‘Nelson Azikiwe?’
‘Another of my friends, Joshua. Actually you met him in my reserve in Low Earth Madison on the day of the eruption. I’d like you to link up with him, in fact.’
Joshua didn’t respond to that. For ‘friends’ read ‘assets’. Sometimes he felt as much a ‘friend’ to Lobsang as a chessboard pawn would to a grandmaster. Even so, ultimately he’d probably find himself doing what Lobsang asked.
‘The politics of the Datum Earth has been dramatically reconfigured,’ Lobsang said now. ‘The new powerhouse nations are Southern Europe, North Africa, India, south-east Asia, southern China – even Mexico, and Brazil which is exploiting the final dieback of the rainforest to open up Amazonia to agriculture and mining. There is much jockeying for position in the new order, as you can imagine. China is somewhat disconnected from its stepwise footprints, compared to America and its Aegis, but on the Datum the Chinese are very strong.’
‘Good luck to them.’
‘But Datum America is prostrate. Not that this concerns you overmuch, I imagine, out in your homestead at Hell-Knows-Where.’
Joshua scowled. ‘You know damn well that I don’t live there any more, Lobsang. I haven’t even been back there in months. You had to send out Bill Chambers to fetch me back from my latest sabbatical, didn’t you?’
‘I had hoped that you might have been able to come to some reconciliation with Helen.’
‘Then you don’t know Helen. I guess all the time I spent back here at the Datum after Yellowstone was the final straw – even though she knew it was the right thing to do. I could never get the balance right, not for her, between home, and—’
‘And the call of the Long Earth. The two sides of your nature.’
‘Something like that.’
‘And Dan?’
‘Oh, I see him as much as I can. Fine kid – thirteen years old, and already taller than me.’
‘And yet your sabbaticals still draw you away . . . How’s your hand, by the way?’
Joshua lifted his prosthetic left hand to his throat, pretended to choke himself, and pretended to fight it off. ‘It has good days and bad days.’
‘I could get you something far better, you know.’
‘With you inside? No offence, Lobsang – but no.’ He held out his mug. ‘Have we run out of coffee already?’
The airship travelled at a leisurely pace. It took until evening before they were over Idaho Falls, maybe eighty miles from the caldera. Here Lobsang said they would stop for the night.
At Joshua’s request Lobsang lowered the ship so they could climb down to the ground, briefly escaping from the heated air of the gondola, although Lobsang insisted they should return to the airship before dark: ‘A lot of bandits out here nowadays, Joshua.’
With Lobsang at his side, Joshua walked around experimentally on a road surface choked with ice and ash drifts, and peppered with boulders of pumice so massive it was hard to believe that any force could propel them eighty yards through the air, let alone eighty miles. The air was bitterly cold, attacking his cheeks and nose and forehead, any part of him that was left exposed by the layers of his cold-weather gear.
He came to a stream, flowing sluggishly. The water was grey with ash, and the tree trunks by the banks were grey-brown. The scene was eerie, the light coppery as the sun went down. And the world was silent. There had been no traffic on the interstate for many miles, but nature was subdued here too; Joshua heard not so much as a bird call, as he inspected the spindly trunks of dead pine trees.
‘Kind of quiet,’ he said to Lobsang.
The ambulant unit was kitted out in Arctic gear as he was. Its breath, evidently heated and kept moist by some internal mechanism, steamed quite convincingly, a touch of verisimilitude. ‘The world is quieter still for me. So many communications nodes and networks have failed or been abandoned. To me, Joshua, it is as if the world is becoming Thulcandra.’
Joshua knew the reference. ‘The silent planet. Why did you bring me here, Lobsang?’
‘How’s your headache?’
‘Of course you’d know about that. If you want to know, it’s worse than ever. I mean, I usually feel uncomfortable when I’m at the Datum, or close to it, but this is worse . . .’ He tailed off, glancing around. He thought he had heard something, breaking the deadened silence. A furtive scuffling. A wolf, starving in this frozen wilderness? A bear? A human, some kind of bandit, as Lobsang had warned him?
