The Long Utopia Page 4

  And once more one of the beetle things reached out with a squirming silvery tentacle-limb. Without thinking Nikos lashed out with the flashlight. He caught the thing on the dark side of its face, avoiding the metal mask. The black shell cracked, and a kind of pulp, green and foul-smelling, leaked out. As the beetle fell back, another made to grab its wounded companion. But in doing so it came close to Nikos, and again he swung the flashlight—

  And the beetle disappeared, with a pop of air.

  Nikos was astonished. It was as if the beetle had stepped, out of this big cellar, this cavern under the ground! How was that possible?

  Again they closed in on him, moving more cautiously now, those strange half-faces with their single eyes following the flashlight as he swung it back and forth. He couldn’t get away, and if they rushed him he couldn’t get them all.

  He tried to think.

  That beetle had stepped away. You couldn’t step out of a hole in the ground. But the beetle had. If a beetle could, he could.

  His Stepper box was still at his belt. He turned its big clunky switch left and right, East and West, and tried to step – but both ways he felt the strange push-back you got if you tried to step out of a cellar, or into a space occupied by something massive, like a big sequoia. It was impossible; you couldn’t step into solid earth or rock. But that beetle had stepped! There must be some way to do this.

  The beetles were still closing in.

  With a spasm of fear and disgust he tried again. He twisted the switch of his Stepper box until it broke off in his hand. But then he stepped, neither East nor West—

  He wasn’t in a hole any more.

  He was sitting on hard, smooth ground. There was a sky above him, brilliant, dazzling, and the light hurt his eyes after the darkness of the big cellar. But this sky was orange-brown, not blue, and there was no sun or moon – nothing but stars, like the clearest night, with many more stars than he’d ever seen, and some of those stars were bright, brighter than any star or planet, brighter than the moon, bright as shards of the sun.

  Frozen by shock, he took a jerky breath. The air was thin and smelled of metal, of dryness.

  He looked around. The ground under him was like compacted earth. He sat on a slope that stretched down to what looked like a river. On the far bank some kind of pale, translucent bubbles crowded together. They were like the blisters he’d seen on the belly of the beetle beasts, he thought, but these were bigger, the size of buildings, and they were fixed to the ground – or some were, while others seemed to be straining to rise into the air.

  And beetle things crawled along paths and roads that tracked the river bank, and crossed low bridges over the water, hundreds of them in great crowds, rustling, scraping.

  All this in a heartbeat, a rush of impressions.

  There was a beetle right beside him. Nikos hadn’t seen it approach. That half-silvered face hovered in front of him, and a coiling pseudopod reached for his right temple. He felt overcome; he’d seen too much to take in, and couldn’t react. He didn’t resist.

  He noticed one more odd thing about the shining sky: that many of the stars to his left, while bright, were tinged green, but those to his right were pure white.

  Then something cold touched his head. Blackness closed in around his vision, like he was falling down another tunnel.

  He woke with a start.

  He was lying on his back. There was blue sky above him, and around him were walls of dirt, good clean ordinary dirt. He was back in that half-dug pit, under the ordinary sky. Out of the big cellar. Almost in a panic he took a breath, and sweet air, thick with the scents of the flowers of the forest, filled his lungs.

  He sat up, gasped and coughed, his throat aching.

  Something touched his face. Thinking it was the silver tentacle of one of the nightmarish beetle creatures, he twisted away and got to his feet.

  It was Rio. She’d licked Nikos’s face. And she’d dropped an animal on the ground beside him: just a dwarf raccoon, unremarkable, limp and dead.

  Nikos looked around quickly, and searched his pockets, his pouch. He still had those baby moccasins. He’d lost his flashlight, and he wondered how he was going to explain that away.

  But here was Rio, safe and sound. She submitted to being grabbed and petted. Then she was first to scramble out of the pit and head for home.

  Nikos said nothing to his parents about his adventure in the old Poulson place.

  The fear gripped him for a whole day and a night. He couldn’t even sleep for thinking about it.

  But on the second day he went back to the fringe of the ragged clearing, and inspected the Poulson house from the safety of the cover of the trees.

  By the third day he was going back in, with his buddies. Back into the big cellar.

