The Long Utopia

14

AMONG 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.’