The Long War

It had all been a rush of strangeness for them both. Even Sally, Jansson had learned, the great explorer of the Long Earth, had known nothing of this place before being brought here, lured by the gossip of the kobolds. To Sally this world had been just another Joker, just another desert world in a band of such worlds which, apparently, had lost much of their water through some calamity during the turbulent epoch of planetary formation. On such a world geological activity was going to be reduced, life restricted… That was the theory. In fact, as Jansson was learning, on many Jokers there were habitable refuges.

On this world there was an island of green, of moisture—from what the kobold had said, Sally had guessed it could be the size of Europe. Unnoticed by dismissive previous explorers, including Joshua and Sally, who had come rushing through this world too hastily. Unnoticed by the teams of researchers who had followed that first expedition to Rectangles: they had been Datum-raised workers with Datum-trained expectations, who thought in terms of one world thick, and never looked stepwise.

Well, here they were, in a world that hosted these dogs, these strange sapients—and, evidently, the trolls, in great concentrations.

For a long interval there was silence. The dog beasts seemed to like to stare, to study, to think before speaking; the grammar of their interactions was not like the human. Jansson and Sally just stood there, waiting. The kobold had a wounded arm, Jansson noticed now, roughly bandaged with a soiled rag. He cackled, evidently enjoying the moment.

The trolls who’d travelled with them didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. Mary sat on a knoll, humming a tune that was naggingly familiar to Jansson, while Ham happily raked the ground with his strong fingers, periodically popping grubs into his mouth. As if, Jansson thought, being approached by a bipedal dog wearing a ray gun happened every day.

The beagle stood before the women, eyes unblinking, that mobile wet nose quivering as, evidently, he smelled them. He must have been nearly seven feet tall, and he towered over both Jansson and Sally. But that, and the ray gun, weren’t the only reasons he was so intimidating, Jansson realized. There was something fluidly animal about him, a sense of honed perfection, right down to the way his fine fur coated his flesh in smooth streamlined layers. And there was intelligence in his eyes, a bright hard directed intelligence.

His teeth, eyes, ears, muzzle, nose were all very dog-like, even though, Jansson saw, the overall shape of his skull, with a bulging brow, might have been humanoid. His face sometimes looked human, sometimes wolf-like, like a shifting hologram. His ears were too sharp, his eyes too far apart, his grin too wide, his nose too flat with that blackened tip… And his eyes, yes, it was like looking into the eyes of a wolf. He made Jansson feel shabby, incomplete. But there was also something unreal about him, as if he were a movie CGI special effect. He just didn’t fit into Jansson’s cosy, parochial, Datum-nurtured consciousness.

He couldn’t step. And presumably none of his kind could, either. Jansson had to cling to that thought, that she could do something he couldn’t—

She coughed, and shivered, a wave of weakness passing over her.

The beagle turned on her. “Your name?”

His language was distorted, a mix of dog-like growls and whines. Hrr-your-rrh ne-rr-mmhh? Yet he clearly spoke English, his words understandable. Another astonishing conceptual leap for an ex-cop like Jansson to absorb.

Jansson tried to stand straight. “Monica Jansson. Formerly Lieutenant, Madison PD.”

The beagle cocked his head on one side, evidently puzzled. He turned to Sally. “You?”

“Sally Linsay.”

The beagle raised his fore-limb, his arm, and pointed at his chest. Jansson saw that his paw, his hand, had four extended finger-like appendages, nothing like a thumb, and he wore a kind of leathery glove over his palm. Protection for when he went on all fours, perhaps. “My name,” he said now. “Snowy.”

Sally clearly tried not to, but burst out laughing.

Jansson turned to the kobold. “Snowy?”

The kobold grinned nervously. “Other pathless-ss ones came befo-rre… Gave na-mme.”

Sally said, “And I know your name. Finn McCool, right?” She glanced at Jansson. “One of the smarter of his breed. Good with humans. I might have known you’d be involved in this, chasing some angle.”

The kobold just grinned. “Josh-shua.”

Sally scowled. “What about Joshua?”

But the kobold would not reply.

Snowy studied them. “You,” he said to Sally, “crotch-stink human-nn.”

“Thanks.”

“Smell same as befor-rre. Like othe-hhrs of your kind. But-tt you…”

He came closer to Jansson. She tried not to flinch as, his eyes half-closed, he sniffed her breath. He smelled of wet fur and a kind of musk.

“St-hhrange. Sick. You smell sick-hrr.”

“Very perceptive,” murmured Jansson.