Sally, meanwhile, was already at work. She had dumped her pack on the ground, pulled out a kind of trenching tool, and started to dig a hole. She had always been tougher than Joshua physically, and even though he had been a poster boy for stepping for forty years, with her mastery of the soft places Sally had always been far more at home in the Long Earth than he was. But he could see that their journey had affected even her too, and she moved stiffly as she dug.
He asked, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Checking we’re not on an island.’
‘An island? I thought we came looking for Lobsang, not for islands.’
‘We are. You can make yourself useful, if you like. Go take a look at what’s over that ridge.’
‘What ridge?’
She ignored the question.
When he felt able he stood up, dropped his own pack beside Sally’s, and looked around. This shallow beach did indeed lead up to a ridge, maybe a remnant of eroded, wind-sculpted dunes.
He walked that way.
The sand under his feet was fine, almost dusty, and very dry. But it let his boots sink in with every pace, using up even more of his energy. They seemed to be well above the high water mark at least, hence the dry sand. But there was no sign of life on this beach, he noticed, no worm casts, seaweed, shells, no wading birds, no crabs working the water that pooled nearer the edge of the sea. No driftwood either, and he wondered how they were going to build a fire.
The sun was high in a milky, washed-out sky. The only sounds were the soft lap of the waves, and the scrape of Sally’s trenching tool. A lifeless world.
His legs were aching and he was panting by the time he reached the summit of the ridge. Up here he found himself looking over an almost flat, red-brown landscape, the horizontal broken by tired-looking remnants of hills on the horizon. The only colours were the pale grey-green of what looked like lichen on the rocks, and a purplish smear on the crust of a mud pool a little further inland. There wasn’t a scrap of vegetation anywhere – though he did see the grey-blue of a stream, or river, maybe half a mile away, running down to its own rendezvous with the sea. So there was fresh water to be had, at least.
In his time he’d travelled far across the Long Earth, but he’d rarely seen a less promising landscape. However, the air was free of mist, and he could see dry land all the way to the horizon in every direction. He was not on an island, unless it was a pretty gigantic one.
He returned to Sally and reported in.
‘Good,’ she said. She sat back, scraped sand from her bare arms, and swigged water from a plastic bottle. She’d dug a respectable arm’s length into the dirt. ‘And I think I dug far enough down to prove there’s no carapace lurking down there. At least the work warmed me up.’
Carapace? ‘Why are you so concerned we’re not on an island?’ After all these years Joshua still got annoyed when she was being cryptic. ‘Where are we, Sally?’
She closed her eyes. ‘I memorized the precise number. Earth West 174,827,918.’
‘Shit. A hundred and seventy-five million?’
‘That’s according to the catalogue compiled by the Armstrong II, the Navy airship that came this way more than a decade ago. Believe the number or not. Some people think the Long Earth gets – chaotic – over large enough scales, and simple numbering doesn’t work any more. Hardly matters if it does, does it? As long as you know where you’re going.’
‘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 antenna if you like, it’s a fold-up kit. I know how you boys like your gadgets …’
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 grinned; he couldn’t help it. ‘It’s just as Nelson Azikiwe described. He said Lobsang took him to see a creature like this, off the coast of New Zealand but a lot closer to home, something like seven hundred thousand worlds out.’
‘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.