The Long Utopia (9 page)

For about one second, Rocky observed, his moral authority held, one slim young man facing the burly worker, and the crowd of his buddies. For one second Rocky thought he might get away with this.

And then a lump of concrete came whirling in from the crowd, missing Stan’s head by inches. ‘Get the little prick!’

There was a roar, and everybody seemed to surge forward.

Rocky lost sight of Martha, and was swept forward with the
rest. But he started to fight back, shoving and pushing his way towards Stan.

And suddenly those two Arbiters were at his side, flanking him, using their shoulders in a coordinated effort to bring him through the crush. In a moment they were over Stan, who was on the ground, having evidently taken a couple of punches, but grinning up at them.

The female Arbiter said to Rocky, ‘You’re his friend?’

‘Yeah—’

‘Get him out of here.’

Rocky reached down and grabbed Stan’s hand.

But Stan, still grinning, said, ‘Leave it to me.’

And for Rocky the world fell away – the sunlight, the pressing crowd, the smell of dust and wet concrete, as if he’d tumbled down a rabbit hole – as Stan dragged him stepwise.

R
ESPONDING TO
R
OBERTA
Golding’s summons, the four Next met in a farmhouse in another footprint of Miami, only a few worlds away from the LETC construction site. The house was just a few decades old yet long abandoned, and the marsh had already reclaimed the ground the vanished pioneers had roughly cleared. For Roberta Golding, at least it offered a welcome relief from the intensity of the sun.

Nobody knew they were here. The Next hid away, in the worlds of dim-bulb humanity.

They were due for a regular update meeting anyhow, which was why Roberta was in this part of the Long Earth, far from the Grange. But after the incident at the Bootstrap site with Stan Berg and the kobold, Melinda Bennett had requested an earlier session. Melinda was one of the two Arbiters who had come to the aid of Stan Berg and Rocky Lewis; the other, here too in his sweat-stained green uniform, was called Gerd Schulze.

The fourth person here today was Marvin Lovelace, the card sharp.

Marvin spoke first. ‘He’s obviously a candidate. The boy Stan Berg. Without even trying he was five, six, seven steps ahead of those construction workers in the game. With poker you need emotional intelligence, of course, you need to be able to read people. It was as if they were
showing
him their hands . . .’

He spoke in English, not quicktalk. They all did here. On Low
Earths, the crowded worlds close to the Datum, there was always a chance of some kind of eavesdropping. Even in a property like this, apparently abandoned, there could be a low-power cam left running by some opportunistic peeping tom, for instance. It was frustrating to talk so slowly, as if they were spelling out words with a baby’s lettered wooden blocks. But they had to communicate somehow; they had to take a chance.

Gerd said now, ‘He has emotional intelligence, maybe, but not maturity. He put himself at risk by charging into that crowd of bozos around the kobold.’

Roberta took off her spectacles and rubbed tired eyes. She was over thirty years old now; even among the Next, she reflected, maybe age was necessary for true wisdom. She remembered very well her own adolescence. She’d been only a little younger than Stan when she’d travelled on a Chinese twain into the far Long Earth, with all its wonders and horrors. Unable to look away – unable
not
to understand – she had cried herself to sleep, most nights. ‘Are you mocking him, Gerd? Berg’s instinct, however uneducated, may be better than yours. What was it you called the others – “bozos”?’

Marvin folded his arms. ‘I reckon he was bluffing. Like in his poker. I think he knew he’d be saved.’

Melinda asked, ‘Who by? Us?’

Marvin said, ‘It’s possible. Maybe he’s guessed the true nature of the Arbiters – or at least has some unconscious suspicion about you.’ The Arbiters, a purely voluntary force recruited from amongst themselves by the Next, worked to keep the peace on the Low Earths, in the general absence of police support after the post-Yellowstone implosion of Datum America. ‘I sometimes think you’re a bit too obvious, you guys in your green uniforms, wandering around the dim-bulb worlds, sorting things out.’

Gerd snorted. ‘Whereas it’s morally acceptable for you to fleece them at gambling games?’

Marvin held up his hands. ‘I’m here to follow our consensus
aims, just like you. Even if it doesn’t always seem wise to me. We went to the Grange in the first place as a refuge from these people, our mother culture, who put a bunch of Next kids in a high-tech concentration camp on Hawaii, and then considered bombing Happy Landings, our garden of Eden. Now here we are, out again, infiltrating their culture . . . Anyhow the dim-bulbs don’t get suspicious about gambling. They almost
expect
you to be smarter than they are, almost expect you to cheat. High finance is the same, by the way.’

Which of course was why Marvin himself was a good agent, a good contact for recruitment. Next-candidate types like Stan were often drawn to gambling for the rare opportunities it offered in dim-bulb worlds to use their superior intellects to make some money. When they came, Marvin was in a prime site to spot them.