  5

  JOSHUA VALIENTÉ’S son Rod called for him at the old family home in Reboot, in a stepwise footprint of New York State a hundred thousand steps West of the Datum. Joshua met him on the porch. It was a little after midnight on May 1, 2052.

  ‘Happy birthday, Dad.’

  Joshua shook the hand of his only child warmly. At twenty, the boy was taller than Joshua, taller than his mother. He had her paler complexion, his father’s darker hair. He wore clothes of treated leather and what looked like spun wool dyed a pale green. In fact he looked alien in the lantern light of the Green homestead, but comfortable in himself, in his own skin. And he looked like he must fit right in with the shifting, ever fragmenting, kaleidoscopic communities of the stepwise forests to which he seemed increasingly drawn.

  And he’s Rod now, Joshua reminded himself. We named him Daniel Rodney, the boy was always Dan, and the man is Rod. His choice. Joshua simultaneously felt pride in this handsome, confident young man, and a stab of regret at the evident distance between them. ‘Thanks for coming, son. And thanks for making this trip with me. Or the chunk you’re doing anyhow.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t done it yet. And you haven’t seen the ship I got for you to ride in.’

  ‘Your “stepping aircraft”. You were kind of enigmatic.’

  ‘It’s not a twain, Dad. Nothing like that big old ship we rode to the Datum when I was a kid. What was it called?’

  ‘The Gold Dust.’ That was Helen, Joshua’s ex-wife, Rod’s mother; she came out of the house now and wrapped her son in a hug. Helen was dressed plainly, and kept her greying strawberry-blonde hair pulled back in a practical bun. On coming back to Reboot, after her marriage to Joshua had broken up, she’d resumed her profession of midwife, and by now was pretty senior in the stepwise-extended community of New Scarsdale. She was strong, you could see that, strong in the upper body, strong and competent. On such a birthday as this Joshua was very aware of his own age, but Helen herself would be forty next year.

  And out came the house’s final inhabitant. Helen’s father Jack, leaning precariously on a stick, was in his seventies. ‘My boy, my boy.’ He wrapped his free arm around Rod’s shoulders, and Rod submitted with good grace.

  Helen bustled around. ‘Come inside and let’s get this door closed. It might be May but the nights are still cold.’ She led them all into the house’s main room, the core of the structure and the first to be built, where, as a pioneer family in the years before she’d met Joshua, all the Greens had once lived in a cosy heap . . . All the Greens, except of course Rod the phobic, who they’d left behind in Datum Madison: Helen’s brother Rod, to her son a mysterious lost uncle, and whose name he had chosen to adopt.

  Rod stood there awkwardly, by a table laden with food, back in a room into which he evidently didn’t feel he fitted any more. ‘Mom, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’

  Helen smiled. ‘You knew I would, though, didn’t you? Look, I know you two are going to be keen to get away—’

  Jack growled, ‘Not even stopping by to say hi to Aunt Katie and her girls, and the grandkids? You know how they look up to you, the great twain driver.’

  ‘I’m not a twain driver any more, Gra
nddad.’

  ‘But even so—’

  ‘I’m only here for Dad.’

  ‘Fool stunt!’

  ‘If Dad wants to cross a hundred thousand worlds, all the way back to the Datum, on his birthday, a single day, fine by me. We’ll fly most of it. I want to do nine hundred miles to the Wisconsin footprint by dawn, and after that another six hours’ flying and more stepping over Madison.’

  ‘If you don’t break down on the way. Damn fool stunt if you ask me.’

  ‘Nobody is asking, Jack,’ Joshua said, gently enough. ‘And after Rod drops me off I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

  Helen rolled her eyes at her son. ‘With Sally Linsay! Some birthday treat that will be. Two antisocial old curmudgeons stomping across the Long Earth complaining about how fine it used to be when there were no people to mess it up – none but them.’

  Rod shrugged gracefully. ‘It’s Dad’s choice, Mom. You’re only fifty once.’

  ‘Damn fool stunt,’ Jack said again.

