The Long Utopia Read online

  ‘I’ve got the area signposted,’ Burdon said. ‘A one-to-one map. A bit rough but it will do.’

  ‘Good man. We get back over. We get our families to safety. And then—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And then we consider the future. For us, our families. And our “kind”, as Mr Radcliffe called us.’

  Luis thought he had never heard such a grim tone of voice from Hackett before. Yet he was right; the path ahead was clear – the only path they could take now. They must run to their families, and hide from the government’s assassins.

  Gingerly, in the flickering light of the candles, he got to his feet.

  Nelson, having learned as much as he felt he needed to, went in search of Joshua.

  But according to the most reliable source on Joshua’s whereabouts, the Home in Madison, Joshua was gone, vanished once more into the deep Long Earth.

  25

  THE MAN STANDING at the door of the Berg house, here in Miami West 4, was aged maybe twenty-five – seven or eight years older than Rocky and Stan. He wore a battered wide-brimmed hat, leather jacket, scuffed jeans, heavy-duty moccasins. He had a pack on his back, and at his waist he carried a rolled-up whip, a Stepper box, and some kind of handgun. He looked ready for travel, Rocky Lewis thought immediately. Too ready, like a cartoon.

  The guy stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Jules van Herp. Born in Datum Quebec; my family evacuated because of Yellowstone when I was eight. Call me Jules.’ He grinned at Rocky. ‘So, you ready for the Grange?’

  Rocky winced, and glanced around to see if they’d been overheard. In the months since Stan had first been approached by Roberta Golding, the one thing that had been drummed into them was how secretive the Next were. You didn’t even say the name of the Grange out loud. And now here was this clumsy character just blurting it out.

  Stan emerged from the house, carrying a pack, blinking in the light. It was early morning here in West 4, and the sun was just rising beyond the thin sky-piercing thread of the space elevator. He stood by Rocky and inspected Jules van Herp. ‘Well, you’re not one of them,’ Stan said dryly. ‘Not with a dopy expression like that.’

  ‘Oh, hell no. I just work for them. I’m here to help with your trip.’

  Stan scowled at him. ‘So if you’re not a Next, what are you, Jules? A native bearer?’

  Rocky winced again. For a young man who was increasingly thought of in these parts as a source of wisdom, Stan could be brutally cruel. But then, Rocky thought, they were both still just seventeen.

  Jules did not seem offended, however. ‘Just doing my job, and it’s a job I enjoy. I’ll take you to meet the others. Not far from here stepwise. I see you’ve got your pack. You won’t need much once you’re there, at the Grange. People always take more than they need, the first time. Some kind of comfort thing, I guess.’

  Rocky asked, ‘You’ve done this before? Taken people there?’

  ‘A few times.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We do need to move, however. You understand you’ll be going through soft places?’

  Rocky suppressed a shudder. ‘So we’ve been told.’

  Jules grinned easily. ‘Don’t sweat it, it’s not so bad. Anyhow, you’re safe in their hands.’ His confidence in the Next seemed absolute, Rocky thought. ‘But the soft places aren’t like stepping. They’re limited in space and time; you have to hit the right moment.’

  ‘So we’ve appointments to keep.’

  ‘That’s it. Any more goodbyes you need to make?’

  In fact, Rocky thought, as they’d waited for the Next to come take Stan away, it had been nothing but a long drawn-out goodbye for months.

  ‘No,’ Stan said simply. ‘It’s done. Let’s get on with it.’

  So, hastily, very early this September morning – and grumpily, with Rocky’s head aching faintly from the last-night drinks party thrown by their buddies, who’d been told they were leaving to study beanstalk engineering techniques a couple of worlds away – with a stroke of their Stepper boxes they left Earth West 4 behind. Rocky watched the still incomplete space elevator vanish from his view, leaving the unspoiled sky of West 5.

  Then, following Jules’s lead, they stepped again, and again. Stan was a natural stepper, who only carried a box for cover. Rocky was a lot less capable, but Roberta Golding had supplied industrial-strength anti-nausea drugs, and these first steps, at least, weren’t difficult.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the West 10 footprint of Miami.

