The Long War

dozen steps further West – to a world full of trolls, as Sally said she could feel, hear, as soon as they arrived. The beagles were waiting, they were told, for the return of some kind of ruler from . . . someplace else. It would be this ruler who would deal with the humans.
    Jansson supposed it gave them time to get their bearings, for her to recover somewhat from the journey so far. Even that first jaunt, from Rectangles to here, had been a grotesque experience, because the beagle who had met them couldn’t step; it had had to be carried on the back of the squat, ugly humanoid Sally had called a ‘kobold’.
    It had all been a rush of strangeness for them both. Even Sally, Jansson had learned, the great explorer of the Long Earth, had known nothing of this place before being brought here, lured by the gossip of the kobolds. To Sally this world had been just another Joker, just another desert world in a band of such worlds which, apparently, had lost much of their water through some calamity during the turbulent epoch of planetary formation. On such a world geological activity was going to be reduced, life restricted . . . That was the theory. In fact, as Jansson was learning, on many Jokers there were habitable refuges.
    On this world there was an island of green, of moisture – from what the kobold had said, Sally had guessed it could be the size of Europe. Unnoticed by dismissive previous explorers, including Joshua and Sally, who had come rushing through this world too hastily. Unnoticed by the teams of researchers who had followed that first expedition to Rectangles: they had been Datum-raised workers with Datum-trained expectations, who thought in terms of one world thick, and never looked stepwise.
    Well, here they were, in a world that hosted these dogs, these strange sapients – and, evidently, the trolls, in great concentrations.
    For a long interval there was silence. The dog beasts seemed to like to stare, to study, to think before speaking; the grammar of their interactions was not like the human. Jansson and Sally just stood there, waiting. The kobold had a wounded arm, Jansson noticed now, roughly bandaged with a soiled rag. He cackled, evidently enjoying the moment.
    The trolls who’d travelled with them didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. Mary sat on a knoll, humming a tune that was naggingly familiar to Jansson, while Ham happily raked the ground with his strong fingers, periodically popping grubs into his mouth. As if, Jansson thought, being approached by a bipedal dog wearing a ray gun happened every day.
    The beagle stood before the women, eyes unblinking, that mobile wet nose quivering as, evidently, he smelled them. He must have been nearly seven feet tall, and he towered over both Jansson and Sally. But that, and the ray gun, weren’t the only reasons he was so intimidating, Jansson realized. There was something fluidly animal about him, a sense of honed perfection, right down to the way his fine fur coated his flesh in smooth streamlined layers. And there was intelligence in his eyes, a bright hard directed intelligence.
    His teeth, eyes, ears, muzzle, nose were all very dog-like, even though, Jansson saw, the overall shape of his skull, with a bulging brow, might have been humanoid. His face sometimes looked human, sometimes wolf-like, like a shifting hologram. His ears were too sharp, his eyes too far apart, his grin too wide, his nose too flat with that blackened tip . . . And his eyes, yes, it was like looking into the eyes of a wolf. He made Jansson feel shabby, incomplete. But there was also something unreal about him, as if he were a movie CGI special effect. He just didn’t fit into Jansson’s cosy, parochial, Datum-nurtured consciousness.
    He couldn’t step. And presumably none of his kind could, either. Jansson had to cling to that thought, that she could do something he couldn’t—
    She coughed, and shivered, a wave of weakness passing over her.
    The beagle turned on her. ‘Your name?’
    His language was distorted, a mix of dog-like growls and whines. Hrr-your-rrh ne-rr-mmhh? Yet he clearly spoke English, his words understandable. Another astonishing conceptual leap for an ex-cop like Jansson to absorb.
    Jansson tried to stand straight. ‘Monica Jansson. Formerly Lieutenant, Madison PD.’
    The beagle cocked his head on one side, evidently puzzled. He turned to Sally. ‘You?’
    ‘Sally Linsay.’
    The beagle raised his fore-limb, his arm, and pointed