Roberta nodded. ‘Your work’s understood, Marvin. And appreciated. But you know as well as I do that the debate is fluid. Some say we shouldn’t intervene at all, even in the most gross cases. And at the other extreme there is the Greening, the idea that we should work to restore humans to their wild state.’ Which some Next theorists argued was something like humanity’s Middle Stone Age, a pre-farming, pre-metals age of small wandering bands. All humans needed, some Next argued – all they needed to turn the Long Earth into a true Long Utopia – was a little gentle nudging from their intellectual superiors. Which, sceptics pointed out, when the cities broke up and the governments dissolved and humanity became a race of transient wanderers, would leave the Next in a position of permanent control . . .

Marvin folded his arms. ‘So if we’re unsure of our goals, why are we working on West 4 at all? Why the hell are we helping them build these big new space programmes? Some of them seem to be groping spontaneously, in fact, for something like the Greening. Look at the “combers”. And you have workers out there in Miami 4 protesting because they think the slow pace of the project is the
fault of their inadequate bosses.
We
know it’s not. It’s not even anything economic, financial, political. We know the problem is that human industrial society is softening at the edges. The lifestyle they call “comber” is just too tempting; especially after an accident or some such, you get swathes of workers just downing tools and walking away to go pick fruit. People don’t
have
to work like this, and, increasingly, they just won’t. So why are we here?’

Roberta sighed. ‘Because these Low Earths still have large populations, after the Yellowstone emigrations. Declining, but still large. They
must
stay organized on large scales just to feed their own people. And because, for now, they
can
do this, and we can’t.
We
need the benefits too.’ The Next were still few in number, their direct technological capability limited. ‘We rely on high-tech goods of all kinds. Frankly, we’re parasitical on the Low Earth cultures for such goods. So, until we have a better solution of our own, we let this run – and encourage it, subtly.’

‘Hmm,’ said Marvin. ‘You know, they tell a joke, the dim-bulbs. “Doctor, doctor, my brother-in-law thinks he’s a tom cat.” “Well,” says the doc, “bring him in to see me and I’ll cure him.” “I can’t,” says the guy. “We need him to keep down the mice.” That’s what you’re saying about the dim-bulbs. These guys are crazy, a pathology. It would be kinder to let them all wander off, back into the forest where they came from. But we won’t let them be cured, because we need them to keep down the mice.’ He laughed softly.

Gerd said, ‘Well, we need to make a decision about this boy, Stan Berg. Whether or not he knows already what he is – and I have a feeling he does – we may need to get him out of here and to the Grange for his own protection.’

Roberta nodded. ‘I agree. You’re right. I’ll break cover and talk to Stan and his family when he returns. Where did he go, by the way?’

Marvin shrugged, and the Arbiters looked blank.

A
MONG HIS OTHER
attributes, Stan was a much better stepper than Rocky, and as usual Rocky had found the latest plummet, across three worlds in a matter of seconds, hard to take.

He had landed in Miami West 1 doubled over and retching. At least there was nobody around to see it, even if they were standing in the heart of a sprawling development of vast concrete shells. This was a virtual-reality theatre – evidently, he saw from the signs, a conservation project of the post-Yellowstone Museum of the Datum movement.

Stan rubbed his back. ‘You OK, buddy? Come on, let’s get out of the sun.’

He led Rocky a couple of blocks – they saw nobody around – and pushed open a swing door into a cavernous empty space. Rocky glimpsed sheer concrete walls, roughly finished.

Then, without warning, the virtual-reality simulation kicked in. Suddenly it was as if he was outdoors again: he was in some dismal snow-bound city, under a leaden sky. An artificial wind blew in from somewhere, and it was
cold.
Like Stan, he was dressed only in light stepwise-Earth Florida-summer’s-day gear; he was immediately shivering, and he wrapped his arms around his chest. ‘Where the hell’s this supposed to be? Some place on the Datum, right?’

‘Yep. In England. You’ve heard of England? Welcome to the volcano winter. Come on, something to show you. Not far.’ Stan hurried off through deserted streets.

Rocky, shivering like he’d break, had no choice but to follow.

They followed fading brown signs labelled ‘Medieval City’. An outer belt of modern development – modern for pre-Yellowstone anyhow, all concrete and glass and houses in neat little rows, all abandoned, some burned out – gave way to an inner core of narrower streets, older buildings of stone and brick, and, towering over it all, a tremendous spire, slim, very tall, elegant, glimpsed here and there through gaps in the rows of roofs. The buildings here were mostly terraces, crowding the roads like rows of ageing teeth, and they had evidently been rebuilt and reused, some still residential but others converted into boarding houses or cafés or tourist-trap shops – and all of them were now boarded up and abandoned. There was a sense of great age, of generations having lived and died here, reworking the building stock over and over. It was all utterly alien to Rocky. Miami West 4, the community he’d grown up in, had few buildings older than
he
was.

