The Long Utopia

8

SALLY BROUGHT HIM to Earth West 30. On this particular Earth, here on the Madisonian isthmus, there stood a waterfront development with sodium lights glaring in the light of early evening, and golf carts parked up in rows. It turned out to be a sports lodge, a tourist facility. You got this kind of outfit on ‘significant’ worlds, such as worlds with round numbers: West 30, East 20. And, evidently, volcano winter or not, there were still enough rich folk to support such places.

Nelson Azikiwe, dressed in boots and sensible Low-Earth-type outdoor gear, was waiting for them at the designated spot, just outside the car park.

Sally hitched her pack and looked around disdainfully. ‘Tourists. Outta here. Keep safe, Nelson, Joshua.’

Joshua replied, ‘You too—’

But of course she had already gone, in a pop of displaced air.

Joshua shook hands warmly with Nelson. ‘Thanks for this, buddy.’

‘Well, any friend of Lobsang is a friend of mine – and you and I have known each other a fair time now. It is my pleasure to be your companion on this, the last leg of your long walk. One should not be alone on one’s birthday.’

Nelson’s accent was soft, pleasing, a clipped South African overlaid with crisper British consonants. He seemed unchanged since, Joshua had last seen him, at Lobsang’s memorial, save that at around sixty years old he had perhaps a little more grey in that black hair.

Electronic music began to blare from the lodge, half a mile away. Nelson winced. ‘I think that’s our cue. Shall we take our first step?’

The lodge was whisked away. In Earth West 29 the lake shore was happily virginal.

As he took the impact of the step Nelson managed to stay upright – many poor steppers doubled over with the nauseous reaction, controlled by drugs or not – but Joshua could see discomfort contort his face.

‘Hey, are you sure you want to do this? It’s only a stunt, after all.’

‘Well, Joshua, this is the last stage of your descent from heaven. First you flew like the Holy Spirit through the sky – or like Lobsang’s disembodied soul between incarnations, perhaps. Then you strode boldly with Sally Linsay, a super-powered human. And now for these last few steps you must limp along beside an old man like me, a mere mortal. We will complete our remaining twenty-nine Stations of the Cross before midnight, I assure you. Of course we cannot linger in the radioactive ruin of Datum Madison itself, but I am told that the Sisters at the Home have arranged a small celebration for you, back in West 5. Think cake rather than champagne, however.’

‘That’ll be very welcome.’

‘I think I am recovered. Shall we take another step?’

In West 28 it was raining softly, and though the isthmus itself was empty Joshua could see the lights of a township a couple of miles to the south.

Another step, ten minutes later, and on the rise on which, in Datum Madison, stood the Capitol building – or, since 2030, its ruin – a stone pillar had been erected, with plaque affixed.

Nelson said, ‘In England – where I had my parish, you know – after the Romans had gone, the first Christian missionaries who attempted to convert the pagan Saxons would raise stone crosses in their sparse villages, as tokens of the churches that would one day be built there. Many of the crosses survive, even today. And thus, in the great days of the Aegis, the US administration has scattered its symbols across significant sites like this, in otherwise largely empty worlds. An echo of the future communities to come.’

‘You do see something of the stepwise worlds, then.’

‘Oh, yes – though I have never enjoyed stepping myself. I made one journey into the far Long Earth with Lobsang … But I do enjoy my jaunts into the Low Earths – to be precise the Low Britains. Even today, even after the great emigrations from the Yellowstone winter, those worlds remain largely wild. The lowest dozen or so worlds, to West and East, soaked up the outflow of an estimated half the pre-eruption Datum population, but even West 1 has a population only about the size of the Datum’s around the year 1800. Give us a few centuries and we’ll fill it all up, no doubt. But for now even the Low Earths are echoing halls.

‘And the Low Earths are as the Datum used to be before humans – as they were in the last interglacial, perhaps, before the final Ice Age. Because the trolls and other humanoids stay away from the Datum, even those spin-offs of humanity haven’t affected things much. So Low Earth Britain is a place of oak wildwood, grassland and heathland, a place of water and light, where elephants, rhinos and bears mingle with badgers, deer and otters … Full of wonders from humanity’s lost past. I don’t feel the need to go much further.’

