The Long War

‘Here.’

‘I recognize this place.’

‘You should. Classic Joker. In fact you discovered it, during The Journey with Lobsang.’

‘Yeah, and we passed straight on through. What are we doing here, Bill? Those bugs are going to choke us if they get in the air vents.’

‘Patience, grasshopper.’

The airship lifted now, Joshua could feel it, though the world remained hidden by the swarming, angry bodies of the flying insects – they were like huge locusts, perhaps, an impression he remembered from that first visit.

Abruptly the Shillelagh rose into sunlight. Joshua saw he was still hovering over the flanks of Rainier, or this world’s copy of it. Evidently this world was warmer than the average, for forest rose up almost all the way to an eroded summit – it was oak woodland, mature trees rearing out of a luxuriant tumble of fallen trunks and thickets. He spotted a stream down there, bubbling down the steep slope of the mountain. As he watched, something blundered through the undergrowth and crashed away east, and a few roosting creatures took fright and rose up – they weren’t birds, they were like huge, fat dragonflies – and fluttered noisily away to safety.

When Joshua looked away from the mountain summit, he saw a landscape cloaked by swarming insects, a pulsing, gleaming carpet of them that seemed to extend all the way to the ocean shore, visible in the distance. The land crawled with them, like black rivers coursing between sparse patches of green, and clouds of flyers rose up everywhere. But nothing flew as high as this summit, and not as high as some of the other mountains of the Cascades, whose flanks rose out of the swarms like green-clad islands in an insectile sea.

‘They’re altitude limited,’ Joshua observed. ‘The insects.’

‘Yeah, most of the larger species. Not all. Enough to make the summits survivable.’

‘Survivable by who?’

‘By us, Joshua. Well, specifically, by you.’

‘We’re stopping here?’

‘Yeah. Not long, maybe overnight.’

‘Why?’

‘We’ve an appointment to keep up here. This is why I wanted to start us off in the Cascades. I’ll drop an anchor, deploy the ladder. The grassy stretch by that stream down there looks a good place to camp. Take the tape. The cassette, you know.’

Somewhat reluctantly Joshua began to pull his kit together: a sleeping bag, food packets, fire-making gear. Bug repellent spray! ‘I’m going down alone, am I?’

Bill sounded embarrassed. ‘Look, Joshua, I don’t want to sound like a fan-boy here. Your Journey’s famous – and of course I know the inside story. The idea of you going down into all them unknown worlds all alone, while Lobsang stayed tucked up in the airship. Comedy gold.’

‘Well, that’s a consolation for all the scars.’

‘But the strategy actually makes sense. You go down, do the exploring thing, make contact.’

And Joshua wondered, contact with what?

‘Meanwhile I’ll stay aloft, ready to help out when it all goes tits-up.’

‘When?’

‘If, mate. If. Slip of the tongue.’

Not for the first time in the course of his adventures in the Long Earth, and against his own better judgement, Joshua went with the flow.

Bill insisted that he carry a two-way radio, and a small shoulder unit with TV and sensor links. Joshua agreed, despite unpleasant memories of Lobsang’s shoulder-riding parrots, and for his part packed a handgun.

The climb down into the undergrowth was easy. Immediately he was on the ground the ship rose, taking the ladder with it.

Alone, Joshua turned around slowly. In this open space that the stream had carved between the trees, it was pleasant enough. The air smelled of damp wood and the leaf mould of millennia, and he heard the remote buzz of the lapping ocean of insect swarms below this summit. Over his head squadrons of some insectile equivalent of bats hurtled after things like flies.

He had nothing much to do but wait. He began to make his camp, spreading out his blanket roll and sleeping bag. He thought about a fire, but the air was warm and moist enough without it. With his travel rations he didn’t need to cook. He began to relax. It was almost like he was on sabbatical. He toyed with the idea of doing some fishing, just for fun, if the streams on this summit supported any fish . . .

The radio clicked into life. ‘Josh, can you hear me, mate?’

‘No.’

‘Ha ha. How you doing down there?’

‘Making a restaurant reservation.’

‘Funny you should say that. If it does all go tits up and you need supplies quickly there’s a cache, only a mile or so downstream.’

‘A cache? Of what?’

‘Survival stuff. A little shelter, a bit of food, knives, tools. Spare laces for your boots. Left by combers, for combers.’

Joshua sat on his sleeping bag. ‘Bill, what is this place? Why did we stop here? I mean, in a Joker? Who the hell stops in Jokers?’

‘Combers do. That’s the point, really. You want to know the story of this world? How Earth West 110,719 got its locusts? Our best guess is that pterosaurs never evolved on this world.’

‘Pterosaurs?’