Lobsang was staring. ‘Chak pa!’
Sally looked over his shoulder. She saw that as the tremors worsened, swathes of landscape at the bottom of the hill were breaking up, almost liquefying, and the surviving forest was sinking, square-mile chunks of it vanishing from sight in clouds of dust, as if it was falling through wet cardboard. The noise was all around them now, the howling wind, the roar of the fires, the rush of huge masses on the move. She remembered the little furball living in the fig, and she hoped it had had time to enjoy its last meal, had got back to its young before the end.
Stan looked at Sally. He had to shout to make himself heard. ‘What did Lobsang say?’
She grinned, remembering a voyage through the Gap, long ago. ‘Tibetan swearing, I think. Is that right, Lobsang? Lobsang?’
Lobsang was sitting stock still, as if hypnotized.
Sally grabbed his chin, pulled his head to face her. His eyes, an old man’s rheumy eyes nested in wrinkles, were blank, vague, as if he had succumbed at last to Long Earth Syndrome. ‘Go,’ she yelled. ‘Go! Before you lose yourself. Now!’ She slapped his face as hard as she could.
‘Ow!’ He raised his hand to his cheek. Then he grinned at her. ‘Good luck, Sally Linsay. It’s been a privilege.’
His eyes rolled back, and he tumbled stiffly over, a puppet with its strings cut.
And the ground dropped from beneath her.
Not by a few feet this time. It dropped out of reach, gone. For a heartbeat she still had hold of Stan’s hand. But he was torn from her grip, and they were whirled apart.
Then she was falling in mid-air, in the smoke and the ash, as if she were a moth over a campfire. The ground below was gone altogether. Her world was three-dimensional now, with only fire under her, and gushes of steam and white-hot sprays of what must be liquid rock, and around her trees and chunks of cooler rock falling as she was, and above her clouds that boiled. She was tiny, a mote in this immensity. But she had her hat jammed on her head, her pack on her back. And she saw, in the last instant, a human figure: Stan, it must be, flying as she was, and he was waving his arms and legs, starfishing in the air.
She thought back on her life, all that had happened to her, all she had seen, all she had done. She was Sally Linsay, pioneer of the Long Earth and the Long Mars, and she’d never planned to die in her bed. What a way to finish. Falling in the hot air, she yelled in exultation—
Flame licked. The moth was consumed.
55
ON ANOTHER WORLD, under a different sky – in another universe, whose distance from the Datum, the Earth of mankind, was nevertheless counted in the mundanity of human steps – Joshua Valienté lay beside his own fire.
And he gasped, suddenly feeling hollow, as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
56
WHEN LOBSANG HAD first met Joshua, he had downloaded a node of his consciousness into a soft drinks machine. It had been a playful gesture, a practical joke. Why not pull such stunts, if you could? But Lobsang had been young then. Comparatively.
The experience of having his mind housed in this small automated spacecraft was not unlike being stuck inside that vending machine.
The satellite, launched from the long-gone Brian Cowley, was no larger than a basketball, with very limited manoeuvring and self-repair capabilities. Lobsang felt tiny, diminished, crippled. But the craft was studded with sensors, its hull glistened with lenses, and small, wispy antennas were fixed to struts extended from its flanks.
And through these lenses and sensors, Lobsang was able to witness the death throes of a world.