The Long War (41 page)

‘This is no consolation,’ Roberta murmured, hiding her face. ‘Just mindless animal warmth.’

‘I know,’ Jacques said. ‘But it’s all we have. Try to sleep now.’

C
APTAIN
M
AGGIE
K
AUFFMAN’S
requested meeting with George Abrahams came to pass only a few days after her request of the cat, not particularly to her surprise. They arranged to rendezvous at a community further West, in a stepwise Texas, a town called Redemption – a location conveniently on the
Franklin
’s route to Valhalla, where all the Operation Prodigal Son dirigibles were now being summoned for the showdown with the Declaration-of-Independence ‘rebels’.

Redemption turned out to be quite a large settlement, and one of the more grown-up ones – the kind with a sawmill boasting a zero-fatality record on a billboard. Maggie was sure the locals would already have registered their township’s existence with the appropriate bureaux, and certainly would never have troubled the likes of the
Benjamin Franklin
. She happily ordered an R&R break for the crew, but made sure Nathan Boss had the MPs on the watch for trouble.

And then she waited. She even interrogated the cat: ‘OK, where’s Abrahams?’

The cat said softly, ‘You don’t find George Abrahams. Dr. Abrahams finds you.’

After a couple of hours there came a ping from the duty officer. A car was waiting for her by the access ramp.

It looked like a British Rolls-Royce, though curls of steam seemed to be seeping from under the hood. A man in black was standing beside an open door, with the air of a driver to the wealthy classes.

And in the car, when she climbed in, was George Abrahams. Somehow he looked bigger than she remembered, more imposing – no,
younger
, she thought.

He smiled as the car pulled away. ‘The car’s operated by the restaurant.’

‘What restaurant?’

‘You’ll see. Nice sense of style, don’t you think? Even if it is a steampunk limousine . . . Are you all right, Captain?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you seem . . . younger.’

Abrahams smiled, and whispered, ‘Well, it is all a façade, as we both know very well.’

Maggie found that faintly sinister, and it triggered something of the paranoia she seemed to be developing. Before disembarking, she’d slipped a locator into her uniform pocket, and now she was glad of it. ‘I can’t believe that you intend anything like a kidnap. I must tell you that my ship—’

‘Don’t be melodramatic, Captain. Look, we’re nearly there. It really isn’t a very big town, is it? Well, most Long Earth communities aren’t, yet. Sometimes we forget how new all this is – that Step Day was just a generation ago.’

She was relieved to find they were indeed pulling up at a restaurant. Inside, she was impressed by the decor: heavy on stone and massive timbers in the usual colony-world style, but still elegant. Obviously some budding entrepreneur had realized that even in the reaches of the Long Earth people sometimes wanted a touch of class.

And the Chardonnay was excellent.

As they sat together in a booth for two, she raised a glass, ironically. ‘So who should I be drinking to? Who are you, Mr. Abrahams? Am I having dinner with the Black Corporation?’

‘Actually, Captain Kauffman, the answer to your question is
no
– essentially. Though I do work with them and through them, I suppose – well, I told you that. I like to think of myself as working on behalf of humanity. And indeed on behalf of the troll nation, two fine species kept apart by stupidity. And that is why, Captain Kauffman, you have come to my attention, mine and that of a few others.’

She felt angry, exposed. ‘What others? Douglas Black?’

‘Certainly Douglas Black. Captain, you must think of yourself as a valued long-term investment. One of several, in fact.’

Fuming, she didn’t reply.

Abrahams said now, ‘You’ve certainly fulfilled the promise
I
saw in you.’

‘What promise? When?’

‘When they gave you command of the snazzy new
Benjamin Franklin
– despite a rather patchy official career record up to that point. Now, please don’t be offended when I tell you that I had a hidden hand in that. I can tell you now that one of the selection panel disliked your outspokenness over your family’s atheism, another even today has an antiquated view about women in senior positions . . .’

‘I can’t believe you had any influence over Admiral Davidson.’

‘Not at all. But he needed support from the panel. Well. All I can say is that, even in the depths of the Pentagon, levers can be pulled. Would you like another drink?’

‘So I’ve been manipulated.’

