The Long Utopia Read online

  Joshua grinned. ‘Ouch. It’s like that episode of classic Trek where the Greek gods lost their worshippers.’

  ‘Joshua, I’m trying to describe my deepest existential crisis. Perhaps we could discuss Star Trek some other time.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I had a breakdown, Joshua. In a sense I did die, or part of me. And the surviving piece has become a pioneer. A farmer. Once I tried to apprehend the problems of all mankind. Now I am immersed in the particular. Or I was.’ Lobsang sighed. ‘And yet here I am. Agnes, my anchor, had me face up to my wider responsibilities.’

  ‘And Sally Linsay.’

  Lobsang looked at him sharply. ‘Sally? What about her?’

  ‘I talked this over with Agnes. Lobsang, you keep talking about coincidences, or the lack of them. Isn’t it a coincidence that this crisis with the beetles has blown up slap bang in the world you happen to be homesteading?’

  ‘I have wondered about that . . .’

  ‘She set you up.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sally, of course. You say you went to her for advice on a suitable world. And she brought you out here?’

  ‘That’s so.’

  Joshua laughed. ‘She knew there were problems here. Or she guessed it; her intuition about the Long Earth is pretty powerful. Remember how we first met her?’ It had been on their first jaunt together into the deep Long Earth – on The Journey, as fanboy types now referred to it. ‘There we were drifting through the High Meggers for the very first time, two bozos in a leaky prototype airship – and she’d already gotten wind of the crisis First Person Singular had caused, that massive stepwise disruption, and she was waiting for us. And now she’s got hold of you and Agnes and dropped you right on top of this latest drama. That’s why the world is blowing up under you, Lobsang. Sally made sure you were here when it did.’

  Lobsang seemed angry. ‘If that’s true she should have consulted me.’

  ‘Would you have gone to New Springfield if she had? You’ve just been telling me about your breakdown, about your need to escape. This was the only way she could swing it.’

  Lobsang was silent, frozen.

  Joshua sighed. ‘You never guessed, did you? For all your world-spanning intellect, for all your experiments with humanity, you’re still horribly naive about people, aren’t you, Lobsang?’ He glanced out of the window, looking south, the Atlantic to his left-hand side, choppy and foam-capped, the storm-lashed forest to his right. ‘No sign of any action down there. I think I’ll take some exercise. There’s a fold-out treadmill in back. Call me if anything changes.’

  ‘Oh, I will,’ said Lobsang stonily.

  Joshua looked back with a grin. ‘Poor old Lobsang. You want me to gather a few laurel leaves? It wouldn’t hurt—’

  ‘Go take your run, Valienté.’

  29

  WHEN AGNES WALKED slowly up the trail back to her homestead on Manning Hill, bearing a basket of mushrooms she’d picked by the river, Marina Irwin came out to meet her.

  Agnes smiled warily. Marina didn’t smile back, and Agnes might have expected that. This morning, with George/Lobsang away, Marina had agreed to watch Ben for a couple of hours. But the business of the Poulson house and Nikos had created some tension between the families. It was often this way, in Agnes’s experience, when you had to speak to parents about their children.

  It took a moment for Agnes to register that the expression on Marina’s face was more serious than that.

  She hurried forward. ‘Is something wrong? Is it Ben?’

  ‘No,’ Marina said quickly. ‘Not Ben. He’s fine, he’s napping. It’s your cat, I’m afraid. It’s Shi-mi.’

  Agnes checked Ben, who was sleeping peacefully.

  Then she looked for Shi-mi.

  The cat was lying by the hearth. When Agnes arrived, Shi-mi tried to lift her head, but dropped back. ‘Agnes,’ she said, softly, scratchily. ‘I couldn’t reach my litter. I made a mess. I do apologize.’

  Agnes ruffled the fur above Shi-mi’s eyes. ‘A quite convincing mess too.’

  ‘My decline was sudden. An abrupt shut-down. I imagine the process is realistic. Marina was very kind, but there was nothing she could do. I hope she is not distressed . . . Agnes?’

