The Long War

They emerged from the latest soft place into a landscape that was almost but not quite desert. They stood in a broad valley, with cliffs on either side pocked by caves. On the valley floor were a few stunted trees, the remnants of a broken stone bridge, and a building, one vast cubical mass of shaped black stone. The air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture out of your flesh, and Jansson instinctively searched for shade. Sally remembered this place well. And the radiation threat, she said. They would be safe enough as long as they stayed well away from that building.

This was the world they had informally called Rectangles, when Sally had found it with Joshua and Lobsang, ten years ago. A world of failed intelligence, it had seemed, and death. The world where Joshua had found a single beautiful artefact, a sapphire ring. A world that seemed unchanged a decade on, save for the detritus of more recent visitors: boot prints in the dirt, campfire scars, archaeologists’ trench-marker flags—even some trash, plastic cartons, ripped bags.

The troll and her cub wandered off, looking for water, food, shade.

Sally got Jansson comfortable in the shade of one of the struggling trees, on a rough bed of their piled-up gear and covered by a single silver emergency blanket. Then she briskly built a fire—they didn’t need the heat, but it might keep any critters away.

Jansson said, “So you’ve been here before. With Joshua, all those years ago. And we’re here because the trolls are here… or near by. Hiding out. That’s your guess, right? Whatever that’s based on.”

Sally shrugged, non-committal.

Jansson thought she understood, by now. During the journey Sally had kept disappearing, for a few hours at a time, a day, sometimes for longer periods. Plugging herself into whatever network of contacts and information she had built up out here. Jansson suspected Sally herself would find it hard to sum up the various whispers she’d been hearing, from various sources. If she came here she’d find trolls, or trolls would find her; that was the sum of her instincts. Jansson just had to hope Sally’s scraps of information and gut sense added up to a good guide…

Jansson gave up thinking about it. It would certainly do no good to ask Sally. Taciturn nature or not, a selective silence was one of Sally’s most irritating habits.

When Jansson had drifted off to sleep, Sally went hunting.

The valley bottom itself was suspiciously flat, Sally thought, just as had been her impression the first time she was here. As if it was all one slab: another artefact, maybe, like the building itself. There were slopes of scree at the base of the canyon walls, and here and there green extremophile-type plants, lovers of heat and dryness, struggling for life. At first glance there was no sign of movement, no animals or birds or even insects. That didn’t bother Sally. Where there was greenery of any kind there were going to be herbivores to browse on that greenery, and carnivores to browse on the herbivores. It was a question of patience. All she had to do was wait. She never carried food—not in the endless larder that was the Long Earth. A lizard or two would do. Something like a naked mole rat, maybe. A deep burrower.

By the steep valley wall, in the shade of a rock face, she settled on her haunches. This was how Sally had lived her life for a quarter of a century now, ever since she’d left Datum Earth for good not long after Step Day, when her father had made his ambiguous gift of Stepper technology to mankind. And of course she’d had plenty of practice out in the Long Earth in the years before that. Living off the land on the move was easy, but it was a fantasy to believe that animals that had never met man were naturally tame. An awful lot of good things to eat were too used to running from anything strange. You had to wait…

This place was just as she remembered, save for the more recent boot prints, she saw as she relaxed, and took in her surroundings. Of all the discoveries Joshua and Lobsang had taken back to the Datum from their voyage of exploration a decade ago, this was probably the most sensational: evidence of intelligent dinosaur-like creatures more than a million and a half steps away from the Datum. It had done Lobsang no good to protest that the colony-organism that had called itself First Person Singular was far more interesting and exotic, because nobody understood that. Nor was it any use to point out that the creatures whose remains they’d found here, though reptilian, could not really be dinosaurs in any meaningful sense…

There had been a clamour to know more. The universities had received a flood of funding to send out follow-up parties. For a few years researchers had crawled over this site, though the radioactivity made the work hazardous, and they had sent out drone planes and balloons equipped with infrared sensors and ground-penetrating radar to take a look at the rest of this world.