  Helen insisted, ‘Well, if you won’t see your family, and if you won’t let me fuss over you for even one night, then at least you can let me refuel you. You’ve a long journey ahead. So here, there are home-made cookies with plenty of sugar, and sandwiches – the pork’s frozen but it’s good – and iced tea, and hot coffee, and lemonade. I know it’s midnight but who cares? Sit. Eat.’

  Joshua and Rod shared a glance, shrugged as they used to when Rod was a kid named Dan and they’d both known not to argue, and sat at the table. Even Jack awkwardly lowered his bulk into a chair. They filled their plates with food, and helped themselves to drink.

  ‘Too damn late for all this,’ Jack grumbled, as he bit into a cookie the size of a small plate, wincing as he tried to lift his hand to his mouth.

  Joshua knew that Jack, unfortunately for him, was typical of his generation, the first Long Earth pioneers. The labour he’d put in during those early years building Reboot, after a months-long trek out here with the young Helen and the rest of the family, had bequeathed Jack crippling arthritis in old age. But he had stubbornly refused expensive Low Earth drugs, and turned away even basic help. Even agreeing to come live with Helen had been the end result of a war of attrition mounted by Helen, when she’d come back home from Hell-Knows-Where, and her older sister Katie who had always stayed in Reboot with her own family. Jack still wrote, or tried to, on rough local-made paper, with gnarled old hands holding crude local-made quill pens. Helen had told Joshua he was working on a memoir of the heroic days of Valhalla’s Gentle Revolution, when the peoples of the Long Earth had stood up for their independence from the Datum: a brief drama barely remembered now, Joshua suspected, by Rod and his comber friends, as they faded steadily into the endless stepwise green.

  Anyhow Joshua knew Jack was right about the lateness of the hour. Even though many of the younger generation were slipping away, the core population in Reboot still made a living off the farms they and their parents had carved out of the native forests, starting around a quarter of a century ago. And, following the rhythms of their animals’ lives, they generally retired with the setting sun. Midnight was a foreign country to farmers.

  But Helen said now, ‘Oh, hush, Dad. When I’m doing my mid-wifing we’re up all hours. Newborn babies don’t keep to any clock. Why, you get up in the night to make me coffee when I come stumbling in before the cocks crow. And besides, if this is the only time Rod has to be with us, I’m not about to sleep it away. More tea?’

  ‘Not yet, thanks.’ Rod looked uncomfortable. ‘Mom, listen – I heard you have some news too.’

  Helen raised her eyebrows. ‘Gossip travels fast, even across the Long Earth. Well, I’m not sure what you heard, Rod, but the truth is—’

  Jack cackled. ‘She has a new boyfriend. That pasty-faced kid Ben Doak!’

  Joshua forced himself not to grin. He was glad he’d had time to absorb this news already himself. By now it didn’t feel so bad; it was just another layer on top of the lump of wistful sadness and regret he’d been carrying around inside since his marriage had broken up. And Ben Doak was kind of geeky.

  Helen snapped, ‘Oh, shut up, Dad. He’s not a kid, for God’s sake, he’s only a couple of years younger than me . . . You know him, Rod. He was another of the first settlers, him and his family. We got to know the Doaks pretty well even during the trek. He has a couple of kids of his own, younger than you, and he lost his wife to a forest disease that hit us hard a year back—’

  ‘I’ve been back since then, Mom.’

  ‘Sorry. And since I lost my husband to another kind of disease,’ with a glance at Joshua, ‘we thought we’d – well – join forces.’

  Jack snorted. ‘Sounds like a military alliance, not a marriage. You ask her this, Rod, because I’ve tried and I get no answer. Does she actually love this Doak boy?’

  Evidently this was an old argument between the two of them. Helen flared back, ‘For all the time you’ve spent out here, Dad, you still think it’s like Datum Madison, where you grew up. Full of people coming and going, full of choice for company. Where you have the luxury of waiting until you’ve found somebody you could fall in love with. Out here it’s different.’

  Rod took his mother’s hand. ‘I do understand, Mom. It’s the same for us.’

  Jack said, ‘Sure. Running around in the forest like Robin Hood and his outlaws. You’re not in one of those “extended marriages” we hear about, are you?’

  ‘If I was, I wouldn’t blab about it to you, Granddad, would I?’

  Jack thought that over, and winked at Rod. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Mom, I will come back for the wedding.’

