The Long Utopia (16 page)

Lobsang immediately hugged her. ‘Calm, Agnes.’

‘I didn’t sign up for this, Lobsang,’ she whispered, away from the boy.

‘Well, it was your idea to come here.’

‘Only because I thought Ben had been down here before us. Oh, God,
Ben
, he must have been terrified if he got this far . . .’

‘I don’t think he was. He kept coming back, didn’t he?’

‘Where
are
we, Lobsang? Some distant part of the Long Earth? Have we been through one of Sally Linsay’s soft places?’

‘I don’t think any Earth ever had a sky like this. We’re far from home.’

‘How far? The Long Mars? Mars has an orange sky, doesn’t it?’

‘But not all those stars.’

‘How did we
get
here? How could a step—’

‘There have been rumours.’

‘Of what?’

‘Flaws in the Long Earth. Places where stepping a certain kind of way can take you – elsewhere. There were stories of Jokers with this sort of property – one, called the Cueball, Joshua and I discovered ourselves. Not that we stuck around to find out
how
strange it was.’

Yes, Agnes thought. This is a flaw. Not just the Poulson house, the hole in the ground. The whole of Earth West 1,217,756. Just as had been her intuition, almost from the beginning. A flaw, something that shouldn’t be here. Somehow it was all connected. It had to be.

‘Interesting,’ Lobsang said.

She managed to laugh. ‘What, one thing in particular as opposed to all the rest?’

‘The sky. Those green-tinged stars. On one side of the sky, not the other. Now, why that odd asymmetry?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She pushed away Lobsang’s arm. Nikos was watching her; she felt embarrassed by the weakness she had shown. ‘Take me home,’ she said sternly.

At their cabin, Shi-mi was waiting for them by the door. She seemed to be bursting with news.

The cat said without hesitation, ‘I was able to observe your experiments. The pendulum and the timer funnels and the sundial. I have come to a conclusion. I regret that the precision is uncertain—’

‘That’s OK,’ Agnes said. ‘Just tell me.’

‘When we came here the day was twenty-four hours long. Just as on all the worlds of the Long Earth – well, almost all. I remember that well; I observed it myself. But now—’ And she shuddered.

Agnes crouched down. ‘Shi-mi, are you all right? Let me get you something.’

‘No. Please, Agnes.’ She opened her green eyes wide. ‘
Now
, according to your clocks, the day is shorter.
Twenty-three hours only
, plus a few minutes. You were right. You were right . . .’

Agnes stared at Lobsang. ‘The silver beetles. The Planetarium. Now this, the world spinning faster on its damn axis. What does it mean, Lobsang?’

‘I’ll have to find out.’ He sighed. ‘So much for the homesteading.’

‘To find out – what do you need to do that?’

‘A twain,’ he said. ‘I need a twain, so I can see the whole world. And Joshua Valienté, Agnes. I need Joshua.’

F
OR
N
ELSON
A
ZIKIWE
, patiently enquiring, the mysteries of the deeper history of Joshua Valienté and his family continued to unravel . . .

Luis Valienté never forgot his adventure with Abel and Simon, the runaway slaves, back in 1852. It was an incident that had made him proud to be British, and indeed to be a Waltzer, one of Oswald Hackett’s Knights of Discorporea. A validation too, for the first time in his life, of what he
was.

But as the years passed, he gradually became less and less entangled in the affairs of the Knights, and his life followed its own distinct path.

That path took a decisive turn thanks to his share in a fictitious Californian gold mine – all Fraser Burdon’s doing, of course – a lode easily extracted thanks to their piggybacking on the results of some poor fellow’s five years of prospecting in the true California. Luis marvelled at Fraser’s ingenious cover-up of their strike’s peculiar provenance. The mine, according to Fraser’s account for the authorities, had supposedly been opened up by a ‘distant cousin’. Its location had been ‘lost’, along with all documentation, in a botched robbery attempt when the ‘cousin’ had come into town and attempted to register his latest ‘strike’ . . . They got away with it. There were, it seemed, even wilder stories than that circulating in the strange subculture of the Gold Rush.

