The Long Utopia (26 page)

A
GNES WAS SUSPICIOUS
as soon as Lobsang said he had a plan. ‘A plan? A plan to do what? Lobsang, you already blew our cover, all but, by standing up in front of those Navy officers and taking over the meeting.’

‘I don’t think it matters. The universe isn’t giving me any choice, Agnes.’

‘Oh, don’t get pompous. Do you imagine the universe cares about
you
? Look, Lobsang, think about it—’

‘What is there to think about? Who are these beetles, these bugs, to fall on a world and consume it for their own purposes – everything it was, everything it could have been, gone in a flash, just to fuel another minute stage of their own endless expansion?’

‘Hm. I’d say you have a point if it wasn’t for the fact that that’s what humanity has always done, as you’ve lectured me about many times.’

‘That’s true. But now
we’re
in the path of the juggernaut. And there are evidently people, minds of some sort, fighting back in the Planetarium sky. Are they not right to resist? Should we not at least try as well?’

Agnes shook her head. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t see why it has to be
you
. And besides, how can we fight back against creatures who can modify whole worlds?’

‘An inferior technology might be able to strike a blow against a superior, given boldness and the advantage of surprise. Consider
Captain Cook,’ he said. ‘The Hawaiians killed him, when he landed on their islands.’

‘Much good it did the Hawaiians in the long run.’

‘Agnes, I don’t think I can save this world. But perhaps I can stop the beetles spreading further, from threatening more of the worlds of mankind. But I’ll need help.’

‘You’ve already sent Sally and Joshua on some kind of mission, I know that.’ Not that Agnes was sure what that quest was about.

‘Yes. But even if they succeed in their quest I don’t think it’s going to be enough.’

‘Then what? Who else do you want?’

He said simply, ‘The Next.’

A
S FOR
J
OSHUA
and Sally:

Hand in hand, they emerged from their fall through the latest soft place, the latest flaw in the great tangled structure that was the Long Earth. Joshua found himself standing on red, gritty earth, by the shore of a body of water, a turbid grey sea, or lake maybe.
Standing
: in fact he immediately crumpled over, all the energy sucked out of him. And he was suffused by a cold deep in the core of his body, as if he was suffering from hypothermia, even though the air here was warm, if dry, salty. Squatting on his haunches he wrapped his arms around his body and tried to still the shivering by main force.

This was the after-effect of passing through soft places. Joshua, having travelled on and off with Sally for many years by now, knew that she had grown up with a knowledge of the soft places, and a basically subconscious ability to detect and use them. His own best mental image was that the Long Earth was like a necklace of worlds, spread out in some higher order of reality, along which he could step one by one, in one direction or another, which had arbitrarily been labelled ‘West’ and ‘East’. But, it seemed, that necklace wasn’t a simple string but looped back over itself, intersecting itself in knots and cuts. So, if you could locate it correctly, a soft place could take you on a seven-league-boot step across a far stepwise distance in the Long Earth, and if you worked it right a long way geographically too. Damn useful if you knew how to use them. Damn interesting
for the theoreticians too. And damn tough for any but the very best steppers.

He’d get over this; he’d been through it before. But the older you got, the harder it felt. And every damn time, these days, the stump of his left arm, under the prosthetic hand, ached like hell.

Sally, meanwhile, was already at work. She had dumped her pack on the ground, pulled out a kind of trenching tool, and started to dig a hole. She had always been tougher than Joshua physically, and even though he had been a poster boy for stepping for forty years, with her mastery of the soft places Sally had always been far more at home in the Long Earth than he was. But he could see that their journey had affected even her too, and she moved stiffly as she dug.

He asked, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Checking we’re not on an island.’

‘An island? I thought we came looking for Lobsang, not for islands.’

‘We are. You can make yourself useful, if you like. Go take a look at what’s over that ridge.’

‘What ridge?’

She ignored the question.

When he felt able he stood up, dropped his own pack beside Sally’s, and looked around. This shallow beach did indeed lead up to a ridge, maybe a remnant of eroded, wind-sculpted dunes.

He walked that way.

The sand under his feet was fine, almost dusty, and very dry. But it let his boots sink in with every pace, using up even more of his energy. They seemed to be well above the high water mark at least, hence the dry sand. But there was no sign of life on this beach, he noticed, no worm casts, seaweed, shells, no wading birds, no crabs working the water that pooled nearer the edge of the sea. No driftwood either, and he wondered how they were going to build a fire.

