The Long Utopia

44

HE SAT WITH them, in their rough camp on the desolate beach. He even accepted a share of their rations. Sally handed him chocolate, and a tin mug of coffee brewed on their small solar-powered stove.

‘Mm, chocolate,’ he said, biting into a bar he held in his left hand. His right arm was missing from the shoulder. ‘You know me, Joshua. I always did relish my food. At least this version of me; I can’t speak of my subsequent iterations, and it has been twenty-eight years since I last participated in a synching. Even during the voyage of the Mark Twain—’

‘Clam chowder and oysters Kilpatrick,’ Joshua said.

Sally snorted. ‘The good old days in the Bluesmobile. After thirty years apart, you two haven’t changed.’

Lobsang said, ‘These days, mostly I draw my energy directly from the sunlight.’ He stood and turned, and Joshua saw a silvery panel glisten on his back, reaching down to the top of his buttocks: a solar-cell array. ‘I bask like a plant.’

There had been other modifications, Joshua had the chance to see now, aside from that missing arm. The naked body was quite hairless, lacking even eyebrows. In places the skin seemed to have been patched; Joshua saw no seams, but there were swathes of a subtly different shade from the general pale brown tan. And the genitalia had gone, to be replaced by a rather gruesome metallic plug in the groin: a simple release valve, it seemed.

Lobsang said, ‘I do need solid sustenance, of course. Organic biochemistry to support my gel substrate. I can consume bacterial scrapes, algae. Some of the Traversers on this world bear fruit trees, even root plants. And at times the Traversers allow me to consume the flesh of their deceased animal specimens, if it is suitable – if the death is the result of an accident, perhaps, if the meat is not corrupted.’

Joshua said, ‘Bacon?’

‘On good days.’

Sally said, ‘Lobsang, your arm …’

Joshua said, ‘Yeah. But it’s not his missing arm that’s drawing my attention.’

Lobsang gri

Joshua felt a sympathetic twinge in his own groin. ‘Please.’

‘I had suffered damage in the course of our journey, you’ll recall. Notably when we fell into the Gap. And in the years after you left me with First Person Singular, time took its toll; this unit was never meant to be able to sustain itself without workshop maintenance, not for a period of decades. I sacrificed the arm, and other organs,’ he said, winking at Joshua, ‘for spare parts. I doubt I could pass as a human again. But then, I did not imagine I would ever need to.’

‘Well, I’m glad you survived,’ Joshua said.

‘Me too,’ Sally said grudgingly. ‘Though not surprised.’

‘Thank you for your good wishes. And now you come seeking me out.’

‘Lobsang asked us to,’ Joshua said. ‘I mean the one who replaced you, who assembled himself from the iterations, the backups you left behind.’

‘There’s much I can deduce, by your very presence. Something has happened.’

Joshua said gently, ‘You could say that.’

‘Are the odds against us? Is the situation grim?’

‘You could put it like that,’ Sally said. ‘Although that sounds like a line from a movie. You two will never grow up, will you?’

Joshua dug in his pocket, and produced a memory pod, a small capsule. ‘He – Lobsang – gave me this. He says it contains the briefing you’ll need.’

Lobsang nodded, his eyes closed. ‘I will come with you nonetheless, of course, regardless of the contents of the briefing; I must trust my own judgement – his judgement.’ He glanced at Sally. ‘You travelled through a soft-place network?’

‘Of course. And we’ll go back that way, if you can take it.’

‘I don’t have a choice, do I? Can you give me a few hours, before we leave? After so long – it will take me some time to say goodbye to my life here. I have learned a lot, of course, but there is much I’ve yet to understand. The Traversers evolved here, in this band of worlds, but they roam the Long Earth, though few seem to come as far as the Datum.’

‘Some sure do,’ Joshua said with a grin. And he told Lobsang how a later edition of himself had found a Traverser, which that Lobsang had called Second Person Singular, which seemed to have wandered so far down the Long Earth that it may even have strayed into the oceans of the Datum itself – for it had collected people.

Lobsang made an odd gesture, as if he was trying to clap with one hand. ‘Whole families, living in the belly of the whale. How wonderful. But of course humans fit the sampling strategy. There seems to be a certain selectivity about the creatures the Traversers want. The animals are all of a characteristic size, within one or two orders of magnitude of a human, or a troll. No tiny rodents – though some of those seem to smuggle themselves on board even so. No pliosaurs or whales, at the other end of the size scale. Their sampling is careful and selective, and ought to do no harm to the populations they are taking from. First Person Singular, by the way, was an exception, a sport. She became not a sample-taker but a destroyer. She took it all, a motile extinction event, purposeful, sentient, devouring whole biospheres—’

‘Until she could go no further,’ Joshua said, remembering. ‘Samples. Select. You make it sound like there’s some purpose behind it all. But what purpose? To create a zoo? An ark?’

‘Or a biological collection, like Darwin on the Beagle? I suspect if I knew the answer to that, Joshua, I would know very much more about the greater mysteries of our existence. And I suspect that the deeper question is not what that purpose is – but who intervened in these creatures’ evolution to give them that purpose.’

Joshua puzzled over that. ‘Good one. Textbook enigmatic, Lobsang.’

Sally stood up. ‘While you two pick up your bromance, I’m going for a walk.’

Lobsang’s face was distorted, lopsided. Joshua, watching with fascinated horror, saw that he was trying to smile. ‘Lobsang, you look like a stroke victim.’

‘Sorry. I had no mirrors. I will practise. I wouldn’t want to scare anybody.’

‘No,’ Joshua said carefully. ‘Especially not your son.’

He took that bit of news calmly, nodding, his expression blank. ‘I have been a busy chap, haven’t I? I don’t think a simple synch will be enough this time.’

‘I wouldn’t think so, Lobsang.’

‘Shall we walk?’

So Lobsang completed his preparations, and they left for home.

But by the time Joshua, Sally and Lobsang had completed the long stepwise journey back to New Springfield, the situation there had got a whole lot worse.

45

THE GLOBAL EXPEDITION was Captain Boss’s idea. He would select a diverse group with broad experience and opinions, load them aboard the Cowley, and take them on a brief tour of this suffering world, before coming to a final decision on what to do about the problem of the silver beetles. Joshua thought this Navy captain was either showing a democratic instinct or indecision, depending on your point of view.

So the party gathered outside New Springfield, ready to board the great craft over their heads, enduring an awkward wait for the elevator cage to descend.

Joshua looked around. Alongside himself and Sally, still newcomers to this battered world, here were the science people from the twain crew and its civilian passengers. Agnes stood between two versions of Lobsang, the sombre elderly-gentleman pioneer edition and the battered robot explorer, eerily alike yet unalike. The Irwins, colonials from New Springfield, were here as representatives of their neighbours, who were still stubbornly sitting it out in their lodges on stepwise worlds. The Irwins were very obviously trying not to stare at the ambulant units – they’d only recently learned the truth about their animatronic neighbours.