The Long Utopia

‘As you do, evidently. But even so, Sally, I never came remotely so far before.’

‘I know.’

‘Which is why I feel so beat up?’

‘You got it.’

‘And you think we’ll find Lobsang here?’ Meaning the ambulant unit that they had left behind on Earth West 2,000,000 plus, twenty-eight years ago, as it had departed with an entity that had called itself First Person Singular.

‘I know we will,’ she said with her usual strained patience. ‘Which is why I brought you here.’

‘Fine. So what now? I guess I could go fetch some fresh water. There’s a stream just over thataway.’

‘You do that.’

‘I don’t see any wood for a fire.’

‘The nights aren’t cold. Also there are no roaming critters to be kept away. Not on the continental land anyhow. A lean-to and our survival blankets will be enough.’

‘I guess there’s no hunting to be done. No fish to be fished from that ocean.’

She shrugged. ‘We can survive on our rations for a few days, Joshua. We could process bacterial slime if we had to. But we won’t be here long – just as long as it takes to find Lobsang – or for him to find us.’

‘And how do we go about that?’

‘It’s all in hand, Joshua.’ She reached into her pack and pulled out a small radio transmitter set. ‘Short-wave radio. Our signals will bounce around the planet. Lobsang will hear. Go fill up the water bottles. I’ll let you set up the ante

But Joshua had stopped listening.

The sea was no longer featureless. Suddenly, it seemed, there was an island, not far off shore, a shield of green and yellow on the breast of the grey water. He pointed. ‘How did I miss that?’

Sally murmured, ‘Don’t beat yourself up. It wasn’t there before.’

Belatedly Joshua thought to rummage in his pack for his binoculars.

On the island, through the glasses, he saw a suite of life quite unlike anything that characterized the mainland as far as he’d seen. Beyond a fringe of what looked like beach, there were forest clumps, and animals moving – what looked like horses, but small, almost dog-sized. Even the seawater by the shore was mildly turbulent, evidently full of life.

And this ‘island’ had a wake.

Sally was watching him. ‘You understand what you’re seeing?’

‘Sure.’ He gri

‘Lobsang called that one Second Person Singular. It was actually a lot more typical of its class of creatures than the one we encountered, the one who called herself First Person Singular. The one that liked you.’

Only because Joshua, somehow, with his odd, almost troll-like sensitivity to the presence of other minds, had been able to sense her thoughts, even across the great span of the Long Earth. Thoughts that to him had been like the clanging of some great gong, echoing from beyond the horizon: thoughts full of bafflement and loneliness. And she, in turn, it seemed, had sensed his presence too.

‘First Person Singular wasn’t normal,’ Sally said. ‘She was the one gone wrong. Hence the mutual attraction between you, no doubt. Lobsang called the class of these beasts Traversers.’

‘And this is why we came here … Sally. Something’s happening.’

All around the living island the water was bubbling, growing more turbulent. Joshua saw that its profile was diminishing, almost as if the island was collapsing on itself, and the trees that sprouted from the rocks and earth that had collected on the back of this mobile creature shook and shuddered.

‘It’s sinking,’ Joshua said.

‘Yep. Submerging again. It’s what it does. Keep watching …’

Now, Joshua saw through his binoculars, flaps opened up on the island ground – flaps of some crusty material, big, irregular, hinged by some kind of muscle, like a clam’s shell. The shy little horses bolted for the flaps and dived down through them without hesitation, disappearing from Joshua’s view into the body of the island beast. The flaps closed tight, just as the waves lapped over their position.

And then the island simply sank, its apparently rocky ‘shore’, the trees, its cargo of plants and animals, slipping under the waves until only a patch of disturbed water remained, swirling like a feeble whirlpool, with nothing but a few leaves left scattered on the water surface.

‘Just as Nelson described,’ Joshua said. ‘I hardly believed it.’

‘Now do you see why I wanted to make sure we weren’t on an island? This world is the origin, Joshua. Where the Traversers came from. Actually the Armstrong crew understood what they saw here pretty well, they’d read the accounts of the journey of the Mark Twain, and they got it about right in their reports …’

The Armstrong’s science team had observed biological complexity in this world and its neighbours. There was more than just lichen and bacterial slime here, if you looked for it. But that complexity was not expressed as on the Datum, organized into plants ranging from blades of grass up to sequoia trees, or animals from the smallest amphibians up through horses and humans and elephants and blue whales. Here the complexity was at a global level – almost. As if the evolution of life had skipped a step and gone straight from green slime to Gaia.

Here, in the lakes and oceans, compound organisms swam: each like a tremendous Portuguese man o’ war, microbial swarms linked into huge protean life forms. They were living islands. And, as the Armstrong crew had observed, those compound organisms often enveloped animals within their structures – animals, however, like the miniature horses and other creatures Joshua saw now, that were not native to this world, but had been collected from elsewhere.

‘Lobsang may understand it better by now,’ Sally said. ‘I guess he ought to, after all this time.’

‘So we’re on the home world of the Traversers. Why?’

‘Because this is where Lobsang must be. The last time we saw him, at the end of The Journey, he was disappearing into the sunset on the back of First Person Singular, the mightiest Traverser of all. Where else would he be?’

Joshua lowered his binoculars. ‘So now what?’

‘So now we set up our radio, and make ourselves comfortable, and wait. Come on, Joshua, a life alone in the High Meggers has always involved a lot of waiting around. You want to play with my ante

So they got down to pioneering, in perhaps the most desolate landscape Joshua had ever visited. ‘A world like a sensory deprivation tank,’ he told Sally after a couple of days. The only excitement came from what he thought might be glimpses of the Traverser, but they all turned out to be illusory, after that first visit, just the shadows of clouds on the grey sea.

Until their fifth day on the beach, when the Traverser returned.

And somehow Joshua was not at all surprised when those carapace flaps cracked, and after the usual horse-like creatures emerged to gambol in the sun – and deer-like creatures, and bear-like and dog-like creatures, and animals that looked like mashed-up, misshapen combinations of all these familiar forms, even things like small stegosaurs – after all of them, an ambulant unit came walking calmly up into the light, as if climbing a stair. The human-shaped machine was quite nude, a walking statue, and yet even from here Joshua could see evidence of damage: one arm was missing entirely.

‘You two,’ the unit said mildly, calling across the water. ‘Of course it would be you two.’

‘Play time’s over, Lobsang,’ Sally said, and Joshua thought there was a note of genuine sadness in her voice.