The Long War

59

LOBSANG LOVED TO talk – and indeed, to listen too, if you could keep up with him. In the weeks they spent crossing stepwise copies of the Pacific Ocean together, en route to New Zealand, Nelson came to understand fully that Lobsang was in a position to know everything that was worth knowing. He tried to imagine how the periodic synching of Lobsang’s various iterations must feel – as if, metaphorically, they all met up in some big hall somewhere, all talking at once, communicating their disparate experiences with frantic urgency.

As a result the twain ride to a stepwise New Zealand passed pleasantly enough for Nelson. He even found he was able to put aside the idea that Lobsang, and the shadowy entities behind him, saw him as a ‘valuable long-term investment’ – along with many others, he supposed, a shadowy community of tentative allies, whose very names, he imagined, he might never learn.

Still, like all journeys, this one came to an end, sixteen days after their departure from Wyoming.

Nelson had visited Datum New Zealand many times. In this remote world, some seven hundred thousand steps West of the Datum, the Land of the Long White Cloud was evidently sparsely inhabited if at all, and its green mountains, its crystal skies, were unspoiled, and a magnificent sight from the air.

Heading west, the twain drifted away from the coastline and out to sea. Finally it slowed over a small island, a shield of green and yellow on the breast of this version of the Tasman Sea.

‘So?’ Nelson asked. ‘What are we here to see?’

‘Look down,’ Lobsang’s disembodied voice advised him.

‘Something on that island?’

‘It’s not an island . . .’

Through the twain’s excellent telescopes Nelson saw forest clumps, and a fringe of what looked like beach, and animals moving – what looked like horses – elephants – even a dwarf giraffe? An eclectic mix . . . And, more excitingly, people, on that strange beach. The seawater near by was turbid, mildly turbulent, and evidently full of life.

And this ‘island’ had a wake.

‘It’s not an island,’ Nelson said at last. ‘It looks alive.’

‘You have it. A complex, compound, cooperative organism, a multiplex creature travelling north-east, as if determined to cross the Pacific . . .’

‘A living island!’ Nelson laughed, unreasonably delighted. ‘An old legend, come to pass, if it’s so. Saint Brendan, you know, crossing the Atlantic, is supposed to have landed on the back of a whale. That was the sixth century, I believe. There are similar tales in a Greek bestiary of the second century, and later in the Arabian Nights—’

‘And now the reality. Nelson, meet Second Person Singular.’

The grammar made Nelson wince, although he picked up the reference to the notorious discovery of the Mark Twain. ‘So what now?’

‘We go visit.’

‘We?’

The door to the gondola lounge deck opened, and in walked Lobsang, shaven head, orange robe – at first glance the Lobsang Nelson had met in Wyoming.

Nelson asked, ‘This is your “ambulant unit”?’

‘And fully waterproof. Come . . .’

They made their way to the stern of the ship, and the hatch through which Nelson had been winched aboard at the start of the voyage.

‘We will be perfectly safe down there by the way,’ Lobsang said now. ‘Even should you choose to go scuba diving around the rim of the carapace.’

‘Are you crazy? I’ve been in these waters before. Sharks, box jellyfish—’

‘You’d come to no harm.’ Lobsang pressed a button, and a dinghy folded itself out of a compartment, inflated, and dangled over the open hatch from a winch. ‘I’ve visited this assemblage of life many times before, and I can assure you of that. Now, come make some new friends.’

Inside five minutes they were both clambering out of the dinghy, and on to the carapace of Second Person Singular.

Not that it felt like that. It felt as if they were climbing up a sandy beach. The ‘ground’ was solid under Nelson’s feet, as if rooted deep in the rocky fabric of the Earth, like any island.

He looked around at a beach littered with sand and broken shells, clumps of forest. There was a fresh breeze; this hemisphere was emerging from its winter. He smelled salt and sand and seaweed, and a warmer, wetter scent of vegetation from the interior. The scents, the colours, the blue of the sky and sea, the green of the trees, were overwhelming, vivid. ‘It’s like Crusoe’s island.’

‘Exactly. But mobile. And – look there.’

A flap in the ground, earth underpinned by some kind of shell – yes, part of a tremendous carapace – opened up gently, like a yawning hatch, and a dozen or so humans emerged, grinning, climbing some kind of stair. Of all ages, they were naked and bronzed like athletes. A couple of children stared at Nelson.

One woman stepped forward, a red flower in her hair, still smiling, and said in good if oddly accented English, ‘Welcome. What news of home? Please mister please, if you have any tobacco, please please . . .’

Lobsang was smiling indulgently.

Nelson managed to ask, ‘Who the hell are these people?’

‘Well,’ said Lobsang, ‘since this lost beast has evidently wandered into the oceans of the Datum itself, at least several, I suspect, are descendants of the crew of the Mary Celeste . . .’

Whether Nelson was supposed to take that literally or not, he got the idea.

