The Long Utopia

She said, ‘Come on. Let’s get done what we stayed here to do. Where shall we go? I guess we could be anywhere, on this broken planet.’

Stan looked around. ‘Top of the hill?’

Lobsang smiled. ‘Where my home is, or was, what’s left of it. Suits me, so long as we don’t get blown off.’

The climb up Ma

Looking down from here, Sally could still see the basic layout of the landscape Lobsang and Agnes had lived in, the forest, the creek that had drawn the settlers to this place. But now the creek was brown, turbid with washed-down mud, and the forest was dying back, scarred by fires, battered by the wind, wrecked by the touchdown of twisters. Hundred-year-old trunks lay scattered like spilled matchsticks.

And already the sun was setting behind the racing clouds, another of this world’s truncated days coming to an end.

She grabbed her companions’ hands firmly. The three of them stood close together, holding hands in a ring, face to face on this desolate hill, resisting the gusty wind. They had to shout to make themselves heard.

Lobsang said, ‘When shall we three meet again?’

Sally gri

‘When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won …’ Stan blinked a squall of rain out of his eyes. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We had good schools in Miami West 4. It wasn’t all stalk jack engineering.’

‘Well, the quote’s apt given the weather,’ Lobsang said. ‘And it is a battle. A battle we already lost. But maybe we can win the war, the war for the Long Earth, with this single strike.’ He looked in their faces. ‘Just so we’re all on the same song sheet: the projections of the spin-up have been uncertain for a while. In the last few days the rate of energy increase has gone super-exponential. Hard to model, to predict. We told our families we might have weeks left. But that was for their comfort, yes?’

Stan nodded. ‘I know. What’s the latest guess?’

‘Not weeks. Hours. A couple of local days, if we’re lucky.’

‘It makes no difference,’ Stan said, with an authority that belied his years. ‘But we need to get the Cauterizing done before we run out of time.’

Sally squeezed his hand harder. ‘So how do we do it, Lobsang?’

‘Stella Welch and I have gone through it … Let’s be clear where we are. This world has become, presumably by some higher-dimensional accident, a point of intersection of our Long Earth, our chain of worlds, with another chain. Another Long world. A chain to which the world we call the Planetarium belongs.’

Stan said, ‘Like two necklaces crossing. Tangling up.’

‘That’s it. Visualize that. It’s important that you visualize … Step along one axis, East or West, and you follow the track of the Long Earth. Step another way, North or South, and you follow the Long Planetarium, as the beetles seem to have done. So the co

Stan closed his eyes. ‘You could pinch the necklace of worlds, the Long Earth. Knot the thread so one pearl is cut out of the chain, the pearl that’s tangled up with the Planetarium necklace. Detach this world from the Long Earth necklace completely …’

‘Yes. Think about that. A simple repair job. Picture it. You too, Sally. Stepping has always been a mental faculty. Even the act of creating a Stepper box is a kind of mandala, a kind of autohypnosis, a way to unlock a potential in us that already exists. To step is a feat of the imagination – one must be able to visualize another world, in a sense, in sufficient detail, to reach it. A very fine description – so fine that the description becomes the object, just as quantum physics is essentially about information—’

‘Lobsang,’ Sally warned. ‘Less of the techno-babble.’

‘Yes, yes. I apologize. But you must see that to talk this through is an essential part of the process. For you, Sally, it is like reaching for a soft place. A different kind of flaw in our own Long Earth’s co

Sally tried to imagine that, tried to imagine reaching for a soft place now. Sometimes you could see them, see a shimmer in low sunlight, often at liminal places, places of borders – between water and land, perhaps, a shore, a river bank; at dawn or sunset, the border between day and night. And now, on this world, she had reached her own ultimate border, between reality and unreality, existence and non-existence. Life and death.

‘We are reaching for a soft place,’ Lobsang said, steadily, hypnotically, as if reciting a prayer. ‘Or perhaps we are creating one … A permanent soft place, a tu

Falling.

Sally staggered. Suddenly she felt very cold, colder even than the wind’s chill, as if she had fallen through a soft place, the longest fall she’d ever known.

And Stan cried out. He released their hands and toppled back, stiff as a cut-down tree, landing on his back in the grass. He began to twitch, convulse, and spittle flecked his open mouth. Lobsang hurried to his side.

As Lobsang tended to Stan, battered by the wind, Sally tried experimentally to step out of here. She couldn’t. It was as if she were confined between two walls to either side that she could not see, walls of glass. For her, a natural stepper, it was a strange, u

‘We did it, Lobsang,’ she said, wondering. ‘The Cauterizing.’

‘He did it, mostly. With your help.’

‘What does it mean, Lobsang? For the future. If Stan here is typical, and not some kind of super-powered freak. If the Next can take apart and reconstruct the Long Earth itself – what will they do with such powers?’

‘That’s no longer our concern,’ he said sternly. ‘Give me a hand here.’ He’d got Stan turned over on his side, in the recovery position, but the boy was still fitting. ‘I have a med kit in my pack. Then we’re going to need to get into shelter …’

She hurried down the hill, in search of the med kit.

53

IN THE LEE of the hill, in a sturdily constructed lean-to – a last gift of the crew of the Cowley – the three of them spent an uneasy four-hour ‘night’.

They ate, wrapped in survival blankets. None of them slept. The air felt increasingly warm, smoky, ash-laden, like the air of the Datum just after Yellowstone, Sally thought. And the noise was continuous now, the rush of the wind, a rolling thunder, like the sound of distant artillery.

Stan recovered quickly from his fit, especially once Lobsang/George had administered a bowl of Agnes’s chicken soup. He chose not to describe what had gone on in his head at the moment of the Cauterizing, and the others didn’t press him. Another issue, Sally thought, for a future none of them was going to see.

The morning came with a dawn as abrupt as a thrown switch.

That and a savage earth tremor, a drop that felt like they were on some vast elevator that had just slipped its cable a couple of feet, Sally thought.