  Here, Roberta Golding and Marvin Lovelace met them in the middle of a prairie; a scrap of shade from a clump of trees sheltered them from the light of an intense sun. Roberta wore her thick spectacles, and Marvin his card-sharp uniform of shades and small black homburg. They both wore nondescript travelling gear, and carried small packs.

  Roberta smiled at them. ‘Good morning. You’re ready to go onwards?’

  ‘I was expecting you,’ Stan said to Roberta. ‘But not him,’ he jerked a thumb at Jules, ‘or him,’ and he pointed at Marvin.

  Roberta laughed, good natured. ‘Well, Jules is one of you who knows us, and who we can trust. He’s here as kind of a middle-man who might be able to tell us if something goes wrong – better than you might be able to articulate for yourselves for now.’

  Marvin grinned. ‘And you know me, right? Good old Marvin, who saved you from getting beat up more than once for winning out fair and square over some stalk jack in the poker.’

  ‘Anything we can do to help you feel grounded,’ Roberta said. ‘Which is why we encouraged you to bring a companion.’

  ‘I’ve known Rock here all my life. He’s like the brother I never wanted.’

  That was classic Stan. Rocky smirked, and punched his arm.

  Stan scowled. ‘But it doesn’t make me feel grounded to keep hearing all this talk of us and them.’

  Roberta said evenly, ‘This kind of reaction is common. It’s possible for you to back out, at any stage. We will trust your discretion.’

  Marvin nudged him. ‘Come on, man. Don’t bail now. Won’t you always be curious about what you’re missing?’

  Stan shrugged. ‘Fair point. Let’s do this.’

  ‘Good,’ Roberta said firmly.

  Rocky looked at Roberta dubiously. ‘We’re going through the soft places, right? What do we have to do?’

  She smiled, evidently trying to be reassuring. ‘Just hold my hand.’

  They emerged in another prairie, with a subtly different ensemble of waist-high green plants, differently shaped trees – and, in the distance, a herd of tremendous beasts of some kind walking in the mist, dimly visible, like mountains on the move . . .

  A passage through a soft place was different.

  Regular stepping was like consciously striding from one stone in a stream to the next. Now Rocky felt as if he had fallen through some flaw in the world. He couldn’t have described what he saw during the transition. But the vertiginous sense of falling was real enough, as was the bone-sucking chill he felt now, a harsh contrast to the warmth of the fall day on West 10.

  To his shame, Rocky found he was still clinging to Roberta’s hand, like a kid with his mother. He let go hastily.

  ‘You have just travelled a thousand steps from West 10,’ Roberta said. ‘In fact a little more.’

  Rocky asked, ‘Which way did we come? East or West?’

  ‘Does it matter? And we have moved geographically too; we are far from the footprint of Florida.’ Roberta looked into their eyes. ‘Are you both OK? The chill you feel is real; a soft-place transition extracts energy as a simple Linsay step does not, or not measurably. Also it will have felt as if you were in motion for some time. Seconds, perhaps longer; the feeling is subjective and varies between individuals. But in fact, if you had checked your watches, no physical time passes during the transition.’

  ‘Teach me how to do this,’ Stan said.

  Roberta glanced uncertainly at Marvin, who shrugged.

  Stan said, ‘Look, you don’t have a mo
nopoly on soft places. I’ve heard of them before. Some humans who don’t have the pretension to call themselves a separate species can find them too, right?’

  ‘It is a question of training. Of mental discipline. You will not be ready until—’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  Roberta evidently wasn’t used to being interrupted. But she said, ‘It is all a question of imagination. Just as our hominid ancestors could look at a rock and picture the tool inside, so we can consider this world and imagine another. The more advanced the intellect, you see, the more detailed the visualization. And at last when the visualization is rich enough—’

  ‘You step.’

  ‘Yes. Into a world which, we think, crystallizes from a Platonic potential into the realm of the actual. It is just as in quantum mechanics – if two objects have a quantum description sufficiently precise, if their states are identical, they are the same object. To go further than simple Linsay stepping is essentially an application of higher mathematics . . . Oh, if only you could quicktalk! English is utterly inadequate, and slow. Like shouting poetry down a drainpipe. Stan, you may be able to learn.’ But she glanced at Rocky, and her message was clear. Not you. ‘Are you ready? We will make some stops – call them educational opportunities – before we reach our destination. Hold my hands, both of you . . .’

