The Long War

Another question that occurred to Nelson was how old this beast was. How long had it been sailing these stepwise seas? If he dug around in the forest, or in the dark spaces within its carapace, would he find the bones of antique beasts—the skeleton of a stegosaur?

Even Lobsang had no answer to such questions.

It was in the jungle, on the fourth day, with Nelson deep in thought, that Cassie trapped him. She was the woman who habitually wore a red flower in her hair, who had asked for tobacco when he’d landed.

He knew by now what she wanted. He tried to avoid eye contact with her, but, with the susurration of the sea all around them, he was cornered in her stare.

“Mister Lobsang say you are tight and sad and needing loving…”

The statement hung there, and Nelson could practically hear two value systems colliding in his head with a scream of stripped cogs. All right, he was a Puritan type; any male child brought up by Nelson’s mother on the one hand and her version of God on the other would have turned out that way. He had had relationships, including a long-term girlfriend with whom he’d had an “understanding’, a very old-fashioned term, but…

But then there were the islanders. He’d seen evidence of long-term relationships, like marriages, but among the young especially things were pretty relaxed. After all, everybody here knew everybody else—it was just like St. John on the Water in that regard—and there was a kind of protective communal tolerance.

Besides, as Lobsang had told him, it was good for the islanders to have their gene pool replenished by passing travellers. Nelson almost had a duty to accept this invitation.

“Only a little wiggle, Mister Nelson!” She smiled, and laughed, and walked up to him.

And suddenly he was immersed in the moment, the analytical part of his mind seemed to dissolve and his forty-eight years fell away. The world was alive with light and colour, the blue and the green, he could smell the sea and the vegetation and the animals of this place, he could smell the seawater-salt on the flesh of this woman as she approached him, and when she touched his lips with a fingertip he could taste her…

Nobody saw them. Well, save for Lobsang, probably.

Afterwards he stayed away from the jungle, and was never alone with Cassie, ever again.

On the fifth day, for a shower and a change of clothes, they returned to the twain, which shadowed the wake of Second Person Singular.

They sat together in the gondola, in formal western clothing that now felt stiff and confining. The living island drifted beneath them, complex, beautiful, fecund. It might almost have been designed to be viewed from the air.

“We haven’t yet spoken of why you summoned me to your company in the first place, Lobsang.”

“Summoned?”

“You said we’d play no more games—that breadcrumb trail I followed was effectively a summons. Now you show me this Traverser…”

“An example of the remarkable fecundity, or inventiveness, of life in the Long Earth.”

“Why? Why bring me here, why show me this?”

“Because I believe you have a mind of a quality to appreciate a theory I have been nurturing since the opening up of the Long Earth.”

“A theory about what?”

“About the universe—mankind—the purpose of the Long Earth… This is all very tentative, yet crucially important. Would you like to hear it?”

“Is it conceivable that I won’t? Or that I could stop you?”

“Reverend Azikiwe, I am impervious to sarcasm. Call it a feature of my self-programming…

“Consider this. The Long Earth will save mankind. Now that we’re spread across the stepwise worlds, even the destruction of a whole planet, the creation of a new Gap, would not destroy us all. And indeed the Long Earth opened up just in time, some would argue. Otherwise we might have finished ourselves off. Soon we would surely have been scrabbling like chimpanzees in the ruins of our civilization, fighting over the last of the resources. Instead, we undeserving apes suddenly have the key to multiple worlds, and we are gobbling them up as fast as we can.”

“Not all of us. Your islanders on the Traverser are pretty relaxed, and don’t seem to be doing anybody any harm. And out in the Long Earth there seem to be plenty of drifters, ‘combers’ they call them, who don’t trouble anybody.”

“But look at this current situation with the trolls—pleasant, helpful and trusting creatures—of course we must dominate them, enslave them, kill them. Look at the tension over Valhalla and its quiet rebellion. I can’t leave you to get on with your life, even a million steps away. I must tax you, control you!”

Nelson said carefully, “Well, Lobsang, do you intend to do something about this? Of all the entities I know of in the human worlds, surely you alone have the power—”