The Long War

George Abrahams – not that Maggie remotely imagined that was his authentic identity. Douglas Black. Levers being pulled. No, strings being jerked, and Maggie Kauffman was the puppet. Well, there was little to do but accept it. That, she thought, or find a way to leverage her new ‘partnerships’ to her own advantage.

She got into bed without disturbing the cat.

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.’