The Long Utopia Read online

  ‘It’s sinking,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Yep. Submerging again. It’s what it does. Keep watching . . .’

  Now, Joshua saw through his binoculars, flaps opened up on the island ground – flaps of some crusty material, big, irregular, hinged by some kind of muscle, like a clam’s shell. The shy little horses bolted for the flaps and dived down through them without hesitation, disappearing from Joshua’s view into the body of the island beast. The flaps closed tight, just as the waves lapped over their position.

  And then the island simply sank, its apparently rocky ‘shore’, the trees, its cargo of plants and animals, slipping under the waves until only a patch of disturbed water remained, swirling like a feeble whirlpool, with nothing but a few leaves left scattered on the water surface.

  ‘Just as Nelson described,’ Joshua said. ‘I hardly believed it.’

  ‘Now do you see why I wanted to make sure we weren’t on an island? This world is the origin, Joshua. Where the Traversers came from. Actually the Armstrong crew understood what they saw here pretty well, they’d read the accounts of the journey of the Mark Twain, and they got it about right in their reports . . .’

  The Armstrong’s science team had observed biological complexity in this world and its neighbours. There was more than just lichen and bacterial slime here, if you looked for it. But that complexity was not expressed as on the Datum, organized into plants ranging from blades of grass up to sequoia trees, or animals from the smallest amphibians up through horses and humans and elephants and blue whales. Here the complexity was at a global level – almost. As if the evolution of life had skipped a step and gone straight from green slime to Gaia.

  Here, in the lakes and oceans, compound organisms swam: each like a tremendous Portuguese man o’ war, microbial swarms linked into huge protean life forms. They were living islands. And, as the Armstrong crew had observed, those compound organisms often enveloped animals within their structures – animals, however, like the miniature horses and other creatures Joshua saw now, that were not native to this world, but had been collected from elsewhere.

  ‘Lobsang may understand it better by now,’ Sally said. ‘I guess he ought to, after all this time.’

  ‘So we’re on the home world of the Traversers. Why?’

  ‘Because this is where Lobsang must be. The last time we saw him, at the end of The Journey, he was disappearing into the sunset on the back of First Person Singular, the mightiest Traverser of all. Where else would he be?’

  Joshua lowered his binoculars. ‘So now what?’

  ‘So now we set up our radio, and make ourselves comfortable, and wait. Come on, Joshua, a life alone in the High Meggers has always involved a lot of waiting around. You want to play with my antenna kit, or not?’

  So they got down to pioneering, in perhaps the most desolate landscape Joshua had ever visited. ‘A world like a sensory deprivation tank,’ he told Sally after a couple of days. The only excitement came from what he thought might be glimpses of the Traverser, but they all turned out to be illusory, after that first visit, just the shadows of clouds on the grey sea.

  Until their fifth day on the beach, when the Traverser returned.

  And somehow Joshua was not at all surprised when those carapace flaps cracked, and after the usual horse-like creatures emerged to gambol in the sun – and deer-like creatures, and bear-like and dog-like creatures, and animals that looked like mashed-up, misshapen combinations of all these familiar forms, even things like small stegosaurs – after all of them, an ambulant unit came walking calmly up into the light, as if climbing a stair. The human-shaped machine was quite nude, a walking statue, and yet even from here Joshua could see evidence of damage: one arm was missing entirely.

  ‘You two,’ the unit said mildly, calling across the water. ‘Of course it would be you two.’

  ‘Play time’s over, Lobsang,’ Sally said, and Joshua thought there was a note of genuine sadness in her voice.

  44

  HE SAT WITH them, in their rough camp on the desolate beach. He even accepted a share of their rations. Sally handed him chocolate, and a tin mug of coffee brewed on their small solar-powered stove.

  ‘Mm, chocolate,’ he said, biting into a bar he held in his left hand. His right arm was missing from the shoulder. ‘You know me, Joshua. I always did relish my food. At least this version of me; I can’t speak of my subsequent iterations, and it has been twenty-eight years since I last participated in a synching. Even during the voyage of the Mark Twain—’

  ‘Clam chowder and oysters Kilpatrick,’ Joshua said.

