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.
This probe had been in synchronous orbit, more than twenty thousand miles high, and from out here Lobsang could see it alclass="underline" a whole hemisphere at a glance, the planet like a dish held at arm’s length. The blanket of air was stained by smoke and steam. Immense auroral displays cupped the world at north and south poles, and Lobsang speculated about a tremendous distortion of the planetary magnetic field as it collapsed. Storms swirled, giant weather systems white and purple and sparking with lightning, lashing the turbulent oceans and pouring on to the land. Still Lobsang could make out the forms of the continents, just – he saw the Americas, North and South, sweep across the face of the globe as the world turned through its final, desperately accelerated rotations. But increasingly there was little difference between land and sea, for rivers of molten rock ran brightly along the spreading fractures of the ocean floors, and filled the tremendous crevices that were opening up on the continents. Briefly Lobsang was reminded of spacecraft views of Io, innermost moon of Jupiter, a world tormented into unending volcanism by its primary’s mighty tides.
But Earth was evolving quickly, and even that comparison was soon lost. With startling speed the continents dissolved, as if fifty-mile-thick granite was no more than a mere skim being burned away by the red-white heat of the interior. Now Lobsang saw raftlike fragments of landscapes rotate, tip up, even grind against each other in collisions that threw up immense mountain ranges that could survive only minutes. Surely, already, nothing could be left alive down there: nothing left of Stan and Sally.
And still the spin-up continued. He could see the growing obliquity of the world as a whole now; the planet seemed to soften, its surface stretching, accommodating. It seemed to him that a new transient geography was forming on the exposed mantle, with rivers of hotter material erupting from the interior and running across the marginally cooler surface, rivers that washed away the last scraps of solid crust. There was even a kind of weather as vast clouds of plasma broke through the surface and spread glowing tendrils across the planet’s face.
Now a new phase began. What looked like a kind of tornado opened up on the equator, directly below Lobsang’s position, a swirling mass with a darker centre – a centre that exploded with stupendous force, spraying fragments out into the dissipating atmosphere. It was a volcano, a massive outlet of mantle energies, on whose flanks even Yellowstone would have been no more than a glowing speck. Looking to the planet’s horizon Lobsang saw more such giant features in profile, blisters visibly rising about the world’s distorted curve, all around the equator. And from this angle Lobsang could see huge bolides thrown out, masses of glowing rock rising above the horizon, for a few moments still falling back to the sea of molten silicate below. But then came one tremendous eruption, and a spray of bolides escaped from the world altogether and sailed off into space, spinning and cooling. Significant chunks of the Earth, already being lost to space.
Now he saw evidence of the beetles, for the first time. What looked like tremendous filmy butterflies, with wings of net that must be hundreds of kilometres across, came sailing down from higher orbit to drift through the gathering ring of cooling rock fragments around the equator, scooping them up. A cynical harvest was beginning.
The world’s shape seemed to deform visibly now. The poles must be sinking at hundreds of miles per hour, the equator distorting at a similar rate, and the big volcanoes became mouths that vomited material continuously into space. The surface was featureless, almost, save for the equatorial volcanic wounds. The world was a drop of liquid, with an almost abstract beauty, Lobsang thought.
Then there was a kind of pause, as if the planet was drawing breath.
And the surface seemed to lift off, all at once, like a tremendous global eruption. Vast amounts of material, a spray of shining rock and clouds of plasma, lifted high into space, some of it flowing in great currents in the sky, perhaps shaped by the remnant magnetic field. Lobsang saw a brighter, inner light – the light of the core itself, perhaps, a mass of compressed liquid iron the size of the moon – shining through the disrupted outer layers, casting straight-line shadows hundreds of miles long.