The Long Utopia

26

THE AIRSHIP SHILLELAGH hovered over Manning Hill, over the Abrahams farmstead, tethered to the remains of the gondola which had delivered Lobsang, Agnes, a little boy and a cat to this world three years before. As Agnes strode up the hill, bearing a box of eggs – a souvenir of a coffee morning at the Irwins’ – she realized that the twain had already been there a week. Agnes had become a lot more aware of the passage of time thanks to her clocks and calendars.

The battered old airship was a novelty, of course, in the sedate green world of New Springfield, and even after a week the children, and some adults too, still came to stare. Joshua Valienté had been introduced as a visitor, an old family friend, and nobody had questioned that simple cover story – even those few who had heard of this hero of the early days of stepping. And Joshua was generous with his time, as ever. After arriving in the airship he had given the local kids rides across the forest-choked landscape of Earth West 1,217,756. These kids thought nothing of stepping, nothing of the existence of the multiple worlds of the Long Earth – but few of them had ever got to see their home from the air.

Six-year-old Ben, of course, loved his Uncle Joshua. And Joshua made time too for Shi-mi, who had come hesitantly out to meet him when the airship first landed.

Well, Joshua had finally made it here. But he had taken some finding, after Agnes had sent the word out through Bill Chambers and the Sisters at the Home and other old friends. Since the final breakdown of his marriage Joshua had become more reclusive still, it seemed, spending even more of his time on his solitary ‘sabbaticals’, huddled in his Robinson Crusoe one-man stockades on remote worlds.

Agnes had been afraid of Joshua’s reaction when he discovered Lobsang was still alive. In the event he just laughed. ‘I knew it.’

Meanwhile the situation was becoming urgent.

For a world that had been sold to them as lacking pronounced seasons, there seemed to be a heck of a lot of weather. As the months they’d waited for Joshua had passed, there were more and more freak events: storms, droughts, howling winds – and, strangest of all, bizarre ‘magnetic storms’, as Lobsang called them, when auroras would flap in the sky like tremendous curtains, streaming north to south. Agnes had never heard of auroras at latitudes as low as this, not that she was any kind of expert. These storms had consequences. The furballs and their predators blundered about even more randomly than before. Maybe these creatures, like navigating birds, relied on a stable magnetic field for their sense of direction.

As for the people, the storms played hell with the few electronic gadgets they had that still worked. Agnes herself, of course, was a thing of clockwork and gears – that was how she thought of herself anyhow. When the storms came she fretted about how she, Lobsang and indeed Shi-mi might be affected. Lobsang told her not to worry; her innards were well shielded, and her substrates were biochemical rather than metal. Lobsang said that in fact they should be affected less than the standard-issue people around them, whose minds were also linked to their bodies through electromagnetic fields in their brains and nervous systems. That just made her more afraid for Ben, and his growing young body.

Well, Joshua was here now. And, a week after the arrival of the Shillelagh, he and Lobsang were ready to get to work.

Inside the house, Agnes found the two of them sitting at the kitchen table picking over beetle artefacts: silver bangles and pendants, what looked like a small Swiss army knife also wrought in silver, and a shard of smooth black material, curved, broken, like a piece of a smashed Easter egg.

Lobsang looked up. ‘Ben’s playing out back.’

‘Good.’ Agnes bustled around the kitchen, storing the eggs, preparing a fresh pot of coffee. ‘I’ll call him for lunch if he doesn’t come in.’

Joshua said, ‘Well, I guess we’re about ready to go.’

‘Go?’

‘Go tour this world in the Shillelagh,’ Lobsang said. ‘Take a proper look at it, outside of this pinprick we inhabit.’ He shook his greying head. ‘It’s amazing that we’ve done this, in retrospect. You and I, Agnes. Stepped into this one place, in a whole new world, with no real idea what’s over the horizon.’

Joshua said, ‘Well, that’s how most people do it, Lobsang. First light tomorrow, as agreed?’

‘Suits me,’ Lobsang said. ‘It won’t take long to get ready. I’ve packed everything I’ll need from our old gondola into the twain already.’

‘Good,’ Agnes said firmly. ‘But what’s all this junk on my kitchen table?’

‘Samples,’ Lobsang said, and he put his arms around the fragments, as if shielding them from her. ‘We’re trying to be scientific, if belatedly. These are beetle artefacts – given as gifts to the children – and a few scraps we collected from the Gallery, what appear to be detached limbs, even this shard of broken carapace. I was telling Joshua that I’ve put these through the mass spectrometer in the gondola.’