And suddenly Luis was rich.

Luis invested his gold money in the burgeoning field of steam engines, for, just as the railways were spreading their iron web around the world, so the oceans, the oldest transport highways of all, were being challenged by a new generation of ships driven by coal and steam, ever since the pioneering service of the
Great Western
from 1838. Unlike his father, Luis managed to invest well and wisely, on the whole – well enough that he could afford to dabble in another nostalgic passion, backing variety shows in the theatres of England.

He did learn that Burdon had sunk much of
his
money into armaments – a growing industry after decades of relative peace in Europe were ended by the brutal war in the Crimea. After that conflict, during his visits to London, Luis often noticed a veteran who had a pitch at a corner of the New Cut, a one-legged fellow who would ape army routines, marching and standing to attention and shouldering arms with his crutch. He wore a medal of some kind, and Luis wondered if he might have met the Queen herself, who had taken a great interest in the war, and had met the troops and handed out the gongs . . . Old folk would tell you there had been a flood of such figures a few decades back, after the war against Bonaparte. They had all died off since, but now there was a fresh crop.

Armaments! Burdon, he supposed, had always had an air of brutal realism about him that Luis lacked, for better or worse.

Not long after his American adventure Luis had married. His bride was a young woman who had once been a singer in the variety halls, and had flirted briefly but intensely with the Great Elusivo. ‘Elusivo no more!’ Hackett had joked, when acting as best man at the wedding. ‘Now she’s got you pinned down at last!’

The couple settled in a decent town house in Richmond, and raised a daughter who they christened Elspeth – ‘Ella’ to her father, in a nod to Luis’s own ‘elusive’ past that was a secret even from his
wife. Later came a son, Robert. As the children grew Luis kept an eye on them both, but to his relief neither showed signs of being a Waltzer, with none of the joys and complications such a condition might bring. The family lived modestly, quietly and respectably.

Luis noted the death of Prince Albert in 1861 – well, how could he not? The news dominated the nation. The Queen disappeared into mourning black, and all traces of the somewhat pretty if suspicious young woman Luis had once glimpsed in the vaults of Windsor Castle were extinguished. Luis did wonder how the passing of Albert, the great champion of the Knights of Discorporea, would affect their work. But truth be told, once he reached his own fortieth birthday in 1863, Luis heard little of whatever exploits the Knights were getting up to. His own increasing age made him that much less useful as an agent, of course. And Oswald Hackett had always had a secretive streak.

By the turn of the next decade – and while the British watched aghast as a newly unified Germany under its ferocious Chancellor Bismarck tore into France, advancing even to Paris – Luis’s contact with the Knights had dwindled to the occasional, almost nostalgic, letter or visit.

So it was a surprise when Hackett called one day in the spring of 1871 and asked him to go to Berlin. He and Burdon were to make separate trips, he said, with instructions to visit particular locations, including government buildings and royal residences.

Luis was reluctant, but he was wary of angering Oswald Hackett. So he complied. He fulfilled his own mission without incident or alarm.

And it was a still greater surprise, a few weeks later, when he, Hackett and Fraser Burdon were all summoned once more to Windsor.

L
UIS STAYED OVERNIGHT
in a hotel on the Strand.

Restless, anxious, he was up before the dawn, long before his appointment with Hackett and Burdon. He made his way down to the river, where in the grey light the mudlarks dug for wood and coins and bits of coal: children and old women, up to their knees in cold river-bed ooze. And he saw the sewer hunters emerging from their tunnels with their hoes and poles, coated in filth, splitting whatever grimy haul they had retrieved from the muck. Even in the city streets there was activity at this hour, the bone grubbers sifting garbage for anything they could eat or wear or sell on. All these people were striving to be up before the competition, as if the city was a vast midden infested by human insects, just as Hackett had once said, rooting and sifting and consuming the slightest morsel they found.

By eight Luis had made his way to Charing Cross, where the others were waiting by the brougham that would take them to Windsor.