  And Rocky, helpless, was hurled through another plummeting seven-league-boot leap.

  26

  THE AIRSHIP SHILLELAGH hovered over Manning Hill, over the Abrahams farmstead, tethered to the remains of the gondola which had delivered Lobsang, Agnes, a little boy and a cat to this world three years before. As Agnes strode up the hill, bearing a box of eggs – a souvenir of a coffee morning at the Irwins’ – she realized that the twain had already been there a week. Agnes had become a lot more aware of the passage of time thanks to her clocks and calendars.

  The battered old airship was a novelty, of course, in the sedate green world of New Springfield, and even after a week the children, and some adults too, still came to stare. Joshua Valienté had been introduced as a visitor, an old family friend, and nobody had questioned that simple cover story – even those few who had heard of this hero of the early days of stepping. And Joshua was generous with his time, as ever. After arriving in the airship he had given the local kids rides across the forest-choked landscape of Earth West 1,217,756. These kids thought nothing of stepping, nothing of the existence of the multiple worlds of the Long Earth – but few of them had ever got to see their home from the air.

  Six-year-old Ben, of course, loved his Uncle Joshua. And Joshua made time too for Shi-mi, who had come hesitantly out to meet him when the airship first landed.

  Well, Joshua had finally made it here. But he had taken some finding, after Agnes had sent the word out through Bill Chambers and the Sisters at the Home and other old friends. Since the final breakdown of his marriage Joshua had become more reclusive still, it seemed, spending even more of his time on his solitary ‘sabbaticals’, huddled in his Robinson Crusoe one-man stockades on remote worlds.

  Agnes had been afraid of Joshua’s reaction when he discovered Lobsang was still alive. In the event he just laughed. ‘I knew it.’

  Meanwhile the situation was becoming urgent.

  For a world that had been sold to them as lacking pronounced seasons, there seemed to be a heck of a lot of weather. As the months they’d waited for Joshua had passed, there were more and more freak events: storms, droughts, howling winds – and, strangest of all, bizarre ‘magnetic storms’, as Lobsang called them, when auroras would flap in the sky like tremendous curtains, streaming north to south. Agnes had never heard of auroras at latitudes as low as this, not that she was any kind of expert. These storms had consequences. The furballs and their predators blundered about even more randomly than before. Maybe these creatures, like navigating birds, relied on a stable magnetic field for their sense of direction.

  As for the people, the storms played hell with the few electronic gadgets they had that still worked. Agnes herself, of course, was a thing of clockwork and gears – that was how she thought of herself anyhow. When the storms came she fretted about how she, Lobsang and indeed Shi-mi might be affected. Lobsang told her not to worry; her innards were well shielded, and her substrates were biochemical rather than metal. Lobsang said that in fact they should be affected less than the standard-issue people around them, whose minds were also linked to their bodies through electromagnetic fields in their brains and nervous systems. That just made her more afraid for Ben, and his growing young body.

  Well, Joshua was here now. And, a week after the arrival of the Shillelagh, he and Lobsang were ready to get to work.

  Inside the house, Agnes found the two of them sitting at the kitchen table picking over beetle artefacts: silver bangles and pendants, what looked like a small Swiss army knife also wrought in silver, and a shard of smooth black material, curved, broken, like a piece of a smashed Easter egg.

  Lobsang looked up. ‘Ben’s playing out back.’

  ‘Good.’ Agnes bustled around the kitchen, storing the eggs, preparing a fresh pot of coffee. ‘I’ll call him for lunch if he doesn’t come in.’

  Joshua said, ‘Well, I guess we’re about ready to go.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘Go tour this world in the Shillelagh,’ Lobsang said. ‘Take a proper look at it, outside of this pinprick we inhabit.’ He shook his greying head. ‘It’s amazing that we’ve done this, in retrospect. You and I, Agnes. Stepped into this one place, in a whole new world, with no real idea what’s over the horizon.’

  Joshua said, ‘Well, that’s how most people do it, Lobsang. First light tomorrow, as agreed?’

