The Long Utopia (24 page)

N
EW
S
PRINGFIELD COMMUNITY
meetings were generally well attended. In a place where you had to make your own entertainment, people turned up, even if just in hope of seeing some fireworks. People would come drifting in from their stepwise lodges, the population slowly gathering. But this particular meeting was going to be fractious. Agnes knew it.

It was taking place outside the Irwins’ principal home, a sprawl of tepees and tents, just over the Soulsby Creek ford from Manning Hill. Everybody was here, sitting on the grass or on chairs hauled over. Oliver Irwin was standing there like he was chairing the meeting – well, in a way, so he was – with Marina sitting at his feet, and Lydia curled up against her, and Nikos with the elderly Rio a huge sleepy lump at his side. There were Angie and Nell Clayton, and the elegant, elderly Bells with the grandchildren they cared for, and the cheerful Bambers, who always looked like they’d just crawled out of the swamp they made their living from. Lobsang and Agnes and seven-year-old Ben sat quietly to one side on a log, keeping a low profile, and Agnes hoped fervently they would continue to do so.

All around them the blustery wind blew, and there was the usual stink of sulphur in the air, commonplace now, and somewhere sheep bleated miserably. Even the trees of the endless native forest were dying back. It wasn’t a happy day, it didn’t feel right. But then, Agnes reflected sadly, it hadn’t felt right here for months, if not years.

And over all their heads hovered the massive bulk of a twain: a military airship, the USS
Brian Cowley
.

The ship hung silent, its turbines idle, the great hull held in place by mooring ropes anchored to the ground. You couldn’t help but be intimidated by the huge ceramic armour plates of its underbelly with their weapons pods and spy-hole observation ports, or by the row of spruce military officers on the ground, who had come down from the ship to tell the folks of New Springfield that they were going to have to leave their home.

Agnes’s fears were fulfilled. From the beginning the meeting didn’t go well.

At Oliver’s invitation the ship’s captain, called Nathan Boss, a stiff-looking forty-something, stood up to make his pitch. ‘If you’ll just let me go through the logic of what we’re trying to do here—’

Somebody yelled, ‘Don’t go
through
anything. Just go
away
!’

Catcalls and laughter. That was fair enough, Agnes thought. These people had come out to this world precisely to get away from having smart men in uniforms tell them what to do.

‘We’re here to help you,’ Captain Boss tried now. ‘We came here with a team of scientists to study what’s going on here, in this world. And I brought with me a letter passed on from my own command chain – in fact there is a note for you from President Starling himself—’

‘That crook!’

‘
I
didn’t vote for him.’

‘The President says that the whole of the extended stepwise nation is with you at this difficult time. We only want to help you—’

‘Then shift that ship and quit blocking the light on my beets!’

More laughter.

Lobsang leaned over to Agnes. ‘Ironically, it’s obvious why they’re so crabby.’

‘Of course it is. Nobody’s getting any decent sleep.’

And they hadn’t for a long time. In the months since Lobsang’s airship jaunt to the south with Joshua, things had worsened dramatically. The length of a day was now down, incredibly, to just twenty hours. Not only that, according to Lobsang who was now measuring such things for himself, the spin-up of the world seemed to be accelerating further.

The nights went by too fast, and it was as if they were all permanently sleep-deprived, or jet-lagged. Of course you could just step away to the neighbouring worlds if you sought a normal day-night sequence – worlds where, bizarrely, sunrise and sunset were drifting out of synch with the home world. But, Agnes had seen it for herself, the more the day here shrank in length, the more people came back to their homes, night after night, as if defying reality, and their own weakness.

‘Stubbornness,’ Agnes said now. ‘Sheer, dogged, Yankee stubbornness. Ain’t no clattering sci-fi monster of a silver beetle going to drive me out of
my
home.’ For it seemed obvious to everybody that the strange creatures who shared this world must somehow be responsible for the other odd phenomena; you didn’t need to see Lobsang’s global system of metal viaducts to understand that. ‘And the more jet-lagged we get the more stubborn we become.’

