The Long War

The features of this particular ambulant unit reminded Joshua of some of the guises, the bodies Lobsang had donned before. But he had allowed himself to age—or at least, Joshua thought, he had programmed some suite of nano-fabricators to carve wrinkles and inflate jowls and make him look somewhere over sixty. His posture was bent, his movements slow, and the hands that clasped the rake had slightly swollen joints and skin pocked with liver spots. Of course it was all artifice. Everything about Lobsang was artifice, and you had to keep reminding yourself of that. But it was impressive artifice even so; if Lobsang was going to do “elderly monk” he was going to get every detail right, down to the frayed hem of his grubby orange robe.

Joshua, resolutely unimpressed, didn’t feel much like small talk. “Why did you want to see me? Because of that stunt Sally pulled?”

Lobsang smiled. “In cahoots with your old friend MPD Lieutenant Jansson, I’ll remind you. Cahoots.” He repeated the word, forming the syllables with exaggerated motions of his lips. “Lovely word, that. The kind of word that’s necessary to use, purely for the pleasure of saying it. One of the many unexpected joys of incarnation… What were we saying? Oh, yes, Sally Linsay. Well, her tunnelling-out with the troll Mary and her cub has made the news across the worlds.”

“Tell me about it,” Joshua said ruefully. Thanks to the old footage of the return of the Mark Twain, and the liberal use of face-recognition software, Joshua was now famously known as an associate of Sally. He had been badgered by the media, and by groups adopting various positions on the trolls and the issues surrounding them.

Lobsang said, “Sally’s stunt has brought the issue of the trolls and their relationship with humanity to the top of the news agenda, yes. But the whole business has been bubbling up into a crisis for some time. I’m sure you’re aware of that. And now the trolls have started to take action of their own. Action with direct consequences for us all.”

“I heard. Trolls just clearing off all over, right?”

Lobsang smiled. “Let me show you. Or rather, let my trolls show you.”

“Your trolls?”

“There’s a pack of them a dozen or so steps away. My holding here extends stepwise, across several worlds.” He held out his hand, as if in invitation. “Shall we go see?”

There were perhaps twenty trolls in the group. Females sat lazily grooming in the shade of a sprawling tree—the early evening was warm in this particular world—while cubs played, a few young males wrestled in a desultory way, and at the fringe of the pack adults flickered in and out of existence. And as they worked or played or dozed, they sang, a lively sing-along overlaid with complex hooting harmonies, the melody line repeated in canon to form an unending round.

Lobsang led Joshua to a small fenced-off garden area. There were a couple of benches, a water fountain. And, under the broken canopy of a scattering of trees, the ground here was covered in moss, not grass, moss that glowed bright green in the low sunlight.

“Take a seat if you like,” Lobsang said. “Help yourself to water. It’s clean, from a freshwater spring. I should know; I have to clean the pipes.” He got down stiffly on to his hands and knees and began to work his way across the moss lawn, plucking out stray blades of grass, like removing weeds. “‘The Rare Old Mountain Dew’,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The song the trolls are singing. An old Irish folk song. You know, it’s possible to date the first contact with humans of any given troll pack by the songs they sing. In this case, to the late nineteenth century. Do you remember Private Percy? I have carried out such an exercise, tentatively; the result is a kind of map of natural steppers in the pre-Willis Linsay era. Though of course it’s not always possible to track back the trolls’ own wanderings.”

“What did you mean by your trolls, Lobsang?”

He shuffled forward, working at the lawn patiently. “A figure of speech. I found this pack in a Corn Belt world; I invited them to follow me here, as best I could. There are other groups here. Of course they are no more my trolls than Shi-mi was my cat, on the Mark Twain. But I have created a reserve here, and on the neighbouring worlds, many square miles in extent and many worlds deep. I have kept out humanity and done my best to make the trolls, this pack and others, feel welcome. I have been striving to study them, Joshua. Well, you know that I have been pursuing that project for ten years, since our journey on the Twain and our visit to Happy Landings. Here I can watch them in conditions approaching their wild state.”

“And is that the reason for the humble pose, Lobsang? You, a superhuman entity that spans two million worlds, reduced to this?”