The Long War

Jansson said, ‘So we’re lucky we got found by a beagle that didn’t just kill us outright.’
    ‘There’s no higher morality,’ Sally said. ‘By the way,’ she added more softly, ‘I just jumped to another conclusion.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘She said Snowy’s truthful. That implies that others aren’t. These super-dogs know how to lie.’
    Jansson nodded. ‘Noted.’

49
    S OON THEY MADE out a smear of smoke on the eastern horizon.
    The trail they followed turned to bare mud scored by the ruts of traffic. The land seemed greener too, away from the open sward of scrubland into which they had stepped. They even passed by a few forest clumps. To Jansson, no naturalist, many of the trees looked like ferns, with squat, stubby trunks and sprawling, parasol-like leaves.
    In one place she could see through a screen of trees to a shimmer of open water, a lake, and by its bank creatures had gathered to drink. They were rather like small deer, Jansson thought, but their bodies were a little too heavy, their legs a bit too stubby. Deer with a dash of pig, perhaps.
    Li-Li was on the alert as the cart rolled through its closest approach to the lake. At his reins, Snowy stared fixedly at the deer things, his ears erect. Li-Li growled a phrase to him, over and over.
    Finn McCool the kobold grinned his anxious, nervy grin at Sally and Jansson. ‘She says, “Snowy. Remember wh-hho you a-are . . .” These dog fellows-ss run off four-legged after prey if they get chance. Sh-should be on leash-shsh . . .’
    ‘Nothing would surprise me,’ Jansson said, as the cart rolled on away from the water.
    Sally said, ‘We ought to remember that our hosts might look like dogs, but they’re not dogs . That might lead us astray. Their ancestors never were dogs, because dogs probably never evolved here, not as we know them. These are sapient creatures carved from some dog-like clay. Just as we are sapients made from heavily modified apes . . .’
    Jansson found herself longing for the concrete and glass of the Datum, the reassuringly grubby crimes of lowlife humanity. Perhaps all this, natural selection’s arbitrary shaping of living things, was something you got used to out in the Long Earth. Not her, not yet. ‘The plasticity of living forms.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Nothing. A line from a book.’
    Her reaction merely seemed to puzzle Sally.
    Now they passed through farmland, a belt of it that evidently surrounded the beagle city. A scrawl of dry stone walls, none of them straight, divided the land into rough fields crowded with beasts browsing or grazing. Some of these looked like fatter, stupider versions of the deer things Jansson had spotted by the lake in the forest. Others were more like cattle, goats, pigs, even what looked like some kind of rhinoceros with lopped-off horns, and a few fat, feathery versions of the bird creatures that drew this truck. Dogs could be seen patrolling the herds. In one field, deer-like animals were being driven into an enclosure, perhaps for milking.
    And here Jansson saw trolls, the first since they’d arrived in this world, save for Mary and Ham. A party of a couple of dozen, perhaps, were working their way along a dry stone wall, evidently making repairs. They sang as they worked, the usual beautiful multi-part harmony applied to a lively, jumping melody. Ham, who had been napping on Mary’s lap, woke up now, and climbed up on his mother’s shoulder to see. In his immature piping voice he sang back phrases, echoing the song.
    Sally listened hard. ‘I’d swear they’re singing “Johnny B Goode”. My father would have known.’
    Jansson said, ‘These are the farms of smart carnivores. Right? Nothing arable, no crops. Nothing but meat on the hoof.’
    ‘Right. There’ll be plenty of peptides in the arteries after they’ve fed us up a few times here, Monica.’
    ‘The trolls seem happy, judging by that party we saw.’
    ‘Yes.’ Sally seemed oddly uneasy with that observation. ‘These dogs are evidently sapient. We know trolls like to be around sapients. I guess that’s why they’re coming here, to this world, for refuge. Sapients, but non-human. So they’re comfortable here.’
    ‘You’re jealous!’
    ‘Am not.’
    ‘Come on. Everybody knows you like trolls, Sally Linsay. You championed their cause even before this latest blow-up, even before we absconded from the Gap with Mary.’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘Well, now you’re finding out that, no matter how