The Long War

And at the final customs barrier, after Nelson had cleared through, a clerk chased him and produced a leaflet. “Oh—this was left for you, Mr. Azikiwe.”

The leaflet was an ad for a Winnebago. Nelson was planning to fly to Madison; he didn’t need a Winnebago. But when he looked up again, the clerk was gone.

Nelson felt a thrill of connectivity, like solving a Quizmasters puzzle. “I get it, Lobsang,” he said. And he pocketed the leaflet.

By an hour later he had rented a top-of-the-line Winnebago, with plenty of generator capacity for his tech, and a bed, a big one, just the size for him.

He drove out of the airport parking area in this home on wheels and, having no further instructions he could discern, picked a direction at random and hit the freeway. Just the experience of driving on such roads was glorious. He wondered if this, in the end, was the ultimate expression of the American dream: to be in transit, all problems left behind like discarded trash, nothing in life but follow-the-horizon movement, motion for the sake of it.

He drove west for the rest of the morning.

Then he parked up in a small town, shopped for fresh food, and logged on for a quick inspection of the latest sweepings of the online world, including the findings of his buddies in the Quizmasters. He’d had them working twenty-four/seven on his problem since he’d tantalized them with the barest hint: “Say, we have all seen that clip of the Mark Twain being towed into Madison and the girl talking about a cat that spoke Tibetan, haven’t we? Is there a clue there? But a clue about what? Looks like someone is playing with our heads…”

Given Nelson’s starting hint, the Quizmasters had been going crazy, speculating, inferring and pattern-matching. Standing in the Winnebago, making an elegant curry from fresh-bought ingredients, Nelson watched messages and tangled hypotheses flicker across his screens, and thought it all over.

When the curry was ready he largely ignored the screens. Nelson had learned to love the manners of the English past, as he’d known them in St. John on the Water, when people used to address their food; there was something about the phraseology that made the boy from the townships smile. But while he ate, he saw from the corner of his eye how the Quizmasters were beating themselves up, putting out theories at the rate of one a minute, some of them completely outlandish.

And then up came one trace that drew his attention: thanks to an oddity of TV scheduling, by hopping among various channels, starting just about now it would be possible to watch the classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind continuously for the next twenty-four hours.

He murmured, “So: Devil’s Tower, Lobsang? It’s been done before, a bit unoriginal. But I’ve never been there, I’ve always wanted to see it. I won’t ask how to find you; I rather believe you will find me…”

Nelson finished his curry and cleaned up. His sat-nav told him it was around a thousand miles north-west from Chicago to Wyoming. A dream ride in a vehicle like this. He’d take his time, he decided, and see the sights; he was nobody’s puppet.

Maybe he’d even catch one of those iterations of Close Encounters.

31

Their final fall through the soft places, the longest of all, brought Sally and Jansson to a world only a dozen steps or so from the Gap itself. Soft places transported you geographically as well as stepwise. They landed in England, the north-west, near the Irish Sea coast—a location Sally knew was close to the footprint of GapSpace, home of the new space cadets.

Monica Jansson arrived exhausted, bewildered. Sally had to help her lie down on the soft grass of this latest hillside, wrapped in a cocoon of silvery emergency blankets.

It had taken a week for them to traverse the two million worlds to the Gap through the soft places—a lot faster than any twain, but a gruelling journey even so. Sally had to scry out the soft places, using motions like a kind of tai chi. They seemed to cluster in the continental heartlands, away from the coasts. They were easier to find at dawn or sunset. Sometimes Jansson could even see them, a kind of shimmer. Weird stuff. But they would take you wherever you wanted to go, in four or five steps.