‘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 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.’