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.’
Sally said, ‘Listen, we should eat while we’ve got the chance – and not just Agnes’s soup.’ She rummaged through their supplies, bequeathed by the Cowley.
Stan was staring at the images. ‘They’re going to finish this. They really are going to take this Earth apart altogether, aren’t they? It seems such a waste.’
‘The beetles wouldn’t say that,’ Lobsang said. ‘They believe they’re improving the neighbourhood.’
Sally laid out food packets. ‘Well, we have beef, chicken, bread, salad stuff. I wonder if they packed any mustard?’
Stan said, ‘But why would the beetles do this? What’s the point? I thought the theory was these beetles are colonizers.’
‘That’s how it looked from the world we called the Planetarium,’ Lobsang said. ‘Which they appeared to be terraforming, to their requirements. But we also saw evidence of conflict, in the sky of the star cluster. A war in heaven. Evidently their colonizing wave is being opposed. But here, by coming stepwise to this Earth, the beetles suddenly found themselves in an empty world – empty of their competitors at any rate – and under an open, empty sky. In such a situation the optimal strategy, for aggressive colonizers, must be—’
‘Like a dandelion,’ Sally said, seeing it suddenly. ‘Or a puffball fungus. To colonize all the empty space, as widely as possible, as fast as possible, before anybody else gets a chance. And that means sending seeds off in all directions, as many as you can.’
‘Ah.’ Stan closed his eyes. ‘I understand. They take apart the whole Earth. They capture the dispersed mass, turn it into—’
‘Copies of themselves, probably,’ Lobsang said. ‘The numbers are staggering. If they turned this whole world into a horde of beetles, each of which weighs as much as an adult human, say, then there could be as many as ten billion trillion of them, scattering in all directions. Far more beetles than there are stars in the Galaxy.’
Stan said, ‘And each one, in principle, capable of landing on a virgin world, and replicating away until it’s achieved the same damn thing again.’
‘All of which is why we needed to ensure the beetles didn’t spread into the Long Earth stepwise, that we contained them here. Otherwise—’
Sally smiled. ‘Otherwise, in a few years, the worlds of the Long Earth would be going up like a string of firecrackers, one by one.’ She mimed explosions with her fingers. ‘Poom! Poom! Poom! … And from each contaminated world the beetles will spread out to infect an entire Galaxy.’