Sam was twenty-nine years old, almost as dark as his father, naked to the waist and looking as fit as a decathlete. Now he squinted up in the air. ‘Your ship moving. Knows storm coming.’ He pointed north.
‘The storm is coming . . . Never mind.’ Since he’d arrived at the island, Nelson had learned that as he’d grown up Sam had always been made aware by his mother, an island-born woman called Cassie, that his father was not one of the other men of the island, but had been the ‘han’some clever fella’ who had visited all those years ago, and, only once, had walked into the jungle with her . . . Cassie had done her best, with the limited resources available to her, to give Sam enough of an education that he would be able to converse with his father when Nelson returned, as Cassie always had faith that he would. She’d done a good job, and it wasn’t Nelson’s place to pick holes in the young man’s grammar. And besides, Sam’s native language was a perfectly respectable creole, dominated by English but laced with many other tongues. It was Nelson’s failing that he couldn’t speak the local language, not the other way around.
Now Sam pointed, scanning his finger along the northern horizon. ‘See. Black smudge?’
‘It seems so far away. Harmless.’
‘Far, not harmless, here soon. Sky ship turn to face wind?’
‘If it needs to it will fly up above the weather . . . Do we have to shelter?’
‘Oh, island look after us, no worries.’
And Sam meant that literally. Sitting here on this authentic-seeming beach, with the island under Nelson feeling every bit as solid as its geological counterparts, it was almost impossible to believe that the island was no island, no inanimate lump of coral or rock, but a living thing, evidently sentient to some degree, and capable of caring for the cargo of living creatures that dwelt on its back – including generations of human beings. Yet you only had to be here for a few days to observe for yourself that that was true.
He was maundering again. Sam was watching him patiently.
‘I’m sorry, Sam. Off with the fairies.’
‘Show you.’
‘Yes?’
Sam reached into the pocket of his trousers, an elderly pair of jeans long faded to blue-white. He produced a small figurine and passed it to Nelson.
Nelson cradled it, turned it over. It was a slim form carved in ivory – well, there were dwarf elephants, even mammoths, on this island, and when they died they would bequeath plenty of ivory for such purposes. The limbs were mere suggestive scratches, but the face was a more detailed cartoon. And there was a splash of some red pigment in the hair.
Nelson felt a warm shock of recognition. ‘Cassie. And she’s smiling.’
‘Yes.’
‘She always did wear red flowers in her hair, I remember that.’ It was as if Nelson was back in his study when that avatar of Lobsang had first broken the news to him about his distant family. He was a very old man, he thought, suddenly subject to the most intense emotional experience of his life. ‘I never meant it to happen, you know.’ He glanced at Sam. He felt ridiculously embarrassed to be discussing such matters as his son’s conception with the man himself.
‘Mother say she meant it. As soon as you show up—’
‘Yes, yes, all right. And I was being pushed from the other direction too.’
‘By friend Lobsang? I know story.’
‘That’s him. He implied it was almost my duty to get someone impregnated, as a donation to the gene pool of the island’s human population. Ha! Well, in the end . . . It was love, Sam. Brief as it was, a singular moment as it was. Can you believe that?’
‘Mother say so, always.’
‘Despite Lobsang banging on about gene pools, somehow I never really imagined that anything would come of it – that she actually would get pregnant. That you might exist. Let alone little Troy! Simply beyond my imagination. I suppose you can blame half a lifetime in the Church of England for that. If I’d known, I would have come back.’
‘No.’ Sam took back the ivory piece and held it tenderly. ‘Mother know. Your life far from here. I was gift from you, she said, and later little Troy. Father, when people die here, not bury dead like England.’ He got the pronunciation slightly wrong – Ann-GLAND. Nelson did not correct him. ‘We come from island. We return to island. Chambers, full of living things – green and pink – there we lay dead.’
Nelson imagined vats of life deep within the island’s carcass, dissolving the corpses of its passengers – humans, yes, and presumably the other animals that inhabited its surface. ‘It seems appropriate,’ he said gently.
