The Long Cosmos (17 page)

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 Traversers, he reflected, carried some strange beasts, but none so strange as themselves.

With Troy leading him on tiptoe, Nelson wandered on.

They found horses, small and hairy. And what looked like wombats, what looked like armadillos, what looked like sloths – an eclectic mix of creatures, many of them extinct on the Datum Earth, yet presumably prospering still on this world and its stepwise neighbours. It was the nearest he could imagine to a realization of Noah's Ark. Every so often he glimpsed something smaller – a rat, a mouse – but he and Lobsang had long ago concluded that this ‘collection', if there was any purpose behind it at all, was the result of a strategy to select animals with a body weight of around an adult human's, give or take an order of magnitude. The mice and rats were just as much visitors here as Nelson was.

But he and Lobsang, he remembered, could only guess as to the meaning of all this. Lobsang had suspected that the Traversers, once natural creatures, the products of Darwinian evolution, had been
modified
. Engineered subtly, for some conscious purpose. ‘Perhaps they are indeed collectors,' Lobsang had once mused. ‘Latter-day Darwins, or their agents, scooping up interesting creatures for – well, for science? To populate some tremendous zoo? Simply for their aesthetic appeal?' But such conversations had taken place a long, long time ago, and Nelson still had no answers.

The horses whinnied and stirred, and Nelson felt the Traverser itself shudder and rock. It was a queasy, massive sensation, like riding out a mild earthquake.

He felt Troy's hand slip into his own.

‘Troy? Are you all right?'

‘Yes.' But the boy didn't sound convinced.

‘Does it often do this? The Traverser.'

‘Not often. Sometimes. Upset.'

‘By the storm?'

‘Not storm.'

‘What then? . . . Oh, look, never mind. Come on, shall we go back and find your mum and dad?'

22

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
the storm had passed, Nelson found himself in a small sailboat, resting on the placid sea – perhaps a half-mile from the island that was not an island, to his west. Sam and his handful of crew busied themselves with their chores – tending lines, checking their nets and lobster pots. A fishing trip was hard work, yet as with everything the islanders did there was always an element of play. All but naked in the rich morning sunlight they laughed, joked and competed over the strength of the knots they could tie, the size of fish they could lure from the depths of this remote sea.

Even Nelson's twain was back. When the storm had cleared, the ship had returned to its station-keeping over the island, and hung like a translucent fish in the bright, warm air. It was a relief to be in the open air again, and all seemed well in the world.

Nelson himself was content to rest. He'd treated every year of reasonable health in his eighth decade of life as a bonus, and all of these islanders were so much younger than him – let them do the work; let the fish come to Nelson's line if they willed it, otherwise not.

Around noon, or so he judged it from the position of the sun in the sky, Sam approached him. Nelson came to himself slowly; he'd evidently been dozing. Sam set up a kind of umbrella of palm fronds for shade, and produced a leaf basket that turned out to contain water, the juice of some exotic fruit and the baked flesh of fish. Nelson ate gratefully, wishing only that his palate, dulled with age, was capable of appreciating the spices better.

Sam, chewing on his own portion, eyed his father. ‘Leave tomorrow?'

‘Day after at the latest. Doctor's appointment, son. When you're my age – well, that twain up there rattles with the pills I have to take.'

Sam smiled. ‘Stay. Sunshine. Fishing. Come live with us.'

Nelson sighed. ‘But I don't deserve that. All I ever did was stay a few nights and saddle your poor mother with a bun in the oven. Sorry to be crude about it.'

‘Happy alive, Father. Happy for gift of my life. Happy with Lucille, with Troy. Happy, happy. You come back, we take care of you, as long as—'

‘As long as I've got left?'

‘As long as like.'

Nelson sighed. ‘And I'd entertained fantasies of taking you all back to England. We're not going to agree, are we? And so we'll end up apart. I'll go my way and you yours, which is the worst of all solutions—'

And it was then, as he was speaking of departing, sitting in this still boat on a semi-infinite sea, under a perfect sky, that he thought he heard Troy call for him.

Afterwards he was never sure if he had heard that call or not. Later still, Nelson remembered how Troy had thought the Traverser had been in some distress days earlier. Could the island-beast have known what was coming?

Certainly, some of the boat's crew seemed to be aware of
something
. They sat up or stood, frowning, and stared around at the horizon.

Then one young man stood straight and pointed west. ‘Look!' he cried, anxious, troubled. ‘Island! Island!'

Everyone in the boat, sitting or standing, turned and looked that way. And Nelson could immediately see why the lookout was so concerned.

The Traverser, which had been a low dark mass on the ocean, fringed by the green of its central forest, was gone. Not submerged – that process always took some time. Gone, vanished –
stepped away
, Nelson realized, with a deep jolt of shock.

The crew flashed into action with the vigour and decisiveness of youth. Nelson realized they anticipated an incoming wave – the sudden disappearance of a beast the size and shape of a small island meant that a lot of water was going to be displaced – and they tied down pots and bundles of gear. One kindly young man even slipped a rope around Nelson's waist, for security. Nelson was barely aware of this gesture, or of the surge of the boat under him as the great wave passed. Sam, cut off from his family, tearfully roared out his pain even as he worked.

And Nelson, exhausted, terrified, tearful, looked up at the twain hovering in the turbulent sky. ‘Lobsang! If you can hear me – help, Lobsang! Help me get Troy back!'

