‘Lobsang, you said you were looking for large-scale events. You got ’em. It’s like the aftermath of a tsunami.’
‘The coast was uninhabited; nobody to be harmed, nobody to witness it. But you understand that all this is a side-effect, Joshua. A by-product of the spin-up, the injection of all that rotational energy. The oceans slosh and so does the air. You get freak waves, storms. Far inland we’ve had some of the storms, but we weren’t aware directly of the big waves.’
‘Directly?’
‘I have noticed earth tremors, coming more and more frequently. Others may have too, Agnes perhaps; we haven’t discussed it. Well, you’d expect that. If this Earth is spinning faster its very crust must be distorting, the equatorial bulge increasing as the planet flattens out.’
‘Do you measure the tremors? Since Yellowstone, everybody’s a geologist, right?’
‘Joshua,’ Lobsang said patiently, ‘we don’t have any seismometers. Why would we bring a seismometer? As I keep telling you, I didn’t come here to be a scientist. I came to live.’
‘We’ll need to get the scientists out here eventually, though. From the government, the Low Earth colleges.’
‘If we can.’
‘So which way now, Lobsang?’
‘Let’s stick to the coast. That’s where the visible damage will be. For now the interior is sheltered, relatively, the continental forest protecting itself.’
‘Fine. North? South?’
‘South. If you were spinning up a world, you’d work at the equator, wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I never thought about it. South it is.’
The controls of this airship were simple: a steering handle, a joystick; it was the work of a couple of minutes to set the course. Then Joshua yawned and stretched.
‘Why don’t you hit the sack for a few hours, Joshua? I don’t need sleep, if I adjust my settings. You get some shut-eye; I’ll play Robert the robot.’
‘Who? Never mind. OK, Lobsang. Though I think I’ll fix some supper first …’
Joshua slept well, waking long after dawn.
At a glance out of his window, all he saw at first was ocean and forested land, bathed in morning sunlight. Then he realized that the airship appeared to be circling, running in wide, gentle sweeps; he could see its shadow shift across the ground.
There must be something down there. Presumably nothing urgent, or Lobsang would have woken him.
He showered, shaved and dressed. He collapsed his bed back to a sofa, and folded away the partition that divided his cabin from the rest of the gondola. Passing through the small galley area he turned on the coffee perc and drank a slug of orange juice – except that it wasn’t orange, not quite, but a compress from one of the many unfamiliar citrus types native to this band of worlds. Then, glass in hand, he joined Lobsang at the forward windows.
Still the Shillelagh banked and turned, and land and sea wheeled beneath.
‘So,’ Joshua said.
‘I wanted you to see what’s down there. But I wanted you to get your beauty sleep too, so I kept the ship running. I figured that shutting down the engines would alert your famous hair-trigger Daniel Boone senses—’
‘All right, all right. You wanted me to see what?’
‘Take a look. We’re at the coast of New York State, or its footprint. Below us is Long Island. It’s taken a battering from the storms and waves; its vegetation cover has been pretty much flattened.’
Joshua looked down at the island. A strip of silver, running east to west, lay across the scarred landscape.
At first glance it looked like a road to Joshua, or perhaps a rail track. It arced away to the west, running inland as far as he could see until it became a fine line, still dead straight, lost in the misty morning air. To the east, towards the sun, it strode across Long Island on slim pillars, and then on across the sea.
‘Wow. That’s what you wanted to show me. What’s it for? It looks like a roadway. But I see no traffic.’ Joshua imagined some immense invasion force falling from the sky, tank brigades sweeping along that mighty viaduct …
‘Unknown, for now. I can make some guesses, but we need to see more. I do have some details. What it’s made of, for instance – well, the outer surface at least; spectroscopy told me that. Steel. Nothing terribly exotic. No doubt built with materials mined here on this Earth, just as we saw the beginnings of back in New Springfield. And as to who made it—’ Lobsang had a tablet, loaded with telescopic images. He showed this to Joshua now. ‘It took me some time to find them. Not many of them about …’
In the magnified images Joshua saw silver beetles, a small party of them – five, six, seven. They hurried along the surface of the roadway – if it was a roadway – pausing every fifty yards or so to press what looked like instrument packages to the surface. Seen from a height they were very cockroach-like.
‘So the beetles built this.’
‘Evidently.’
‘Are they testing it? Checking it out?’
‘Something like that, I imagine.’
Joshua looked east again, towards the ocean. The viaduct stretched away, heading dead straight for the rising sun. ‘I wonder what’s supporting it out there. Beyond the continental shelf you’d need pretty long pillars.’
‘Pontoons and anchors, perhaps?’ Lobsang suggested. ‘Like oil rigs. Joshua, that is one of many details to be determined.’
‘Then what do we know?’
‘That the viaduct extends at least from horizon to horizon, aligned precisely east to west – and that is east-west according to the Earth’s rotation axis, not the magnetic compass directions. Given we have come across its span here, having essentially arrived at a random point—’
‘Ah. You think it could go on for ever.’
‘All around the Earth at this latitude, yes. Why not? Spanning the ocean to Europe and beyond, crossing the continental forests on great pillars. It would be interesting to see what allowance is made for the higher ground, such as the Appalachians to the west of here. Does it follow the contours? Or is it driven at a constant height through the mountains, with bridges and tunnels?’
‘Well, we’ll have to track it to know that.’
‘And again, given we came across this so quickly, starting from our random origin, it’s hard to believe this band is unique. The only one of its kind, happening to be at this particular latitude, so close to home? It’s more likely there must be many mighty structures like this across the face of this world. I did tell you we’d find something large-scale, Joshua.’
‘You weren’t wrong.’
‘And if this viaduct does girdle the planet – and if there are more like this – then the beetles must already be consuming the resources of this world at a prodigious rate. Somewhere there must be mines the size of small nations … This is a predation far worse than humanity ever inflicted on the resources of the Datum. It is – illogical – to feel ownership. To be territorial. In what sense does this world belong to humanity? There wasn’t a soul here half a century ago, and even now only a few scattered communities at most. And yet—’
‘And yet this Earth is more ours than theirs.’
‘Yes, Joshua.’
‘OK, Lobsang, we found this viaduct. What next?’
‘We go on. See what else is out there.’
‘Fine.’ Joshua tapped a tablet to disengage the autopilot. ‘I guess the basic question is, do we follow this viaduct, or not.’
Lobsang thought briefly. ‘Not. I fully expect to find more viaducts of this kind; this one ought to be typical. We should look for them.’
‘Fine. North, or south?’
‘South. I still believe the main action must be at the equator …’
Under Joshua’s guidance the Shillelagh turned its battered nose south, and the turbines once more bit into the air.