  Sally snorted. ‘The good old days in the Bluesmobile. After thirty years apart, you two haven’t changed.’

  Lobsang said, ‘These days, mostly I draw my energy directly from the sunlight.’ He stood and turned, and Joshua saw a silvery panel glisten on his back, reaching down to the top of his buttocks: a solar-cell array. ‘I bask like a plant.’

  There had been other modifications, Joshua had the chance to see now, aside from that missing arm. The naked body was quite hairless, lacking even eyebrows. In places the skin seemed to have been patched; Joshua saw no seams, but there were swathes of a subtly different shade from the general pale brown tan. And the genitalia had gone, to be replaced by a rather gruesome metallic plug in the groin: a simple release valve, it seemed.

  Lobsang said, ‘I do need solid sustenance, of course. Organic biochemistry to support my gel substrate. I can consume bacterial scrapes, algae. Some of the Traversers on this world bear fruit trees, even root plants. And at times the Traversers allow me to consume the flesh of their deceased animal specimens, if it is suitable – if the death is the result of an accident, perhaps, if the meat is not corrupted.’

  Joshua said, ‘Bacon?’

  ‘On good days.’

  Sally said, ‘Lobsang, your arm . . .’

  Joshua said, ‘Yeah. But it’s not his missing arm that’s drawing my attention.’

  Lobsang grinned. ‘Makes you wince, does it, Joshua?’ He reached down to his groin and casually pulled out the plug.

  Joshua felt a sympathetic twinge in his own groin. ‘Please.’

  ‘I had suffered damage in the course of our journey, you’ll recall. Notably when we fell into the Gap. And in the years after you left me with First Person Singular, time took its toll; this unit was never meant to be able to sustain itself without workshop maintenance, not for a period of decades. I sacrificed the arm, and other organs,’ he said, winking at Joshua, ‘for spare parts. I doubt I could pass as a human again. But then, I did not imagine I would ever need to.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you survived,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Me too,’ Sally said grudgingly. ‘Though not surprised.’

  ‘Thank you for your good wishes. And now you come seeking me out.’

  ‘Lobsang asked us to,’ Joshua said. ‘I mean the one who replaced you, who assembled himself from the iterations, the backups you left behind.’

  ‘There’s much I can deduce, by your very presence. Something has happened.’

  Joshua said gently, ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Are the odds against us? Is the situation grim?’

  ‘You could put it like that,’ Sally said. ‘Although that sounds like a line from a movie. You two will never grow up, will you?’

  Joshua dug in his pocket, and produced a memory pod, a small capsule. ‘He – Lobsang – gave me this. He says it contains the briefing you’ll need.’

  Lobsang nodded, his eyes closed. ‘I will come with you nonetheless, of course, regardless of the contents of the briefing; I must trust my own judgement – his judgement.’ He glanced at Sally. ‘You travelled through a soft-place network?’

  ‘Of course. And we’ll go back that way, if you can take it.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice, do I? Can you give me a few hours, before we leave? After so long – it will take me some time to say goodbye to my life here. I have learned a lot, of course, but there is much I’ve
yet to understand. The Traversers evolved here, in this band of worlds, but they roam the Long Earth, though few seem to come as far as the Datum.’

  ‘Some sure do,’ Joshua said with a grin. And he told Lobsang how a later edition of himself had found a Traverser, which that Lobsang had called Second Person Singular, which seemed to have wandered so far down the Long Earth that it may even have strayed into the oceans of the Datum itself – for it had collected people.