‘As for your handling of the trolls – did you know that you are actually featured in the long call now? “The woman who let trolls fly”. . .’

‘Manipulated,’ she repeated. ‘My whole life, my whole career, it sounds like. How am I supposed to feel about that? Grateful?’

‘Oh, not manipulated. Just – moved into the right position. It is up to you to take the opportunity offered, or not. After all, even within the parameters of your military mission, as a twain Captain you have had a great deal of autonomy. Your decisions are your own; your character is your own. You are who you are. Black, and I, and indeed Admiral Davidson, believe in giving the brightest and the best full freedom to operate. Anything else would be a betrayal.

‘Of course you are
watched
. We are all watched, in this technology-soaked age. What of that? But as to perceived “manipulation” – we, all of us, all of mankind, face enormous challenges, an unknown and unknowable future. Isn’t it better that we of good heart should work together, than not? Look, Captain Kauffman, all of this need make no difference to how you approach your work, when you go back to the ship after our conversation is over. Indeed, I would not expect it to.’

‘I can’t quit, can I?’

‘Would you, if you could?’

She left that hanging. ‘And are you going to tell me who you are?’

He seemed to think that over. ‘The question has no real meaning, my dear. Now – shall we order?’

When the limo returned her, dropping her a short distance from the
Benjamin Franklin
, she saw the reassuring outline of Carl, standing by the access ramp. As she approached he actually saluted – quite professionally, too. She was careful to acknowledge.

It was late, and there was no alarm in evidence, so after a brief diversion to the bridge she made for her cabin. The cat was curled up beside the bunk. She was actually purring in her sleep – if indeed she was sleeping at all.

George Abrahams
– not that Maggie remotely imagined that was his authentic identity.
Douglas Black
. Levers being pulled. No, strings being jerked, and Maggie Kauffman was the puppet. Well, there was little to do but accept it. That, she thought, or find a way to leverage her new ‘partnerships’ to her own advantage.

She got into bed without disturbing the cat.

L
OBSANG LOVED TO
talk – and indeed, to listen too, if you could keep up with him. In the weeks they spent crossing stepwise copies of the Pacific Ocean together, en route to New Zealand, Nelson came to understand fully that Lobsang was in a position to know
everything
that was worth knowing. He tried to imagine how the periodic synching of Lobsang’s various iterations must feel – as if, metaphorically, they all met up in some big hall somewhere, all talking at once, communicating their disparate experiences with frantic urgency.

As a result the twain ride to a stepwise New Zealand passed pleasantly enough for Nelson. He even found he was able to put aside the idea that Lobsang, and the shadowy entities behind him, saw him as a ‘valuable long-term investment’ – along with many others, he supposed, a shadowy community of tentative allies, whose very names, he imagined, he might never learn.

Still, like all journeys, this one came to an end, sixteen days after their departure from Wyoming.

Nelson had visited Datum New Zealand many times. In this remote world, some seven hundred thousand steps West of the Datum, the Land of the Long White Cloud was evidently sparsely inhabited if at all, and its green mountains, its crystal skies, were unspoiled, and a magnificent sight from the air.

Heading west, the twain drifted away from the coastline and out to sea. Finally it slowed over a small island, a shield of green and yellow on the breast of this version of the Tasman Sea.

‘So?’ Nelson asked. ‘What are we here to see?’

‘Look down,’ Lobsang’s disembodied voice advised him.

‘Something on that island?’

‘It’s not an island . . .’

Through the twain’s excellent telescopes Nelson saw forest clumps, and a fringe of what looked like beach, and animals moving – what looked like horses –
elephants
– even a dwarf giraffe? An eclectic mix . . . And, more excitingly, people, on that strange beach. The seawater near by was turbid, mildly turbulent, and evidently full of life.

And this ‘island’ had a wake.

‘It’s not an island,’ Nelson said at last. ‘It looks
alive
.’

‘You have it. A complex, compound, cooperative organism, a multiplex creature travelling north-east, as if determined to cross the Pacific . . .’