  ‘I’m here, sweetheart.’ The cat shuddered and yowled, and Agnes stroked her until she was still. ‘We still have choices, Shi-mi. You know that. We can take you to the gondola, the workshop—’

  ‘No. This is my place. I have lived here, these last years, as a true cat. People accept me. The mice fear me. I disdain the dogs. It is right that I, I . . . I-I-I-I—’

  The sudden judder in her voice was mechanical, profoundly disturbing, an intrusion of artificiality – or in fact of reality, Agnes supposed. But she stroked Shi-mi’s side until she was calm again.

  Shi-mi said now, ‘Agnes, say goodbye to Joshua for me. And Lobsang. And make sure you tell Maggie Kauffman what became of me. Tell her I expect Mac to crack a bottle of single malt – Auld Lang Syne, not the cheap stuff – in memory of a flea-bucket.’

  ‘I will. You have always been a good friend, Shi-mi.’

  ‘I am Ben’s cat now. That’s all I ever wanted to be, I’ve discovered. And I, I . . .’ Her voice tailed off into a soft, quite convincing purr. Then, as Agnes stroked her, she shuddered once, and her eyes opened wide, and their soft green LED light faded to dark.

  30

  THE NEXT TIME he called a halt, Lobsang stopped the twain dead, in the middle of the night, without warning. In the pitch dark, as the engines shut down, Joshua woke immediately.

  In shorts and a T-shirt he rolled out of bed, pushed out through the partition into the body of the gondola, and stumbled into the co-pilot’s seat, beside Lobsang. A dashboard clock showed two a.m. The only internal light came from the control tablets, which underlit Lobsang’s face as he peered through the window. Outside, the moon, more than half full, was bright.

  It was obvious why they had stopped.

  Under the prow, looking south, Joshua saw ocean to his left-hand side, waves glistening like mercury in the moonlight. To the right lay land cloaked with forest green. And spanning the world from left to right, east to west, was another viaduct: slim, glistening in the moonlight, striding on confident pillars out of the ocean and across the land.

  ‘Just like the last,’ Lobsang said. ‘I mean, the same dimensions, apparently the same material. The night is very clear. I can trace it all the way to the ocean horizon, as straight as I can measure.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘About the latitude of South Carolina. Some five hundred miles south of the New York viaduct. Took us around eighteen hours to get here.’

  ‘OK. So, Lobsang, if this is typical as you keep saying, if the whole world is girdled with these things – if they’re all around five hundred miles apart—’

  ‘There may be a couple of dozen of them. Of course the distribution may not be a simple spacing with distance, or latitude. We’ve no way of knowing, without a view from orbit.’

  ‘This is just as you anticipated, it seems, Lobsang. Global. I wonder how long it took them to build all this.’

  ‘We’ve no meaningful way to answer that question, Joshua. We don’t know how long they’ve been here, on this world. Or how fast they work. I suspect they’ve accelerated their progress since they encountered us. Getting it done before we can react. But that’s only a guess, for now.’

  ‘OK. But why, Lobsang? What’s it all for? A transport system? Rail lines? Are these aqueducts, like the Romans used to build?’

  ‘I doubt it’s anything so simple. I could make guesses, but it would not be constructive at this stage.’

  Joshua studied him. His face, underlit by the tablets’ glow, was even harder to read than usual. ‘You sound subdued. Are even you in awe of what these beetles are building?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘So, what next?’

  Lobsang said thoughtfully, ‘We’ve come under no threat. Th
e beetles must be aware of our movements; we passed over a work party, remember, on the New York viaduct. We are evidently irrelevant to them. And our findings cannot be lost, even if we do not return; I have already sent short-wave radio reports back to Agnes.’

  ‘You think we should go on. All the way to the equator?’

  ‘That’s what I suggest.’

  ‘Then let’s do it.’

  The airship forged on, tracking the North American east coast, heading steadily south.

  It was evening of this third day of the journey when they came upon the next viaduct, another five hundred miles or so south. This one spanned Florida, at about the latitude of Miami.

