The Long Utopia Page 5

  Rod grunted. ‘To me and my buddies this is normal. A planet’s not supposed to glow in the dark.’ He stowed away the pharma kit. ‘So you ready?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Rod tapped a corner of another of his glowing screens.

  The first step was a faint jolt, like a bump in the road – and suddenly they were in a rainstorm – and out of it with the second step.

  After that, worlds flapped past Joshua’s view, one after another, variations on a theme of black, with not a light to be seen on the ground below. From the beginning the stepping was faster than Joshua’s heartbeat, which was a little disconcerting, like too-fast music. But as the step rate increased the inevitable juddering sensation soon smoothed out, to be masked, in fact, by the faint vibrations of the smooth-running engines as the plane settled into its run, heading generally geographic west, towards the heart of the continent and the footprints of Wisconsin, even as the stepping continued.

  ‘Nice machine,’ Joshua said.

  ‘Sure. “Wicked.”’

  ‘I won’t ask how much you paid to use it. Or how you earned the money in the first place, living the way you do.’

  ‘I’m making my living my own way, which you know nothing about. Look, here I am for you, just as you asked. You wanted us to spend time. Fine. This ride is my gift to you, Dad. Happy birthday, OK? But why the hell are you doing this?’

  ‘Why the hell not? I’m fifty. I’ve spent my life wandering the Long Earth. Why not cross a hundred thousand worlds in a day? Why not mark it with a stunt like this, while I still can?’

  ‘I hate to tell you, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a speed record.’

  Joshua shrugged. ‘I don’t care about comparisons. I never much cared what other people thought of me, as long as they left me alone.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should care, Dad. I mean, like Mom said, you could have marked your birthday with something which wouldn’t have involved you being out here all alone.’

  ‘Like what? A barbecue?’ Joshua looked at his son sideways. Rod’s face was softly illuminated by the glow of the control tablets. ‘Now you sound like your mother. Or your grandfather. Once Dan was going to be a twain driver. Now here’s Rod the comber, who knows it all.’

  Rod replied irritably, ‘I wanted to fly twains when I was a little boy, for God’s sake. And I got to do it, for a while. But there aren’t the opportunities now – you know that.’

  It was true enough. Twains still flew locally, especially across the more industrialized Low Earths, but the big Datum–Valhalla route, a ‘Long Mississippi’ that had spanned a million worlds with a bridge of trade and cultural exchange, had withered after the Datum Earth had been effectively knocked out by Yellowstone. And then, after the catastrophic winter of 2046 and a new wave of emigration from the battered Datum, most Long Earth trade had shrunk back to relatively short-range exchanges.

  Still, changing career plans was one thing; changing your name was a different kind of statement.

  Joshua hesitated before saying, ‘I think it’s disturbed your mother that you’ve started to use your uncle’s name, you know.’

  ‘It’s my middle name. You gave it to me.’

  ‘True, but—’

  ‘This is the hidden secret of the Greens, isn’t it? Jack the great political firebrand, my mother the midwife: once hero trekkers, now the heartbeat of Reboot. But they are only out here because they abandoned their phobic son back on Earth, and look what happened to him in the end.’

  After Helen’s eighteen-year-old homealone brother had played a part in the anti-stepper terrorist nuking of Datum Madison, Wisconsin, he’d spent a lifetime in custodial institutions. He’d died in there only recently, of an infection he’d caught in hospital. Joshua realized with a shock that he’d committed his single, terrible crime when younger than Rod was now.

  ‘OK, but you’re kind of throwing this in their faces. Jack’s particularly. You shouldn’t judge them, Rod. They just couldn’t find a way to make it work for everybody.’

  ‘We all make mistakes, eh, Dad?’

  ‘Yes, frankly. You just haven’t made yours yet, son. Or maybe you just don’t know it.’

  ‘Thanks for that. Now maybe you should shut up and let me fly this thing.’

  ‘Rod, I—’

  ‘Forget it.’

  After that, much of the night was spent in not very companionable silence. Long hours of darkness which Joshua spent much of beating himself up for what he’d said, or hadn’t said, not for the first time where his family was concerned.

