The Long War

30

IT TOOK NELSON Azikiwe a couple of months after that talk with Ken, when he’d let the cat out of the bag about his resignation, for him to tidy up his affairs in the parish, dispose of extraneous belongings, and brief his successor – including on the temperamental toilet – before he was ready to depart on the next phase of his life, in search of the Lobsang Project and other mysteries. He took his time. He had always led something of an itinerant life, but believed in making time to say his goodbyes properly.

He decided to travel to America by plane; his generation wasn’t used to the slow-boat nature of twain travel. But there weren’t as many aeroplanes around these days, Nelson discovered, not since the Long Earth had begun to be serviced by the twains. It was the new worlds, of course, for which the twains were so well suited: airships didn’t need airports, they could set you down easily almost anywhere. But even for lateral, cross-Earth travel, even on the Datum, airships had come back into vogue. For one thing helium, a safely non-flammable lift gas, was a whole lot easier to obtain now, the Datum’s natural stock having been badly depleted before the resources of the stepwise worlds had been opened up. And the stately pace of airships certainly worked for cargo: sacks of corn and mineral ore didn’t mind how long it took to get there, and rarely complained about the in-flight movie.

But an industry like the traditional airlines would take some time to die, and for now, on the Datum, the planes still flew – even though for this trip Nelson had to put up with delays, as many US flights were grounded because of ash clouds arising from an event at Yellowstone, some kind of minor eruption there.

The plane Nelson finally caught swung out from England, crossed the north Atlantic, flew down over the Canadian Shield, and at last reached the endless farmland of Datum America, which spread beneath his window like a glowing carpet. If you had the eye for it, he realized, there were occasional gaps to be seen in that grand panorama of cultivation, scraps of recovering wildness in the summer green where a homestead or a farm had been abandoned, almost certainly because the owners had decided to step Westward. (And it was West for most Americans, despite the assurances of the experts that the stepping labels ‘West’ and ‘East’ were purely arbitrary.) Off they stepped, in search of more land, a better life. Or, he mused, possibly they went simply because, well, the new worlds were out there, and there was something in the genes of an American, and perhaps even a Canadian, that impelled you always to move on. It was a frontier with apparently no end, and while there wasn’t exactly a stepwise stampede these days the Long Earth still drew in the pioneers.

His own destination was more modest: O’Hare. He’d stop in Chicago a while. Then he had plans to visit a new university being built in Madison, Wisconsin, West 5, as part of the city’s post-nuke recovery. He had friends there, and interests. Madison was where Willis Linsay had first posted the plans for a prototype Stepper box on the internet, a glorious, destructive gesture that had changed the world for ever – indeed, the worlds. And Madison had been the boyhood home of Joshua Valienté himself. Nelson, on the track of the Lobsang Project, had an inkling that Madison was a place where he might find some things out, get some questions answered.

As it turned out, this tentative plan didn’t even survive his leaving the airport.

Nelson was always glad to get out of the cramped enclosure of a plane. He was a large man, the kind of man who had trouble fitting into an airline seat, but who could walk through any neighbourhood anywhere without having to worry overmuch about his security. Sometimes the deference accorded to him simply because of his size bothered him. But by and large, he reflected as he patiently queued his way through the landing process, he had to admit it was useful to get your way without even asking.

His size had certainly saved him from all but a few scuffles in the South African townships of his boyhood. All such troubles had however evaporated when he found the local library and discovered a universe of ideas into which his young consciousness rose faster than a Saturn V into the Florida sky. That wasn’t to say he had simply soaked up the lessons of authority; almost from the beginning he was identifying problems to solve, and indeed solving them. One teacher remarked that he had a genius for connectivity.

His life had changed utterly, for better or worse, the day he had first applied his analytical skills to the concept of the Almighty. Even if you dismissed the traditional notion of God, it had always seemed to him that without a First Cause of some kind there was a philosophical void, a space to let. His buddies in the nerdosphere populated that void with the Illuminati, maybe, or the staring eye in the dollar-bill triangle . . . After Step Day, after the opening-up of a universe vast, fecund and accessible to mankind, it seemed to him that the need to fill that void had only deepened. Which was essentially why he had decided to devote the next phase of his life to an exploration of that void, and related mysteries.

Anyhow, this morning at O’Hare, Nelson’s intimidating size, backed up by his problem-solving ability, certainly helped him thread his way through the maze of US immigration.

And at the final customs barrier, after Nelson had cleared through, a clerk chased him and produced a leaflet. ‘Oh – this was left for you, Mr. Azikiwe.’

The leaflet was an ad for a Winnebago. Nelson was planning to fly to Madison; he didn’t need a Winnebago. But when he looked up again, the clerk was gone.

Nelson felt a thrill of connectivity, like solving a Quizmasters puzzle. ‘I get it, Lobsang,’ he said. And he pocketed the leaflet.

By an hour later he had rented a top-of-the-line Winnebago, with plenty of generator capacity for his tech, and a bed, a big one, just the size for him.

He drove out of the airport parking area in this home on wheels and, having no further instructions he could discern, picked a direction at random and hit the freeway. Just the experience of driving on such roads was glorious. He wondered if this, in the end, was the ultimate expression of the American dream: to be in transit, all problems left behind like discarded trash, nothing in life but follow-the-horizon movement, motion for the sake of it.

He drove west for the rest of the morning.

Then he parked up in a small town, shopped for fresh food, and logged on for a quick inspection of the latest sweepings of the online world, including the findings of his buddies in the Quizmasters. He’d had them working twenty-four/seven on his problem since he’d tantalized them with the barest hint: ‘Say, we have all seen that clip of the Mark Twain being towed into Madison and the girl talking about a cat that spoke Tibetan, haven’t we? Is there a clue there? But a clue about what? Looks like someone is playing with our heads . . .’

Given Nelson’s starting hint, the Quizmasters had been going crazy, speculating, inferring and pattern-matching. Standing in the Winnebago, making an elegant curry from fresh-bought ingredients, Nelson watched messages and tangled hypotheses flicker across his screens, and thought it all over.

When the curry was ready he largely ignored the screens. Nelson had learned to love the manners of the English past, as he’d known them in St. John on the Water, when people used to address their food; there was something about the phraseology that made the boy from the townships smile. But while he ate, he saw from the corner of his eye how the Quizmasters were beating themselves up, putting out theories at the rate of one a minute, some of them completely outlandish.

And then up came one trace that drew his attention: thanks to an oddity of TV scheduling, by hopping among various channels, starting just about now it would be possible to watch the classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind continuously for the next twenty-four hours.

He murmured, ‘So: Devil’s Tower, Lobsang? It’s been done before, a bit unoriginal. But I’ve never been there, I’ve always wanted to see it. I won’t ask how to find you; I rather believe you will find me . . .’

Nelson finished his curry and cleaned up. His sat-nav told him it was around a thousand miles north-west from Chicago to Wyoming. A dream ride in a vehicle like this. He’d take his time, he decided, and see the sights; he was nobody’s puppet.

Maybe he’d even catch one of those iterations of Close Encounters.