‘A living island!’ Nelson laughed, unreasonably delighted. ‘An old legend, come to pass, if it’s so. Saint Brendan, you know, crossing the Atlantic, is supposed to have landed on the back of a whale. That was the sixth century, I believe. There are similar tales in a Greek bestiary of the second century, and later in the
Arabian Nights
—’

‘And now the reality. Nelson, meet Second Person Singular.’

The grammar made Nelson wince, although he picked up the reference to the notorious discovery of the
Mark Twain
. ‘So what now?’

‘We go visit.’

‘We?’

The door to the gondola lounge deck opened, and in walked Lobsang, shaven head, orange robe – at first glance the Lobsang Nelson had met in Wyoming.

Nelson asked, ‘This is your “ambulant unit”?’

‘And fully waterproof. Come . . .’

They made their way to the stern of the ship, and the hatch through which Nelson had been winched aboard at the start of the voyage.

‘We will be perfectly safe down there by the way,’ Lobsang said now. ‘Even should you choose to go scuba diving around the rim of the carapace.’

‘Are you crazy? I’ve been in these waters before. Sharks, box jellyfish—’

‘You’d come to no harm.’ Lobsang pressed a button, and a dinghy folded itself out of a compartment, inflated, and dangled over the open hatch from a winch. ‘I’ve visited this assemblage of life many times before, and I can assure you of that. Now, come make some new friends.’

Inside five minutes they were both clambering out of the dinghy, and on to the carapace of Second Person Singular.

Not that it felt like that. It felt as if they were climbing up a sandy beach. The ‘ground’ was solid under Nelson’s feet, as if rooted deep in the rocky fabric of the Earth, like any island.

He looked around at a beach littered with sand and broken shells, clumps of forest. There was a fresh breeze; this hemisphere was emerging from its winter. He smelled salt and sand and seaweed, and a warmer, wetter scent of vegetation from the interior. The scents, the colours, the blue of the sky and sea, the green of the trees, were overwhelming, vivid. ‘It’s like Crusoe’s island.’

‘Exactly. But mobile. And – look there.’

A flap in the ground, earth underpinned by some kind of shell – yes, part of a tremendous carapace – opened up gently, like a yawning hatch, and a dozen or so humans emerged, grinning, climbing some kind of stair. Of all ages, they were naked and bronzed like athletes. A couple of children stared at Nelson.

One woman stepped forward, a red flower in her hair, still smiling, and said in good if oddly accented English, ‘Welcome. What news of home? Please mister please, if you have any tobacco, please please . . .’

Lobsang was smiling indulgently.

Nelson managed to ask, ‘Who the hell are these people?’

‘Well,’ said Lobsang, ‘since this lost beast has evidently wandered into the oceans of the Datum itself, at least several, I suspect, are descendants of the crew of the
Mary Celeste
. . .’

Whether Nelson was supposed to take that literally or not, he got the idea.

Soon he found himself sitting awkwardly in a circle of very interested, very naked people, anxious to know about what was happening back on the Datum Earth. They sat close to what looked like a hearth – the fire was set on slabs of stone, no doubt in deference to the pain receptors of the back of their host, and Nelson quietly reminded Lobsang that Saint Brendan had caused his whale-island to submerge with the sting of a carelessly lit fire . . .

The inhabitants’ language seemed to be a Creole made up of mostly European tongues, but dominated by English, and not difficult to understand. Nelson told them what he could think of about recent developments on the Datum. They smiled and listened, bland, clean-shaven, well-fed, stark naked.

For a break they were served halved coconut shells, brimming with milk.

Lobsang told Nelson that in the course of previous visits he had been able to make some direct contact with the island beast itself, it being similar in many respects to the original First Person Singular.
How
he achieved this contact he wouldn’t say. The beast carried about a hundred human passengers. Some arrived as a result of a shipwreck or similar accident – and left by dying, or waiting until the end of the beast’s ‘cycle’, as Lobsang called it, the length of time this apparently benevolent kraken took to do its rounds, when the people could disembark on some shore they might turn into a home.

But of course, as Nelson could see from the infants who sat before him staring with open curiosity, this little community was a living one. People were born here – and, presumably, some lived out their lives and died, all without ever setting foot, perhaps, off the back of this patient creature. They saw nothing strange about their itinerant home, or their way of life; it was only in discussions with Lobsang that he began to understand himself.