‘True, perhaps. And this world
is
the one the founders chose – this is where they have the bulk of their iron tools, for one thing, even if they were drawn here to an ore seam the beetles’ actions may have created. Why should they give all that up? But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to the advice of the Captain here and his crew. I mean, they did bring a properly equipped science team.’

‘But the Navy wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t called them in, Lobsang.’

‘Somebody had to. I’m concerned, Agnes. Not just for us, not just for this town . . .’

Agnes glanced down at Ben, who was trying to work a handmade wooden yoyo. He wore a beetle-silver bangle on his wrist, as
did most of the kids in this town. And he looked tired, snappy, irritable, just like the rest. She grabbed Lobsang’s hand, synthetic flesh on synthetic flesh, but it felt like a human contact, warm, strong. ‘Look, Lobsang, Oliver Irwin is the mayor of this dump, in all but name. You played your part; you brought in the Navy. Now let Oliver do the talking. Let these others sort it out.
Don’t be Lobsang.
Be George. Be ordinary. Be Ben’s dad. That’s why we came here, remember. It’s best if everybody figures this out for themselves – makes their own decision about their lives, rather than have
you
make it for them.’

He took a deep breath, ‘I’ll try, Agnes. I will try.’

Captain Boss, visibly frustrated by his reception, yielded the floor to one of his officers, a woman, late forties, slim, dark, crisp-looking.

‘My name’s Margarita Jha. Commander, USN. I’m the chief science officer on this vessel, the
Cowley.
As the Captain indicated we have on board a slew of specialists, civilian and military, come to study the strange phenomena that are afflicting your world here. Their team leader is Dr Ken Bowring of the US Geological Survey, whose speciality is seismology. We also have meteorologists, oceanographers, you name it. We even have an anthropologist with an attachment to the SETI Institute, that’s the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, come to study your, ah, unwelcome neighbours . . .’

Jha spoke well and fluently, and was listened to politely in return. She had an air of command her captain rather lacked, Agnes thought.

‘But,’ Jha said, ‘my own specialty is biology. That’s where I started. And as a biologist I have to tell you that, unfortunately for you, and your kids, your animals, your crops – indeed, for all the living things native to this particular stepwise Earth – now that the spin-up has reached a period of twenty hours or so, we’ve passed a fundamental limit.

‘You
can’t
adapt to a day of that length, or shorter, and nor can other living things. Experiments connected to the space programme have shown this; twenty or twenty-one hours is the minimum length of day we can withstand.’ She counted the points off on her fingers.
‘I’m talking about your chickens not laying properly. The critters you call furballs, who come hunting at dawn – you must have seen them staggering around as if they’re drunk or high, at all the wrong times of the day, and then the poor little beasts get snapped up by the big birds and other predators, as long as
they
are awake and functioning. The flowering plants can’t track the sun. Even the trees are suffering, in the long run. Your world has an intricate ecology, just as we find everywhere on the Long Earth, and a beautiful one – but that ecology is dependent on a twenty-four-hour daily cycle. I’m afraid we’re predicting a significant die-back, and soon. And that’s even before you start to talk about the effects of the volcanism that’s breaking out, the fires, the ash clouds suppressing the temperatures, the toxic gases you can
smell
– we all remember Yellowstone, don’t we? Ken Bowring will tell you about that.

‘Folks, it’s not just your lives that have been disrupted. We’re talking about a peculiar kind of extinction event on this world. And it’s your great misfortune that your township has been caught up in it.’

Captain Boss stepped forward. ‘Thank you, Commander. Admirably clear. Any questions?’

Oliver Irwin was still standing. He glanced around at his neighbours. ‘I’m sure I can speak for all of us. What are we going to do about this, Captain?’ He looked up at the military airship. ‘What are
you
going to do about it?’

