some of them were sporting skinny erections.

Joshua looked for positives. ‘Well, they’re smaller than me. Five feet, maybe?’

‘Don’t underestimate them,’ Lobsang’s whisper in his headset urged. ‘They’re stronger than you. And this is their world, remember.’

The pant-hooting cries began again, and seemed to reach a crescendo. Then one of the elves kicked his animal’s ribs. The beast, its own eyes fixed on Joshua, began to stride steadily forward. The elf bared human-looking teeth and hissed.

This time they weren’t playing.

There are moments when terror is like a treacle that slows down time. Once when Joshua was a kid he had slipped over an edge at a limestone quarry, just a ten-minute bike ride from the Home, and his friends couldn’t haul him back, and he had had to hang on while they ran for help. His arms had hurt like hell. But what he remembered most of all was the tiny detail of the rock right in front of his eyes. There had been flecks of mica in it, and lichen, a miniature forest dried yellow by the sun. That little landscape had
become
his whole world, until somebody somewhere started yelling, and some other guy’s hands grabbed his wrists, hauled on arms that felt like they were filled with hot lead …

The elf leapt in the air, and flickered out of existence. The hog trotted on, grunting, speeding up. The realization came to Joshua, with all the clarity of a mica fleck on a sun-warmed rock, that the elf was stalking him. And it had
stepped
.

The hog was still coming. Joshua stood his ground. At the last second it hesitated, stumbled, veered away from him.

And the elf returned, stretching, its feet braced on the hog’s back, its hands clamped around Joshua’s neck – hands in place to throttle Joshua,
even as it stepped back into the world
. Joshua was astonished at the precision of the manoeuvre.

But now the elf’s strong ape hands were squeezing, and Joshua was driven to the ground, unable to breathe. He reached, but the elf’s arms were longer than his; he flailed, unable to reach the creature’s snarling face, and blackness rimmed his vision. He tried to think. His weapons, his pack, were stolen and scattered, but the parrot still sat on his shoulder. He grabbed the parrot’s frame with both hands, and shoved it in the face of the elf. Bits of glass and plastic erupted, the elf fell back screaming, and mercifully that death grip at his throat was released.

But the other elves on their hogs screamed and closed.

‘Joshua!’ A loudspeaker, booming from the air. The airship was coming down, slowly, ponderously, dangling a rope ladder.

He got to his feet, gasping for breath through a crushed throat, but a bank of elves on hogs stood between him and the ladder, and the injured elf on the ground shrieked its fury. The only gap in the circle surrounding him was the way that lead elf had come.

So he ran that way, away from the airship, but out of the circle of elves. The wrecked parrot was still attached to his coverall by cables; it dragged through the dirt behind him. The yelling elves pursued him. If he could somehow double back, or maybe reach the forest—

‘Joshua! No! Watch out for the—’

The ground suddenly gave way under him.

He fell a yard or so, and found himself in a hollow surrounded by dogs – no, like a mix of dogs and bears, he’d glimpsed this kind before, lithe canine bodies with powerful heads and muzzles like bears. Their black-furred bodies squirmed all around him, females, puppies. This was some kind of den, not a trap. But even the puppies were snapping, snarling packets of aggression. The smallest of them, it was almost cute, closed its bear-like jaws on Joshua’s leg. He kicked, trying to loosen the little creature’s grip. The other dog-bears barked and snarled, and Joshua expected them to fall on him in a moment.

But here came the elves on their swinish mounts. The adult dogs rose up out of their den in a pack, and hurled themselves at the hogs. The fight erupted in a cloud of yelps, barks, grunts, cries, pant-hoots, snapping teeth, screams of pain and sprays of blood, while the elves flashed in and out of existence, as if glimpsed under a strobe lamp.

Joshua climbed out of the den and ran away from the fight, or tried to. But that stubborn pup clung to his leg, and he was still dragging the absurd wreckage of the parrot. He glanced up. The airship was almost overhead. Joshua jumped for the rope ladder, grabbed it, and viciously kicked away the pup. The airship rose immediately.

Below, the dogs had now encircled the huge hogs, which fought back ferociously. Joshua saw one big dog-bear sink its teeth into the neck of a screaming hog, which crashed to the ground. But another hog scooped up a dog in its big tusked jaw and threw it through the air, squealing, its chest ripped open. Meanwhile the elves flickered through the carnage. Joshua saw one elf face a dog that leapt for his throat. The elf flicked away and reappeared beside the dog as it sailed through the air, spun with balletic grace, and swiped at the animal’s torso with a thin stone blade, disembowelling the dog before it hit the ground. The elves were
fighting
for survival, but Joshua got the impression they were fighting individually, not for each other; it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. It was every man for himself. Or would have been, if they had been men.

And the airship rose up, beyond the reach of the trees, and into the sunlight. The fight was reduced to a dusty, blood-splashed detail in a landscape across which the airship’s shadow drifted serenely. Joshua, still barely able to breathe, climbed the ladder, and spilled into the gondola.

