The Long Utopia Read online

  ‘Who put you in charge?’

  ‘You did twenty years ago, when you brought me back,’ she said softly, with an eye on Nikos. ‘So, did you bring the flashlights?’

  The passage down the sloping shaft that led from the ‘cellar’ was easy enough. In the years they’d been coming down here Nikos and his little buddies had dug in hand- and footholds.

  But both Lobsang and Agnes were astonished when they climbed stiffly out of the shaft, and found themselves standing in a long, low chamber, lit only by their flashlights: a floor of trampled dirt, a smooth roof supported by pillars of rock or dirt. All this was evidently deep underground.

  Agnes asked, ‘What is this place?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nikos said. ‘Something to do with the silver beetles. I call it the Gallery. Because it’s like a gallery in a big museum in a picture book my Mom used to read with me when I was little.’

  He sounded different now, Agnes thought, in this echoing space, his face half-shadowed in the light of the flashes. Not so ashamed of the stunts he’d pulled. More like he was proud of what he’d found. Well, maybe he should be, she thought. She supposed he should have told people about this, but to have kept his nerve and go exploring in the first place was something.

  ‘It’s no gallery,’ Lobsang said. ‘Some kind of mine – and worked out, it looks like.’ He splashed his light on the roof, the floor. ‘An iron ore seam? This area’s rich in ore, it’s one reason New Springfield was planted here. But I’m not aware of any large-scale works here, apart from a few minor scrapes for the forges.’

  ‘This is more than a minor scrape, George.’

  ‘I can see that. So, Nikos, what about these silver beetles of yours?’

  ‘Turn around,’ said Nikos softly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Turn around.’

  Agnes and Lobsang turned, swinging their flashlights.

  The beetle was here.

  As their lights splashed on it, it unpeeled from the ground, standing on a cluster of hind limbs, its black carapace gleaming with silver insets, and semi-transparent sacs of some kind of gas clustered on its exposed, greenish underside. It was the size of a human.

  And a kind of face, half-hidden behind a silver mask, swivelled to consider them.

  Agnes was astounded, overwhelmed. Whatever she had been expecting it hadn’t been something so utterly alien. She shrank back, would have fled if Lobsang had not held her.

  ‘Stay calm, Agnes.’

  ‘I am calm, Lob— George. I am calm. What the hell is it?’

  Lobsang held his hands up to show they were empty, and carefully walked around the creature.

  The beetle stood passively before Nikos, who had unwrapped his pack to reveal chunks of rock of various sorts, some hard like granite, some softer sandstone. Boy and beetle were a silent tableau while Lobsang inspected them.

  ‘I’ve known people who’ve travelled to the ends of the Long Earth,’ Lobsang said softly as he walked. ‘I’ve travelled pretty far myself. But I never heard of anything like this.’

  Nikos grinned. ‘There’s plenty more where he came from.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a he?’

  ‘I don’t imagine Nikos does, for sure,’ Agnes said testily.

  ‘Agnes – just tell me what you see.’

  ‘Like an insect,’ she said immediately. ‘It is like a beetle. That black shell stuff that covers it looks segmented. I can’t count how many legs it’s got. Legs, or arms. Maybe it’s more like a centipede?’

  ‘I don’t think it matches any class of creature known on Earth. Or on the Long Earth, in any working-out of terrestrial evolution. Not even the intelligent crustaceans Maggie Kauffman found during her journey of exploration aboard the Armstrong II.’

  ‘Something new, then,’ Agnes said.

  ‘Or something not from here. Not from any Earth. Damn it,’ he said with sudden petulance, ‘I don’t want this to be happening. I don’t want mystery. I wish you hadn’t brought me down here!’

  ‘You don’t wish that at all, George.’

  He sighed. ‘OK. What about the silver?’

  Agnes looked closely. ‘I see . . . belts. A kind of sash, slung across its upper body. Little studs that seem to be stuck in the, umm, carapace. Things like bangles on some of the limbs – just like the bracelet Ben came home with. And that mask, of course. The head, George. The head looks almost human, apart from the eye.’

