The Long War

It had surprised nobody to learn that the pyramid, this valley, was only the visible tip of a worldwide culture: ancient, long fallen, buried in the sands of this arid world, which Lobsang and the Mark Twain had not been equipped to explore properly, or even detect. In and under the dust there were traces of cities, roads, canals—not human-like in layout, clearly the product of different minds, but otherwise eerily familiar, and all very ancient.

No, these were not dinosaurs, but their ancestors might once have been dinosaurs—just as humans had had ancestors in the dinosaur age, furtive squirrelly quadruped mammals… Perhaps in this world the tremendous asteroid impact that had destroyed the dinosaur-dominated ecology of the Datum had worked out differently; here it might have taken out the big beasts and left behind their smaller, smarter, more agile cousins. The Rectangles creatures were remotely descended from raptors, perhaps.

But, much later, they had evidently suffered their own extinction event. Maybe there had been war, or plague, or another asteroid fell unluckily… In the aftermath, a community of survivors, or their descendants, their technology lost, their civilization smashed, had been drawn here by the strange phenomena surrounding a nuclear pile, possibly natural, a chance concentration of uranium ore under that building. It had been a god, a temple that had slowly killed them.

That was one theory, at any rate: a chance concentration of the ore. But from the beginning there had also been speculation that this pile was not some natural phenomenon but the ruined and still toxic remnant of a much older and higher technology. The remnant radioactivity came from an abandoned core, or maybe a waste dump. This hypothesis was the subject of much debate, but it fitted Sally’s own first impressions when she’d come upon this place.

It was kind of satisfying that the answers weren’t simple or clear. Like all worlds, this one was no neat, finite theoretical model but the product of its own long and unique evolutionary history. Sally, moreover, had been through college herself in Madison; she understood enough science to know when a house of theorizing started to totter on foundations of inadequate data, and ignored most of the guesswork.

She was pleased that Joshua had never revealed the existence of the one tangible souvenir they had brought back from this place: the exquisite ring—it could almost have been crafted by a human jeweller—that they had found on the fleshless finger of one post-dinosaur. Pleased that Joshua had kept it all these years.

Well, the research money had run out, the Long Earth was always full of other study targets of various kinds, and the archaeologists had long since sealed up their digs and gone away. And Sally, now, in hunting mode, was glad of it. Glad of the solitude. Nobody here but us shadows on the rock…

A hot breath on her neck. The hunter hunted, she thought immediately. She hadn’t been paying attention. She whirled, reaching for the knife at her belt.

A wolf: that was her first impression. Huge, fur bristling, mouth open, tongue hanging, eyes like windows into Arctic waste. It looked as heavy as she was, more. And it had got close enough to taste her, practically, before she’d even noticed.

She forced herself not to just step out of here, her first reaction. She wasn’t alone on this trip; she had to think of Jansson. She wondered if she had time to shout a warning to Jansson, and whether it would do any good.

But the animal didn’t attack.

It stepped back, one pace, two, raised itself up—and stood, on its hind legs, not balancing like a dog doing a circus trick, but standing easily, naturally, as if it were designed to stand like that. Now she saw it had a kind of belt around its waist, from which tools hung—including a very technologically advanced-looking pistol made of some kind of metal, that looked like nothing so much as a Buck Rogers sci-fi ray gun, and was totally out of place. When the wolf spread its empty paws to her, she saw that the digits were long, flexible, the paws almost like thumbless hands encased in some leathery glove. Surprise heaped on surprise.

And then it spoke.

“Sally Linsss-ay.” Its voice was a growl, a rasp, a kind of crudely shaped whisper, but understandable, and the human words were backed up by subtle posture changes: a raise of the head, a twitch of the snout. “Coming he-rrhe, we knew. Kobolds-ss say. Welcome.” And it lifted its magnificent head and howled.

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