This time the three of them, all older – Oswald Hackett was in his late fifties now – were met only by the man they knew as Mr Radcliffe, with a few hefty flunkeys at hand.

This encounter took place with the four of them standing somewhat uneasily in a drawing room that Luis suspected was one of the castle’s lesser chambers, deep in the bowels of the Conqueror’s tower, but whose carpet alone had probably cost more than all his
own holdings combined, and whose walls were adorned with black crape, in the funereal style Victoria had maintained since the death of the Consort. Just the four of them, save for ‘servants’ in suits who stood by the walls and doorways, looking to Luis’s eye like nothing so much as Coldstream Guards playing at being butlers, and he imagined he wasn’t far wrong.

Radcliffe too had aged, of course; he must be nearly sixty now, with a greying at the temples, a slight stoop to the posture. But his attention remained blade-like, his stare skewering. ‘So, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Once again we meet. No Prince this time, sadly.’

Burdon snorted. ‘But maybe you’ll have the Widow of Windsor serve us tea, what?’

Hackett glared at him.

Radcliffe’s smile was the kind that did not extend above the line of his thin moustache. His advancing age had not mellowed him, evidently. ‘You know why you are here – or I imagine you have guessed. You were all asked to go into the new Germany, and the heart of Berlin in particular. Now here you are with your reports. Would you care to accompany me to the archive? You’ll recall it from your previous visit. The staircase down is just along the hall from here . . .’

Hackett would have followed, but Burdon grabbed his arm. Burdon said, ‘Not this time, thanks. Gettin’ a bit sensitive to being confined, in my old age.’

Hackett pulled away, eyes narrow, frowning. But Luis was surprised when, for the first time in Luis’s memory, he deferred to Burdon’s leadership.

Radcliffe affected mock surprise. ‘You, Mr Burdon, the famous gold-miner of California, scared of a bit of shut-in? Surely not.’

‘Occupational hazard. Well.
Are
you servin’ us tea? Why not take it here?’ He glanced around at the beefy servants. ‘I imagine these fellows are discreet. There’s no
reason
you want us down there, is there?’

Radcliffe gave way. He invited them to sit.

In short order a flunkey showed up with tea, another bulky fellow. As the man poured, Burdon murmured to Luis, ‘I never thought to see such fine china handled by a gorilla’s mitt like that.’

Now Radcliffe asked for their reports on Bismarck’s Berlin.

When it was his turn Luis described the cover he’d devised. ‘I posed as a theatrical entrepreneur, studying local acts with an eye to booking them for the English theatres. I took a room on the Unter den Linden, from where I had every excuse to stroll past the Prinz Carl Palace, and the ministries on the Wilhelmstrasse . . .’ All this was by way of summary; they had all had to submit detailed written reports, including sketch maps. It had been enough for Luis to have inspected these great buildings from the outside; the others had Waltzed their way inside on more penetrating spying missions.

When they had all reported, Radcliffe nodded. ‘Good, good. Now, I wonder if you have guessed why we have ordered such a mission. And why it had to be
you three
, the very apex of the pyramid of your Knights of Discorporea,’ and he said the words as if they were ashes in his mouth.

‘That’s not hard to guess,’ Hackett said sternly. ‘I think you mean to strike at Bismarck himself.’

Luis was astonished by this allegation. But Radcliffe did not flinch.

And Hackett continued relentlessly, ‘I can even guess at the logic.’

‘Go on.’

‘
To avert a European war
. We all remember the poor Prince with his dreams of unifying Europe under a drowsy dynasty – he married his and Victoria’s eldest daughter to the crown prince of Prussia to achieve just that end. Well, that didn’t wash with Bismarck. Now you have this tremendous brute of a German dog prowling around a European back yard that has been more or less at peace, as we all know, since the downfall of Napoleon. And in Bismarck you face
a man ruthless and determined and of tremendous political and strategic skill—’

‘Who might be the ruin of us all,’ Radcliffe said, nodding. ‘And who, as you say, has terminated a half-century of relative peace on continental Europe with a terrible war, and he and his successors might spark off more before the hash is settled. No, the man has to go before he does any more harm, and spends any more lives. Which is where you gentlemen take the stage.’