  Lobsang made an odd gesture, as if he was trying to clap with one hand. ‘Whole families, living in the belly of the whale. How wonderful. But of course humans fit the sampling strategy. There seems to be a certain selectivity about the creatures the Traversers want. The animals are all of a characteristic size, within one or two orders of magnitude of a human, or a troll. No tiny rodents – though some of those seem to smuggle themselves on board even so. No pliosaurs or whales, at the other end of the size scale. Their sampling is careful and selective, and ought to do no harm to the populations they are taking from. First Person Singular, by the way, was an exception, a sport. She became not a sample-taker but a destroyer. She took it all, a motile extinction event, purposeful, sentient, devouring whole biospheres—’

  ‘Until she could go no further,’ Joshua said, remembering. ‘Samples. Select. You make it sound like there’s some purpose behind it all. But what purpose? To create a zoo? An ark?’

  ‘Or a biological collection, like Darwin on the Beagle? I suspect if I knew the answer to that, Joshua, I would know very much more about the greater mysteries of our existence. And I suspect that the deeper question is not what that purpose is – but who intervened in these creatures’ evolution to give them that purpose.’

  Joshua puzzled over that. ‘Good one. Textbook enigmatic, Lobsang.’

  Sally stood up. ‘While you two pick up your bromance, I’m going for a walk.’

  Lobsang’s face was distorted, lopsided. Joshua, watching with fascinated horror, saw that he was trying to smile. ‘Lobsang, you look like a stroke victim.’

  ‘Sorry. I had no mirrors. I will practise. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody.’

  ‘No,’ Joshua said carefully. ‘Especially not your son.’

  He took that bit of news calmly, nodding, his expression blank. ‘I have been a busy chap, haven’t I? I don’t think a simple synch will be enough this time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so, Lobsang.’

  ‘Shall we walk?’

  So Lobsang completed his preparations, and they left for home.

  But by the time Joshua, Sally and Lobsang had completed the long stepwise journey back to New Springfield, the situation there had got a whole lot worse.

  45

  THE GLOBAL EXPEDITION was Captain Boss’s idea. He would select a diverse group with broad experience and opinions, load them aboard the Cowley, and take them on a brief tour of this suffering world, before coming to a final decision on what to do about the problem of the silver beetles. Joshua thought this Navy captain was either showing a democratic instinct or indecision, depending on your point of view.

  So the party gathered outside New Springfield, ready to board the great craft over their heads, enduring an awkward wait for the elevator cage to descend.

  Joshua looked around. Alongside himself and Sally, still newcomers to this battered world, here were the science people from the twain crew and its civilian passengers. Agnes stood between two versions of Lobsang, the sombre elderly-gentleman pioneer edition and the battered robot explorer, eerily alike yet unalike. The Irwins, colonials from New Springfield, were here as representatives of their neighbours, who were still stubbornly sitting it out in their lodges on stepwise worlds. The Irwins were very obviously trying not to stare at the ambulant units – they’d only recently learned the truth about their animatronic neighbours.

  The newly arrived Lobsang, dressed in a nondescript Navy coverall, was easily distinguished from his twin, at least. For the sake of those who had to look on him, the more obvious flaws in this Lobsang’s visible skin had been roughly patched – but he was still lacking that arm, and one sleeve was neatly sewn flat. Of those present only George, Agnes, Joshua and Sally knew that the right arm wasn’t all this ambulant unit was missing. For Joshua the worst moments had come when the two ambulants had swapped data, at the beginning. They would clasp hands, or stare into each other’s eyes, and Joshua imagined streams of data pouring from their gel-based processing cores through the medium of their touching palms, or chattering in sparks of light between their eyes, as they synched their understanding.

  And, to complete the group, here was a young man in a homburg hat who called himself simply Marvin, standing beside a middle-aged woman, brisk, sturdy, competent-looking, named Stella Welch. Dressed simply, plainly spoken, these were representatives of the Next, somehow summoned by Lobsang. They looked very ordinary to Joshua, but then he’d only met immature Next before, like Paul Spencer Wagoner. The sun cream, dark glasses and floppy hats they all had to wear out in the open – the extreme winds had thrown water vapour high into the stratosphere and broken down the ozone layer – did nothing to add to the authority of the Next.

  ‘I imagined Vulcans,’ Joshua admitted to Sally.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Look at us. What a crew. Three androids, the egghead science types, two blank-eyed brainiacs, two bewildered Mom-and-Pop homesteaders – and two lifelong misfits in me and thee, Joshua.’

