The Long War

– should I have? At what cost? How many would you have had me kill, in order to avert an action that would have remained entirely hypothetical? What would you have thought of me then? Humans have free will, Joshua. God will not, and I can not, stop them harming each other. I think you should talk to Agnes about this.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘She might help you find it in yourself to forgive me.’
    Joshua thought he could never do that. But he had to put it aside, he knew. With an effort he focused on his surroundings. ‘So, the trolls. What have you learned about them?’
    ‘Oh, a great deal. Such as about their true language. Which has nothing to do with the crude signing and point-at-the-picture pidgin humans have imposed on them when they want to give them orders.’
    ‘But even that’s pretty powerful, Lobsang. You see clips of Mary saying “I will not” everywhere. On posters, in graffiti, online, even on animated T-shirts.’
    ‘That’s true, but it’s irresponsible for the tax rebels of Valhalla to mix up their symbols with those of the troll issue – conflating two separate conflicts, each of which spans the whole of the Long Earth.’ Lobsang sat back on his heels, convincingly sweating. ‘You know that their music is the heart of the trolls’ true language, Joshua. Surely that’s no surprise. After contact with humans they pick up our songs, but they make them their own, spinning endless variations . . . Music is a way for them to express the natural rhythms of their bodies, from their heartbeats, their breaths, the periodicity of their strides when they walk, even the sparking of the neurons in their heads, perhaps. And they use the rhythm of the song as a timing device, when they want to step together, or hunt. Galileo did that, you know.’
    ‘Galileo?’
    ‘He used music as a kind of clock to time his early experiments in mechanics. Pendulum swings and so on. And of course the trolls’ songs carry information. Even a simple disharmony can carry a warning. But there’s much more to it than that. Watch them now; I think they’re planning a hunt . . .’
    The flickering of the stepping trolls, around the core group, was becoming more intense. The returning trolls would add a new line to the ongoing harmonies, loudly or softly, boldly or subtly; the song as a whole was evolving, adapting, and the other steppers seemed to react.
    ‘I plant food sources around the reservation,’ Lobsang said. ‘Across the stepwise worlds, I mean. Honeycombs, for instance, and animals for them to hunt, deer, rabbits. The pack works as a kind of single organism in seeking out such resources. Stepper scouts spread out across the worlds, and if one finds a promising resource, a deer herd say, he or she will return and, well, sing about it.’
    ‘They’re still singing about getting drunk on Irish moonshine as far as I can tell.’
    ‘The core song is only the carrier wave, Joshua. I’ve done some acoustic analysis; there are variations in pitch, rhythm, even the phasing of the song scraps, that carry information about how far away the find is, how high a quality the food is. Other scouts will pick up on that, go and check it out, and come back with a confirming report, or maybe a contradiction. It’s an efficient way for the pack to explore all the local possibilities, and soon they’ll settle on a selection – often they’ll switch to another key, or another song altogether, to signal unanimity – and then they step away. Honeybees work this way; when they need to find a new location for the hive they send out scouts, who come back and dance out the data.
    ‘Trolls individually are not much smarter than chimps, but collectively they have evolved a way for the group to make intelligent, robust decisions. But it isn’t like human decision-making, or democracy. Even the kind of democracy you practise out in the boondocks.’ He smiled at Joshua. ‘I heard they made you a mayor.’
    ‘Sort of.’
    ‘Tightly contested election, was it?’
    ‘Oh, shut up. My main job is to moderate the town meeting. Hell-Knows-Where is still small enough for all the capable adults to gather on the common land, and debate the issues. We use Roberts’s Rules of Order .’
    ‘Very American. But maybe there’s something of the trolls’ collective wisdom in what you’re practising. Sooner that than suffer the errors of a single wrong-headed leader. The trolls almost always get it right, Joshua, even when I set them