The Long Utopia

‘That’s the idea.’

Bowring sucked his teeth. ‘So the world’s spi

‘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 spa

‘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.’

Bowring shrugged. ‘We think the ceramic shell acts as a kind of exoskeleton, to support the weight. And there is a lot of weight; that spongy stuff is very high density. We’ve run various scans – MRI, sonar. There is structure in there, but it’s a kind of network with identifiable nodes, not a collection of organs like the human. The same kind of structure extends to the head, which seems to be more a sensor pod than a brain pan.’ He glanced at Abrahams. ‘Which could be significant. The human skull has grown over our evolutionary history, but even so there’s only so much room in there – and cerebral functionality has to share space with extensive areas devoted to sight processing, for instance.’