  Maybe Joshua slept a little. He suspected Rod napped too, leaving the flying to the autopilot. Even the flaring of an occasional Joker did not disturb them.

  The sun came up on all the worlds of the Long Earth.

  Some fifty thousand steps from the Datum they were still deep in the thick band of worlds known as the Mine Belt: cooler and less well forested than the Earths of the Corn Belt, which began around the location of Reboot and stretched away to the stepwise West. The Mine Belt worlds were mostly exploited only as sources of minerals of various kinds, either for local use or for export to the Datum and the Low Earths – though even that kind of trade was dwindling now. But there were herds of animals to be seen, drawn to the water courses and lakes, mostly four-legged mammals but not much like anything that populated the human cultural imagination: things like giant camels, and things like elephants with oddly shaped tusks, stalked by things like huge cats. As they stepped, the herds, dark flowing masses, were there and gone in an eye blink.

  They had a silent breakfast of Helen’s cookies and lukewarm coffee from a flask.

  Around eight a.m. the character of the worlds below changed again, subtly. This was the Ice Belt, a band of periodically glaciated worlds, of which Datum Earth – at least in its primordial state, before humanity got to work – appeared to have been a typical example. These Earths were cooler, with open prairie and grasslands, the forests shrunk back to patches of evergreen, and tundra in the far north. As Joshua had learned during his own forays into the Long Earth, and on that first journey of exploration with Lobsang two decades ago, when you crossed the Long Earth it was like flying through the branches of some tremendous tree of possibilities and probabilities. The closer you got to the Datum, the more links in the chain of coin-toss cosmic accidents that had led to the peculiar circumstances of the home world locked into place, and the more familiar the landscapes became. So now, on the sparsely populated grasslands below, they saw animals of the kinds alongside which humans had evolved, even if said animals hadn’t necessarily survived to feature in the modern world: mastodons and mammoths, deer and bison. In most of these Earths the epochal collision of the Americas, North and South, must have taken place, for they saw immigrants from the south, such as giant sloths and armadillos the size of small cars.

  But, apart from the very occasional pinprick of a campfire, or the even rarer lights of a small township, there was no sign of mankind.

  Joshua remarked, ‘Nobody at home. And yet you still meet people, especially back on the Datum, who will tell you we conquered the Long Earth.’

  Rod shrugged. ‘So what? Why do you need to conquer, or not conquer, anything? Why not just accept things the way they are? Because even if they do change, you can always just step away . . .’

  And Joshua saw that that really was how Rod thought about the world, or worlds: as a kind of endless now, an endless here, a place where location and time didn’t matter – and endlessly generous, a place you didn’t need to work at, didn’t need to build on, or fix. A place of endless escape. Joshua felt a sudden, intense jumble of emotions. Born in the Long Earth, Rod was of a generation that was forever divided from Joshua’s by the great chasm of Step Day, and never could their world views be reconciled.

  He couldn’t help it. He reached over and grabbed Rod’s shoulder, squeezing it hard. But Rod failed to respond.

  It was a relief for both of them, Joshua suspected, when noon arriv
ed and the plane banked over an uninhabited footprint of the Madisonian lakes, precisely three thousand steps West of the Datum. A single thread of smoke rose up from a campfire by the shore.

  And as the plane began its final approach, a woman by the fire got to her feet and waved.

  7

  ROD EXCHANGED VERY few words with Sally Linsay. Joshua suspected he had always felt uncomfortable with the tension between his mother and Sally – even though, Joshua supposed, Sally’s transient lifestyle was a lot more like Rod’s own choice than Helen’s sedentary midwifery. Rod said goodbye politely enough, and exchanged a handshake with his father.

  Then Sally and Joshua stood side by side as they watched the plane climb into the sky, before it flew stepwise and out of existence. Joshua tried to close the lid on his latest cargo of regret, a feeling of another opportunity missed, somehow.

  Sally let Joshua gulp down a lunch of roast rabbit leg and a cup of cold coffee, while she pulled her pack on her back and kicked out her fire.