  ‘Eerie, isn’t it? Probably a coincidence of form.’

  His lecturing tone irritated her. ‘Well, you don’t know anything at all, George, not yet. But maybe Nikos does. Nikos, can you talk to this thing?’

  ‘No,’ Nikos said firmly. ‘I’ve never heard them make a sound. Except for a kind of scraping when they walk. That’s their armoured bodies, I reckon. Some of them fly. Their backs open up and wings unfold. When they fly, they kind of rustle.’

  Somehow, illogically, that detail made Agnes shudder.

  Nikos said, ‘But you see more of that in the Planetarium. Not here.’

  Lobsang said, ‘The Planetarium? . . . Never mind. Tell us later. OK, you don’t speak to them. So tell me what you’re doing with those rocks.’

  ‘I swap them for the silver things. The rings, the pendants. We pick up bits of rock from the ground, all around the forest, and we bring them here. If we’re doing it properly we have to show them where we found the rocks on a map. I say map. It’s just a kind of scribble I drew once.’

  ‘You’re swapping rock samples for silver artefacts?’

  ‘I guess you could call it that.’

  Agnes asked, ‘If you can’t speak to them, how did you work all this out? The whole idea of the trade.’

  Nikos seemed irritated at having to be quizzed like this, in his own little empire. ‘It took a long time. It started with a bit of quartz I had in my pocket, one of the first times. I just showed it to one of them. After that—’

  ‘Never mind,’ Lobsang said. ‘Agnes, I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow. But why would they want rock samples? Well, because they want to do some more mining, I guess. They need to study the landscape. But to what end? . . .’

  ‘Show me,’ Agnes said. ‘Show me how you do your trade.’

  Nikos shrugged. He just held out a bit of rock. Silvery limbs unfolded from the creature’s belly, took the rock, and handed over a small silver artefact in return, like a pendant.

  Agnes said, ‘George, do you see that? The limbs. They’re not just sleeved. Some of those arms are metal.’

  ‘Mmm. Maybe that dark chitin-like carapace is actually artificial too. This thing could be some kind of cyborg. Half biological, half mechanical.’

  ‘In that case,’ Agnes said, ‘it should feel right at home with us.’

  Nikos glanced at her, puzzled by that.

  Lobsang asked, ‘Nikos, you say there are more of these creatures?’

  ‘Masses. The first time I came down here the whole place was swarming. You don’t see that so much now. I think maybe they’d nearly finished what they were doing down here.’

  ‘OK. But you also see them in this place you call a planetarium, right?’

  ‘I mean, it’s not really a planetarium—’

  Agnes asked, ‘Another name from your mother’s picture books?’

  ‘Yeah. Seems kind of babyish now, I guess.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Lobsang said. ‘Can you show us?’ He looked around. ‘What, is it an adjoining chamber, another shaft?’

  ‘Oh, no. You have to step there.’

  Agnes recoiled as he said that, instinctively. ‘That’s impossible. Everybody knows that. You can’t step out of an underground chamber, a mine, a cellar.’ She thought of Joshua, who had taught her most of what she knew about stepping.

  Nikos twisted his face. ‘Well, it’s a funny kind of step. I’ll have to show you.’


  Agnes glanced at Lobsang. ‘You think we should follow? If he’s survived it – and for all we know Ben too – I guess we can.’

  Lobsang said pointedly, ‘But we don’t have our Stepper boxes with us, remember, Agnes. We weren’t expecting to travel stepwise today.’

  That was true, but they both knew, and Nikos didn’t, that they had Stepper technology integrated into their bodies. Agnes even had a peculiar little hatch in the small of her back where she could insert a potato.

  But Nikos said, utterly without fear, ‘You won’t need them. I’ve got my box on my belt.’ He held out his hands. ‘Come on. I’ll take you.’

  The beetle creature curled back to the ground, scuttled away with a scrape of chitin and metal on rock – and, as it receded into the shadows, Agnes thought she saw it wink out of existence. Maybe stepping was somehow possible down here, then.

  She grabbed Nikos’s right hand. ‘Let’s do it. What can possibly go wrong?’