Hackett nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, this is a step up from the Underground Rail Road, and your petty bits of spying. Even compared to the time you had us go into Sebastopol during the siege.’

Luis raised his eyebrows; he hadn’t heard of that one.

Burdon gave Radcliffe a mocking smile. ‘But what exactly is it you would have us do? Abduction, assassination? Of the
German Chancellor
? Are you serious? Do you expect us to believe that Her Majesty’s government would stoop to such a tactic? This isn’t some Balkan principality, you know. And besides, such an act would probably destabilize all Europe and bring us to war even faster than Bismarck with all his scheming ever could.’

Radcliffe kept calm. ‘It is the will of Her Majesty.’

‘Phooey,’ said Burdon. ‘Produce her and let her tell us so herself.’

Hackett seemed appalled. ‘Have some respect, man.’

Radcliffe stood. ‘If only you would come to the archive, I could explain the scheme better. We have documentation – maps – reports – it is already an expensive and carefully considered operation.’

Burdon said, ‘Determined to get us down in that hole in the ground, aren’t you?’

Radcliffe took a breath. ‘Also there is someone waiting to see you there. You met a prime minister once before, in Lord John Russell, many years ago. And now—’

Burdon laughed out loud. ‘You expect us to believe that you
persuaded old Gladstone, not just to support your bonkers scheme, but to turn up in person and sit in some cellar waiting on the likes of us?’

Hackett seemed confused. ‘It does sound rather unlikely, Mr Radcliffe. If you would care to clarify—’

But Burdon cut him off. He stood, facing Radcliffe. ‘All
I
would care to clarify is that this meeting is over. Ta-ta, Radcliffe, and thanks for the tea. Now if you’ll show us back to our brougham—’

‘Now,’ Radcliffe said softly.

Luis, still sitting, sensed rather than heard the massive form step up behind him. Then it was as if a thunderclap went off inside his head. He was aware of two, maybe three powerful men grabbing him and flinging him to the ground.

And he fell into the dark.

When he woke, he was in the well-remembered vault under Windsor Castle. Radcliffe, evidently, had got his way. And when he tried to move Luis discovered that his wrists and ankles were locked in shackles of heavy iron.

In the gas-lit gloom, just as before, here were the decent but not ostentatious furniture, the shelving with books and records, the doorways leading to further rooms crowded with gifts and gewgaws: the clutter of monarchy. It seemed just as it had been when Albert had leaned against the fireplace opposite, quoting his own speeches about duty, and Luis had thought he’d glimpsed Victoria hurrying by . . . All that, he realized, was nearly a quarter of a century ago.

But while the room hadn’t changed, its human occupants had. Here was Radcliffe, standing before him with a cold smile. Luis, Burdon and Hackett, all of them struggling back to consciousness, shackled side by side in armchairs, each with a red-coated soldier at his back. There were more soldiers at the doors, by the walls, even in the rooms beyond.

As Luis moved his battered head the pain returned, a clamouring like gunfire. He bit his tongue to force himself not to cry out.

There was a nurse before him, a sweet-faced girl in a uniform. ‘Drink this,’ she said. She held up a cup of some liquid to his lips, warm and tasting of honey; he gulped it down greedily, and the pain in his head started to abate.

Hackett’s face was ablaze with fury. ‘You all right, Valienté?’

‘Been better. Head still works.’

‘Good man. Burdon?’

‘Better than you’d think, old boy.’

Burdon seemed oddly at ease. But then, Luis reflected, he seemed to have been in control of events since they arrived here, more so than Hackett. Luis fervently hoped he still was – somehow.

Hackett looked up at the man standing before them. ‘What’s the meaning of this? What the deuce are you up to, Radcliffe?’

Burdon laughed. ‘Yes, and where’s Bill Gladstone? It was all a blind, wasn’t it? The whole business of Bismarck – probably even our bogus trips to Berlin on government money – all a lure to get us into this trap.’