‘We keep nothing of dead,’ Sam said. ‘Not like you speak. No ashes. No stones on island – wash away! Instead, markers. In chamber deep in island.’ He looked down at the little figurine. ‘This hers.’
‘I would like to see that.’ This travelling island had been sailing its stepwise oceans for centuries, at least. That chamber of the dead must be full of little statuettes like this, rows of sketchy figures and smiling faces, the most antique peering out of deep generations. ‘You know, I was older than your mother, by a considerable margin. I did not expect to outlive her.’
‘She die forty-seven year old. A good age! Old go away smiling, make room for lots more babies.’
‘Like little Troy.’
‘Like Troy.’ Sam took his father’s hand, his strong brown fingers wrapped over Nelson’s rougher, liver-spotted flesh. ‘My mother saw grandson, happy and healthy. What more want?’
And there was a deep booming noise, rich, resonant. Like a thousand bass-voiced monks chanting. It seemed to come from within the island.
‘What in Jupiter was that?’
Sam stood, and carefully tucked the figurine of Cassie back into his pocket. ‘Island call. Come on.’
Nelson stood, stiff after sitting too long on the sand. The booming continued, and he thought he could feel it through his feet, the island’s fake ground itself vibrating. And he saw that the storm was a black mass of cloud now, piling up in the sky, the uppermost clouds streaming. Soon the clouds would blot out the sun. He blinked up at the sky, looking for the twain, but it was already out of sight.
Sam took hold of Nelson’s hand again as they walked slowly up the beach.
Nelson saw that the great lids were already opening, ridged discs hinging up on tremendous muscles like the opening of giant oysters or clams: slabs of the chitinous carapace that underpinned the surface carpet of rocks and dirt and living things. Within the openings revealed, Nelson could see rough ramps leading down into chambers that glowed softly with a deep-blue underwater light.
And from all over the island, people were coming, men, women and children – some babies in arms, a few very old, and nobody as old as Nelson himself – all of them making their peaceful way down the ramps and into the island’s interior. There was no sign of fear or panic. The adults chatted as they marched down the ramp and into the gloom. Older children ran around their legs, shouting, their voices echoing as they swarmed down into the cavernous inner chambers. People seemed happy, excited by this break from the routine.
Nelson shook his head. ‘They’re like a crowd at a Christmas sale. Or the way Christmas sales used to be . . .’
‘What, Father?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Down ramp before animals come. And before storm . . .’
Over Nelson’s head, the clouds covered the sun; it grew suddenly dark, distinctly colder. And Nelson heard a shrill trumpeting sound. The mammoths were coming! Nelson felt a deep visceral thrill.
He let his son lead him down the ramp.
21
‘SLOW DOWN, TROY! I’m not as young as I was . . .’
But the ten-year-old, slim, lithe, wearing only a kind of loincloth, was an explosion of energy. ‘Come on, Granddad! Fun come see horses spinies elephants!’ And, holding Nelson’s hand, he tried to haul him deeper into the Traverser’s innards.
‘Now, Troy, gentle with Granddad.’
Troy’s mother was
called Lucille. As far as Nelson could tell she was a permanent partner for Sam. It obscurely pleased him that Troy was growing up with at least a semblance of a normal family around him, that he knew who his mother and father were. Not that Nelson was judgemental about such things. After all, it had struck him the first time he visited the island with Lobsang that in such a small community, relationships were necessarily going to be flexible, moral judgements pragmatic.
Now Lucille, short and pretty, was quietly admonishing her son. ‘Besides, under-under, quiet! Look at other children. Little Moll, Rosita, Parker, quiet under-under, good as gold . . .’
They were all in a chamber of a very organic kind, with smooth, curving, enclosing walls, moulded – no, grown – into complicated shapes. It was like being inside some vast sea shell. Nelson was a big man. He towered over these compact islanders, and he had to duck to avoid thumping his head. But the chamber was surprisingly roomy.
