The Long War

He blushed and said, “Brother Geoffrey. Auditor of the Uncut Brethren. We are a contemplative order; we believe the prepared soul can overcome all hostile circumstances…” His voice faltered.

The story she extracted from Brother Geoffrey, in between his sobs and mea culpas, had been repeated all over the Long Earth. Every stepwise Earth was a new world, a world for free, a blank slate on which you could write a wonderful life, if you dreamed a strong enough dream and watched your back. Here, the Brethren had built a decent open township, along, according to Geoffrey, Athenian lines. Their philosophy seemed to be a melange of the teaching of figures that Maggie, in her vague theological understanding, generally identified as the good guys, Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius among them. But they had not listened to basic warnings that must have been given them by more experienced hands, even before they left the Datum.

And the peril that had befallen them, out of many possible out here, had been elves.

Mac approached her. “We’ve done a little forensic analysis on that pit. Captain, it was the elves did the attacking. Defensive wounds only on the trolls. The elves evidently stepped in, targeting the humans…”

In her briefings Maggie had seen records of such bewildering attacks, launched out of nowhere by stepping hunter-killers. “A stockade would have been no use against steppers.”

“No, but cellars would, and I don’t think this lot dug those either. The trolls got caught in the crossfire—hell, they may have just been passing through, they may even have been trying to help. Damned unlucky for them, since trolls are getting so thin on the ground. And it didn’t do the trolls themselves any good. These guys don’t know the difference between trolls and elves, I figure.”

“So the colonists turned their guns on trolls and elves indiscriminately.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Thanks, Mac.”

Geoffrey still stood beside her. “My mother—my own mother has been taken. And—”

“I know. But it wasn’t the trolls. Look.” She pointed at little Carl, playing with kids’ toys, much to the joy of the few children here in their drab smocks. “That is what trolls do. You need to understand the reality of the Long Earth if you’re to survive here. And in your case, if there are elves in the stepwise vicinity, that means accepting the trolls. They will help you clear your fields, put up barns, dig wells. And, best of all, they’ll deter the elves.”

He seemed to struggle to absorb that. But his next response was positive. “How do we do that? Bring the trolls here, I mean.”

A difficult question, or at least bad timing, since the trolls seemed to be withdrawing from the human worlds all over. She shrugged. “Be nice to them. To start with, I suggest that with the help of my crew you bury the corpses of those trolls alongside those of your own people. Pretty soon every troll on this world, and all the other worlds, will know about that bit of respect. Oh, and we’ll help you dig some cellars before we go. Anti-step precautions, right? And a stockade for good measure…”

They worked through the rest of the day.

That evening, as the sun went down, the community gathered to listen to the song of the Franklin’s trolls. Soon the replies started coming, like echoes from beyond the dim horizon, the ones far away eerily mingling with those near by, the calls flowing and floating over the landscape and melding into one great symphony.

Yet there was a certain emptiness to the sound. This world, like all the human-occupied worlds of the Long Earth, was becoming bereft of trolls, and a silence was falling across all the Long Earth, as if there had been an extinction event, some terrible plague. What a strange phenomenon it was, Maggie thought. She could think of no precedent, nothing like this before—it was as if all the elephants were withdrawing from Africa, maybe. A rejection of mankind by the natural world. Even her own trolls seemed oddly restless, and she was determined to release them if they showed serious signs of wanting away.

The next thing, she thought with resignation, would be demands on her from various homesteaders to bring back their troll labourers, how it was about time the government did something…

The Benjamin Franklin hovered over New Purity for two more days, before riding high into the air and vanishing stepwise.

39

Sally knew the world they had arrived at. Of course she did.

And of course it was new to Jansson. All of this, like the Gap, like every world beyond the Lows, was new to her.

It had taken three weeks of travelling, since the Gap, to get here, with regular stepping and falls through the soft places. Sally could have got here quicker, Jansson suspected, but she had worked to keep them hidden as well as on the move—and you couldn’t move trolls on too quickly; those big frames took a lot of feeding, every day.