They came into a kind of square, of ice-bound mud that might once have been grass-covered. And there before them, standing alone, topped by that great spire, was a cathedral, huge, its proportions distorted by their perspective from the ground – like a spaceship of stone, Rocky thought, that had just landed here.

Stan led him forward confidently. Set in a wall of elaborately carved stone was a heavy wooden door, which Stan pushed open; it was evidently unlocked. And then they were inside the cathedral. There was an immediate hush, a sense of even deeper age. Rocky had never been in such a building before in his life.

They walked down the cross-shaped building’s long axis. Pillars of stone stood in tall rows, supporting arches which in turn held up a fantastically ornate roof. Rocky saw that the building itself was intact, more or less – even the great stained-glass windows were still complete – but the contents had been more or less stripped, leaving the long stone floor bare. Maybe the benches for the congregations that must once have gathered here had been taken for firewood.
The whole thing must be built of nothing but stone and wood, Rocky thought, but it looked light as air.

Stan asked, ‘You understand this is all a recent capture?’

‘Sure.’ That was the point of the Museum of the Datum movement, to preserve what was left of the cultural treasures of the mother world before they were lost in the post-Yellowstone abandonment. Portable treasures, art works for instance, were shipped stepwise, on people’s backs or by twains, but buildings, whole city centres, could only be ‘saved’ as virtual-reality recordings.

Stan said, ‘So you know where you are yet?’

‘Disneyland?’

‘Heretic. This is a place called Salisbury. Abandoned, like most of the rest of England. You can see the looters spared the cathedral, for reasons of their own. People do have values, even when they’re hungry and cold.’

‘
I’m
hungry and cold.’

The two of them sat on the floor by one wall, huddling for warmth. People had been building fires on the stone floor at the very heart of the old church, Rocky saw, where the long axis met the crosspiece, directly under the spire; the floor there was scorched, the ceiling stained with smoke.

‘I guess you come here a lot,’ Rocky said.

‘How could I not? You have to go to the Datum for the really great old buildings, volcano winter or not. Some of the cathedrals and mosques and such are still in use over there. People go back to worship. In Barcelona, for instance, in Spain. The churches and mosques in Istanbul. This is my favourite, of all I’ve visited. All the better for being empty. It won’t last for ever, though. That spire’s just stone on a wooden frame. Somebody needs to keep it maintained.’

‘Why do you care about these places, Stan? I thought you despised religion. I remember when that preacher came around the beanstalk site going on about the Pope. You made him cry!’

‘I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they’re all but meaningless. I despise the division religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet . . . Don’t you see it, Rock? Look at this place – imagine building
this
with nothing but thirteenth-century tools. Not only that, they kept on building it, generation after generation, lives of toil devoted to a single purpose. And look at what they made! Why, it was as ambitious in its day as a Linsay beanstalk is now. In a place like this you can reject the answers those builders accepted, you can even reject the questions they asked, but you have to cherish the urge to ask such sublime questions in the first place.’

Not for the first time, and surely not for the last, Rocky sensed a huge distance between himself and his lifelong friend – a distance that only seemed to be widening as they grew up. Yet he knew he could never abandon Stan. It wasn’t just friendship, or loyalty, he was starting to realize. It was something more than that.

A kind of dazzling.

He blurted, ‘Stan, sometimes you scare me.’

Stan looked at him, genuinely puzzled. ‘Really? I don’t mean to. I’m sorry. You’re a good friend. But if you’re scared, why are you here?’

Because I can’t help it, was Rocky’s only answer. ‘Listen, I’m cold. Shall we get out of here?’

‘In a while.’ Stan stared up into the elegant spaces of the cathedral, his expression emptying, as if his mind was soaring up like a bird.

When they did step back home, they emerged into warm evening sunshine.

They strolled home; their families had neighbouring apartments in a rough dormitory development on the edge of the beanstalk
facility. They reached Stan’s home first – but Martha asked Rocky to come in for a moment.

Inside, sitting with Martha, was a woman, in her thirties maybe, slim, dark, grave, dressed in a kind of business suit. Rocky had no idea who she was.

Stan, though, seemed to recognize her. ‘About time you showed up,’ he said.

Rocky was baffled.

Martha’s face was bleak. ‘Rocky, this woman is called Roberta Golding. She is a Next. She says Stan is too.
He’s
a Next, or they think so. And she’s come here to take him away from me.’