Lobsang seemed unaware. ‘But this is different, yes? Your headache. You must have a sense that something about the Datum has changed.’
Joshua grunted. ‘And so do you, right? You’ve got evidence, haven’t you? Evidence of something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me back.’
‘Indeed. Evidence of something – well put. Something elusive and difficult to define, yet nevertheless apparent to me, who, despite my post-volcano handicap, still spans the world like a disembodied bardo spirit—’
‘Like a what?’
‘Never mind. Something real, Joshua. Look – you know me. If nothing else I am a keen student of the folly of mankind, which at times has seemed almost terminal.’
‘As we’ve discussed many times,’ Joshua said dryly.
‘Well, now something has changed. The aftermath of Yellowstone seems to have triggered it. People have responded well or badly. But amid the heroism and cowardice, the generosity and the venality, if you take a global view – and I am scarcely capable of less – it seems to me that humanity’s response to Yellowstone has been characterized by a startling outbreak of what Sister Agnes once described as common sense.’
And, just as he uttered those words, a figure in an orange jumpsuit, barefoot, with shaven head, materialized out of thin air, already in the middle of a flying leap. ‘HAAARRRGGH!’
‘Not now, Cho-je!—’
But Lobsang’s words were cut off as the newcomer wrapped his legs tight around Lobsang’s neck. Lobsang was forced to the frozen ground – but as he fell he stepped away, disappearing, leaving the newcomer rolling alone in the dirty ice, ash staining his orange jumpsuit.
Joshua carried a gun, bronze, steppable. He always carried a gun. Before the guy could stir Joshua had the weapon out in front of him, held two-handed, legs wide. ‘I knew I heard something tracking us. Don’t move, grasshopper.’
But Lobsang appeared at his side, breathing hard, his robe ripped at the neck. ‘It’s all right, Joshua. I’m under no real threat. This is just—’
‘HYY-AAGH!’ The guy on the ground did a kind of back flip, and once more launched himself through the air at Lobsang. But Lobsang dipped into his own forward roll, and the newcomer was sent flying. This time it was the assailant who stepped away, before he hit the ground.
Lobsang straightened up, breathing hard. ‘It’s one of Agnes’s ideas. You see—’
‘NYA-HAAH!’ Now the assailant, Cho-je, came back into the world above Lobsang’s head, with his fists clamped together and ready to slam down on Lobsang’s crown. But Lobsang ducked, whirled, and caught him with a kick in the stomach – and again Cho-je disappeared.
Joshua gave up. He holstered his weapon, stood back, and watched the fight. It was a blur of kicks, punches, even head-butts that rained in with hard, meat-slapping impacts, and of stepping, as the two figures popped in and out of existence, each trying to get the down on the other. During his travels with Lobsang Joshua had watched plenty of Jackie Chan movies. And out in the Long Earth he had been involved in his own battles with elves, stepping humanoids honed by the hunt, who could cross between the worlds with such precision that they could materialize alongside you with their hands already in position to close around your throat. This was something like all of that, he thought, hastily mashed together, a high-speed blur of action that was all but impossible to follow.
‘HEE-ARR-AARGH!’
‘Cho-je, you fool!—’
It ended when Lobsang grabbed Cho-je’s left hand, as if to shake it, and, holding on hard, execut
ed a standing somersault. When it was done he was still holding the hand, which had been ripped off at the wrist. Cho-je, bemused, breathing hard, looked at the stump of his arm; Joshua saw LEDs spark amid a whitish fluid that dripped to the ground.
Cho-je bowed to Lobsang. ‘Nice work! Good to see Sister Agnes’s care has not softened you up!’
‘On the contrary,’ Lobsang said. ‘Until we meet again.’
‘Until then. If I may have my detached extremity . . .’ Lobsang gave him back the severed hand, and Cho-je snapped out of existence.
‘So, Lobsang – Cho-je?’
