The Long Utopia (10 page)

I
ALWAYS KNEW
he was special,’ said Martha Berg. ‘I suppose every mother thinks that. Even as a toddler, when he started to talk, he would gabble away.’

Roberta Golding nodded gravely. ‘We call that quicktalk. All Next children do this naturally.’

They were sitting around a table in the small living room of Martha’s house: Martha, this Roberta Golding woman, Stan – and Rocky, to whom the Next were not much more than a legend, a kind of horror story of the past, of smart kids the government had tried to lock up, or charismatic super-geniuses who had hijacked a US Navy twain and killed everybody. But this woman hadn’t come for Rocky.

Stan was just smiling.

Martha went on, ‘As he grew he was always running ahead of what his teachers planned for him. Fortunately that’s not much of a problem here, because the schooling is so informal. Mostly Jez and I worked it out between us—’

‘Jez, your husband.’

‘He’s aloft just now. I mean, up in the orbital anchor station of the tower. Takes days to get up and down, you know; even when work stops down
here
they’re stuck up
there
. . .’

Roberta said, ‘There’s no rush. We don’t have to make any decisions before you can speak to your husband.’

‘Well, we kept his schooling going until he was beyond the both
of us, and off on his own. There are pretty good online resources here. We just let him loose on that.’

Roberta glanced at Stan. ‘I too grew up among humans, Stan. I know how frustrating it can be. How you have to keep yourself hidden.’

Martha said ruefully, ‘Oh, he didn’t do a lot of hiding.’

‘But if he had grown up among the Next,’ Roberta said softly, ‘he would have been learning with others like himself – and in our community, the Grange, we adults learn from the children in their discovery of the world.’ She eyed Stan. ‘There is a whole universe of ideas to explore. The legacy we inherited from humanity is only the beginning, for us.’

Rocky blurted now, ‘I hate the way you talk. We, you. Humanity, the Next. You look human enough to me. I’m sorry. I know it’s not my business.’

Martha touched his arm. ‘You’re his friend. Of course it’s your business.’

‘But, in fact,
I am not human
, as you are,’ Roberta said gently. ‘Genetically we diverge. The structure of my brain is different from yours.’ She smiled. ‘The neurologists at the US Navy base at Hawaii, where the most intensive study of Next children was performed before the establishment of the Grange, were able to determine that much.’

‘This Grange,’ Martha said nervously. ‘This is where you’re proposing to take Stan. Where is it?’

‘Far from here. Stepwise, I mean. We keep the location a secret. It was set up in the aftermath of an incident at a place called Happy Landings. A threat was made to destroy us. My kind. It could not have got us all, and the attempt was not made in the end; wiser heads prevailed. Nevertheless we heeded the warning. We have detached ourselves from the human world, for our safety, and yours.’

‘But you’re here now,’ Rocky said. ‘Acting undercover. Right?
Pretending you’re something you’re not. Like the Arbiters.’ Who, Roberta had revealed, were Next agents too.

‘I can’t deny that. But we are here to study you, as well as help you. You are, after all, our precursors. And there has been no proper study of mankind.’

Martha said, a touch bitterly, ‘You mean no study aside from what we did ourselves. Which doesn’t count.’

‘That is so. And we do try to help you, in various ways.’

Rocky found that disturbing. He was only sixteen; he knew he was ignorant, naive. But he wondered just how much influence a covert organization of super-intelligent post-humans might be having, working across the worlds of mankind.

‘And,’ Roberta said, ‘we are looking for more of our own. Like you, Stan. Happy Landings was something of a forcing ground for the genetic development which led to our emergence: a peculiar community of humans and trolls thrown together, a product of the strange nature of the Long Earth. That was what created
us.
But now that genetic upgrading has spread through the rest of the population, and here and there, now and then, one of us will emerge among you.’

‘Us and you, again,’ Rocky said bitterly. ‘Stan’s a poppy growing in a weed patch, right?’

‘Not at all,’ she said blandly.

Martha said, ‘And you’re offering Stan a place with you in this – Grange?’

‘We’re offering him the chance to come visit us. See if he thinks he will be happy there.’

‘Suppose he isn’t,’ Rocky said. ‘Suppose he wants to come home. Will you let him?’

‘Of course. It’s not a prison, or—’

‘But he’ll know where you are. You said they already tried to blow you up once.’

Roberta said gently, ‘Stan could not expose us without exposing
himself. He’s far too intelligent to do any such thing. Isn’t that true, Stan?’

Stan hadn’t spoken since first being introduced to Roberta. ‘Talking to you is interesting. Like a chess game, almost. We can both see our way to the end game.’