‘Well,’ Boss said, ‘in the long term we intend to continue to study this phenomenon, or this group of related phenomena, as best we can. But in the short term we’re going to have to lift you off this rock, and take you, your children, and all your goods, somewhere safe. I know you have stepwise lodges, but I understand this particular world was the centre, for you. We’ll take you wherever you want to go.’ He added with a forced smile, ‘Look, we won’t leave anyone behind. Your pets – even your farm animals will be saved. The twain is a big ship.’

Oliver stiffened, and the townsfolk muttered.

Agnes groaned. ‘That young man just does not get it.’

Oliver Irwin said, ‘Sir – Captain Boss – let me tell you this. This isn’t a “rock”. Or a “centre”. This is our home. And when I ask you what you’re going to do about it, I don’t want to hear you say we need to run and hide.’ A rumble of approval from his neighbours. ‘We’re not quitters. We’re Americans. We’re pioneers. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re going to
stay
here. And if you can’t help us,’ to yells of approval, ‘then please do what Al Todd asked you to do, and get that big ship of yours out of the light of his beets.’

‘Darn right!’

‘Well said, Oliver.’

Boss looked helplessly at Jha.

The science officer stepped forward again. ‘We do sympathize, sir. Really. The US Navy isn’t fond of quitting either. But we don’t even know what we’re dealing with here—’

‘It’s those darn silver beetles,’ said Angie Clayton. ‘That’s obvious enough.’

Boss said, ‘But we hardly know anything about them. You know that we’ve taken the
Cowley
on a tour. We spanned much of the continent, this footprint of North America. The creatures you call the beetles are building – something. Like immense road systems. What we don’t know is why they’re doing all this. What the purpose of their network is. And unless we can figure out at least that much—’

Lobsang sighed.

Agnes plucked his sleeve. ‘Lobsang.
No.
’

‘—then we can’t even predict what comes next—’

‘I must speak up,’ Lobsang murmured.

‘George wouldn’t. Sit still.’

‘—we don’t have any kind of handle on any of this—’

‘But I do,’ Lobsang announced. He rose to his feet, grave.

Agnes covered her face with her hands. Oliver stared. Ben looked bewildered.

Captain Boss glanced over. ‘I’m sorry, Mr – Abrahams, was it?’

‘George Abrahams. I do know what the beetles are constructing. It’s a Dyson motor.’

‘A what?’

‘Maybe you’d better let me speak to your science people.’ And Lobsang walked past Oliver Irwin, towards the crew, as if taking over. Just as Agnes had dreaded.

Al Todd got to his feet and pointed. ‘Yeah, you do that, Abrahams, you big shot! I always thought there was something not right about you. All our troubles started the day you showed up here. Maybe you should hitch a ride on this Navy tub right back out of here!’

The meeting started to break up, the mood frustrated and angry.

Ben stared up at Agnes, wide-eyed. ‘Agnes? Does Mr Todd mean it?’

‘No, Ben. He’s just upset, is all. He doesn’t mean anything. Now you come with me while George is busy, those chickens won’t feed themselves . . .’

‘D
YSON
? Y
OU MEAN
Freeman Dyson?’ The man was asking the question even as he shook Lobsang’s hand.

‘Manners, Dr Bowring,’ Jha murmured. ‘Introductions first. Mr Abrahams—’

‘Actually I’m a doctor also.’

‘I apologize. Dr George Abrahams, meet Ken Bowring, US Geological Survey. As I said back there Dr Bowring is the team leader of our civilian science cadre.’

‘Freeman Dyson, though. That’s who you meant, isn’t it? Come, walk with me, sir, please. I’d like to show you the data we’re assembling, the interpretations we’re making.’

