The Long Earth

They had trotted into the elevator quite happily, and once on board seemed to take everything in their great, flat-footed stride, including an artificial man and a robot cat.
    Lobsang said, ‘Trolls are of course mammals. And mammalian creatures love and cherish their offspring – well, for the most part. Mothers teach their children. And so I am learning like a child, with baby steps, as it were. As I myself play the part of a child, I feel I can with care derive a certain elementary vocabulary: good, bad, up, down. And thus we make progress.’
    He was enjoying this, Joshua could tell. ‘You’re the troll whisperer, Lobsang.’
    But Lobsang took no notice of that and walked among his happy band of trolls. ‘Please note, I offer a nice shiny ball. Good! Joshua, observe the sounds of appreciation and interest. See the pretty shiny thing! And now, I take it away. Ah, the sounds of sadness and privation, very good. But note that the adult female is alert, emitting sounds of uncertainty, with just a subtle hint that were I to try anything really nasty with her favourite bag of woolliness she would quite likely rip off my arm and beat me to death with the wet end. Splendid! Joshua, see, I give the ball back to the pup; now mother is less apprehensive, and all is sweetness and light once more.’
    And it was, thought Joshua. The
Mark Twain
, anchored over Happy Landings, moved gently in a sunlit breeze, with just enough creaking from the woodwork to lull you almost as if you were in a hammock. A pleasant place with happy, happy trolls.
    The spell was broken when Lobsang asked, ‘Henry, could you provide a dead troll, do you think?’
    Henry looked deeply uncomfortable. When he spoke he had an odd, lilting accent. ‘Mister, if one of them dies they scrape out a very deep hole and bury the body, scattering flowers upon it beforehand to ensure the resurrection, I do believe.’
    ‘Ah, then I suppose that a forensic dissection is out of the question? I feared so … I beg your pardon,’ he added, with what struck Joshua as unusual tact for him. ‘I intended no disrespect. But the scientific value would be high. I am confronted with a hitherto unknown species which, despite the lack of what we are pleased to call civilization, and lacking our form of intelligence, has a method of communication of an intricacy and depth unrivalled among humanity until the expansion of the internet. Thanks to this facility I believe that anything interesting and useful that a troll learns very shortly becomes known to every other troll. They
appear
to have expanded frontal lobes, I suspect mostly utilized to store and process memory, both personal and species-wide … Oh, for a body to dissect! Well, lacking that, I will do the best I can, which will be the best that there is.’
    Henry laughed. ‘You don’t believe in modesty, do you, Mr Lobsang?’
    ‘Absolutely not, Henry. Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.’
    Joshua threw a ball towards a baby troll. ‘Neanderthals put flowers on the bodies of their dead too. I’m no expert, I saw it on the Discovery Channel. Are the trolls nearly human, then?’ He had the sense to duck as the exuberant return from the pup sailed over his head and splintered the bulkhead.
    ‘The young will experiment,’ remarked Lobsang. ‘“Nearly human” is right, Joshua. Like the dolphins, orang-utans and, if I am being charitable, the rest of the higher apes. It’s a tiny gap between us and them. And nobody knows how
Homo sapiens
became, well, sapient. Sally, do the trolls use tools?’
    She looked up from her playing. ‘Oh, yes. Away from humans I’ve seen them use sticks and stones as improvised tools. And if you bring a fresh band to Happy Landings, and if they see a guy fixing a weir in the river, a troll might pick up a handsaw and help him, if he’s shown what to do. By the end of the evening, every troll in that band will know how to do it.’
    Lobsang patted a troll. ‘So it’s a case of monkey see, monkey do.’
    Sally said, ‘No, it’s a case of troll see, troll sit down, troll think about things and then, if it’s appropriate, troll make a half-decent lever or whatever and, by the end of that evening, troll tell other trolls about the usefulness of it. Their long chant is a troll Wikipedia, quite apart from anything else. If you want to find out anything like “Am I going to throw up if I eat this purple elephant?” then another troll will tell you.’
    Joshua said, ‘Hang