And the light from overhead, coming through layers of translucent Traverser carapace and filtered through seawater, was a bright, oceanic blue-green. They had indeed submerged.
He briefly wondered about insects: flies, spiders, ants, termites. It was hard to imagine them trooping two by two into the Traverser’s natural holds, yet such creatures were necessary for any functioning ecology. He imagined they had evolved their own ways to survive these periodic inundations.
Meanwhile those taken into the Traverser’s great belly were safe. He looked around the chamber, where the people milled around, set out blankets, talked quietly. Among other vocations Nelson had once been an engineer, of software at least, and he tried to think that way now. How did the Traverser work? This dry, air-filled room must serve as a buoyancy chamber, doubling as an airtight shelter for the animal inhabitants – and the people. The air smelled fresh enough, though there was an odd, salty, organic tang to it, like seaweed maybe. He wondered how long the air would last, in fact. Probably a good while; the island, a mile long, must be riddled with air-filled chambers like this to be able to float at all. And maybe, he mused, the Traverser had some ingenious way to replenish the air it stored.
And now, it seemed, his grandson was determined to be his guide on a tour of some of those chambers.
‘Oh, Troy, leave poor Granddad alone!’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Nelson said, lowering his voice to the soft level that seemed to be assumed by everybody else in here, underwater, under-under. ‘I’m glad of a chance to see all this. Don’t worry, I won’t let him wear me out.’
‘Well, all right. Just this once. No tread on good boys and girls nappin’ like supposed to.’
‘Won’t. Come on, Granddad . . .’
They made their cautious way across the chamber’s uneven floor, stepping over people with smiles and apologies. As Lucille had said, the drill seemed to be for people to settle down in little family groups, sitting, lying down, talking softly. Some of the children were napping, curled up with each other or against their parents. Others were playing quiet games with shells and beads and boards scratched on to sheets of what looked like eucalyptus bark.
‘Makes sense,’ Nelson whispered to Troy.
‘What, Granddad?’
‘For everybody to be sitting still and sleeping. Makes the air last longer.’
Troy looked puzzled, but Nelson was pleased that he seemed to be trying to figure that remark out, rather than dismissing it or arguing about it.
Nelson supposed most of the island’s human population must be gathered in this one place. In the gloom it was hard to count heads, but he estimated there must be about a hundred. There couldn’t be many less to provide a population genetically diverse enough to stay stable across the generations – a diversity aided by the occasional injection of genes from outside, like his own, he reflected with some embarrassment.
On the other hand there wasn’t room for many more. As far as Nelson could gather the people practised abstinence, or used non-penetrative sex or withdrawal methods, and it seemed there were various contraceptive treatments available from the island flora. None of these methods was accident-proof, of course, but overall the people seemed to be able to keep their numbers in reasonable balance. Nelson had wondered (but hadn’t enquired) if, in the course of surviving booms and crashes and food shortages in the past, they’d learned the hard way how to keep the population size down. Certainly having a short life expectancy helped, as Sam had observed: the old vanished gracefully, leaving room for the young.
Nelson tripped over somebody’s leg in the dark. Again he’d become lost in his maundering.
‘Grand-dad! Careful!’
‘I’m sorry, Troy. You lead the way, I’ll watch my feet . . .’
Troy led Nelson, always just a little too quickly, up and down ramps and through short corridors, and they pushed on through more chambers, many just as roomy as the big dormitory but mostly empty. It was all very organic, the walls smooth and curving with no edges at floor or ceiling, and short connecting passageways shaped like back-to-back trumpets smoothly leading off from one chamber to the next. Nelson was undoubtedly crawling around within the anatomy of a living creature, and a far greater one than he was. He felt minuscule.
Closest to the upper carapace, the overhead chambers, translucent and allowing through the greenish light, were all filled with scummy water. Nelson wondered if the plankton and other organisms growing in there were encouraged, in order to replenish the oxygen of the inner air, as he had speculated. And for the plankton, he supposed, protection from the browsing creatures of the sea was the reward for their dribble of oxygen.
