‘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 antenna kit, or not?’
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.
44
HE SAT WITH them, in their rough camp on the desolate beach. He even accepted a share of their rations. Sally handed him chocolate, and a tin mug of coffee brewed on their small solar-powered stove.
‘Mm, chocolate,’ he said, biting into a bar he held in his left hand. His right arm was missing from the shoulder. ‘You know me, Joshua. I always did relish my food. At least this version of me; I can’t speak of my subsequent iterations, and it has been twenty-eight years since I last participated in a synching. Even during the voyage of the Mark Twain—’
‘Clam chowder and oysters Kilpatrick,’ Joshua said.
Sally snorted. ‘The good old days in the Bluesmobile. After thirty years apart, you two haven’t changed.’
Lobsang said, ‘These days, mostly I draw my energy directly from the sunlight.’ He stood and turned, and Joshua saw a silvery panel glisten on his back, reaching down to the top of his buttocks: a solar-cell array. ‘I bask like a plant.’
There had been other modifications, Joshua had the chance to see now, aside from that missing arm. The naked body was quite hairless, lacking even eyebrows. In places the skin seemed to have been patched; Joshua saw no seams, but there were swathes of a subtly different shade from the general pale brown tan. And the genitalia had gone, to be replaced by a rather gruesome metallic plug in the groin: a simple release valve, it seemed.
Lobsang said, ‘I do need solid sustenance, of course. Organic biochemistry to support my gel substrate. I can consume bacterial scrapes, algae. Some of the Traversers on this world bear fruit trees, even root plants. And at times the Traversers allow me to consume the flesh of their deceased animal specimens, if it is suitable – if the death is the result of an accident, perhaps, if the meat is not corrupted.’
Joshua said, ‘Bacon?’
‘On good days.’
Sally said, ‘Lobsang, your arm …’
Joshua said, ‘Yeah. But it’s not his missing arm that’s drawing my attention.’
Lobsang grinned. ‘Makes you wince, does it, Joshua?’ He reached down to his groin and casually pulled out the plug.
Joshua felt a sympathetic twinge in his own groin. ‘Please.’
‘I had suffered damage in the course of our journey, you’ll recall. Notably when we fell into the Gap. And in the years after you left me with First Person Singular, time took its toll; this unit was never meant to be able to sustain itself without workshop maintenance, not for a period of decades. I sacrificed the arm, and other organs,’ he said, winking at Joshua, ‘for spare parts. I doubt I could pass as a human again. But then, I did not imagine I would ever need to.’
‘Well, I’m glad you survived,’ Joshua said.
‘Me too,’ Sally said grudgingly. ‘Though not surprised.’
‘Thank you for your good wishes. And now you come seeking me out.’
‘Lobsang asked us to,’ Joshua said. ‘I mean the one who replaced you, who assembled himself from the iterations, the backups you left behind.’
‘There’s much I can deduce, by your very presence. Something has happened.’
Joshua said gently, ‘You could say that.’
‘Are the odds against us? Is the situation grim?’
‘You could put it like that,’ Sally said. ‘Although that sounds like a line from a movie. You two will never grow up, will you?’
Joshua dug in his pocket, and produced a memory pod, a small capsule. ‘He – Lobsang – gave me this. He says it contains the briefing you’ll need.’
Lobsang nodded, his eyes closed. ‘I will come with you nonetheless, of course, regardless of the contents of the briefing; I must trust my own judgement – his judgement.’ He glanced at Sally. ‘You travelled through a soft-place network?’
‘Of course. And we’ll go back that way, if you can take it.’
‘I don’t have a choice, do I? Can you give me a few hours, before we leave? After so long – it will take me some time to say goodbye to my life here. I have learned a lot, of course, but there is much I’ve yet to understand. The Traversers evolved here, in this band of worlds, but they roam the Long Earth, though few seem to come as far as the Datum.’
‘Some sure do,’ Joshua said with a grin. And he told Lobsang how a later edition of himself had found a Traverser, which that Lobsang had called Second Person Singular, which seemed to have wandered so far down the Long Earth that it may even have strayed into the oceans of the Datum itself – for it had collected people.