Lobsang was sweating, quite convincingly. ‘As I said, Agnes’s idea. She has the notion that I’m too powerful. I need challenges, she says. So I endure an endless routine of toughening up and training. Actually, Joshua, Agnes got the idea for Cho-je from my account of our sparring matches during our voyage on the Mark Twain. I do derive enormous benefit in terms of ambulant body control from such exercises, and Cho-je is an increasingly ingenious opponent. By the way, in addition to this training partner, she also recruited another, one of the past inmates from the Home, a rather reclusive young man who has devoted his life to launching ingenious computer-virus attacks on me.’
‘Viruses, huh?’
They began to walk back to the twain. ‘Viruses are a worse threat to me than any physical violence, no matter how many backups I create. Any synching between my iterations at all leaves me open to a potentially lethal attack. I’m thinking of installing at least one entirely non-electronic backup.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, a few hundred monks in a scriptorium somewhere, endlessly copying my thoughts from one bound paper volume to another. A scriptorium on the moon maybe.’
‘One thing has definitely changed about you, Lobsang. Your jokes are no better. But at least now I can tell they are jokes.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘And to think that just as this incident with Cho-je occurred you were about to lecture me on “common sense”.’
‘We can continue that discussion in the morning. The twain is relatively spartan but quite comfortable, I think you’ll find.’
‘Any good movies?’
‘Of course. Your choice. But nothing with singing nuns in, if you don’t mind . . .’
9
IN THE MORNING they ate breakfast in near silence, and flew on. Rather than make straight for the caldera Lobsang at first skirted it to the west, following the line of what remained of a south-to-north highway. As they edged closer to the caldera, the increasing thickness of ash began to overwhelm the landscape as it had existed before the eruption. They were entering a true volcanic province, Joshua thought, like a fragment of an alien world brought down to the Earth.
‘The civilization of Datum Earth will never recover,’ Lobsang murmured, as they peered down at the strange landscape.
Joshua grunted. ‘That seems a tough conclusion to come to. It’s only been a few years . . .’
‘But think about it. We’d already used up all the easily accessible ore, the oil, much of the coal. And the world was already suffering tremendous climate disruption because of all the industrial gases we spewed into the air. When Yellowstone’s effects finally fade, the best guess for the future is widespread instability, as the world seeks a new equilibrium after two massive environmental shocks, one human-induced, one volcanic.’
‘Hmm. So is this why there’s talk of rewilding?’
The idea was, when the winter finally receded from the Datum Earth, why not take the chance to heal the world? All the species that had been driven to extinction on the Datum still prospered in the neighbouring worlds (though once again, Joshua knew, on some of the Low Earths many of those creatures were already in trouble). So, in North America, you could bring back the mammoth and the wild horse and the bison and the musk ox, and the seals in the rivers and the whales in the oceans – just step specimens over, as infants perhaps, to the Datum. Similarly you could let the landscapes and seas recover to their natural state.
‘It’s a romantic idea,’ Lobsang said. ‘Of course there’s a great deal of work to do before the Datum is even safe.’
‘Such as, decommissioning nuclear power plants?’
‘And waiting for dams to fail, for drained wetlands to flood . . . It will take decades, centuries, for pollutants like heavy metals and radioactive waste to be reduced to safe levels. Even then, where we have driven roads or dug mines into the bedrock, the mark of mankind will linger for millions of years.’
‘Makes you proud.’
‘If you say so, Joshua. However, an effort to heal this world using the riches of its stepwise siblings seems a noble ambition, whatever the limitations in practice.’
At last, to the north of Yellowstone itself, they paused over what had once been a township. Little remained but a few scattered traces of foundations, the hint of a grid of streets protruding from the ash; much of the rest was buried completely.
Joshua checked a map display; in cheerful white, green and yellow, with finely drawn state and county lines, it displayed the vanished human landscape as it had once been. ‘This is Bozeman.’
‘Yes. Or was. I thought you’d like to see this, Joshua. I saw from the records that you and Sally went in here on the final day of the eruption itself, when the caldera collapsed. Stepping into danger, seeking to save lives at the risk of your own evanescent existence.’
‘We weren’t the only ones,’ Joshua said without emotion.
The twain dipped in the air, skimming over ground choked by an unknowable thickness of ash and pumice.