Radcliffe ignored him and studied Hackett. ‘So, Dr Hackett, are you impressed with the way we took you down? I’m fly to the dodge, you see.’

More East End slang, Luis noticed.

‘
This
is the way we’ve learned to tackle you Waltzers. Hit you with overwhelming force before you’ve got time to think about it, before you’ve time to slip away to whichever corner of hell you godless creatures visit when you’re not here. And then, unconscious, bundle you up in a hole in the ground like this, where even you can’t Waltz out – how do you put it? – either widdershins or deiseal. Efficient, ain’t it? You won’t give us the lucky dodge again. We’ve been practising, you see.’

Hackett glared at him. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

And Burdon asked, more calmly, ‘Practising on whom?’

‘On more of your sort.’ Radcliffe began to pace, calm, thoughtful. ‘Here’s what you fellows need to understand. Your day is done, you and your flash tricks. You were always something of an indulgence of the old Prince, God rest him. But once he had gone it was clear that Her Majesty had always found you rather repulsive. “More shadows than men,” she said of you.

‘Meanwhile I and many of my colleagues have always been suspicious of the power you wield,
and
the notion that it is only through your own good will that we can have any surety that you will not turn your powers against your own government. Why, every one of you when he’s had the chance has used his talent to enrich himself, has he not? You, Burdon, with your phantom gold mine, and you needn’t think we haven’t unravelled the truth about that. You, Valienté, with your absurd act as the Great Elusivo.’

‘What, are you a critic now? I got good notices in my time. Why, once in the
Observer—
’

‘Even you, Hackett! Pious and pompous as you are now, you weren’t so as a younger man, were you? I’ve a file on you as thick as my arm. No, you’re too dangerous to be allowed to run around uncontrolled, d’ye see? And then there’s the whiff of—’ He sought the right word. ‘The whiff of the
unnatural
about you. We’re British, by God, a manly race. And we don’t want your shifty, slippery sort pollutin’ the blood, no matter how useful you may occasionally be – and, I’ll grant you, you have been. Well, we’ve decided to bring you in – beginning with you three, among the first to present yourselves here all those years ago – what colossal arrogance you showed then! And now the first to be taken down.’

But not the last, Luis realized in a sudden panic, not the last. Now he feared for his family, for Ella and Robert.

Radcliffe said, ‘And believe me, you’ll never see daylight again. As you can see, we have learned how to deal with your kind.’

‘By practising,’ Burdon said. ‘You told us that. Answer my question, then: on whom?’

‘On whomever we could find. We’ve had the scientists working on it, chaps at the Royal Society, devising a programme of testing. Anybody we suspected might have your sort of faculty – the soldier who mysteriously dodged the bullets copped by everybody else in battle, the particularly prolific thief, the particularly persistent jail-breaker – that sort. And then we tested them to see if they could Waltz, or not.’

Hackett looked appalled. ‘How, man?’

‘By stressing them. Wall a man up in some sarcophagus. Set him in front of a firing squad. Chuck him in a cage and sink it in the Thames; if he can skip out he’ll do so, you see. Mostly it fails – and, no, we didn’t kill ’em all, but it’s no waste if we had. One in a thousand, or less, showed signs of what
you
can do. And once they’ve stepped out you might think they’d be away scot free and beyond our reach, but many of ’em didn’t even know they had the capability before being forced to use it – they had always just escaped unconsciously – and then almost all of ’em came right back again, and straight into the arms of my bonny lads in their red coats. Once we had ’em, it was down into a basement under the Royal Society for all of them. Very systematic people, these scientists. Very methodical. Although, if there’s something in the brain that enables this Waltzing business, well, they ain’t found it yet.’

‘You’re talking about vivisection,’ Hackett said. ‘You monster.’

Radcliffe bridled at that, and leaned over him. ‘You’re the monster, man! Not me! D’ye not even see
that
clearly?’ He straightened up and resumed his pacing. ‘What we have learned is how rare this ability of yours is. After all, the threat of violent death has been a common occurrence during human history; if Waltzing was any more prevalent you’d think we’d have noticed by now.