  ‘No time to lose, eh, Sally? You haven’t changed.’

  ‘You betcha I haven’t changed. Why would I need to? Anyway you’ve been sitting on your fat ass in that plane all night, you need the exercise. Happy birthday, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Sally, fifty-five years old now, only looked even tougher than she had when she was younger, Joshua thought. As if she’d weathered down to some hardened nub. She said now, ‘Listen up. You want to get to the Low Earths by the evening, right? Three thousand worlds in six hours or so. We’ll need to keep up the pace, a step every few seconds. We’ll take regular breaks, we can do it.’ She eyed him. ‘Always assuming you don’t want to cheat and take a short cut.’

  ‘You mean, through a soft place? Not unless we have to.’

  ‘This is your birthday treat. Why the hell would you have to do anything?’

  ‘I have an appointment. I’m meeting Nelson Azikiwe for the last leg.’

  ‘That bore.’

  ‘Everybody’s a bore to you, Sally. Even me, probably.’

  ‘Especially you, Valienté. Don’t flatter yourself.’ She inspected him more closely, acutely. ‘Are you OK? Seriously.’

  ‘I’ve been having my headaches. That’s why I cut short my last sabbatical.’

  ‘Ah. The Silence headaches. Your legendary sensitivity to disturbances far out in the Long Earth—’

  ‘It’s no joke, Sally. Lobsang always said you were jealous of me for that.’

  ‘Huh. That master psychologist. Well, you’ve been right before—’

  ‘Right about First Person Singular. Right about the big troll migration back in 2040—’

  ‘I don’t need a précis. You have any idea what’s up this time, specifically?’

  ‘No,’ he said unhappily. ‘I never do.’

  ‘Yeah. So is it disabling? Are we going to do this walk, or what?’

  Without replying, Joshua dumped the remains of his lunch, got his pack settled on his back, checked his boots, and they began.

  Sally led the way on a steady plod around the lake shore. They kept back from the water edge itself where animals were likely to congregate, and away from any crocs or other hazards in the water.

  They’d just keep walking around this lake, or its Long Earth footprints, until the evening. And every few paces, they’d take a step East, together. As easy as that. Parallel lakes, and parallel shores.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about your son, you know.’

  Joshua smiled. ‘You’re giving me family advice? You, no marriage, no children – a father who abandoned you until he needed you to piggy-back him across the Long Mars?’

  She grunted. ‘Did you know there are Australian Aborigines up there now? Spreading out across the Long Mars. Their social structures are fit for purpose on such arid worlds, it seems.

  ‘And as for family advice – look, all kids rebel against how their parents did things. It’s natural. Your son’s generation, lucky for them, are growing up in a completely different environment from you and me. Entirely new challenges, new ethics. Especially since the Datum imploded and the government stopped trying to tax everybody. And for sure, the Long Earth has had a way of imposing a natural selection of the smart over the dumb, right from the beginning.’

  ‘I know, Sally. I was there, remember? And if the selection isn’t natural, you lend it a hand, right?’

  She glared at him. ‘Somebody has to, now that even Maggie Kauffman and her flying Navy gunships are rarely to be seen.’

  Joshua knew Sally was earning a living these days as a kind of professional survivor. In return for a pre-agreed fee she’d stay a few months, maybe a year, with a new community of settlers, helping them endure the most obvious dangers, avoid the first few booby-traps. For a woman who never suffered fools gladly, Joshua knew this was a tough career choice; the physical challenges would be easy for her, but it was hard for Sally to be supportive as opposed to judgemental.

  But Joshua had his own contacts out in the Long Earth, and he’d heard a lot of rumours about what Sally was really up to. She was gathering a growing reputation for vigilantism. He was concerned for her, that she was losing her way. For now, however, he said nothing.

  They walked into a world where the animals were comparatively thick on the ground, and drawn to the lake. Maybe there was some kind of drought on in this particular footprint. The travellers paused, sipping their own bottled water. The air felt dusty and hot. A herd of what looked like deer lapped watchfully at the water, and a giant sloth raised itself up to nibble at the curling leaves of a dying tree. Things like big opossums clustered without shyness at the sloth’s feet, browsing on the litter it dropped.