  Lobsang, more reluctantly, took the boy’s left hand.

  And—

  The sky was orange-brown and crowded with stars, some of them big enough to show as discs, some tinged faintly green against the general background. A sun, fat and red, sat on the horizon, its hull fragmented by refraction. The ground was crowded with blisters, like domes, some low and close to the ground, some taller and bulging at the top, like mushrooms, almost like trees. Agnes saw something like a river, what might be a road alongside it.

  It was all quite baffling. She took a deep breath. The air was thin and smelled of insects, like crushed cockroaches, metallic, sour.

  And silver beetles crawled everywhere, along that riverside road, across the open spaces between the bubble-things. If the one they had encountered in the Gallery had crossed over with them, it was already lost in the crowd. None of them seemed to be paying any attention to a fifteen-year-old boy, and two androids masquerading as a farmer and his wife.

  Nikos grinned. ‘This is the Planetarium. Isn’t it great?’

  Agnes looked at him, and then down at herself. The strange light from the sky made the skin of her hands look orange, washed out the green dye of her shirt, the blue of her jeans. She didn’t fit here, not at all. The strangeness seemed to descend on her, all at once. She couldn’t handle it. She felt herself shivering.

  Lobsang immediately hugged her. ‘Calm, Agnes.’

  ‘I didn’t sign up for this, Lobsang,’ she whispered, away from the boy.

  ‘Well, it was your idea to come here.’

  ‘Only because I thought Ben had been down here before us. Oh, God, Ben, he must have been terrified if he got this far . . .’

  ‘I don’t think he was. He kept coming back, didn’t he?’

  ‘Where are we, Lobsang? Some distant part of the Long Earth? Have we been through one of Sally Linsay’s soft places?’

  ‘I don’t think any Earth ever had a sky like this. We’re far from home.’

  ‘How far? The Long Mars? Mars has an orange sky, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But not all those stars.’

  ‘How did we get here? How could a step—’

  ‘There have been rumours.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Flaws in the Long Earth. Places where stepping a certain kind of way can take you – elsewhere. There were stories of Jokers with this sort of property – one, called the Cueball, Joshua and I discovered ourselves. Not that we stuck around to find out how strange it was.’

  Yes, Agnes thought. This is a flaw. Not just the Poulson house, the hole in the ground. The whole of Earth West 1,217,756. Just as had been her intuition, almost from the beginning. A flaw, something that shouldn’t be here. Somehow it was all connected. It had to be.

  ‘Interesting,’ Lobsang said.

  She managed to laugh. ‘What, one thing in particular as opposed to all the rest?’

  ‘The sky. Those green-tinged stars. On one side of the sky, not the other. Now, why that odd asymmetry?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She pushed away Lobsang’s arm. Nikos was watching her; she felt embarrassed by the weakness she had shown. ‘Take me home,’ she said sternly.

  At their cabin, Shi-mi was waiting for them by the door. She seemed to be bursting with news.

  The cat said without hesitation, ‘I was able to observe your experiments. The pendulum and the timer funnels and the sundial. I have come to a conclusion. I regret that the precision is uncertain—’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Agnes said. ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘When we came here the day was twenty-four hours long. Just as on all the worlds of the Long Earth – well, almost all. I remember that well; I observed it myself. But now—’ And she shuddered.

  Agnes crouched down. ‘Shi-mi, are you all right? Let me get you something.’

  ‘No. Please, Agnes.’ She opened her green eyes wide. ‘Now, according to your clocks, the day is shorter. Twenty-three hours only, plus a few minutes. You were right. You were right . . .’

  Agnes stared at Lobsang. ‘The silver beetles. The Planetarium. Now this, the world spinning faster on its damn axis. What does it mean, Lobsang?’

  ‘I’ll have to find out.’ He sighed. ‘So much for the homesteading.’

  ‘To find out – what do you need to do that?’

  ‘A twain,’ he said. ‘I need a twain, so I can see the whole world. And Joshua Valienté, Agnes. I need Joshua.’

  23

  FOR NELSON AZIKIWE, patiently enquiring, the mysteries of the deeper history of Joshua Valienté and his family continued to unravel . . .

