The Long War

“Don’t tell him that, he might get the hump. I have him on infrared,” said Bill. “I see his weaponry. He won’t harm you. Well, probably not. Tell me how you’d describe him.”

“Can you imagine Gandhi meets Peter Pan?”

“No…”

The kobold grinned, showing those sharp teeth. “Not worry, little mann. I protect. Be ss-safe. Be friend.”

“Great. My name’s Joshua.”

He nodded gravely. “Know. Lobsang ss-send you.”

“Lobsang? You know about Lobsang?… Why aren’t I surprised?”

Bill said, “You’re all over the kobold grapevine, Joshua. Especially since I started putting out feelers about Sally on your behalf.”

“You got ss-tone that sing-ss?”

“The stone that sings?”

“Yah. Stone that eats soul of mann, sings. The holy music. Menn that ss-sing after death.” The kobold paused, moving his lips as he thought hard, and added, “Like Buddy Holly.”

“Say yes,” said Bill.

“Yes.”

“Flip, Joshua, do I have to spell it out to ye? Give him the cassette.”

“Oh—the ‘stone that sings’. I get it.” Joshua reached for his jacket, which he had been using as a pillow, found the battered old cassette tape in the pocket, and handed it over.

The kobold reached across and took it like a devout worshipper handling a relic. He sniffed at it, held it to his ear and shook it gently. “Bill was-ss here before. We talk. He give me mus-ssic. He give cof-ffee. He give machine that drinks-ss sunlight and plays-ss holy mu-ssic.”

“You mean a cassette machine?”

The kobold turned the tape over in his long fingers. “Kinks-ss?…”

“It’s the album you wanted,” Bill said from the radio. “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.”

“Good…” The kobold dug a battered old tape-drive walkman from the pouch at his waist, held up a glittering solar-cell surface to face the sunlight, pulled ancient-looking headphones around his neck, and pushed the tape into a slot. “Extra-ss?”

“You’ve got the twelve-track mono version released in Europe, and then the fifteen-track UK edition in stereo and mono, and some rarities. An alternate mix of ‘Animal Farm’. An unreleased track called ‘Mick Avory’s Underpants’…”

But the kobold was no longer listening. He backed up against a tree, the worn foam of the headphones pressed against his ears.

Bill said softly, “That’s it. He’s out of it for a couple of hours while he checks that out. Joshua, if you need breakfast, now’s a good time.”

“The Kinks, Bill?”

“A great 1960s band from the UK, who made it big in the US with—”

“I don’t care. No disrespect to the Kinks. What’s with the tape?”

“Trade goods, Joshua. Kobolds like human culture. Some of ’em are big on music. This one was hooked when he first heard ‘Waterloo Sunset’. He’s a kind of snitch. An informant. I get him the music he wants; he gives me—information.”

“Yeah, but who uses a cassette machine?”

“Well, he’s older than he looks, Joshua. He’s been doing trades like this for years. And he’s a humanoid with an evolutionary path that split off from mankind’s millions of years ago. He’s not likely to be a technology early adopter, is he?”

Joshua pushed his way out of his sleeping bag. “I need a coffee.”

44

The first steppers, exploring the Long Earth, had found no trace of modern man away from the Datum.

Oh, they had found a few stone tools. They had found fossil hearths in the depths of caves. They had even found a few bones. But no great leap forward—no cave paintings, no flower-adorned burials, no cities, no high technology. (Well, none that was human.) The spark of higher intellect must have been lit behind beetling pre-human brows on a million worlds, just as on Datum Earth—but it hadn’t caught anywhere other than on the Datum. Whatever the reason, the alternate universes into which Earth’s pioneers poured out were mostly dark, quiet worlds. Worlds of trees, many of them, Earths like great tumbled forests. The Datum itself was just a clearing in the trees, a spark of civilization, one circle of firelight beyond which the shadows spread to infinity. There were humanoids out there, descendants of lost cousins of humanity, but people knew they would never encounter a humanoid that was anything like as smart as they were. Never a humanoid that could speak English, for example.

The only thing wrong with this generally accepted picture was that it was totally incorrect.

Professor Wotan Ulm of Oxford University, author of the bestselling if controversial book Moon-Watcher’s Cousins: The Humanoid Radiation Across the Long Earth, gave the context for the species known as “kobolds” in an interview for the BBC.