  ‘That’s good.’ But she looked briefly anxious. ‘It’s not settled yet, the date. How will I contact you? I mean—’

  ‘I’ll just know, don’t worry.’ He added mischievously, ‘Actually it sometimes helps being related to the great Joshua Valienté. People take a bit more notice of what you’re doing. They pass on messages.’

  Helen gave Joshua a dismissive look. ‘I know it’s his birthday, but don’t make him any more big-headed. And he knows as well as I do that I’d much rather he spent this big day with his family instead of going off on yet another dumb Long Earth jaunt.’

  ‘A jaunt with my son,’ Joshua pointed out. ‘Some of it anyhow. Quality time.’

  Jack said, ‘It’s only because you couldn’t manage the trip any other way, you old fossil.’

  Rod laughed. ‘And speaking of the journey, we need to get going. Mom, thanks – these cookies are delicious, and the sugar will help keep me awake.’

  Jack grunted. ‘It keeps me awake knowing how much we had to barter for that sugar. They use the damn stuff as currency out here.’

  ‘Could I get a doggy bag? . . .’

  So the midnight party, such as it was, broke up. There was a final packing up, a stiff hug and handshake for Joshua from ex-wife and father-in-law, a last slurp of strong coffee.

  Then Rod, carrying a lantern, led his father out of the little township and down a forest trail to the river, where there still stood a stone commemorating the too-brief life of Helen’s mother, Jack’s wife.

  And where, in a clearing, Rod had landed a small plane.

  6

  THE AIRCRAFT’S HULL was a smooth white ceramic, unmarked save for a registration number and the inevitable Black Corporation Buddhist-monk logo that marked a capability to fly stepwise. The wings were stubby, the tailplane fat. The main body was a squat cylinder, just big enough for a small cockpit and couches for four passengers.

  Inside, the plane had a striking smell of new machinery, of cleanliness – like a new car maybe, Joshua thought, a stray memory from back in the first decades of the twenty-first century when he was growing up, and the Datum was the only world there was, and it had been full of cars, new and otherwise. Once their bits of luggage were stowed, and Rod and Joshua were strapped into the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, Rod passed his hands over built-in tablets that fill
ed the small cockpit with their glow. Joshua didn’t recognize a single aspect of the virtual instrumentation.

  ‘You know I’m not really a gadget kind of guy. But this is pretty wicked.’

  Rod winced. ‘“Wicked”? How old did you say you were, Dad? Hold on to your hat, the take-off is kind of sudden.’

  With a hum of a biofuel engine and a subdued roar of jets, the craft jolted forward across a grassy sward, bumping a little on the uneven ground. There was nothing like a runway at Reboot; there weren’t enough aerial visitors to justify it – and most of them came in airships that didn’t need a runway at all. Evidently this little plane didn’t need a runway either. After a remarkably short taxi, it leapt into the dark sky.

  They didn’t step immediately. Rod had the plane bank on autopilot in a wide, lazy circle as he checked the Stepper box at his waist, and then opened up a small pack of pharmaceuticals and began to guzzle pills. As far as stepping was concerned Rod had mixed ancestry: his father, Joshua, was the world’s prototype natural stepper, but there were phobics on his mother’s side – those unable to step at all, such as his notorious uncle, whose name he’d taken. Rod himself was somewhere near typical. With a Stepper box, Rod could step maybe three or four times a minute, but he’d be hit by nausea each time, and needed treatments to control the reaction. Luckily for him, by the time he was trying to fulfil his boyhood dream of flying the twains – the great stepwise-bound freight-carrying airships – the anti-nausea drugs had reached a pinnacle of effectiveness, and steps coming every few seconds, or even faster, were manageable.

  This self-medication went unremarked by Joshua. Although he did wonder if the modern treatments still turned your piss blue.

  The cabin windows were big and generous, and as the ground opened up beneath him Joshua was able to see the scattered lights of Reboot, and the neighbouring farms and shepherds’ shelters. But they hadn’t risen far before the settlement was lost in the continent-spanning forest, a deep green-black sea on this moonless night. ‘Makes you think how few we are, on worlds like this, even after all these years. And after all the breeding we’ve done.’