The Long Utopia

‘Is this infeasible, technologically? Not at all. We could almost build such things.

‘Would it be unethical to unleash such a compound-interest horror on the rest of the universe? Most people would think so, but don’t ask a banker.

‘Is this what the colonists on that godforsaken High Meggers world seem to have discovered in their hole in the ground? A Tipler wavefront? Sounds like it, doesn’t it? …

‘What’s that, Jocasta? What should be done about New Springfield? Well, I should build a very, very high wall around these fellows, metaphorically speaking.

‘Now then, is that enough? I am seventy-eight years old, you know …’

42

AGNES 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.’

43

AS FOR JOSHUA 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, ru

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 a

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.’