‘You kicked a puppy,’ Lobsang said accusingly.

‘Add it to the charge sheet,’ he gasped. ‘Next time you pick a vacation site, Lobsang, think a bit more Disneyland.’ Then the darkness around his vision that had been there ever since the close encounter with the elf folded over him.

31

HE WAS PRETTY
badly hurt, he learned later. Lots of minor injuries, many of which he hadn’t noticed at the time. The damage to his neck, his throat. Scratches, cuts, even a bite mark – not from the puppy at his ankle, this was the imprint of human-like teeth in his shoulder. Lobsang’s ambulant treated the cuts, dosed him with antibiotics, and fed him painkillers.

He drifted away. Sometimes he woke briefly, fuzzily, to see bone-white stars above, or green carpets rolling beneath the airship. The steady swinging rhythm of stepping was comforting. He slept away days, in the end.

But the further they travelled, heading ever West, the more Joshua became aware of that odd pressure in his head, even as he dozed. The kind of stuffy feeling he always got when he had to go back to the Datum: the pressure of all those crowding minds, drowning the Silence. Could it be, as some said, that the Long Earth was a kind of loop that closed back on itself, and he was being brought back to the start, back to the Datum? That would be strange enough. But if not, what lay ahead? And what was driving the trolls across the arc of worlds?

When he finally awoke fully the stepping had stopped once more. He sat up on his couch and looked around.

‘Take it easy, Joshua,’ came Lobsang’s disembodied voice.

‘We’ve stopped.’ His voice was husky, but it worked.

‘You’ve slept deeply. Joshua, I’m glad you’re awake. We must talk. You do realize you were never in any real danger, don’t you?’

He rubbed his throat. ‘It didn’t feel that way at the time.’

‘I could have taken out those elves individually at any time. I have advanced laser sighting on—’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘You’d asked for shore leave. I thought you were enjoying yourself!’

‘As you said before, we need to work on our communication, Lobsang.’

Joshua pushed back the throw, stood up and stretched. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that he couldn’t remember putting on. He didn’t feel like running a marathon, but on the other hand he wasn’t passing out. He went to the head, walking carefully, and briskly washed some of the sweat off his body. His small scars were healing, and his throat no more than twinged. He emerged, and took fresh clothing from the closet.

Through the stateroom window he saw that the airship was anchored over a thick reef of rainforest that stretched to a green-cloaked horizon. Mist banks hung over swathed valleys. The sun was low; Joshua guessed it was early morning. The airship was maybe a hundred feet up.

Lobsang said, ‘We haven’t been stopping every day, but it’s difficult to observe much from up here.’

‘Because of the thickness of the forest?’

‘I’ve been sending down the ambulant unit. We’re far from home, Joshua. We’re over nine hundred thousand steps out. Think of that. You can see how it is here – this is typical, forest blanketing the landscape as far as we can see. Probably covering the whole continent. Difficult to make observations.’

‘But there’s evidently something here you’re interested in, yes?’

‘Look at the live feed,’ Lobsang said.

The image in the wall screen was jittery, uncertain, taken from a camera far away. It showed an opening in the forest, a gash in the canopy evidently caused by the fall of a giant tree, whose trunk lay at the centre of the clearing, coated with lichen and exotic fungi.
The
access of light had allowed saplings and under-storey shrubs to shoot up.

And the new growth attracted humanoids. Joshua spotted what looked like a pack of trolls. They were sitting in the open in a tight cluster, patiently grooming, each picking insects from the back of the one in front. They sang, all the time, snatches of melody like half-forgotten songs – scraps of harmony in two, three, four parts, improvised on the spot and then forgotten, dimly heard by distant microphones.

‘Trolls?’

‘Apparently,’ Lobsang murmured. ‘It would take musicologists a century to unravel the structure of that singing. Keep watching.’

As Joshua’s eyes became accustomed to the shaky images, he began to see more groups of humanoids, across the clearing and in the forest shadows, some of kinds he didn’t recognize, at play, working, grooming, maybe hunting. They were all humanoids, it seemed, rather than apes; any time one of them stood up you could see the neatness of its bipedal stance. He said, ‘They don’t seem to bother each other. The different kinds.’

‘Evidently not. In fact quite the opposite.’

‘Why have they congregated here? After all, they’re different species.’

‘I suspect, in this particular community, they have become codependent. They use each other. They probably have subtly different sensory ranges, so that one kind may detect a danger before the others: we know that trolls use ultrasonics, for example. Similarly, you get different species of dolphins swimming together. I’m following your advice, you see, Joshua. I’ve been taking more time to inspect Long Earth marvels like this aggregation of humanoids. Remarkable sight, isn’t it? It’s like a dream of humanity’s evolutionary past, many hominid types together.’

‘But what of the future, Lobsang? What happens when human colonists get out here in earnest? How can this survive?’

‘Well, that’s another question. And what happens if they are all
driven
East in the greater migration? Do you wish to go down?’