  Agnes said dryly, ‘It’s like a Traveling Wilburys reunion tour.’

  That made ‘George’ laugh.

  His one-armed twin ‘Lobsang’, though, looked puzzled. That was another difference between them. Maybe his knowledge of late-twentieth-century rock bands, always an essential around Sister Agnes, had eroded away during his decades with the Traversers. Indeed this long-lost copy of Lobsang had been staggered to meet Agnes in the first place, and even more so to discover why his successors had had her reincarnated. The Lobsangs had diverged, interestingly.

  The Irwins glanced over, as if offended by the laughter, as well they might be. Agnes had told Joshua something of how it had been when ‘George’ had finally revealed his and Agnes’s true nature. All Agnes could do was apologize to the neighbours she had deceived – and who now kept their kids away from her as if she was about to turn Terminator.

  And then there was Ben. As far as Joshua could see Agnes and Lobsang were putting the boy through a process of slow, gentle revelation. It was never going to be easy. Of course this day, the day of truth, had to come for their adopted son sometime. But now it was forced on them, in the middle of a wider crisis.

  Yes, this twain certainly had a motley and divided crew, Joshua thought. But who else was there to do this? Who was better qualified to handle the problem?

  And the reality of the problem was not in doubt. Even as they stood here, the morning sun, a mother-of-pearl disc sporadically visible in the ash-laden air, seemed to Joshua to move perceptibly, the shadows it cast shifting like an accelerated movie of a sundial. The various timers the ship’s science teams had set up confirmed that the rotation of this world had in the last few months sped up to an astounding twelve hours – half the original day. Even the two Lobsangs had given up trying to estimate the energy that was pouring down from the sky, had given up trying to predict the end point.

  At last the elevator cage arrived. They gave a ragged cheer.

  Joshua Valienté was no fan of enclosure, and he was certainly no friend of the US military.

  But it was a relief, this day in early January of 2059, to ride up from the ground of New Springfield at last, to get out of the stinging sunlight and be enclosed in the sterile, womb-like interior of the USS Brian Cowley. Joshua breathed deeply of clean, recycled, humidified, filtered air, air that smelled of nothing but electronics, carpets, and military-issue boot polish – air that did not smell of death, of ash and sulphur and rot and the smoke of burned forests, air that did not make your lungs ache, for the world outside was even losing its oxygen to the
continent-wide fires.

  The twain itself was interesting to Joshua, a veteran of such vessels. The ‘gondola’ of this Armstrong-class ship, though the crew called its habitable compartment by that name, wasn’t a gondola at all but entirely contained within the body of the thousand-foot-long lift envelope, with observation galleries around the ship’s equator leading back from the bridge at the very prow.

  The civilian party from Springfield were brought to one such gallery now, led by Margarita Jha, the ship’s science officer. Waiting for them here was Ken Bowring. The burly seismologist seemed to be enjoying this experience far too much, Joshua thought. A yeoman, a smart young man, passed among them with trays of coffee, soft drinks, water.

  Distant turbines hummed, the great ship shuddered slightly as if coming fully awake, and they were lifted smoothly into the air.

  ‘Anchors aweigh, then,’ Agnes murmured, peering out of the window.

  The Irwins, Oliver and Marina, went to stand together close to one of the big viewing windows, peering out into the smoky air.

  Ken Bowring stepped forward. ‘I do understand how you feel,’ he said to the Irwins. ‘But look how much has changed, in the years since the bugs started their spin-up. You can see how much damage has been done, even right here.’ He pointed. ‘The basic features of the landscape are still there, of course, and they still bear the names you gave them. Manning Hill, Soulsby Creek. There’s the old Poulson house, as you call it . . .’ The Poulson house, the beetles’ portal, was now the centre of an intensively observed, heavily guarded military compound, where science crews kept watch day and night on this flaw in the world. ‘But look over where Waldron Wood used to be.’ The slab of dense forest beyond the creek to the north was gone now, a burned-out ruin.