Soon he found himself sitting awkwardly in a circle of very interested, very naked people, anxious to know about what was happening back on the Datum Earth. They sat close to what looked like a hearth – the fire was set on slabs of stone, no doubt in deference to the pain receptors of the back of their host, and Nelson quietly reminded Lobsang that Saint Brendan had caused his whale-island to submerge with the sting of a carelessly lit fire . . .

The inhabitants’ language seemed to be a Creole made up of mostly European tongues, but dominated by English, and not difficult to understand. Nelson told them what he could think of about recent developments on the Datum. They smiled and listened, bland, clean-shaven, well-fed, stark naked.

For a break they were served halved coconut shells, brimming with milk.

Lobsang told Nelson that in the course of previous visits he had been able to make some direct contact with the island beast itself, it being similar in many respects to the original First Person Singular. How he achieved this contact he wouldn’t say. The beast carried about a hundred human passengers. Some arrived as a result of a shipwreck or similar accident – and left by dying, or waiting until the end of the beast’s ‘cycle’, as Lobsang called it, the length of time this apparently benevolent kraken took to do its rounds, when the people could disembark on some shore they might turn into a home.

But of course, as Nelson could see from the infants who sat before him staring with open curiosity, this little community was a living one. People were born here – and, presumably, some lived out their lives and died, all without ever setting foot, perhaps, off the back of this patient creature. They saw nothing strange about their itinerant home, or their way of life; it was only in discussions with Lobsang that he began to understand himself.

‘These people are nurtured,’ Lobsang said. ‘Cherished. Every creature in the vicinity of Second Person Singular is docile in the extreme. It is as if this creature of close cooperation is surrounded by a looser cloud of mutual trust. Oh, one must eat, the occasional small fish might be snapped up, but Second Person Singular will not harm, or allow to be harmed unnecessarily, any higher creature. And in particular, no human.’

‘If something this size ever got into major transport routes, especially on the Datum, there’d be trouble.’

‘Oh, true. These beasts – I’ve called them Traversers – generally know enough to keep away from the Datum. As far as I can tell this particular specimen has got lost; it has strayed too close to the Datum, perhaps even passing into the Datum itself. At the moment it is trying to get to a place which I translate as “sanctuary” which, curiously enough, is close to Puget Sound. When we leave I intend to leave behind an iteration of myself, to navigate it to a place of safety. Most of its brethren, like First Person Singular, appear to dwell much further out from the Datum. Perhaps there is some – centre – in the remote Long Earth.’

‘In the digests that were circulated about the beast that the Mark Twain travellers – well, you, I suppose – called First Person Singular, you suggested that the creature travels the Long Earth making a sort of audit. A stocktaking!’

‘It’s as good a first guess as any. There seem to be various different subspecies, none as large or as threatening as the original First Person Singular, however. Not all of them have this kind of shell-like carapace for example. All of them are themselves colony organisms, like Portuguese men o’ war writ large – but they grow, they add to themselves by collecting specimens from the land and sea, some taking passengers as you see here, some incorporating them into the greater organism, like First Person Singular. And they are sapient, to some degree. Of course sapience implies purpose.’

‘What purpose?’

Lobsang shrugged, a little artificially. ‘Perhaps they are indeed collectors. Latter-day Darwins, or their agents, scooping up interesting creatures for – well, for science? To populate some tremendous zoo? Simply for their aesthetic appeal? You’ll observe that most of the animals gathered here are of a similar body weight, within an order of magnitude or two – no blue whales, of course, and very few mice or rats. As if selectively sampled. But that may be too narrow a perspective. It seemed to me that the only goal of First Person Singular was to learn, to grow – goals shared with all minded creatures. But perhaps she was a special case . . .’

Whatever the purpose of all this, the human population considered it not a bad deal, as far as Nelson could tell. According to Lobsang, their living home looked after them even when it found it necessary to submerge: it took its animal and human passengers into air-filled chambers inside its carapace.

‘Not that it submerges too often,’ Lobsang said. ‘Bad for the vegetation on its back, not to mention the layer of topsoil it accumulates . . . It’s like an unending cruise, don’t you think?

‘Hmm. The Titanic without the iceberg.’

‘Lots of good company, plenty of seafood and occasionally other maritime fare including oysters and the occasional seal – but never dolphins, Nelson – oh, and plenty of sex.’

Nelson had guessed that, given the embarrassing attention he himself was getting from a number of young women. ‘And the people?’

‘Nelson, there are billions in the suffering worlds of mankind who would think themselves blessed if they found themselves on this living shore.’

Nelson grunted.

Lobsang inspected him. ‘Ah, you don’t approve, do you? My dear Nelson, I see it in your eyes and in every expression. You, my friend, are a Puritan, privately aghast at the situation; you are thinking that mankind shouldn’t live like this – there is a lack of striving which you find distasteful, yes? This is at the root of your unease about the Long Earth itself, I suspect. It’s too easy. Mankind, you believe, should be always looking towards the stars, ever striving, learning, growing, bettering itself, challenging the infinite.’

Nelson stared at Lobsang’s face, which showed deadpan with just a hint, a tiny scintilla, of humour. What was the human and what was the computer? ‘You are disturbingly perceptive.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’