The Long War

“Of course you are watched. We are all watched, in this technology-soaked age. What of that? But as to perceived ‘manipulation’—we, all of us, all of mankind, face enormous challenges, an unknown and unknowable future. Isn’t it better that we of good heart should work together, than not? Look, Captain Kauffman, all of this need make no difference to how you approach your work, when you go back to the ship after our conversation is over. Indeed, I would not expect it to.”

“I can’t quit, can I?”

“Would you, if you could?”

She left that hanging. “And are you going to tell me who you are?”

He seemed to think that over. “The question has no real meaning, my dear. Now—shall we order?”

When the limo returned her, dropping her a short distance from the Benjamin Franklin, she saw the reassuring outline of Carl, standing by the access ramp. As she approached he actually saluted—quite professionally, too. She was careful to acknowledge.

It was late, and there was no alarm in evidence, so after a brief diversion to the bridge she made for her cabin. The cat was curled up beside the bunk. She was actually purring in her sleep—if indeed she was sleeping at all.

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—”