The Long Earth

hopping from one world to another at a whim kind of shit?’
    Sally said, ‘OK, I get your point, but you know what I mean. It’s all so
nice
. I’ve talked to them about it and they say it’s the fresh air; no crowding, plenty to eat, no unfair taxes, yada, yada, yada …’
    ‘Or maybe it’s the trolls,’ Joshua said bluntly. ‘Trolls and humans, mixed up together.’
    ‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘Sometimes I wonder …’
    ‘What do you wonder?’
    ‘I wonder if there’s something so big going on here that even Lobsang would have to recalibrate his thinking. Just a hunch, for now. I’m just suspicious. But then a stepper who isn’t suspicious is soon a dead stepper.’

39
    JOSHUA ROSE EARLY the next morning and explored further, alone. People were friendly and ready to walk, chat and even hand him pottery mugs of lemonade. He overcame his natural inclination to silence, and talked back, and listened.
    The area was pretty well homesteaded by now, he learned, with thriving settlements at the coast and along the river valleys. None of them had many more than a couple of hundred inhabitants, though people would get together on festival days – or when interesting visitors showed up, such as Lobsang with his airship. And in response to the greater influx of newcomers in recent decades, the community had had to expand, new settlements seeding across the countryside.
    The reason this rapid expansion had been possible, he learned, was the trolls. Trolls were useful, trolls were friendly, companionable – and, crucially, ever ready to lift a heavy load, an exercise they took much delight in. This donation of muscle power had helped the colonists here overcome their lack of manpower, draught animals and machinery.
    But in a sense the reason for all the building work, the growth of the new settlements,
was
the trolls. Trolls, he discovered, were allergic to crowds – that is to say, crowds of humans. No matter how many trolls there were, they would get nervous if there were more than one thousand, eight hundred and ninety humans in the immediate vicinity, apparently a number found by careful experimentation in the past. They didn’t get mad, they just got going , not coming back, sheepishly, until a few dozen humans had kindly found somewhere else to be, and the numbers dropped down under the limit. But as the goodwill of trolls was immensely valuable, Happy Landings was spreading southwards as a confederacy of small troll-friendly townships. This was hardly inconvenient, since you could always walk to the next township in a matter of minutes, and there was plenty of room in this riverine landscape for more.
    Later that morning Joshua learned that this fact, the size of the townships, was of intense interest to a young man called Henry. He had been raised among Amish until one day he stepped into a soft place and landed, as it were, among a different kind of chosen. It seemed to Joshua that Henry had come to terms with this elevation quite happily. He explained to Joshua that back home his people had always reckoned that around a hundred and fifty people was just the right size for a caring community, and so he felt at home here. He also thought, however, that he had died, and that Happy Landings was, if not heaven, at least a staging post for the journey onwards. Being dead didn’t seem to bother him very much. He had his place in this little society: he was a good husbandman, gentle around animals and particularly fond of trolls.
    And that was why, this morning, when at Lobsang’s request Joshua brought Henry up to the airship with a few trolls, Henry believed he had ascended to heaven at last, and was speaking to God. There are some things which you don’t put up with when you have been brought up by nuns, even if they are nuns like Sister Agnes. Joshua tried to disabuse Henry of the belief that the impressive saffron-clad personage he met after travelling into the sky was, in fact, God. But given Lobsang’s ego and air of omni-competence there was little to dissuade him.
    Lobsang, meanwhile, was burning to learn more about the language of the trolls. And that was why now, on the observation deck, there were already a couple of female trolls flanking Lobsang’s ambulant unit, and four or five juveniles having a lot of fun playing with Shi-mi. Henry had been brought along to help calm the trolls – that had actually been Sally’s suggestion – but nothing seemed to faze a Happy Landings troll.