‘We are still perhaps fifty miles from the caldera,’ Lobsang said. ‘But this place like many others was caught by the final pyroclastic flow. The eruption ceased when the caldera chamber was empty of magma. The tower of smoke and ash in the air over the volcano abruptly collapsed, and superhot rock fragments came washing out across the landscape at the speed of sound, burying everything for tens of miles around.’
Joshua had been there; he remembered.
‘Now Bozeman, Idaho, is at one with Pompeii. It will take years for the ash fall even to cool, let alone for the land to be reclaimed by humans.’
‘Yet something’s growing down there,’ Joshua said. Peering down, he pointed out scraps of green.
Lobsang was silent a moment; Joshua imagined his artificial senses trained on the ground below. ‘Yes. Lichen. Moss. Even lodgepole pines. Just saplings, but still – the resilience of life.’
The twain turned its nose and headed south, towards the caldera itself.
‘So, Lobsang. Yesterday you told me you were disturbed by a plague of common sense breaking out across the planet? It would be a first, I grant you.’
‘I can give you examples . . .’
The screens in the deck flashed up with brief video snips of tales from across the US during the days and years of the Yellowstone disaster:
One little kid in a first-school classroom in Colorado, his teachers having succumbed to an ash infall, quietly organizing his hysterical classmates and walking them out of the building in a line, heads wrapped in wet towels, hands on the shoulders of the person in front.
A young teenager stuck with her grandparents in a care home in Idaho, full of old folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t step, calmly working out rotas of food sharing and mutual care.
A well-off family in Montana, the mother refusing to leave their home with her surviving children because of one little girl lost, and obviously killed, in the wreckage of an ash-crushed conservatory – her husband going crazy with fear and refusing to stay to dig out the wreck – and an au pair, a girl no more than seventeen years old, organizing the family to dig out the lost one and carry out the body, as that was the only way to persuade the mother to move and save the rest.
Joshua remembered stories he’d heard himself, one from Bozeman in fact, an account of a ‘sensible young lady’ who had come around with dazzlingly smart advice on how to sur
vive the eruption.
‘These anecdotes all involve very young people,’ he observed. ‘If not children.’
‘Indeed. And you’ll note that their exploits are not characterized by heroism, or great feats of endurance, or whatever. Instead they are calm, and full of wise leadership – certainly wise for their age. Good judgement, whose value is evident enough even for the adults around them. And a certain cold rationality. They are able to set aside the kind of illusion that comforts but baffles the regular human mind. Consider the woman in Montana with the dead child. She couldn’t accept the death. The au pair not only accepted it; she accepted she wasn’t going to be able to persuade the mother otherwise, and came up with a strategy to save the family taking that bit of psychology into account.’
‘Hmm.’ Joshua studied the ambulant’s inexpressive face. ‘What are you suggesting, Lobsang? You’ve talked about this before. Are we seeing the emergence of some kind of smarter breed? True Homo sapiens, you’ve always called them – as opposed to regular mankind, a bunch of apes who call ourselves wise . . .’
‘Well, it looks that way. If you are prepared to build a mountain of hypothesis on a raft of a few observations.’
But Lobsang, Joshua suspected, would have more behind his argument than a few scattered fragments of evidence like this. ‘So how is this happening? And why now?’
‘I suspect those two questions may be linked. There may be some – incubator, somewhere out in the Long Earth. Only now, you see, with the advent of widespread stepping, have the products of such an incubator been able to reach the Datum. And perhaps we are seeing the emergence of this new quality under stress. Some gene complex suddenly expressing itself, under the pressure caused by the huge dislocation after Yellowstone. That would explain why we see this now, you see. And then there’s you, Joshua.’
‘Me?’
‘Your headaches. This odd psi sense you seem to have for the presence of an unusual kind of mind – and a powerful one. If I screwed a lightbulb in your ear I suspect it would start flashing a red alert.’
‘Nice image. Something new in the world, or the worlds, then. And something I’m sensitive to, like I was sensitive to First Person Singular.’
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