The sun was high in a milky, washed-out sky. The only sounds
were the soft lap of the waves, and the scrape of Sally’s trenching tool. A lifeless world.

His legs were aching and he was panting by the time he reached the summit of the ridge. Up here he found himself looking over an almost flat, red-brown landscape, the horizontal broken by tired-looking remnants of hills on the horizon. The only colours were the pale grey-green of what looked like lichen on the rocks, and a purplish smear on the crust of a mud pool a little further inland. There wasn’t a scrap of vegetation anywhere – though he did see the grey-blue of a stream, or river, maybe half a mile away, running down to its own rendezvous with the sea. So there was fresh water to be had, at least.

In his time he’d travelled far across the Long Earth, but he’d rarely seen a less promising landscape. However, the air was free of mist, and he could see dry land all the way to the horizon in every direction. He was not on an island, unless it was a pretty gigantic one.

He returned to Sally and reported in.

‘Good,’ she said. She sat back, scraped sand from her bare arms, and swigged water from a plastic bottle. She’d dug a respectable arm’s length into the dirt. ‘And I think I dug far enough down to prove there’s no carapace lurking down there. At least the work warmed me up.’

Carapace?
‘Why are you so concerned we’re not on an island?’ After all these years Joshua still got annoyed when she was being cryptic. ‘Where are we, Sally?’

She closed her eyes. ‘I memorized the precise number. Earth West 174,827,918.’

‘Shit. A hundred and seventy-five
million
?’

‘That’s according to the catalogue compiled by the
Armstrong II
, the Navy airship that came this way more than a decade ago. Believe the number or not. Some people think the Long Earth gets – chaotic – over large enough scales, and simple numbering doesn’t
work any more. Hardly matters if it does, does it? As long as you know where you’re going.’

‘As you do, evidently. But even so, Sally, I never came remotely so far before.’

‘I know.’

‘Which is why I feel so beat up?’

‘You got it.’

‘And you think we’ll find Lobsang here?’ Meaning the ambulant unit that they had left behind on Earth West 2,000,000 plus, twenty-eight years ago, as it had departed with an entity that had called itself First Person Singular.

‘I know we will,’ she said with her usual strained patience. ‘Which is why I brought you here.’

‘Fine. So what now? I guess I could go fetch some fresh water. There’s a stream just over thataway.’

‘You do that.’

‘I don’t see any wood for a fire.’

‘The nights aren’t cold. Also there are no roaming critters to be kept away. Not on the continental land anyhow. A lean-to and our survival blankets will be enough.’

‘I guess there’s no hunting to be done. No fish to be fished from that ocean.’

She shrugged. ‘We can survive on our rations for a few days, Joshua. We could process bacterial slime if we had to. But we won’t be here long – just as long as it takes to find Lobsang – or for him to find us.’

‘And how do we go about that?’

‘It’s all in hand, Joshua.’ She reached into her pack and pulled out a small radio transmitter set. ‘Short-wave radio. Our signals will bounce around the planet. Lobsang will hear. Go fill up the water bottles. I’ll let you set up the antenna if you like, it’s a fold-up kit. I know how you boys like your gadgets . . .’

But Joshua had stopped listening.

The sea was no longer featureless. Suddenly, it seemed, there
was
an island, not far off shore, a shield of green and yellow on the breast of the grey water. He pointed. ‘How did I miss
that
?’

Sally murmured, ‘Don’t beat yourself up. It wasn’t there before.’

Belatedly Joshua thought to rummage in his pack for his binoculars.

On the island, through the glasses, he saw a suite of life quite unlike anything that characterized the mainland as far as he’d seen. Beyond a fringe of what looked like beach, there were forest clumps, and animals moving – what looked like horses, but small, almost dog-sized. Even the seawater by the shore was mildly turbulent, evidently full of life.

And this ‘island’ had a wake.

Sally was watching him. ‘You understand what you’re seeing?’

‘Sure.’ He grinned; he couldn’t help it. ‘It’s just as Nelson Azikiwe described. He said Lobsang took him to see a creature like this, off the coast of New Zealand but a lot closer to home, something like seven hundred thousand worlds out.’

‘Lobsang called
that
one Second Person Singular. It was actually a lot more typical of its class of creatures than the one we encountered, the one who called herself
First
Person Singular. The one that
liked
you.’