She nodded, smiling. ‘That is an acute perception. In a way it is as if we have less free will than these others. Because we can think our way through a given situation, discarding inappropriate alternatives.’

‘
These others
,’ Rocky said. ‘You keep
saying
it.’

‘But,’ Roberta said to Stan, ‘we do debate higher issues. Goals. Motivations. That’s where our differences are expressed. At the level of strategy, not tactics.’

Stan nodded. ‘And what is your strategy? What are your motivations? What do you intend for humanity?’

Martha said hotly, ‘Isn’t that up to us?’

‘No, Mom,’ Stan said evenly. ‘Not with people like this in the world. You’re no more in control of your own destiny than an elephant on a game reserve. That’s a good analogy, isn’t it?’ he said, challenging Roberta. ‘With you as the wardens.’

‘It’s not like that. At least, not all of us think that way. Certainly we want mankind to be . . . happy.’

‘Happy? Wandering around without purpose, in a kind of garden, perfected by you. A Long Utopia. Is that your goal?’

‘We don’t have a goal,’ Roberta said. ‘At least, not an agreed one. We are developing our capabilities, exploring our own motivations. The debate on objectives continues. I invite you to join that debate. If you care about humanity as much as you seem to—’

‘I need to think.’ Stan stood, abruptly. ‘Excuse me.’ He stepped away.

When he’d gone, the room seemed empty.

Martha poured more iced tea. She said, ‘He’ll go with you. I don’t
have to be a super-brain to know that much. I know my son. He’ll go, if only out of curiosity. But he’ll come home again.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Roberta. ‘But I think you should be prepared to lose him. I’m very sorry.’

Martha looked away, evidently unable to speak.

N
ELSON
A
ZIKIWE HAD
said, when offering to research Joshua’s family, ‘One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’ Maybe, but it turned out to be a mighty stubborn thread.

It took months that stretched, surprisingly, to years – four years after the promise he’d made on Joshua’s fiftieth birthday – before Nelson was able to make much progress with his search. His breakthrough came not through such networks as his online buddies the Quizmasters, but through his acquaintance with Lobsang – in fact, through an old friend of Sister Agnes, who heard through shared friends, she said, that Nelson was looking for information about ‘London’s scandalous past’.

For, to Nelson’s surprise, his investigations had led him to that battered city.

Nelson met Miss Guinevere Perch in a Long Earth footprint of London. A couple of steps from the frozen Datum ruin, this new community was a tangle of hastily erected refugee camps cut into oak forest. A contemporary of Agnes, Miss Perch was in her nineties now, withered, birdlike, her hair a tangle, but with a beaming smile for visitors. She lived alone, though with daily assistance, in a house built in a fairly crude Low Earth colonial style. But she dressed richly, and in a room filled with exotic furniture a peripatetic butler served Nelson tea and cake.

Miss Perch gleefully showed Nelson images of the properties
she had once owned on the Datum, including a very expensive Georgian terrace house in central London. ‘Handy for the House of Commons,’ she said. And when she showed him glimpses of the exotic equipment she had kept in the basement of that terrace house, and outlined the activities that went on down there for the benefit of MPs and other parliamentarians – and a visitors’ book, complete with covert photographic portraits, that spanned decades – he understood why she had got in touch with him. When it came to what was left of the British Establishment, even now, sixteen years after Yellowstone, Miss Guinevere Perch knew where the bodies were buried.

And with that power, she was able to help Nelson uncover some very private secrets indeed.

But as it turned out, when Nelson did begin to tug systematically on the thread of Joshua Valienté’s origins, the story he unravelled went much deeper than the biography of Joshua’s own father. It turned out to be a history, in fact, more than two centuries old . . .

From the stage door of the Victoria theatre and down Lambeth’s crowded New Cut, the Great Elusivo – a.k.a. Luis Ramon Valienté, a.k.a. the Hon. Reginald Blythe, and a.k.a. a variety of other pseudonyms depending on circumstances – followed his mysterious interrogator, Oswald Hackett, towards the promised oyster-house.

