The Long Earth

This really did have the feel of a place that had grown slowly but continuously for a very long time, and so was layered with structures one on top of the other, like a tree trunk’s rings. But there did seem to be a preponderance of relatively modern buildings overlaying a very ancient core, as if people had arrived in greater numbers in recent times, the last couple of centuries perhaps. Which was just when, he supposed, the population back on Datum Earth had started to grow fast, no doubt sending a larger flood of scatterlings to Happy Landings.
    Walking by the river, Joshua began to get a sense of how people lived here. All along the bank there were racks of drying fish – mostly salmon-like fish, big healthy specimens, cleanly filleted – and more hanging inside the dwellings, some smoked. Nobody seemed to be working terribly hard, but he saw weirs in the river, traps, nets, and a few workers mending hooks, lines, harpoons. Though there were in fact a few cultivated fields, he learned, further out from the centre – mostly growing potatoes as an emergency food store, and to power the Steppers of those few visitors who used the boxes – the river provided much of what sustained the people here. During the annual salmon runs, so the friendly locals told him in a variety of bizarre accents, the whole population, human and troll, would come down to the river and harvest migrating fish that swam so thick the river water lapped up over the banks. There were evidently other kinds of fish, and Joshua saw great middens of the shells of clams and oysters. The forest was generous too, as Joshua could tell from baskets of berries, acorns, hazelnuts, as well as haunches of animals he could not identify.
    ‘This is why nobody farms here,’ Sally murmured to him. ‘Or hardly anybody. Nobody
needs
to, the country is so generous. Back on the Datum, in this area pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer folk built societies every bit as complex as any farmer’s, with a fraction of the labour. And none of the backache. So it is here.’ She laughed, as rain sprinkled down. ‘Maybe that’s why Happy Landings turned out to be
here
, one of the most generous places on all the worlds. If only it didn’t rain all the time it would be paradise.’
    But there were trolls everywhere, and that was something you would
not
have seen in Washington State back in the Datum. The humanoids threaded their way through the human rubberneckers with a care and attention that Joshua would not have expected from creatures that looked like the offspring of a bear and an upright pig. The evidently contented relationship between human and troll here, and the uniform welcome they received, gave the place an air of peace.
    Paradoxically, this made Joshua uncomfortable. He had no clear idea why. It was just that with the trolls so firmly embedded in the place, the community seemed
too
calm. Not entirely human … Not for the first time in his life he was conflicted and confused; there was much about this place that he had yet to understand.
    And then, in the central square, one of the trolls got down on its haunches and sang. Soon the rest joined in. A troll song was always extraordinary; hearing it seemed to nail you to the spot, in a way that Joshua knew he would for ever be unable to explain. It seemed to go on and on, the mighty chords echoing from the distant forest – although when he looked at his watch when it was over, it had lasted only about ten minutes.
    Sally tapped him on the shoulder. ‘That, young man, is what is called the short call of the troll. The long call can last a month. Heart-warming, isn’t it? In a creepy sort of way. Sometimes you will see them in a clearing, hundreds of them, all singing, apparently independently, apparently unaware of each other – until suddenly it ends on one great chord, like Thomas Tallis, you know? Like it’s coming at you in four dimensions at once.’
    ‘I know Tallis’s entire canon, Sally,’ said Lobsang. ‘It is an apt comparison.’
    Joshua decided he was not going to be left out. ‘I’ve heard of Tallis. Sister Agnes said that if he were alive today he would be riding a Harley. Then again most of her heroes would have ridden Harleys, according to her …’
    ‘I detect patterns in the music,’ said Lobsang. ‘It will take some time to analyse.’
    ‘Good luck with that, mister,’ Sally said. ‘I have known trolls for years, and
I
can only guess what they are talking about. But I’m