Joshua grinned. ‘A backwoods pioneer with a mass spectrometer. You are a cheat, Lobsang.’

‘But the only scientific equipment I have is what we brought to help service our android bodies – in my Frankenstein laboratory, as Agnes puts it. I had to adapt, improvise … The point is, from their isotopic composition I can tell that these things were made locally, from local substances. The silver was mined a few miles from here. The carapace shard is a kind of ceramic based on river-bed clay from Soulsby Creek. And so on.’

Agnes frowned. ‘I thought you believed these creatures are alien. Not of Earth – of any Earth.’

‘So I do. In form and function they just don’t fit, in any version of the terrestrial tree of life. And, Agnes, I took Joshua through to the Planetarium. Whatever’s going on there, that’s surely a strong hint that these silver beetles have an extraterrestrial origin. But now that they’re here they appear to be making more copies of themselves – breeding, you might call it – using local materials. Stuff from Earth, this Earth.’

Agnes said, ‘What a cheek. This is our world, not theirs.’

‘Quite.’

‘So what does this all mean, Lobsang? What are these creatures up to? And how does it fit in with the days getting shorter?’

‘That’s what we mean to find out.’

‘Well, something’s wrong, that’s for sure; this old planet’s broken down and groaning …’

Joshua, who had known Agnes and her tastes all his life, grinned at that. Lobsang looked confused.

Ben’s soft voice called from outside. ‘George?’

Lobsang pushed back his chair and stood. ‘I’ll go see to him.’

Agnes said, ‘Lunch will be ready soon.’

Joshua stood too. ‘You need a hand, Agnes?’

She waved vaguely. ‘If you like. I’m making chicken soup. Find what you can and improvise.’

He smiled, and began looking out ingredients and implements: vegetables, a chunk of goat’s cheese, seasoning, a sharp knife and a chopping board.

‘You always were a good cook,’ Agnes said. ‘Even when you were no older than Ben is now.’ She looked sideways at him. ‘And you are taking Lobsang’s non-death well, I must say. I know you said you weren’t too surprised, but …’

Joshua grunted. ‘He’s pulled a lot of stunts before. And I was half expecting a call.’

She glanced at him. ‘Why? … Oh. You’re talking about your headaches. The Silence, or the lack of it.’

Joshua had his own peculiar sensitivities to the condition of the Long Earth, it seemed, and had done since he was a boy. When the Sisters had seen him come home from his solo teenage jaunts in distress, they’d tried to tease out of him what he was sensing, feeling: trying to get the ineffable out of the most taciturn boy Agnes had ever met. He would speak of a Silence that wasn’t a Silence, or of a sound that wasn’t there, like an echo from distant mountains … He couldn’t articulate what was evidently an uneasy sense of disturbance that sometimes translated into headaches, storm warnings in his own young head.

‘Do you feel anything now? I mean, here?’

‘Not specifically. It doesn’t work like that, Agnes. This one’s been coming for years, though. Noticed it before my fiftieth birthday, I remember.’ He half-grinned. ‘But when I sensed the thunder clouds gathering, I just knew Lobsang wouldn’t let something as trivial as his own death get in the way of dealing with it.’

‘He did need to recover, Joshua. He was reluctant, in fact, to face up to this business of the silver beetles. It’s a distraction from his – humanity project.’

‘But who else was capable of handling this situation?’

‘Who else, indeed.’

‘And it’s a funny coincidence that, of all the possible locations in the Long Earth, he happens to be right on the spot where he’s most needed. Don’t you think?’

They were here because of Sally Linsay, of course. And Agnes thought back now to Sally’s barely concealed amusement when she had brought them to this place. Had Sally known? … Just as Agnes had always suspected, had Sally been playing some kind of game of her own all the time?

Suddenly angry, she turned away. ‘Whatever you say.’

‘Agnes, you have any garlic?’

‘There’s some dried in the store. We’ve seeded it to grow wild but it hasn’t taken yet …’

That evening they finished loading the Shillelagh. Lobsang and Joshua said their goodbyes to Ben, and Joshua made a gentle fuss of the cat.

The next day they rose at dawn. The boy was still asleep. Agnes, indoors, sitting with a coffee, heard a hiss of gas filling the buoyancy bags, and a whir of turbines. She went to a window, and saw the twain lift.

Soon the ship was lost in the immensity of the sky.

She went back to bed, though she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep again, in what was left of this truncated night.