Margarita Jha didn’t know what to make of this man Abrahams. He was tall, slim, a little elderly for an early generation of such a new community, perhaps. But there was something about him that didn’t quite fit. His accent was basically east coast American, she thought, but not quite pitched right, as if he was forcing it. His handsome but rather unremarkable face seemed expressionless – or rather, it was as if the expressions followed the emotional trigger by a perceptible interval, as if they required some conscious impulse. Maybe this guy Abrahams was just an eccentric. Mankind, splintered across the Long Earth, had begun to diverge, culturally, religiously, even ethnically, and in all that room it seemed to her that what she would once have called ‘eccentrics’ were becoming the norm. But even so, Abrahams puzzled her.

‘So,’ said Bowring, ‘you’re a doctor of—’

‘Engineering. My doctoral research was in communication with trolls. I was sponsored by Douglas Black.’

‘Fascinating, fascinating,’ Bowring said, distracted. ‘With the collapse of the old Datum academic institutions, we must rely increasingly on the generosity of figures like Black to fund our research. Still, the work gets done. You know Black himself?’

‘I’ve met him. Before he became a recluse. Or so it’s said . . .’

Jha, and others of the crew, had been involved in another twain mission that had taken Black, in secret and at his own request, to a refuge much further away than either Bowring or Abrahams imagined, probably. She kept her counsel.

They came to the rough work station Bowring and his team had set up, in the shadow of the twain hovering above. Trestle tables were laden with tablets and heaps of paper, meteorological charts, maps; there were samples too of the local flora and fauna. All this was a pale imitation of the more extensive science suite up on the twain itself.

Bowring said now, ‘It’s certainly a pleasure to find you here, Dr Abrahams. Coming in cold to a situation like this, there’s only so much progress we can make in a fixed time. No offence to the people here; your neighbours seem a smart, decent, very fine bunch of people. But to have had a scientifically educated man on the spot for some years—’

‘I understand.’

‘Tell me about a “Dyson motor”.’

‘Do you have a map of the world? Or any kind of global view . . .’

The Navy crew had toured the continent in the twain, and had sent up sounding-rockets for a higher-altitude view. There was even a clutch of simple orbiting satellites, though they had yet to complete a full planetary survey. There were various ways of viewing the result; they had maps on paper, electronic images, photographic surveys. Jha’s favourite was a globe you could handle:
a basketball borrowed from the crew on to which a projected photographic mosaic had been glued. It looked pretty much like a globe of any stepwise Earth, save for a peculiar local readjustment of the continents: that gap between South and North America, the global seaway that ran from the Atlantic coast through the Mediterranean and out through Arabia to the south. That and the ubiquitous green of forests that stretched all the way to the polar regions, north and south.

But on this globe there were also false-colour markings of anomalies. Lurid orange bands around the coasts of the continents showed tsunami damage. Peculiar fractures circled the Pacific, divided the Atlantic lengthways, and spanned the southern oceans from north-east Africa south and east towards Australasia: the planet looked like a cracked vase, Jha thought. The cracks were huge tectonic flaws, bands of volcanoes and quakes. And most striking of all were the spidery bands of silver that followed the equator, and the lines of latitude to north and south.

Abrahams picked up the basketball and traced the silver lines with a finger. ‘I have seen some of these. I took my own twain journey to the south; I saw enough for me to infer the rest. You’ll be able to look it up for yourself. Freeman Dyson was a twentieth-century engineer who thought big. He worked on Project Orion, on how to use military-specification H-bombs to drive a spacecraft. And he came up with at least one conceptual scheme of how to spin up a world.’ He pointed to the latitudinal bands. ‘You wrap the world in conducting straps, and run an electrical current through them to generate a shaped magnetic field around the planet, a field shaped like a toroid, a doughnut. You have another electric current running pole to pole through the planet, and you close the loop with an arc through the magnetosphere. That causes the auroras we’ve been seeing from the ground. And then you throw in a stream of spacecraft, starting in high orbits and spiralling down through the toroidal field.’

‘Spacecraft?’

‘They need only be simple. Massive, but simple. Lumps of moon rock, for example, wrapped in some kind of conducting blanket. On my own twain journey, we reached the equator. I saw such rocks in the sky. You must have too.’

