The Long Utopia

‘People like this, Joshua, they’re the worst of mankind. Predators. Parasites, preying on the labour of others. Consuming decent lives for the sake of a few hours’ fun. How many times have this band pulled a stunt like this before? Because, believe me, it looks to me like they’re practised at it. And they foul up the Long Earth, the way humans were doing on their own planet long before. You want to know how I found this set-up? From the trolls.’

‘What trolls? … Oh.’ He realized that he hadn’t heard a note of a troll-call, sighted a single one of the otherwise ubiquitous humanoids, since arriving in this world.

‘I go where the trolls aren’t. That’s how I know how to find trouble, humans screwing up the place even more than usual.’ She blinked, shook her head. ‘When I was on Mars I had a long talk about this, with Frank Wood, the astronaut guy – remember him? He accused me of being the conscience of the Long Earth. Not what I want to be called, but it made me think.’

‘After you told him where to shove it, no doubt.’

‘When I find something like this – I can’t stand it, Joshua. I can’t stand by and let this happen.’

‘Yet you’re reluctant to kill. Not in cold blood.’ He thought he understood. ‘And so you’re stuck, aren’t you? You’re caught between conflicting impulses – to destroy these bandits on the one hand, not to kill on the other. Just as you’re contradictory about concealment; you hide yourself away, but leave clues so you can be found. You’re like a computer program stuck in a loop. Lobsang would understand.’

‘So go get him and have him spell me on the stake-out.’

He laughed. ‘I’ve a better idea. You’ve got me to help you now. Suppose I go fetch a twain. A military ship. The US Navy is still ru

She snorted.

‘Come on, Sally. This isn’t the Old West. You’ve got a live crime scene here. You’re a witness to much of it, forensics will establish the rest. That’s your way out. You stay here, keep them kettled. I’ll go find a Long Mississippi waystation and send a message. Then I’ll come straight back, and I’ll stay with you until this is resolved. OK?’

She said nothing.

He sighed, stretched out on the rock, sipped more water. ‘Look, take your time deciding. I’m not going anywhere today, I’m bushed anyhow.’

She looked down at him with the thinly veiled contempt that had always, somehow, characterized their relationship, across nearly three decades. She said, ‘Oh, make yourself at home. Well. What shall we talk about? I know. How about you tell me what Nelson Azikiwe found out about your father?’

He squinted up at her. ‘Of course you’d know about that.’

‘You know me, Joshua. I know everything. I was there, remember. I know you went cry-babying to him about Daddy on your fiftieth, after I left you with him. Midlife-crisis cliché or what?’

‘I just wanted to know who my father was. Is that so wrong? Turned out to be a good question. It took years for Nelson to nail it down, mostly because much of it is ancient history, pre-digital. He had to go hunting in person around archives on the Datum, those that survived.’ He glanced at her. ‘He found out a lot about my family. And yours, if you want to know.’ That got her attention. ‘Nelson wouldn’t even let me help pay his expenses and stuff. I think he enjoys the hunt. Solving puzzles …’

‘Just cut to the chase, Joshua. Did you meet dear old Dad, or not?’

He sat up and faced her. ‘Yes.’

33

IT HAD BEEN earlier that year, the early spring of 2058, when Nelson Azikiwe had called Joshua from Datum London, where, he said, the last piece of the puzzle had turned up.

So Joshua went to meet him.

It wasn’t safe to just step into London any more. You couldn’t rely on ground levels; the continuing post-volcanic winter had left the city ice-choked, and thanks to clogged drains much of it was flooded. You had to come into the Datum elsewhere, and travel across geographically. As it turned out, the nearest to London Joshua could reach by a stepwise twain ride was Madrid, eight hundred miles to the south.

The Spanish capital was prospering, relatively. The shifting climate bands had turned central Spain temperate, and Madrid was now much as northern France had once been; wheat fields flourished where olive trees had grown sparsely. Most of the world’s great cities, Joshua guessed, anywhere north of here, were worse off.

After a night in a shabby suburban hotel, Joshua made his way north by train, on the main line through Zaragoza and Barcelona, across the snow-clad Pyrenees to Toulouse, and then further north through France.

Paris was a tough stop: a Parisian spring was now like the worst of a Wisconsin winter. The city seemed to be functioning, with a few diehards going about their business, but in the Champs-Élysées, wide and deserted, the silhouettes of vanished crowds had been painted on boarded-up store windows, a wistful echo of vanished times. Joshua, in the day he spent waiting for his onward transport, found the emptiness eerie.

From here the way into London was by a twain, with engines protected against lingering Yellowstone ash – even after all this time the flight of jet aircraft was still severely curtailed. So Joshua flew over an English Cha

From the air southern England looked as ice-bound as northern France, London a heap of abandoned buildings rising from snow banks and frozen flood plains. The Thames was a stripe of silver snaking through the city, long frozen solid; Joshua glimpsed what looked like skidoos skimming along the ice. As the twain passed over the city Joshua made out young pine trees growing sturdily in the parks, and whole districts that looked as if they had been burned out. The daylight was already fading, and Joshua could see the effects of power shortages, all too familiar now wherever you came from: districts blacked out, tower blocks that looked abandoned completely.

The twain at last descended over Trafalgar Square.

Joshua checked into one of the few hotels still operating, a fading, half-boarded-up pile on the Strand. Nelson had arranged this, as well as the various permits Joshua needed to move around London. There were no working elevators, and in his room door an old electronic key system had been drilled out and replaced with what looked like a Victorian-era lock and key. Inside the room was a notice about the hours when the power was most likely to be available. The central-heating radiator was lukewarm to the touch, and the wind whistled through a cracked window.

That evening, bundled in Arctic clothing, Joshua went for a walk.

The West End, what of it was still accessible above the risen river, was uneasy, shabby, the theatres and shops mostly boarded up. Joshua guessed that Datum London must, like most high-latitude cities, be mostly supported by its footprints in neighbouring stepwise Earths. But in the shop windows of Oxford Street there was some local produce: Canada geese and rabbits, hunted in the wintry Home Counties.

There wasn’t much traffic, on roads that seemed too wide: some folk on bicycles, a couple of police cars. Joshua spotted a red London bus fitted with a gasifier unit. The few people out in the streets wore facemasks to guard against lingering volcano ash. Even so the air didn’t seem as bad as it might have been before Yellowstone; at least the fumes from millions of internal combustion engines had gone, to be replaced by a sootier smog from wood-burning fires.

Joshua glimpsed one police action taking place in a side road, a tough and brutal raid in which step-equipped officers swarmed out of nowhere, hammering their suspects with overwhelming force.