  Luis Valienté never forgot his adventure with Abel and Simon, the runaway slaves, back in 1852. It was an incident that had made him proud to be British, and indeed to be a Waltzer, one of Oswald Hackett’s Knights of Discorporea. A validation too, for the first time in his life, of what he was.

  But as the years passed, he gradually became less and less entangled in the affairs of the Knights, and his life followed its own distinct path.

  That path took a decisive turn thanks to his share in a fictitious Californian gold mine – all Fraser Burdon’s doing, of course – a lode easily extracted thanks to their piggybacking on the results of some poor fellow’s five years of prospecting in the true California. Luis marvelled at Fraser’s ingenious cover-up of their strike’s peculiar provenance. The mine, according to Fraser’s account for the authorities, had supposedly been opened up by a ‘distant cousin’. Its location had been ‘lost’, along with all documentation, in a botched robbery attempt when the ‘cousin’ had come into town and attempted to register his latest ‘strike’ . . . They got away with it. There were, it seemed, even wilder stories than that circulating in the strange subculture of the Gold Rush.

  And suddenly Luis was rich.

  Luis invested his gold money in the burgeoning field of steam engines, for, just as the railways were spreading their iron web around the world, so the oceans, the oldest transport highways of all, were being challenged by a new generation of ships driven by coal and steam, ever since the pioneering service of the Great Western from 1838. Unlike his father, Luis managed to invest well and wisely, on the whole – well enough that he could afford to dabble in another nostalgic passion, backing variety shows in the theatres of England.

  He did learn that Burdon had sunk much of his money into armaments – a growing industry after decades of relative peace in Europe were ended by the brutal war in the Crimea. After that conflict, during his visits to London, Luis often noticed a veteran who had a pitch at a corner of the New Cut, a one-legged fellow who would ape army routines, marching and standing to attention and shouldering arms with his crutch. He wore a medal of some kind, and Luis wondered if he might have met the Queen herself, who had taken a great interest in the war, and had met the troops and handed out the gongs . . . Old folk would tell you there had been a flood of such figures a few decades back, after the war against Bonaparte. They had all died off since, but now there was a fresh crop.

  Armaments! Burdon
, he supposed, had always had an air of brutal realism about him that Luis lacked, for better or worse.

  Not long after his American adventure Luis had married. His bride was a young woman who had once been a singer in the variety halls, and had flirted briefly but intensely with the Great Elusivo. ‘Elusivo no more!’ Hackett had joked, when acting as best man at the wedding. ‘Now she’s got you pinned down at last!’

  The couple settled in a decent town house in Richmond, and raised a daughter who they christened Elspeth – ‘Ella’ to her father, in a nod to Luis’s own ‘elusive’ past that was a secret even from his wife. Later came a son, Robert. As the children grew Luis kept an eye on them both, but to his relief neither showed signs of being a Waltzer, with none of the joys and complications such a condition might bring. The family lived modestly, quietly and respectably.

  Luis noted the death of Prince Albert in 1861 – well, how could he not? The news dominated the nation. The Queen disappeared into mourning black, and all traces of the somewhat pretty if suspicious young woman Luis had once glimpsed in the vaults of Windsor Castle were extinguished. Luis did wonder how the passing of Albert, the great champion of the Knights of Discorporea, would affect their work. But truth be told, once he reached his own fortieth birthday in 1863, Luis heard little of whatever exploits the Knights were getting up to. His own increasing age made him that much less useful as an agent, of course. And Oswald Hackett had always had a secretive streak.

  By the turn of the next decade – and while the British watched aghast as a newly unified Germany under its ferocious Chancellor Bismarck tore into France, advancing even to Paris – Luis’s contact with the Knights had dwindled to the occasional, almost nostalgic, letter or visit.

  So it was a surprise when Hackett called one day in the spring of 1871 and asked him to go to Berlin. He and Burdon were to make separate trips, he said, with instructions to visit particular locations, including government buildings and royal residences.

  Luis was reluctant, but he was wary of angering Oswald Hackett. So he complied. He fulfilled his own mission without incident or alarm.