But where the Armstrong travelled now, things got weirder. Maggie learned that there had been another milestone mass extinction on Datum Earth more than two hundred million years before humanity had arisen; a community crowded with the first mammals, early dinosaurs and the ancestors of crocodiles had been smashed. Now, millions of steps from the Datum, they found the consequences of different outcomes of that epochal event, jumbled ecologies where mammalian hunters tracked dinosaur-like herbivores, or insectile predators chased crocodilian prey. There were worlds with crocodiles the size of tyrannosaurs, or raptors the size of mice with teeth like needles . . .

Whatever the details, what struck Maggie cumulatively, as these first days of rapid travel wore by, was the sheer, relentless vigour of an elemental life force which seemed to seek expression anywhere it could, any way it could, on any available world – an expression in living things shaped by relentless competition, creatures breathing, breeding, fighting, dying.

It got overwhelming after a while. Maggie retreated into the familiar routine of work.

15

ON THE NINTH DAY after the inception of the Chinese drive, Maggie, writing up reports in her sea cabin, barely looked up as she sensed the airship come to a stop, once again. Another science halt; she’d be informed if it was necessary for her to know the details, or if it was thought she’d be interested.

And a day later, with the ship still halted, Gerry Hemingway called. ‘Captain, sorry to bother you. You might want to see this one for yourself.’

She checked her earthometer: Earth West 17,297,031. What the hell, she needed some fresh air. ‘I’ll be there. How’s the weather?’

‘We’re near a sea coast here. Kind of crisp, and it’s February. Bring cold-weather gear, and waterproof boots. And Captain—’

‘Yes, Gerry?’

‘Be careful where you step.’

‘See you on the access deck.’ She stood, and glanced down at Shi-mi. ‘You coming?’

Shi-mi sniffed. ‘Will Snowy be there?’

‘Probably.’

‘Bring me back a T-shirt.’

Maggie Kauffman stood on a sandy beach, by a gently lapping sea. She wondered if this was an inland American sea like in the Valhallan Belt, or if such labels as ‘America’ made sense any more, as the continents slid around the face of the Earth like jigsaw pieces on a tipped-up tray.

She was here with Gerry, Snowy the beagle and Midshipman Santorini whom she’d assigned as an informal companion for the beagle. Even Snowy, who generally went barefoot, was wearing heavy, improvised boots, she saw. Further away more of Gerry’s science team were recording, mapping, monitoring, staring at this unremarkable beach, the ocean, the dunes. There were two armed marines assigned by Mike McKibben, their tough-talking, Scrabble-playing sergeant. Nobody from the Navy side was sure if the marines were attached to parties like this to keep an eye on the local dinosaurs or crocodiles, or on the Navy crew, or on the dog that spoke English.

And two of the party were civilians, wearing odd-looking sensor packs on their shoulders. These were employed by Douglas Black, and sent a continuous feed back to him. Black rarely showed his face outside his cabin, but he was endlessly curious about the worlds they travelled, and liked to explore, if only vicariously.

Well, there were no crocodiles or dinosaurs here, that Maggie could see. Plenty of life in the ocean; she glimpsed fish, seaweed, the remains of some kind of shellfish on the tidal wrack. And crabs, she saw: a hell of a lot of the little bastards running around.

Gerry Hemingway was watching her. ‘Captain, we haven’t filed a formal report yet. What’s your first reaction?’

‘That I’m glad you warned me to put my boots on. These damn crabs are everywhere.’

‘OK. Fair enough. We’ve found a whole belt of worlds dominated by crabs and crustaceans. This is the most spectacular so far. Look, if you’ll indulge us, we’ll show you this step by step. It’s a way of checking our conclusions.’

‘Show me what?’

‘Follow me down to the ocean, please, Captain.’

She glanced at Snowy, who gave a remarkably human shrug, and stepped forward, very carefully.

At the water’s edge, Hemingway splashed out a little way. ‘What about this, Captain? And this?’ He pointed at the seabed, a big patch of pink, a patch of green.

Looking closer she saw the pink was a crowd of shellfish of some kind, like shrimp, and the green was seaweed. ‘I don’t see . . .’ Then she realized that the shrimp things were corralled into a rough square, ringed by walls of stones heaped on the sea-bottom sand, and patrolled by some kind of crab no bigger than the palm of her hand. And the seaweed too was a roughly square patch, maybe six feet on a side. More crabs were working the seaweed, passing over its surface, plucking at the greenery. Working in neat parallel lines, up and down this – field?

She stepped back and looked around. The near-shore sea floor of this coastal strip, as far as she could see to left and right, was covered in rectangles and squares like this, green, pink, purplish, other colours. Now she saw it, it was obvious.

‘Oh.’

Hemingway was grinning. ‘“Oh”, Captain?’

‘Don’t get smug, Hemingway.’

‘Fa-hrrms,’ said the beagle, staring as she was. ‘Little fa-hrrms.’

‘That’s it,’ Hemingway said. ‘We’re evidently seeing careful, conscious, purposeful cultivation by this particular kind of crab. Next step. Follow me, Captain . . .’

They walked along the beach to what looked at first glance like some kind of drainage ditch cut deep into the sand, straight and long and coming out of the dunes. It ran with clear water, down to the sea. Maybe ten feet wide, the surface was cluttered with debris, Maggie saw, maybe litter from the land washed away by some storm . . .

No. She looked again. The ‘debris’ was flowing in two lanes, one washing down towards the sea, the other back up. And what she’d thought was drifting junk was mostly little squares and rectangles, none bigger than eighteen inches or so on a side, floating on the water. The ones heading downstream carried what looked like waste, empty pink shells and other garbage. The ones coming up from the sea were laden, with ‘shrimp’, with seaweed.

Snowy bent over, his black nostrils flaring as he sniffed, and briefly Maggie wondered what he saw, what he sensed . . .

What did she see?

Those little mats, pale brown in colour, were craft, woven of some kind of reed. Purposefully constructed. They reminded her of big table mats. The seaward ones seemed to be flowing with the current, but those heading upstream were attached by fine thread to more crabs on the bank of the little canal: bigger beasts than those she’d seen on the seaweed farms, hefty, clumsy, labouring to pull their threads. She looked closer, and made out more of the smaller crabs. Each of the big haulage animals had at least one little crab beside him, with a pincer holding – what, a whip? Something like that. And on each of the rafts themselves rode another little crab, or two, and they held handles in their pincers which controlled a kind of rudder—

She stepped back. ‘No way.’

‘Way, Captain,’ said Hemingway, grinning. ‘There are many possibilities for life – and, it seems, many possibilities for toolmaking, civilization-building. Here, it was the crabs who took the chance. Why not? On the Datum, crabs are as old as the Jurassic, there are thousands of species, and they can be pretty smart, communicating with clacks of their pincers, fighting over females, digging burrows. They don’t have hands but you could do some fine work with those pincers.’

‘They don’t seem to be reacting to us, do they? Half a dozen vast presences looming over them.’

‘Too big,’ Snowy growled. ‘Not ss-see.’