The Long War

unspoiled, and a magnificent sight from the air.
    Heading west, the twain drifted away from the coastline and out to sea. Finally it slowed over a small island, a shield of green and yellow on the breast of this version of the Tasman Sea.
    ‘So?’ Nelson asked. ‘What are we here to see?’
    ‘Look down,’ Lobsang’s disembodied voice advised him.
    ‘Something on that island?’
    ‘It’s not an island . . .’
    Through the twain’s excellent telescopes Nelson saw forest clumps, and a fringe of what looked like beach, and animals moving – what looked like horses – elephants – even a dwarf giraffe? An eclectic mix . . . And, more excitingly, people, on that strange beach. The seawater near by was turbid, mildly turbulent, and evidently full of life.
    And this ‘island’ had a wake.
    ‘It’s not an island,’ Nelson said at last. ‘It looks alive .’
    ‘You have it. A complex, compound, cooperative organism, a multiplex creature travelling north-east, as if determined to cross the Pacific . . .’
    ‘A living island!’ Nelson laughed, unreasonably delighted. ‘An old legend, come to pass, if it’s so. Saint Brendan, you know, crossing the Atlantic, is supposed to have landed on the back of a whale. That was the sixth century, I believe. There are similar tales in a Greek bestiary of the second century, and later in the Arabian Nights —’
    ‘And now the reality. Nelson, meet Second Person Singular.’
    The grammar made Nelson wince, although he picked up the reference to the notorious discovery of the Mark Twain . ‘So what now?’
    ‘We go visit.’
    ‘We?’
    The door to the gondola lounge deck opened, and in walked Lobsang, shaven head, orange robe – at first glance the Lobsang Nelson had met in Wyoming.
    Nelson asked, ‘This is your “ambulant unit”?’
    ‘And fully waterproof. Come . . .’
    They made their way to the stern of the ship, and the hatch through which Nelson had been winched aboard at the start of the voyage.
    ‘We will be perfectly safe down there by the way,’ Lobsang said now. ‘Even should you choose to go scuba diving around the rim of the carapace.’
    ‘Are you crazy? I’ve been in these waters before. Sharks, box jellyfish—’
    ‘You’d come to no harm.’ Lobsang pressed a button, and a dinghy folded itself out of a compartment, inflated, and dangled over the open hatch from a winch. ‘I’ve visited this assemblage of life many times before, and I can assure you of that. Now, come make some new friends.’
    Inside five minutes they were both clambering out of the dinghy, and on to the carapace of Second Person Singular.
    Not that it felt like that. It felt as if they were climbing up a sandy beach. The ‘ground’ was solid under Nelson’s feet, as if rooted deep in the rocky fabric of the Earth, like any island.
    He looked around at a beach littered with sand and broken shells, clumps of forest. There was a fresh breeze; this hemisphere was emerging from its winter. He smelled salt and sand and seaweed, and a warmer, wetter scent of vegetation from the interior. The scents, the colours, the blue of the sky and sea, the green of the trees, were overwhelming, vivid. ‘It’s like Crusoe’s island.’
    ‘Exactly. But mobile. And – look there.’
    A flap in the ground, earth underpinned by some kind of shell – yes, part of a tremendous carapace – opened up gently, like a yawning hatch, and a dozen or so humans emerged, grinning, climbing some kind of stair. Of all ages, they were naked and bronzed like athletes. A couple of children stared at Nelson.
    One woman stepped forward, a red flower in her hair, still smiling, and said in good if oddly accented English, ‘Welcome. What news of home? Please mister please, if you have any tobacco, please please . . .’
    Lobsang was smiling indulgently.
    Nelson managed to ask, ‘Who the hell are these people?’
    ‘Well,’ said Lobsang, ‘since this lost beast has evidently wandered into the oceans of the Datum itself, at least several, I suspect, are descendants of the crew of the Mary Celeste . . .’
    Whether Nelson was supposed to take that literally or not, he got the idea.
    Soon he found himself sitting awkwardly in a circle of very interested, very naked people, anxious to know about what was happening back on the Datum Earth. They sat close to what looked like a hearth – the fire was set on slabs of stone, no doubt in deference to the pain receptors of the back of their