In some of the lower levels, Nelson came across a still stranger sight. The underside of the island, when it was visible, was complex, encrusted with huge shapes, some of them big tubes with blobs of green stuff growing at the ends.
This arrangement baffled Nelson, but Troy seemed to know all about it. ‘Dolphins. Whales, little ones. Porpoises. Swim in for food. Wiggle and wiggle in tubes!’
And Nelson thought he saw it. Maybe this was a mechanism – one of several, perhaps – that the island used when it needed to move through the water. It lured the big sea mammals into these food-providing tubes, and in return for the snacks that grew there the animals swam their hearts out, gradually pushing the island the way it wanted to go.
Shelter in return for an air supply, food in return for locomotion. The whole arrangement reeked of smartness, Nelson thought, as they wandered on, smart bits of naturally evolved engineering as all parts of this strange symbiotic creature laboured in harmony to support the whole.
And yet he saw no evidence of anything like a central nervous system: no nerve trunks, no spinal cord. Nelson suspected that Lobsang, who knew far more about these matters than Nelson did (of course Lobsang knew more about almost anything than almost anybody), might have said that Nelson was being parochial. The Traversers appeared to have descended from colony creatures, from communities of living things. A Traverser needed to think, but to do that it didn’t need anything like a human, or indeed a mammalian, brain. Perhaps the Traverser’s consciousness emerged from a network of interactions of its onboard community of living organisms. Take those plankton communities in the upper chambers. On one level each algal cell was busily looking after its own business of feeding and reproducing, while on another level an algal community was itself a very complex network. Similarly, aboard the Traverser, a dwarf horse uprooting a mouthful of long grass was eating lunch, but at the same time that very action could be a ‘thought’ of a higher consciousness.
Maybe multi-species cooperation and cohabitation were actually the norm in the Long Earth – indeed, the norm for terrestrial life. Even during his time on the island Nelson had witnessed different species of dolphins swimming together. And during The Journey of ’30, Valienté and Lobsang had even reported discovering, some nine hundred steps from home, a group of hominid species of variant forms, the product of diverse stepwise evolutions, happily living side by side. Once, Nelson supposed,
you might have witnessed such scenes on the Datum itself – but in the course of its inglorious career, Homo sapiens had pretty much seen off any cousin species closer than the chimps. And, isolated, humans had come to believe that ruthless competition, even the extermination of rivals, were inevitable. Nelson was determined to discuss all this with Lobsang when he got the chance – if Nelson himself survived the trip back, if Lobsang ever emerged from his latest electronic womb . . .
He heard the whinny of a horse. The animals were close.
They came to a chamber containing a group of mammoths, apparently dwarfed, but still an astonishing sight to Nelson. From what he remembered of his palaeobiology, these were more like Columbian mammoths, low-latitude browsers, than the woolly variety adapted to colder climes. They seemed to be a group of females and young; the adults stood together, twining trunks and gently clashing tusks, while the young sheltered under their feet. There was a puddle of water for them to drink, in a hollow in the floor, but no food that Nelson could see. Their rumbling voices were like the rolling of boulders.
This chamber seemed large to Nelson, but was presumably claustrophobically small to wild animals – especially plains animals like mammoths – certainly far smaller than many zoo compounds Nelson had seen. Yet the animals waited for their release as calmly as the humans in their dormitory. He wondered now if there was something in the air, a gentle tranquillizer evolved by the Traverser to keep its inhabitants subdued while they were confined. On some Traversers – such as the very first Joshua and Lobsang had discovered, on a world much further out than this – the animal specimens were kept almost anaesthetized, it seemed; within the bulk of the creature they had called First Person Singular the travellers had seen birds, small animals, even elephants like these immersed in some kind of fluid, neither awake nor asleep, neither walking nor swimming. Perhaps there was a whole range of such storage strategies. No one knew.
The Long Cosmos Page 12