Glancing around, Joshua could see no lights in the gathering dusk. ‘Getting dark already. I have a flashlight.’

‘I also. Let’s go on. We may need to light some brands to keep the local wildlife away later …’

They put in some distance after that, stepping every few minutes, pacing themselves help Nelson get over the nausea.

By West 11 Nelson seemed winded, and ready for a longer break. They sat on a low rise, overlooking another copy of the Madisonian isthmus – but here there was a substantial community, the largest they’d seen so far, a sprawl under a gentle haze of wood smoke with the steady glow of electric lights in some of the windows. Joshua even glimpsed a town sign, standing by a dirt track road:

WELCOME TO MADISON WEST 11

FOUNDED A.D. 2047

POPULATION CHANGEABLE

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE HOMELESS TO LIVE HERE

BUT IT HELPS

The first house to be seen, just down the trail, was a shack, really, festooned with oil lanterns, and evidently put together from scraps imported from the Datum: plasterboard and roofing felt and plastic drainpipes. Behind the house was a fenced-off expanse of farmland, with what looked like a potato crop, chickens and goats, a heap of roughly cut lumber. A rack of some corrugated plastic material had been set up to face the south where the sun would catch it, with clear plastic water bottles fixed to its surface. Joshua knew this was a cheap way of purifying water; the sun’s ultraviolet would kill off most bugs.

As the two of them sat there a single vehicle came puttering along the track out of town. Driven by an elderly man who tipped a sun-bleached hat to the two of them, it was a flimsy, open vehicle that ran on a purr of electric motors. Once this had been a golf buggy, Joshua guessed, driven by batteries and manufactured from steppable parts – no steel – to be used on the huge golf courses that, before Yellowstone, had colonized the Low Earth footprints of many Datum cities. But now the buggy had a solar-cell blanket draped over its roof, and its cargo looked like milk churns, not golf clubs. In that farm further down the trail, meanwhile, Joshua saw the silhouette of a more substantial vehicle, what looked like a tractor, but with a kind of fat chimney stack fixed to the rear. That was probably a biofuel solution, a gasifier, a gadget that burned wood to release hydrogen and methane as fuel.

Joshua recognized all this. A colony built out of recycled junk from the Datum, Madison West 11 was characteristic of the second great wave of migration out of the suffering Datum Earth.

The climate as ever had been the problem. By 2046, six years after the Yellowstone eruption itself and the onset of the volcano winter, things had seemed to be stabilizing, if not actually improving. People did continue to die; Joshua remembered a report that in the end Yellowstone had killed more people from lung diseases caused by the ash than had perished in the immediate aftermath of the eruption itself. But then some climatic tipping point had been reached – some had said it was the collapse of the Gulf Stream, but by then the science data-gathering itself had become too patchy to be sure – and the winter that year had been worse than ever. The rivers froze, the ports iced up, and Midwest farmland submitted to permafrost. When the big hydroelectric plants in Quebec began to fail in the freeze, the American national electricity grid collapsed, and such great cities as Boston and New York had finally to be abandoned.

Across America, people who had clung on to their homes for six years finally gave up and walked or drove out of there, either south across the Datum or stepwise into the Low Earth worlds West or East, where refugee camps had overwhelmed communities that were already struggling to cope. With time new towns had started to emerge, like this one in West 11, towns with a new character, using the scavenged remains of the old and scrambling for new solutions. Timber, plentiful on the Low Earths, was used in fuel-producing gasifiers, like the one on the tractor Joshua could see now – a fuel source that was a lot more accessible, for now, than coal or oil or nuclear. Datum museums had been emptied of nineteenth-century spinning wheels and looms and steam engines, for use as models for new kinds of industry. Electricity was got whatever way you could, such as with alternators and batteries from step-capable vehicles like that golf buggy, fixed to windmills or improvised paddle wheels in rivers. Anything resembling a web was still rare outside the larger, older stepwise cities like Valhalla, but in a town like this there would be walkie-talkies and ham radio set-ups, and maybe somebody would be laying down copper wire for a phone network.