‘Yes. We’ve also been observing the moon, from where projectiles of that type are evidently being launched.’

‘And have been for years – since my wife and I first arrived here. The physics is trivial. The flyby rocks come in, they are dragged by the Earth’s new magnetic field, and, thus coupled, they pull at the Earth. Each rock speeds up the planet’s spin, just by a fraction. Then, when they reach their lowest orbit, they start to push
against
the planet’s magnetic field to spiral back out of there again – and, again, they give the planet another minute shove. Theoretically, it’s as if the Earth has been made the armature of a huge electric motor.’ He looked at their faces, seeking understanding.

Jha said, ‘I think I get it. Metaphorically anyhow. I have a daughter. When she was little, in the park in our home town back on West 5, there was a roundabout, a simple thing, a wooden disc with hand rails spinning on a pivot. The kids liked to run by it; each one grabbed a rail and let it go, and with every tug the roundabout spun a little faster.’

‘That’s the idea.’

Bowring sucked his teeth. ‘So the world’s spinning faster. What about the conservation of momentum? Where’s the extra spin coming from?’

‘I don’t have the facilities to observe properly,’ Abrahams said. ‘Perhaps you do. It appears that the flyby objects stream off towards the sun. There they are probably deflected at closest approach by a gravitational assist – or maybe they use solar sails – and that way they harvest angular momentum from the sun, and return for another pass. It’s a slow process for an individual rock; it must take months or years to make a full orbit, from Earth to sun and
back again. But with a stream of such rocks the accelerating effect becomes continuous.’

‘So let’s see if I’ve got this straight,’ Jha said. ‘The latitude bands, the magnetic field they create, are ways of coupling these flyby rocks to the Earth. But what’s really happening is that through the rock stream some of the sun’s spin is being transferred to the Earth.’

‘The sun’s angular momentum, yes. And its angular kinetic energy.’

‘Yeah. A hell of a lot of energy,’ Bowring said dubiously.

Abrahams smiled wistfully. ‘That depends on your perspective. Suppose you doubled this Earth’s spin rate – brought the day down to twelve hours. You’d need four times its original angular energy. But to top up the spin to that rate would take just
thirty minutes
of the sun’s total fusion-energy output. It’s a lot to us, but if you can tap a source as vast as the sun . . .’

Bowring said grimly, ‘Well, the damage is being done. Dr Abrahams, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of effects the spin-up is having on this world as a whole. Every Earth is essentially a ball of liquid: the iron core and the mantle. The solid crust is only a fine rind laid over that liquid interior. Under the continents the crust is maybe sixty miles thick, compared with the Earth’s radius of four
thousand
miles. It’s as if the Earth is a big round crème brûlée.

‘Because of its spin – I mean its regular, standard-issue twenty-four-hour spin –
every
Earth is deformed, flattened slightly, not quite a sphere, bulging at the equator. Normally this isn’t a problem. And the natural state of things is actually for the spin to be changing anyhow, slowing very gradually over geological time. The solid crust has the chance to adjust to the changes of deformation.

‘That’s not the case here. In the few years since the spin-up has begun, the crust’s deformation, at the equator at least, has increased by around eight miles. That might not sound much, but the ocean-floor crust is only about three miles thick. And so—’

Abrahams traced the jagged lines that spanned and circled the oceans on the basketball globe. ‘Fractures in the sea bed.’

‘I’m afraid so. There are natural faults where the sea floor is spreading, such as down the spine of the Atlantic, and where the oceanic tectonic plates butt up against the continents, such as around the coasts of the Pacific. Now these faults are cracking, opening up, and you get quakes and volcanism. If they’re underwater, you can get tremendous tsunamis that batter the coastal areas—’

‘The smell of sulphur in the air.’ Abrahams smiled sadly. ‘The aroma of Yellowstone. Wonderful sunsets. Symptoms of a world coming apart at the seams. And bad news for anybody like me, who only came here looking for a spot of quiet farming.’