  ‘Suits me,’ Lobsang said. ‘It won’t take long to get ready. I’ve packed everything I’ll need from our old gondola into the twain already.’

  ‘Good,’ Agnes said firmly. ‘But what’s all this junk on my kitchen table?’

  ‘Samples,’ Lobsang said, and he put his arms around the fragments, as if shielding them from her. ‘We’re trying to be scientific, if belatedly. These are beetle artefacts – given as gifts to the children – and a few scraps we collected from the Gallery, what appear to be detached limbs, even this shard of broken carapace. I was telling Joshua that I’ve put these through the mass spectrometer in the gondola.’

  Joshua grinned. ‘A backwoods pioneer with a mass spectrometer. You are a cheat, Lobsang.’

  ‘But the only scientific equipment I have is what we brought to help service our android bodies – in my Frankenstein laboratory, as Agnes puts it. I had to adapt, improvise . . . The point is, from their isotopic composition I can tell that these things were made locally, from local substances. The silver was mined a few miles from here. The carapace shard is a kind of ceramic based on river-bed clay from Soulsby Creek. And so on.’

  Agnes frowned. ‘I thought you believed these creatures are alien. Not of Earth – of any Earth.’

  ‘So I do. In form and function they just don’t fit, in any version of the terrestrial tree of life. And, Agnes, I took Joshua through to the Planetarium. Whatever’s going on there, that’s surely a strong hint that these silver beetles have an extraterrestrial origin. But now that they’re here they appear to be making more copies of themselves – breeding, you might call it – using local materials. Stuff from Earth, this Earth.’

  Agnes said, ‘What a cheek. This is our world, not theirs.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So what does this all mean, Lobsang? What are these creatures up to? And how does it fit in with the days getting shorter?’

  ‘That’s what we mean to find out.’

  ‘Well, something’s wrong, that’s for sure; this old planet’s broken down and groaning . . .’

  Joshua, who had known Agnes and her tastes all his life, grinned at that. Lobsang looked confused.

  Ben’s soft voice called from outside. ‘George?’

  Lobsang pushed back his chair and stood. ‘I’ll go see to him.�
��

  Agnes said, ‘Lunch will be ready soon.’

  Joshua stood too. ‘You need a hand, Agnes?’

  She waved vaguely. ‘If you like. I’m making chicken soup. Find what you can and improvise.’

  He smiled, and began looking out ingredients and implements: vegetables, a chunk of goat’s cheese, seasoning, a sharp knife and a chopping board.

  ‘You always were a good cook,’ Agnes said. ‘Even when you were no older than Ben is now.’ She looked sideways at him. ‘And you are taking Lobsang’s non-death well, I must say. I know you said you weren’t too surprised, but . . .’

  Joshua grunted. ‘He’s pulled a lot of stunts before. And I was half expecting a call.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Why? . . . Oh. You’re talking about your headaches. The Silence, or the lack of it.’

  Joshua had his own peculiar sensitivities to the condition of the Long Earth, it seemed, and had done since he was a boy. When the Sisters had seen him come home from his solo teenage jaunts in distress, they’d tried to tease out of him what he was sensing, feeling: trying to get the ineffable out of the most taciturn boy Agnes had ever met. He would speak of a Silence that wasn’t a Silence, or of a sound that wasn’t there, like an echo from distant mountains . . . He couldn’t articulate what was evidently an uneasy sense of disturbance that sometimes translated into headaches, storm warnings in his own young head.

  ‘Do you feel anything now? I mean, here?’

  ‘Not specifically. It doesn’t work like that, Agnes. This one’s been coming for years, though. Noticed it before my fiftieth birthday, I remember.’ He half-grinned. ‘But when I sensed the thunder clouds gathering, I just knew Lobsang wouldn’t let something as trivial as his own death get in the way of dealing with it.’

  ‘He did need to recover, Joshua. He was reluctant, in fact, to face up to this business of the silver beetles. It’s a distraction from his – humanity project.’

  ‘But who else was capable of handling this situation?’

  ‘Who else, indeed.’

  ‘And it’s a funny coincidence that, of all the possible locations in the Long Earth, he happens to be right on the spot where he’s most needed. Don’t you think?’