The pavements of the New Cut, banks of a river of horse-drawn traffic, swarmed with people and their multifarious business. Of course they did at this time of a Saturday evening, in March of the year 1848, when the Surrey-side theatres opened their doors to let out the posh folk from the boxes, and the young costermongers swarmed out of the threepenny stalls. The shops were all open, the keepers in their doorways, the windows full of furniture or tools or second-hand clothes, or heaps of vegetables or cheese or eggs. But there was as much business being done from the stalls that crowded the street itself. The repetitive cries of the stall vendors or their boys rose
up over the clatter of horses’ hooves: ‘Chestnuts, penny a scoop!’ and ‘Pies all ’ot!’ and ‘Yarmouth herrings three a penny!’ Many of these voices were Irish; the destitute folk of that country had come to the city fleeing the famine, and were looked down on even by the poorest of the indigenous folk. More elaborate sermons came from the cheap Johns selling Sheffield-steel cutlery in their thick Yorkshire accents, and the patterers talking up their gaudy literature of gruesome crimes. Luis had to sidestep an old woman seated on a low stool, smoking a pipe, selling framed engravings of Queen Victoria, her Consort and her children from an upturned umbrella. The street entertainers were everywhere too, the ballad singers and the sword swallowers and fire eaters, an old blind woman playing a hurdy-gurdy, and one man with a tabletop display of mechanical figures from Austria, a princess dancing the polka, a trumpeting elephant, which held the attention of rapt street children . . .

Amid all this clamour, Luis kept his eye on the mysterious Hackett.

Luis was a quick study. Oswald Hackett was a powerfully built man in his thirties, some years older than Luis, dressed richly but soberly in a handsome-looking surtout, and walking with an expensive cane. In the light of the lamp by the stage door Luis had noticed that the skin of the hand holding that cane bore marks, scars made by chemicals perhaps. Was the fellow some kind of scholar, a scientist – a chemist? And educated by the sound of it; he had the slight bray, the elongated vowels, that Luis associated with a history shaped by Harrow and Oxford.

Right now the man looked somewhat sickened: pale, breathing hard as he marched along. But this March day was unseasonably warm, and the London air was a touch less sulphurous than usual – the reaction must be due to after-effects of the man’s own disappearing act rather than to the climate. Still, Hackett kept pushing through the crowd, by an apparent effort of will.

‘Further than I remembered to this oyster-house,’ he said now,
panting. ‘Not used to these crowds; forgive my lack of breath. What a swarm this is – eh? As if London is one great decaying tree trunk through which the maggots and the weevils chew their way, selling bits of bark to each other for farthings . . . Ah, but I imagine you feel more at home than I do, Elusivo? After all it was on streets like this that you once scrambled to survive, did you not? Chewing your quid and watching out for the bobbies . . .’

Luis watched sweeper boys at a corner, competing to clean the path of grander folk passing to and from the theatres, some of them somersaulting or handstanding in hope of a tossed penny. He had the uncomfortable feeling that this Hackett knew far too much about him – about a life he would prefer to remain his own secret.

It was a sorry affair after all: his father a shopkeeper who had died poor, of consumption, his mother marrying again before dying herself in childbirth – and a stepfather who had never treated Luis with anything more than contempt, and had eventually thrown him out on the street. Luis was nine years old. Well, he had joined Hackett’s ‘maggots and weevils’ of London to survive, at first sweeping the streets just like these boys he saw before him now, and using his unusual talent to get him out of scrapes – and, yes, away from the bobbies when he needed it. But then, aiming higher, he had developed a street act based on his disappearing tricks: popping out of existence behind a barrel, only to emerge from a doorway across the street. And that had got him noticed, and a job in the warmth of the Surrey-side theatres in variety shows or as an interval turn. All the while he had kept his secret: that his magic tricks weren’t tricks at all – though if they weren’t magic he wasn’t sure what they were.

And now, it seemed, he had been noticed again.

There was no point beating about the bush, he decided. ‘Never mind your oysters. So you can do
it
too, sir. I thought I was the only one . . . May I ask firstly what you call
it
? I do not like people having the better of me.’

‘I have a name for
it
. But does a name matter? And as for you
thinking that you are unique, all I can say, sir, is: so do most of the others. As has been true all the way back into deep history, probably. One of my own ancestors, or so the family story goes, was Hereward the Wake, and he was damned elusive too, wasn’t he? Shall we prove it to each other?’

‘Prove what?’

Hackett halted, glanced around, and led Luis into the shadow of an alley. ‘What’s your preference, Mr Valienté?’

‘Preference?’

‘Widdershins or deiseal?’

‘I don’t know what the devil— Oh.’

‘There are always two directions in which to travel, aren’t there?’

‘I think of them as dexter or sinister.’

‘Fair names. Of course we don’t know which of our terms is congruent with t’other, do we?’ He held out his cane – which Luis now recognized as a sword cane, containing a hidden weapon. Hackett said, ‘Come – grasp the stick. Do me the honour of allowing me to take the lead. Widdershins for this first experiment, I think.’

Staring at the man, Luis considered. He had the feeling that his whole life hinged on this moment, the choice he took now. The chap could have no more on Luis than guesswork so far, guesses based on observing his stage show – it must be so, for Luis would surely have clocked the fellow if Hackett had followed him into the sinister forest to spy on him. Luis could still bluster this out. What could the man do, after all? He couldn’t force Luis to cross over into the eerie silence of the widdershins woods . . .