  ‘You know, Joshua, you and I are different from the rest. We’re not townsfolk, not Datum urbanites. But we’re not pioneers either. We’re not settlers, like your little mouse Helen.’

  ‘Oh, she’s no mouse. And she’s not mine any more—’

  ‘We’re loners. Loners just survive, they move on. They don’t build things, like the pioneers. The Long Earth is always going to have room for the likes of us. We don’t need any kind of definition. We don’t have a role. Not even to the extent that the combers have, that self-conscious lifestyle they’ve developed of deliberately walking on and on, taking nothing save the lowest hanging fruit. We’re just – us. Detached from humanity.’

  ‘And detached from human values? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

  ‘I’m saying I have my own values – and so, I think, do you.’

  He studied her, trying to read her, and failing, as he always had in the twenty-plus years he’d known her. ‘Sin or not, you’re no avenging god, Sally. You need—’

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me how to conduct myself.’ She hefted her pack. ‘We’ll come to a glaciated sheaf soon. We need to get to higher ground so we’re above the ice when we step.’

  ‘I have done this before, you know . . .’

  And here they were bickering, just as Helen had said they would. Sally walked away from the water, stepping as she moved. Joshua had no choice but to follow her, always just a little behind her flickering, stepping presence.

  8

  SALLY BROUGHT HIM to Earth West 30. On this particular Earth, here on the Madisonian isthmus, there stood a waterfront development with sodium lights glaring in the light of early evening, and golf carts parked up in rows. It turned out to be a sports lodge, a tourist facility. You got this kind of outfit on ‘significant’ worlds, such as worlds with round numbers: West 30, East 20. And, evidently, volcano winter or not, there were still enough rich folk to support such places.

  Nelson Azikiwe, dressed in boots and sensible Low-Earth-type outdoor gear, was waiting for them at the designated spot, just outside the car park.

  Sally hitched her pack and looked around disdainfully. ‘Tourists. Outta here. Keep safe, Nelson, Joshua.’

  Joshua replied, ‘You too—’

  But of course she had already gone, in
a pop of displaced air.

  Joshua shook hands warmly with Nelson. ‘Thanks for this, buddy.’

  ‘Well, any friend of Lobsang is a friend of mine – and you and I have known each other a fair time now. It is my pleasure to be your companion on this, the last leg of your long walk. One should not be alone on one’s birthday.’

  Nelson’s accent was soft, pleasing, a clipped South African overlaid with crisper British consonants. He seemed unchanged since Joshua had last seen him, at Lobsang’s memorial, save that at around sixty years old he had perhaps a little more grey in that black hair.

  Electronic music began to blare from the lodge, half a mile away. Nelson winced. ‘I think that’s our cue. Shall we take our first step?’

  The lodge was whisked away. In Earth West 29 the lake shore was happily virginal.

  As he took the impact of the step Nelson managed to stay upright – many poor steppers doubled over with the nauseous reaction, controlled by drugs or not – but Joshua could see discomfort contort his face.

  ‘Hey, are you sure you want to do this? It’s only a stunt, after all.’

  ‘Well, Joshua, this is the last stage of your descent from heaven. First you flew like the Holy Spirit through the sky – or like Lobsang’s disembodied soul between incarnations, perhaps. Then you strode boldly with Sally Linsay, a super-powered human. And now for these last few steps you must limp along beside an old man like me, a mere mortal. We will complete our remaining twenty-nine Stations of the Cross before midnight, I assure you. Of course we cannot linger in the radioactive ruin of Datum Madison itself, but I am told that the Sisters at the Home have arranged a small celebration for you, back in West 5. Think cake rather than champagne, however.’

  ‘That’ll be very welcome.’

  ‘I think I am recovered. Shall we take another step?’

  In West 28 it was raining softly, and though the isthmus itself was empty Joshua could see the lights of a township a couple of miles to the south.