The Long War

‘That’s true,’ Lobsang said complacently. ‘But right now, Joshua, the long call is vibrating with bad news for the trolls. Bad news because of us. Watch this.’ He stood, stiffly, and held up his hands. ‘I am trying to study the trolls in their natural state. I made of this group one basic request, though: that in return for the sanctuary I offer them – protection from humans – they stay here, until I release them. Verbally, I mean, they aren’t physically restrained in any way. Simple as that.’

‘And?’

‘And now, Joshua, I will release them.’ He clapped his hands, once, twice, sharply.

The trolls stopped singing – they stopped stepping, once the scouts had returned – and every head, save for the smallest infants’, turned to Lobsang. After a few heartbeats of silence they broke into a new song, a lilting ballad.

‘“Galway Bay”,’ Lobsang murmured to Joshua.

And then they began to step away, mothers with cubs first, males last for protection from predatory elves. In less than a minute they were gone, leaving only a scuffed patch of ground.

Joshua understood. ‘Gone with the rest, just as the reports say. All over the Long Earth.’

‘It’s true, Joshua. And that is what I wanted to speak to you about. Come. Let’s walk. I’m getting stiff from my weeding . . .’

Across the worlds, June skies remained clear, suns set in unison like synchronized swimmers diving, and dark gathered softly, slowly. On one world an owl hooted, for reasons best known to itself.

And Lobsang spoke further of the trolls.

‘They’ve become vital to the economy of the whole of mankind – including the Datum, if only indirectly. So the corporations, including the Black Corporation, are putting on a lot of pressure, wherever they can apply it, to get the trolls back.’

‘And back at work.’

‘Yes. Also there are security implications. Worse than the trolls disappearing, if they were to be seen to become an active threat to mankind, if a coordinated military response were provoked – we need to avoid that.

‘But there are other, more fundamental issues. The more I study trolls the more convinced I am that they are central to the ecology of the wider Long Earth itself. Like the elephants of the African savannah, they’ve been out there for millions of years, and for all that time they’ve been shaping the landscapes they inhabit – if only by eating so much of them. Sally Linsay taught me this; she’s studied them in the wild, in her way, far longer than I have. If you remove the big beasts from an ecology you can cause something called a trophic cascade. Knocking out the top of a food chain causes destabilization all the way down – booms and crashes of populations – and that can even cause a rise in greenhouse gases, and so on. A tremor of extinctions and eco-collapse all across the Long Earth, or at least as far as the trolls reach. And all because of us.’

Joshua grunted. ‘Makes you proud.’

‘The trouble is, Joshua, there’s no particular reason for the trolls to return. Before Step Day they had a long and deep contact with humans, and they were treated decently, and in turn they treated us decently.’

Joshua thought again of the story of Private Percy Blakeney, a veteran of the First World War trenches, lost and bewildered in the stepwise world into which he’d unconsciously tumbled, who had been kept alive by trolls for decades.

‘But since Step Day it’s been a different story. The exploitation of that cub for experiments at the Gap was only the tip of the iceberg.’

Joshua said, ‘Seems to me we’ll only get the trolls to come back if we can somehow persuade them that we will respect them. That we will listen when they say, “I will not,” as Mary did. Not an easy concept to convey to a humanoid . . .’

‘I know you tried to convince Senator Starling to campaign for them to be protected under US Aegis law. Even that’s not an insignificant challenge.’

‘Yeah, animal protection legislation is a mess.’

‘Not just that, Joshua. For one thing we’d have to decide what the trolls are.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, they don’t comfortably fit the old categories, do they? Of human versus animal, the distinction through which we believe we have dominion over nature. It’s as if, I think, we’d found a band of Homo habilis – something between us and the animal. In some ways the trolls are animal-like. They don’t wear clothes, they have no writing. They have no language that’s quite analogous to our own. They don’t use fire, as even Homo habilis probably did. And yet they have some very human traits. They make simple tools, out in the wild – poking sticks, stone hand-axes. They have strong family bonds, which is why it’s so easy to trap a troll mother, if you have her cub. They show compassion, even to humans. They do have their own language, in their use of music. And they laugh, Joshua. They laugh.