On the other hand, of course, once they
had
crossed, and were out of sight of any bobbies, Luis might get the chance to silence the fellow for good and, simply, leave him there. To survive in London’s demi-monde Luis had had to learn to be good with his fists from a young age. He was no killer, though he had before considered the possibility as a way of keeping his uncomfortable secret,
in extremis.
His life or Hackett’s, that would be the choice. And yet, and yet . . .

His racing thoughts juddered to a halt. Here was another
like him
. Here was a fellow, educated enough by the look and sound of it, who might be able to
explain
this peculiar phenomenon which, it was true, Luis had always imagined was his and his alone, his peculiar gift and burden, a secret to be kept even from his own family.

Oswald Hackett grinned, studying him. Luis had the feeling that the man knew exactly what he was thinking, the choices he was weighing up.

Luis didn’t trust this chap as far as he could throw him. But Luis had always been something of an opportunist; that feature had shaped the entire pattern of his life, his career. He would, he decided, see what the fellow had to say. If Luis didn’t like what he learned, he could always slip away into shadows and anonymity, as he’d done several times in his life before – although it occurred to him that it mightn’t be quite so easy to evade a man who could follow him even into dexter or sinister.

His choice made, without another word, he grasped the cane.

Hackett nodded. ‘Good man.’ He glanced about, evidently to make sure they were unobserved.

And, with the usual slight jolt to the Valienté gut, they were in the forest green.

Luis released the cane.

The trees here were oak, and not the wretched soot-coated specimens that populated the London parks but tall and handsome, like the columns in some great church, Luis often thought. The sky was bright and blue and not hidden from view by the city’s pall, and it was a colder day here too. The city, that great reef of humanity with its buildings blackened by centuries of soot and smoke, did not exist
here
– if this dexter or sinister forest corresponded to the London Luis knew at all. The ground underfoot was firm and dry, as Luis knew well, for he popped over here several times a day in the course of his stage act. Not all of the terrain was so accommodating;
much of the landscape hereabouts was a marsh through which a broad river and its tributaries washed: a version of the Thames perhaps, but untrammelled by humanity. Luis had to choose his theatres well for his performances. The stages he used needed to map over to higher terrain
here
, or at least dry land, for the punters might be confused by his magical reappearances if they always came accompanied by wet feet.

He became aware of Hackett, who was again doubled over, clutching his belly, breathing hard, looking pale. Luis had never made such a journey other than alone before, and now the presence of another in what Luis had come to think of as his own private refuge was something of a shock.

Hackett straightened with an effort, dug a paper packet from his waistcoat pocket, and gulped down a couple of pills. ‘You don’t suffer this?’

‘What?’

‘The nausea. Like a punch in the gut from some East End footpad.’

‘Never had it.’

‘Then you’re blessed. And you saw I had a dose of it before, when I did my quick switch back and forth to show you my credentials.’ Hackett straightened up and eyed him. ‘I envy you, sir, you are evidently a more adept Waltzer than I am.’

‘Waltzer?’

‘It’s my name for what we do –
this
. To Waltz. Don’t you think the borrowing is appropriate? For we dance, you and I, as light on our feet as two German princelings, and skip to left and right, or in
some
direction, faster than the eye can follow. Waltz, do you see? Although I know the dance isn’t so fashionable yet in the twopenny hops of Lambeth as it is in Windsor. And here we are, having Waltzed to the forest. Tell me, have you explored this – new world – to any extent?’

Luis shrugged. ‘What for? There’s nobody here.’

‘No profit to be had, eh?’

‘England’s my world, sir. London.’

‘And wherever you cross over, do you always find the forest?’

‘Only ever tried it in London, and Kent, where I grew up. Yes, forest.’

‘And the deiseal side?’

‘The same.’

‘Well, the forest is the thing, everywhere you go, in England at any rate. Some of my own ancestors – for the trait has been passed down the generations, and preserved in family legend, though
not
written down since one distant aunt was burned as a witch – some of ’em called themselves woodsmen, you know. One of ’em ran with Robin Hood. No wonder the Sheriff of Nottingham could never catch those outlaws.’

Luis snorted. ‘Hood’s a figure from story. A ballad.’

‘If you say so. But tell me – if you do cross further, what then?’

That confused Luis. ‘Don’t know what you mean, sir.’

Hackett goggled at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’ve grown up able to take this first spin of the Waltz, but it has never occurred to you to take the second, or a third? To dance on, into yet another world, and another?’