The Long War

after them even when it found it necessary to submerge: it took its animal and human passengers into air-filled chambers inside its carapace.
    ‘Not that it submerges too often,’ Lobsang said. ‘Bad for the vegetation on its back, not to mention the layer of topsoil it accumulates . . . It’s like an unending cruise, don’t you think?
    ‘Hmm. The Titanic without the iceberg.’
    ‘Lots of good company, plenty of seafood and occasionally other maritime fare including oysters and the occasional seal – but never dolphins, Nelson – oh, and plenty of sex.’
    Nelson had guessed that, given the embarrassing attention he himself was getting from a number of young women. ‘And the people?’
    ‘Nelson, there are billions in the suffering worlds of mankind who would think themselves blessed if they found themselves on this living shore.’
    Nelson grunted.
    Lobsang inspected him. ‘Ah, you don’t approve, do you? My dear Nelson, I see it in your eyes and in every expression. You, my friend, are a Puritan, privately aghast at the situation; you are thinking that mankind shouldn’t live like this – there is a lack of striving which you find distasteful, yes? This is at the root of your unease about the Long Earth itself, I suspect. It’s too easy. Mankind, you believe, should be always looking towards the stars, ever striving, learning, growing, bettering itself, challenging the infinite.’
    Nelson stared at Lobsang’s face, which showed deadpan with just a hint, a tiny scintilla, of humour. What was the human and what was the computer? ‘You are disturbingly perceptive.’
    ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

60
    T HEY STAYED ABOARD Second Person Singular for some days.
    It was a pleasurable enough interval, but Nelson did find it hard to relax into a lotus-eating lifestyle – maybe Lobsang was right that he had the soul of a Puritan – and the innocence of the beast’s human passengers brought out something of the teacher, or the shepherd, in him.
    The islanders were short on raw materials; they had a few handfuls of flint shards, bits of obsidian, metals, evidently garnered from the pockets of shipwrecked ancestors. They treated these as toys, tokens, ornaments. So, with scraps from the twain, Nelson taught them a certain amount of Metalwork 101. How to draw wire, among other things, allowing them to augment their meagre stock of treasured fish-hooks. He even left them instructions in the basics of crystal-set radios. Maybe some day they could use that technology to reconnect with the rest of mankind, whatever fraction of it passed through this world.
    The islanders smiled and nodded, applauded when he assembled some intricate component, and used his bits of wire to adorn their hair.
    Nelson spent some time too strolling in what he called the jungle, the scrap of forest on the carapace. It flourished pretty well, despite periodic dunkings in the sea, but was an eclectic mix of species that reminded him more of a botanic garden collection than anything natural: from ferns to eucalyptus, and many species Nelson failed to recognize. As for the animals, Lobsang was right about there being a rough selection operating for size, in terms of body mass. The elephant types seemed to be a kind of mammoth, with curling tusks and ragged orange-brown fur. But they were dwarfed, no taller than a pony in St. John on the Water, and very shy.
    Another question that occurred to Nelson was how old this beast was. How long had it been sailing these stepwise seas? If he dug around in the forest, or in the dark spaces within its carapace, would he find the bones of antique beasts – the skeleton of a stegosaur?
    Even Lobsang had no answer to such questions.
    It was in the jungle, on the fourth day, with Nelson deep in thought, that Cassie trapped him. She was the woman who habitually wore a red flower in her hair, who had asked for tobacco when he’d landed.
    He knew by now what she wanted. He tried to avoid eye contact with her, but, with the susurration of the sea all around them, he was cornered in her stare.
    ‘Mister Lobsang say you are tight and sad and needing loving . . .’
    The statement hung there, and Nelson could practically hear two value systems colliding in his head with a scream of stripped cogs. All right, he was a Puritan type; any male child brought up by Nelson’s mother on the one hand and her version of God on the other would have turned out that way. He had had relationships, including