23

A
LMOST FROM THE
beginning of the Next's subtle campaign of pre-preparation of mankind for its participation in their coming project, Jan Roderick had been aware of the game, even if he couldn't have put into words what he was perceiving – even if he wasn't
aware
he was aware, Sister Coleen thought. Now there were even more stories, tall or otherwise, a flood of them – eventually Sister Coleen would learn that they all contributed to the memeplex clustering around the Invitation – stories passed from mouth to mouth among the fissured human communities of the Long Earth, and eagerly scrutinized by Jan when he found them.

Stories such as – Sister Coleen saw, reading over his shoulder – the tale of the man who became known as ‘Johnny Shakespeare', supposedly dating from about twenty years after Step Day:

Mr Clifford Driscoll, born in Datum Massachusetts, was a teacher of English. His particular passion had always been for Shakespeare, and he made no apologies for that. To the benefit of those of his students who were capable of listening and willing to learn, that passion fuelled an anxious, intense but compelling teaching style, and an often very successful one.

In those pre-Yellowstone days his early career had been conducted in small public high schools in his native Datum Massachusetts. Here – and unlike on the new worlds of the Long Earth – Shakespeare, along with all of the Datum civilization's cultural heritage, was at least
available
to Mr Driscoll's students, accessible at the touch of a keypad, a whisper into a phone. But, he came to feel, his students' attention had been constantly diverted from their studies by their technological toys, by the endless roaring background noise of the Datum's high-tech, crowded culture – as well as by the timeless distractions of each others' developing young bodies.

And Mr Driscoll himself grew increasingly restless. In his fifties, a bachelor, celibate for more than twenty years, and approaching the last stretch of his career before retirement, Mr Driscoll formulated a new goal. He must go where he was needed. Where he might be
useful.

It was with a kind of missionary spirit that he found a teaching post in a school in what he thought of as one of the colony worlds, West 3, in a small stepwise-Massachusetts town with a booming population and an economy dominated by lumbering. For Mr Driscoll, at first, this was a romantic place to work, an island of human endeavour carved into the great silence of a global forest. And the colony's fast growth rate, some years after Step Day, provided him with classrooms pleasingly crowded with students.

But there were problems.

Even as early as the 2030s, the America of West 3 was no primitive culture. The larger towns already had connectivity through fibreoptic cables, TV, phones. It was not yet saturated with technology; here the students found less to distract them. But that did not make room for English literature in their heads; it did not make room for Shakespeare. And
these
young people were destined for lives working in lumberyards. The Datum and its millennia of culture seemed a glittering and remote abstraction. What use literature to them? What use Shakespeare, in such a world?

That question gained still more profound significance in Mr Driscoll's mind as he learned more of the Long Earth into which he had taken a few tentative steps.

He made an ally of Chet Wilson, a hobbyist engineer who ran hugely popular hands-on technology classes in the school's extensive workshops. Wilson, from rural Massachusetts in the Datum, cared only for his gadgetry. He was a man out of his time: he would have looked at home under the bonnet of a Model T Ford, Mr Driscoll thought, and if he could have got away with whittling all day, he might have done just that. A character as unlike Mr Driscoll's earnest culturedness would be hard to find. Yet they found common ground in their passion for their subjects and a desire to teach.

One day Mr Driscoll idly asked Wilson how far out the wave of human colonization had spread across the Long Earth.

Chet Wilson sucked his teeth and said, ‘Let me give it some thought.'

After an interval Wilson said, ‘Nobody knows, is the truth. I do know there's a big belt of farmed worlds that start out beyond a hundred thousand.'

‘Did you say a hundred
thousand
?' Mr Driscoll was already out of his depth.

‘Not all the Earths in between are going to be populated. Not yet. But you know how people breed, when they get the chance.'

Mr Driscoll was appalled. ‘All those Earths. All those children, those young minds! Who will know only logging, and farming, and digging for iron ore. Or just wandering around picking fruit. And
their
children will grow up knowing less still. What will become of our civilization's heritage after a few generations, Wilson? Tell me that! It will be as if thousands of years of struggle to
learn
and
remember
were just a dream . . . I must think about this.' Muttering to himself, he wandered off.

Wilson, calm, said nothing.

Twenty-four hours later Mr Driscoll returned to the workshop, bubbling with enthusiasm. ‘I have it, Wilson. I have it!'

Wilson eyed him and moved a bit further away.

‘Shakespeare! That's the answer. What represents the crown of our civilization? Shakespeare and his works! And how can a human world ever be called civilized if it does not know Shakespeare? That is to be my mission now, Wilson. I have already handed in my notice at the high school. I will not linger here, wasting my remaining years before handfuls of indifferent students. Instead I will take Shakespeare to the Long Earth! And thus I will shape rude minds. “The play's the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king . . .” Conscience, yes, that's it. I will give the Long Earth its conscience.'

‘How?'

‘How what?'

‘
How
are you gonna take Shakespeare stepwise?'

‘Well, I haven't worked it all out, not yet,' blustered Mr Driscoll. ‘I can go out there and speak of the Bard . . .'

‘Won't do much good if they can't read it.'

‘That's true, that's true. A travelling show, perhaps, to stage the great works? No, no, too complicated a process, and I am no impresario.' Suddenly he shot to his feet. ‘Ah! I have it. I will carry copies of the complete works in some compact edition. Paper, of course; one cannot rely on electronics in the true frontier worlds, I am sure. One edition per town, to be copied and disseminated. But even that, given so many Earths . . . One per world, then! A symbolic act, which may inspire others to emulate my donation, and spread the word of the Bard laterally, so to speak.'

‘Gonna need a stage name.'

‘A what?'

‘So everybody hears about what you're up to. Something memorable.'