Bowring looked impatient, uncomfortable. ‘I must keep stressing that this is still largely guesswork. Extrapolation. We have so little data . . . This is not the Datum, which is, or anyhow was before Yellowstone, saturated by survey gear of all kinds. Networks of seismometers, for instance. I myself worked at the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana, an exquisite instrument. And of course the climate was monitored by ships, planes, satellites, as well as weather stations with a global coverage. Here we have only our one observation platform in the
Cowley
, a few pinprick settlements like yours, Dr Abrahams – forgive me – and a handful of observations from the instruments we can emplace. We need gravimeters to measure the planetary morphological distortion, line-of-sight lasers to measure the distortion directly.’

Jha said, ‘I know you’re doing your best, Ken. As we all are.’

Bowring grunted, visibly unhappy. ‘At least we
can
do something. I myself was trained up properly, before Yellowstone. But the Datum science institutions have never recovered from the volcano. The next generation of scientists will be amateurs, if that.
Then
we’d have no hope of understanding something like this at all.’

‘So,’ said Abrahams, ‘we’ve talked about the what. Have you got any closer to understanding why this is happening?’

‘Well, we’re asking the question, at least. Come see . . .’

The silver beetle was, self-evidently, dead.

It lay on its back on a table, the gas pods removed from its green underbelly, its sections of silvery armour carefully detached and laid aside, its carapace of what looked like black ceramic sliced through and peeled back to expose a greenish, pulpy mass within.

‘I have to emphasize we didn’t kill this thing,’ Bowring said. ‘We found this corpse—’

‘Or this inert unit,’ Jha corrected him. ‘There’s no consensus yet over whether these creatures are alive or not.’

‘Very well. We found him in the big exhausted mine working you call the Gallery. Evidently inactive. We’ve no idea what happened to him, or even how long he’s been there; we’ve no idea how processes of decay work with these creatures.’

‘Or even if he’s a he,’ Jha said dryly.

‘True enough. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. Especially when you see one standing upright, with that eerie mask-like face turned to you.’

‘You settlers call them “beetles”,’ Jha said to Abrahams. ‘I’ve heard the scientists call them “assemblers”. The marines under our Colonel Wang are calling them “bugs”.’

‘But we don’t know what they call themselves because they won’t talk to us,’ Bowring said, sounding exasperated. ‘We believe they are capable of communication, Dr Abrahams. Well, that must be true for them to be able to accomplish such complex feats of engineering as the viaducts. We believe they are individuals; they exhibit individualistic behaviour – such as the first ones discovered by the children here, who began trading rock samples for bits of beetle jewellery. You could regard that as a kind of preliminary communication, if you like. Pre-symbolic. You could even see it as a kind of play.’

‘Play?’ Abrahams mused. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Play, yes. Their assaying of this world has evidently been very
extensive, and it’s hard to imagine a few random ore samples given them by uneducated kids can be of any real value. It’s a chink of hope we might somehow get through to them. And that they’re not
evil.
Not if they can be playful.’

‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Even the conquistadors loved their children, Dr Bowring. Even the Nazis, probably.’

‘True enough. Anyhow that’s as far as we’ve got. We have one of the SETI crowd here who’s been trying to get them to recognize prime numbers in symbols, heaps of stones. You know the kind of thing: mathematics is supposedly the universal language. The beetles just walk away.’

Abrahams laughed. ‘
I’d
walk away if you started counting out prime numbers to me. How boring . . .’

Jha leaned over the beetle on its table, a facemask over her mouth. The dissection had progressed a lot since Jha had last seen the specimen, but in the body’s interior she made out nothing but a kind of spongy mass, undifferentiated. ‘I’m just a lowly plant biologist, but even I can see we’re lacking in internal structure here. No obvious organs, no skeleton.’