Stan looked around. ‘Top of the hill?’
Lobsang smiled. ‘Where my home is, or was, what’s left of it. Suits me, so long as we don’t get blown off.’
The climb up Manning Hill wasn’t steep, but difficult in a wind that hit them harder the more exposed they were. At the summit, Sally could see the foundations of the Abrahams house, the pits they had dug for sewage and storage, the lines of postholes outlining abandoned fields. But little was left of the farmstead but scattered debris, wind-smashed, the labour of years erased.
Looking down from here, Sally could still see the basic layout of the landscape Lobsang and Agnes had lived in, the forest, the creek that had drawn the settlers to this place. But now the creek was brown, turbid with washed-down mud, and the forest was dying back, scarred by fires, battered by the wind, wrecked by the touchdown of twisters. Hundred-year-old trunks lay scattered like spilled matchsticks.
And already the sun was setting behind the racing clouds, another of this world’s truncated days coming to an end.
She grabbed her companions’ hands firmly. The three of them stood close together, holding hands in a ring, face to face on this desolate hill, resisting the gusty wind. They had to shout to make themselves heard.
Lobsang said, ‘When shall we three meet again?’
Sally grinned. ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’
‘When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won …’ Stan blinked a squall of rain out of his eyes. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We had good schools in Miami West 4. It wasn’t all stalk jack engineering.’
‘Well, the quote’s apt given the weather,’ Lobsang said. ‘And it is a battle. A battle we already lost. But maybe we can win the war, the war for the Long Earth, with this single strike.’ He looked in their faces. ‘Just so we’re all on the same song sheet: the projections of the spin-up have been uncertain for a while. In the last few days the rate of energy increase has gone super-exponential. Hard to model, to predict. We told our families we might have weeks left. But that was for their comfort, yes?’
Stan nodded. ‘I know. What’s the latest guess?’
‘Not weeks. Hours. A couple of local days, if we’re lucky.’
‘It makes no difference,’ Stan said, with an authority that belied his years. ‘But we need to get the Cauterizing done before we run out of time.’
Sally squeezed his hand harder. ‘So how do we do it, Lobsang?’
‘Stella Welch and I have gone through it … Let’s be clear where we are. This world has become, presumably by some higher-dimensional accident, a point of intersection of our Long Earth, our chain of worlds, with another chain. Another Long world. A chain to which the world we call the Planetarium belongs.’
Stan said, ‘Like two necklaces crossing. Tangling up.’
‘That’s it. Visualize that. It’s important that you visualize … Step along one axis, East or West, and you follow the track of the Long Earth. Step another way, North or South, and you follow the Long Planetarium, as the beetles seem to have done. So the connectivity of the Long Earth is unusual here. Broken. What we want to do now is change that connectivity, make it the way we want it. Visualize it. Imagine what you’re going to do, Stan …’
Stan closed his eyes. ‘You could pinch the necklace of worlds, the Long Earth. Knot the thread so one pearl is cut out of the chain, the pearl that’s tangled up with the Planetarium necklace. Detach this world from the Long Earth necklace completely …’
‘Yes. Think about that. A simple repair job. Picture it. You too, Sally. Stepping has always been a mental faculty. Even the act of creating a Stepper box is a kind of mandala, a kind of autohypnosis, a way to unlock a potential in us that already exists. To step is a feat of the imagination – one must be able to visualize another world, in a sense, in sufficient detail, to reach it. A very fine description – so fine that the description becomes the object, just as quantum physics is essentially about information—’
‘Lobsang,’ Sally warned. ‘Less of the techno-babble.’
‘Yes, yes. I apologize. But you must see that to talk this through is an essential part of the process. For you, Sally, it is like reaching for a soft place. A different kind of flaw in our own Long Earth’s connectivity, where the loop of worlds crosses over itself. I’ve seen you search for such places. You look inwards as much as outwards. You position your body …’