Only because Joshua, somehow, with his odd, almost troll-like sensitivity to the presence of other minds, had been able to sense her thoughts, even across the great span of the Long Earth. Thoughts that to him had been like the clanging of some great gong, echoing from beyond the horizon: thoughts full of bafflement and loneliness. And she, in turn, it seemed, had sensed his presence too.

‘First Person Singular wasn’t normal,’ Sally said. ‘She was the one gone wrong. Hence the mutual attraction between you, no doubt. Lobsang called the class of these beasts Traversers.’

‘And this is why we came here . . . Sally. Something’s happening.’

All around the living island the water was bubbling, growing
more turbulent. Joshua saw that its profile was diminishing, almost as if the island was collapsing on itself, and the trees that sprouted from the rocks and earth that had collected on the back of this mobile creature shook and shuddered.

‘It’s
sinking
,’ Joshua said.

‘Yep. Submerging again. It’s what it does. Keep watching . . .’

Now, Joshua saw through his binoculars, flaps opened up on the island ground – flaps of some crusty material, big, irregular, hinged by some kind of muscle, like a clam’s shell. The shy little horses bolted for the flaps and dived down through them without hesitation, disappearing from Joshua’s view into the body of the island beast. The flaps closed tight, just as the waves lapped over their position.

And then the island simply sank, its apparently rocky ‘shore’, the trees, its cargo of plants and animals, slipping under the waves until only a patch of disturbed water remained, swirling like a feeble whirlpool, with nothing but a few leaves left scattered on the water surface.

‘Just as Nelson described,’ Joshua said. ‘I hardly believed it.’

‘Now do you see why I wanted to make sure
we
weren’t on an island? This world is the origin, Joshua. Where the Traversers came from. Actually the
Armstrong
crew understood what they saw here pretty well, they’d read the accounts of the journey of the
Mark Twain
, and they got it about right in their reports . . .’

The
Armstrong
’s science team had observed biological complexity in this world and its neighbours. There was more than just lichen and bacterial slime here, if you looked for it. But that complexity was not expressed as on the Datum, organized into plants ranging from blades of grass up to sequoia trees, or animals from the smallest amphibians up through horses and humans and elephants and blue whales. Here the complexity was at a global level – almost. As if the evolution of life had skipped a step and gone straight from green slime to Gaia.

Here, in the lakes and oceans, compound organisms swam: each like a tremendous Portuguese man o’ war, microbial swarms linked into huge protean life forms. They were living islands. And, as the
Armstrong
crew had observed, those compound organisms often enveloped animals within their structures – animals, however, like the miniature horses and other creatures Joshua saw now, that were
not
native to this world, but had been collected from elsewhere.

‘Lobsang may understand it better by now,’ Sally said. ‘I guess he ought to, after all this time.’

‘So we’re on the home world of the Traversers. Why?’

‘Because this is where Lobsang must be. The last time we saw him, at the end of The Journey, he was disappearing into the sunset on the back of First Person Singular, the mightiest Traverser of all. Where else would he be?’

Joshua lowered his binoculars. ‘So now what?’

‘So now we set up our radio, and make ourselves comfortable, and wait. Come on, Joshua, a life alone in the High Meggers has always involved a lot of waiting around. You want to play with my antenna kit, or not?’

So they got down to pioneering, in perhaps the most desolate landscape Joshua had ever visited. ‘A world like a sensory deprivation tank,’ he told Sally after a couple of days. The only excitement came from what he thought might be glimpses of the Traverser, but they all turned out to be illusory, after that first visit, just the shadows of clouds on the grey sea.

Until their fifth day on the beach, when the Traverser returned.

And somehow Joshua was not at all surprised when those carapace flaps cracked, and after the usual horse-like creatures emerged to gambol in the sun – and deer-like creatures, and bear-like and dog-like creatures, and animals that looked like mashed-up, misshapen combinations of all these familiar forms, even things like small stegosaurs – after all of them, an ambulant unit came walking
calmly up into the light, as if climbing a stair. The human-shaped machine was quite nude, a walking statue, and yet even from here Joshua could see evidence of damage: one arm was missing entirely.

‘You two,’ the unit said mildly, calling across the water. ‘Of course it would be you two.’

‘Play time’s over, Lobsang,’ Sally said, and Joshua thought there was a note of genuine sadness in her voice.