  They reached the next viaduct south, another five hundred miles or so, about midday of the next day. It cut across the ocean itself with no land in sight, to north or south. Under a cloudy noon sky, the viaduct was difficult to make out against the grey shoulder of the ocean.

  ‘There’s no Mexico here,’ Joshua said, checking their position on a tablet map.

  ‘Very observant.’ Lobsang told Joshua that on this world – and on similar worlds in this band – Mesoamerica did not exist, as they knew it from the Datum. ‘Here, the Pacific breaks through into the Gulf of Mexico. And if you were to cross the Atlantic you’d find the Mediterranean flowing through the Middle East into the Arabian Sea. So there is a continuous waterway running all the way around the planet, at about this latitude. As a result the global ocean currents are different. Once, long ago, it was like this on the Datum; the palaeontologists call it the Tethys Sea. In fact some Long Earth geographers call these worlds the Tethys Belt.’

  ‘I guess that’s one reason the world’s warmer?’

  ‘Yes. And if they’ve straddled the whole world with a viaduct at this latitude, the beetles must have mostly encountered ocean, on their way around. An incredible feat of engineering.’

  Joshua said, ‘And I used to think oil rigs out on the Gulf were impressive.’

  ‘Onwards, Joshua?’

  ‘Onwards, Lobsang.’

  They came upon the next viaduct at dawn of the next day, the fifth of the journey. It clipped the northern coast of Venezuela – the northern shore of South America, which was, in this world, an island continent separate from the north.

  They continued south, leaving the viaduct behind, crossing dense jungle, a green chaos beneath them.

  Lobsang said, ‘That forest is probably full of exotic animals of kinds nobody ever encountered before. An island world.’

  ‘Leave it for your grandchildren to explore, Lobsang.’

  On they sailed, heading deeper over the interior of the continent now, riding through another day and into the night. And at about midnight they came to yet another viaduct. This was the equator. Lobsang recommended they wait out the night to see it properly.

  They came together at the windows at about six a.m., on the sixth day of their journey.

  The airship drifted in the air directly over the viaduct. It ran, Joshua saw, almost parallel to the course of a tremendous river.

  ‘That must be the local Amazon,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So now what? Do we descend? Down I’ll go with an electronic parrot on my shoulder, just like old times?’

  Lobsang forced a smile. ‘We don’t want to provoke any hostility. For now we wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Again, I suspect that when it comes, we won’t be able to miss it.’ He yawned and stretched, quite convincingly. ‘Now might be a good time to make breakfast, Joshua. Anything but chowder . . .’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Joshua rummaged through the tiny galley. They had frozen meat and French fries, and energy to spare; he decided to make burgers. As he got to work he said, ‘You know, I said it before, we’re going to have to do this properly.’

  ‘Properly?’

  ‘A genuine global survey. Teams of scientists with seismometers and magnetometers and whatever. Geologists and climatologists to predict what’s going to come next. Super-clocks, atomic or some such, to measure the spin-up of the world more accurately than dear Agnes with her pendulums.’

  Lobsang grunted. ‘And the President of the United States, to make a formal first contact and hand over a flag and a plaque? You’re correct in principle, Joshua. It might not be so easy to assemble resources like that, not like it used to be. But we should try—’

  A blinding light filled the cabin, a glare that shifted like a swinging searchlight beam. They both ducked, instinctively. It was as if some tremendous craft was flying over the airship.

  Joshua dumped the food he was handling and ran forward to the window. He saw a fireball, burning and spitting, scrape its way across the pale equatorial sky, leaving behind a contrail of feathery white vapour. It was heading dead east, out towards the mouth of the Amazon and the ocean.

  And now the sound hit them, a tremendous cracking boom that made the gondola shudder.

  ‘My God.’

  Lobsang was smiling grimly. ‘I told you we couldn’t miss it, when it came. How long have we been here? Six hours? There must be several passes like that per day.’

  ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘At a first guess, I’d say it was probably a mass of moon rock, wrapped in some kind of electrically conductive shell. We’ve glimpsed operations on the moon before, remember. That rock must be one of a stream, pouring past the Earth, skimming the atmosphere. As they must have been for years now. This is how they’re spinning up the Earth, Joshua. The beetles. With these latitude bands, and the hurtling space rocks. They turned this whole planet into a huge electrical motor. And they’ve only just begun.’

  Joshua looked down at the green carpet of life below, the river, the blue morning sky: rich, ancient, stunningly beautiful. And unique, as was each of the worlds of the Long Earth. ‘To what end?’

  ‘To serve their own purposes. Will that food take long? We’ve learned all we need to learn, for now. Let’s eat, and go home. We’ve got work to do. And, Joshua.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You might be right. Sally Linsay may have got us all involved in this in the first place. I think we might need her help to make an end of it.’

  Joshua felt a peculiar, deep reluctance to respond. ‘You know, Lobsang, it’s twenty-seven years since the three of us first met, in the High Meggers, when you and I went sailing out on the Mark Twain. I feel like I keep being dragged back to reunions at a school I hated. You think we’ll ever be rid of each other?’

  ‘Not this side of the grave,’ Lobsang said gloomily. ‘You see, Joshua, there’s something specific I need to ask of the two of you.’

  Joshua touched his controls. The Shillelagh turned gracefully in the air and headed for home.

  ‘What’s that, Lobsang?’

  ‘We need to get the band back together, Elwood. I need you to go find me.’

  31

  STAN AND ROCKY weren’t told where the home of the Next was.

  When they got there, after passages through a lot of soft places, and while their travelling companions exchanged bursts of quicktalk, Rocky and Stan stood and looked around. Despite all the mystery, the Grange seemed nondescript to Rocky. They had emerged on the outskirts of a small township by a river: a few dozen houses built of wood and mud brick and what looked like prefabricated ceramic panels. Smoke rose up from chimney stacks. Just houses, Rocky thought at first glance, perhaps a few small workshops, even barns, though he saw no domesticated animals. Beyond the town a grassy plain stretched off to the horizon, where trees crowded, a misty green mass. There were more such townships, three, four, five, some blending into each other, off across the plain. The sky was blue, the day warm – very warm, given they were at the latitude of Valhalla, of Datum Chicago, so they were told.

  Surely it was just another world, in the great stepwise necklace of worlds that was the Long Earth.

  ‘This could be anywhere,’ Rocky said.

  ‘No church,’ Stan murmured.

&
nbsp; Rocky looked again; he was right. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Every other place you go. Every human place. There’s a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, or a temple. And no town hall either. Humans always build town halls. Americans anyhow.’

  Rocky shrugged. ‘Maybe the Next just don’t like town halls.’

  ‘Or clothes? . . .’

  A small group of people came by, a variety of ages; evidently they’d been down to that river, swimming, fishing maybe, and now were on their way back into town, for their skin was glistening wet. And they were showing a lot of that skin. They wore variants of moccasins on their feet, and belts hung with tools, twine and other oddments. Not much else. And no adornments, Rocky managed to notice as he stared, no jewellery or pendants; even their hair was cut neatly but with no sense of styling.

  When they saw the boys staring, the group, young men and women alike, shared bursts of quicktalk, and turned away, laughing.

  Marvin was grinning. ‘Put your eyes back in their sockets. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that,’ Rocky said.

  The little group of travellers broke up. As Roberta and Jules made off for destinations of their own, Marvin led the boys to a small house on the outskirts of the township. ‘This is a place I share with a few others. It’s not mine. You’ll get the idea, we don’t really own stuff here. I’ll go bunk down elsewhere for now. You’re going to need a private space, time alone. Time to decompress. You especially, Rocky.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘But you too, Stan, you’ll have a lot to take in. There’s food in there. Dried meat, fruit, coffee. Go to the river for water, it’s clean. You can build a fire. There’s blankets, clothes that ought to fit if you need them. By which I mean, cover-up clothes like you’re used to. You’re in Rome, but you don’t need to do as the Romans do. Get some rest. I’ll come by in the morning.’ He glanced at them. ‘You won’t be disturbed. People will leave you alone.’