Of course agriculture had been the key, as it had been from the day of the eruption itself – the need to feed all those displaced people. There had been a major international incident when in 2047 the US Navy had raided the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island, for its stock of seeds for heirloom crops – the more primitive, hardier strains needed less cultivation than the varieties that had dominated the vast mechanized fields of the pre-Yellowstone Datum.

But Joshua thought it was working, even if these new patchwork Low Earth towns weren’t quite like any other: neither like their Datum forebears nor even the raw colonial towns of the Long Earth, like Reboot and Hell-Knows-Where. Madison West 11 was always going to be a jumble of old and new. You didn’t drive a car; there were few vehicles on the dirt roads save for farm trucks and ambulances and cop cars and bicycles. You didn’t go online any more, but lined up to deposit your money at bank branches, like the manager was Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Yet these quaint 1900-type practices were studded with bits of high tech, such as solar-cell blankets fixed to thatch roofs.

And Datum America itself had not been abandoned altogether, even now. Americans had come to recognize that what they and their ancestors had made of their continent-sized country was a historic monument in itself. So the new worlds had striven to come to the rescue of the old.

Nelson, evidently tiring, had been quiet since they’d sat down here.

Joshua gave him a playful punch on the shoulder. ‘Not far now, old friend.’

Nelson smiled ruefully. ‘I’m glad to have made the trip.’

‘And I’m glad you did too. You always were good company. And you always made me think.’

‘Ouch. Even on your birthday? My deep apologies.’ He glanced sideways at Joshua. ‘Of course, for most of us such occasions mean family and friends. I myself lost contact with my own family in the chaos of the Johannesburg townships, long before Yellowstone. And here you are, Joshua, wandering alone – well, almost alone – on such a significant anniversary.’

Joshua shrugged. ‘I am more domesticated now. Even Sally admits that. But, you know – sometimes I miss the alien. The beagles for instance.’ Dog-like sapients from a very remote Earth. ‘Life gets boring with only humans to talk to.’

‘I thought it was a beagle that chewed off your left hand.’

‘Nobody’s perfect. And he thought he was doing me a favour. As for the rest – well, I do seem to have had trouble building a family.’

‘Perhaps because you did not come from a family yourself,’ Nelson said seriously. ‘Lobsang told me your story, long ago. Your mother, poor Maria Valienté, who gave birth to you alone, and died aged just fifteen. Your father – quite unknown. Of course you were cherished by Agnes and the Sisters at the Home, but that could only be a partial recompense for such a loss, even if you were never really aware of it.’

‘Lobsang did find out something about my mother.’ And had given him one treasured relic, a monkey bracelet, a silly toy belonging to the kid Maria had been when she’d given birth to him … ‘Nothing about my father, though.’

Nelson frowned, looking into the distance. ‘Which is rather unusual, if you think about it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that if even Lobsang couldn’t find anything, there must have been deliberate concealment. By somebody, somehow, for some reason.’ He grinned. ‘I’m suddenly intrigued, Joshua. This is the kind of puzzle that has always attracted me. I found Lobsang himself by following a research trail, you know – even though it turned out that he had engineered the whole thing. And since Lobsang has gone, my world has been rather depleted of conspiracy theories.’

Joshua studied him. ‘You’re thinking of researching this, aren’t you?’

Nelson patted his arm, and stiffly got to his feet. ‘Shall we make some more progress? The many candles on that birthday cake won’t blow themselves out.’

‘True enough.’

‘The many, many candles—’

‘I get it, Nelson.’

‘Hmm. But would you like me to follow this up? This business of your father. Think of it as another birthday present. If you would rather I didn’t—’

Joshua forced himself not to hesitate. ‘Do it.’

‘And if I do find something – considering the circumstances of Maria’s brief life, it could be distressing. One never knows, when pulling such a thread, what might unravel.’

‘Well, I’m a grown-up, Nelson.’ But he did remember how much Lobsang’s revelations about his mother had confounded him. ‘Look, I’ll trust your judgement, whatever you find. On my count, one, two—’

They winked stepwise together, with pops of displaced air.