The Long War

And was surprised when from the direction of Jake a clear voice said, “I am fed / satisfied; this is fun; I yearn to return to /meaning not understood/…” It emerged as a human male voice, firm, reasonably pleasant, if rather synthetic.

So the troll-call worked, even if it did seem to be more like an exchange of concepts than a true translation. Those nerds at the Black Corporation—or whoever “G. Abrahams” was—must have loved working on the development of this thing.

Now she pointed the troll-call at Marjorie.

“Female here / watching / no mate female / meaning not understood: tentative translation, a female choosing for her own purposes not to have a mate…”

They meant her! “Everybody’s a relationship counsellor,” Maggie grumbled to herself. Plucking up her courage, she raised the troll-call and said clearly into its mouthpiece, “My name is Maggie Kauffman. Welcome aboard the Benjamin Franklin.” A liquid warble accompanied her words.

The trolls seemed to snap to attention. They stared at her, mouths open, eyes wide.

She pointed to herself. “Maggie. Maggie…”

Marjorie gabbled back, apparently attempting to find a label for her. “Friend / grandmother / interesting stranger…”

It was “grandmother” that flabbergasted Maggie. Grandmother! How human was that? And was that how they saw her relationship to her crew, that she was the old woman looking after all the little children? Well, they were mostly a lot younger than her…

She boldly walked up to the trolls, where they sat huddled in a corner of the cabin, and sat on the carpet with them. “I’m Maggie. Maggie… Well, you’re right. I have no husband. No mate. The ship is my home…”

It seemed to her that Marjorie, the female, was looking at her sorrowfully, with soulful brown eyes. With extreme care, a hand like a leather shovel gently touched Maggie’s. Maggie felt she had no choice but to move closer, and she felt huge arms close around her.

Carl, meanwhile, got hold of the ocarina and experimented until he found a way to say, “Peppermint.”

That was how Maggie was found in the morning, coming awake as a crewman very, very gingerly unwound his Captain from the snoring trolls.

Breakfast was somewhat embarrassing. Every last crew member knew how she’d spent the night. But she never had been one for standing on her dignity.

She spent a day letting the crew experiment with the troll-call, under supervision. And she had Gerry Hemingway from Science study its workings, or anyhow its inputs and outputs.

That night she had to order the crew to put the call away, to leave the exhausted trolls to their slumbers on the observation deck.

Then, at breakfast the next day, she called the crew together. She looked carefully around them, and picked out Jennifer Wang, one of the marine detachment, whose grandparents, she knew, had come from China. “Jennifer, you spent a long time with Jake yesterday. What did he say to you?”

Wang looked around, somewhat embarrassed. But she cleared her throat and said, “A lot I couldn’t understand. But it was along the lines of, ‘far from home’. It creased me up! I mean, I’m a Chinese American and proud to be a citizen, but it’s in the blood. How did the big guy know?”

“Because he’s smart,” Maggie said. “He’s intuitive. He’s sapient.

“You know, people, we were sent out here to find sapience in the Long Earth, among other goals. Right? And now here it is, on this ship, living among us: sapience. And that, by the way, will be my defence at the court-martial.

“I’m proud of you all for how you’re dealing with your new shipmates. But if this room isn’t cleared and you’re not at your posts in two minutes, you’re all on a charge. Dismissed.”

33

The last step across was a sudden transition from a dune field, just inland from a grey ocean, the local copy of the Irish Sea, into what looked like a rudimentary industrial park, a place of gleaming tanks, rusty gantries, smoke stacks, blocky concrete buildings. There was nothing very space-age about it as far as Jansson could see at first glance.

“Come on.” Sally shifted her pack and led the way.

Jansson followed, walking steadily across grass-covered ground that gradually gave way to lumpy dunes. The morning was dry and bright in this world, one step away from the Gap. She could smell salt and rotting seaweed in the wind off the sea. She tried to visualize where she was: tried to imagine that there was vacuum, space, a void, just one tap of the Stepper at her waist away from this mundanity. Tried and failed.

They hadn’t covered a hundred yards when the landscape was illuminated by a blinding light, coming from the rim of the development ahead, like a droplet of sunlight brought down to the Earth.