Sally tried to imagine that, tried to imagine reaching for a soft place now. Sometimes you could see them, see a shimmer in low sunlight, often at liminal places, places of borders – between water and land, perhaps, a shore, a river bank; at dawn or sunset, the border between day and night. And now, on this world, she had reached her own ultimate border, between reality and unreality, existence and non-existence. Life and death.
‘We are reaching for a soft place,’ Lobsang said, steadily, hypnotically, as if reciting a prayer. ‘Or perhaps we are creating one … A permanent soft place, a tunnel, a bypass, that will cut out this world permanently, welding together the worlds to East and West, to either side. It is almost as if we are persuading everybody who comes after us that this flawed world is not here any more, that there is nothing between the worlds to West and East.’ He closed his eyes. ‘We are changing the linkage of the Long Earth, in this one place, for ever …’
Falling.
Sally staggered. Suddenly she felt very cold, colder even than the wind’s chill, as if she had fallen through a soft place, the longest fall she’d ever known.
And Stan cried out. He released their hands and toppled back, stiff as a cut-down tree, landing on his back in the grass. He began to twitch, convulse, and spittle flecked his open mouth. Lobsang hurried to his side.
As Lobsang tended to Stan, battered by the wind, Sally tried experimentally to step out of here. She couldn’t. It was as if she were confined between two walls to either side that she could not see, walls of glass. For her, a natural stepper, it was a strange, unnatural feeling.
‘We did it, Lobsang,’ she said, wondering. ‘The Cauterizing.’
‘He did it, mostly. With your help.’
‘What does it mean, Lobsang? For the future. If Stan here is typical, and not some kind of super-powered freak. If the Next can take apart and reconstruct the Long Earth itself – what will they do with such powers?’
‘That’s no longer our concern,’ he said sternly. ‘Give me a hand here.’ He’d got Stan turned over on his side, in the recovery position, but the boy was still fitting. ‘I have a med kit in my pack. Then we’re going to need to get into shelter …’
She hurried down the hill, in search of the med kit.
53
IN THE LEE of the hill, in a sturdily constructed lean-to – a last gift of the crew of the Cowley – the three of them spent an uneasy four-hour ‘night’.
They ate, wrapped in survival blankets. None of them slept. The air felt increasingly warm, smoky, ash-laden, like the air of the Datum just after Yellowstone, Sally thought. And the noise was continuous now, the rush of the wind, a rolling thunder, like the sound of distant artillery.
Stan recovered quickly from his fit, especially once Lobsang/George had administered a bowl of Agnes’s chicken soup. He chose not to describe what had gone on in his head at the moment of the Cauterizing, and the others didn’t press him. Another issue, Sally thought, for a future none of them was going to see.
The morning came with a dawn as abrupt as a thrown switch.
That and a savage earth tremor, a drop that felt like they were on some vast elevator that had just slipped its cable a couple of feet, Sally thought.
The Cowley crew had left a small science station. Lobsang consulted this as they drank coffee from a flask.
‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘“Today” will be less than six hours long, day and night. The rotational energy of this Earth has roughly doubled in the last twelve hours. You have to hand it to those beetles. It took them a long time to build this vast machine, this interplanetary motor. But now that it’s up and running, energy and momentum are just pouring down from the sky. And here’s what it’s doing.’ He opened a tablet which showed a mosaic of global images, taken from space. ‘These are coming from the small satellites the Cowley crew put into orbit, before they left …’
Sally looked closer to see. Under its new latitudinal bands of cloud, the face of this Earth in outline was much as it had always been, the school-atlas shapes of the continents, the blue-grey of the oceans. But a network of jagged red lines spread over the interior of the continents, and glowed under the oceans, although thick banks of steam obscured much of the view over the water. ‘It’s like a bowl full of lava, that somebody dropped on the floor and cracked.’
‘That’s not a bad analogy,’ Lobsang said. His finger traced the glowing flaws scribbled across the face of North America. ‘The planet’s crust is just a fine shell around a ball of liquid rock and metal. Now that shell is breaking open. You can see the boundaries between geological provinces, faults opening up – cracks between the tectonic plates.’ He pointed to a livid blemish in the west. ‘That is the local Yellowstone; it went up at last. But soon even the continental plates themselves will start to crumble. They must. The planet’s deformation has become so severe that at the equator the mantle itself is rising to the surface now.’ He rubbed his face. ‘We may not see it all. All the crap that’s pouring into the air – why, the volcanic debris alone may block radio signals from the satellites.’