The Long Utopia

27

THEY HEADED ROUGHLY south. Running at less than thirty miles per hour, Joshua figured it would take much of the day to reach the Atlantic coast, depending on the precise details of the local geography of this footprint of Maine. Joshua and Lobsang sat side by side in the ship’s battered gondola, which was more like a travel trailer than the spacious liner-like elegance of the Mark Twain, the prototype airship aboard which, more than a quarter of a century before, the two of them had been the first to explore the reaches of the Long Earth, to the High Meggers and beyond.

And under the ship’s prow endless forested landscapes washed by.

‘Trees,’ Joshua said thoughtfully. ‘Lots and lots of trees. You know, the first thing I discovered on Step Day, when I took my own first step out of Datum Madison, out of the Home, was—’

‘Trees.’

‘Yeah. The Long Earth’s big winner, trees.’ The forest purred away below the twain. ‘You say there are trolls here?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Lobsang said.

‘Makes you think. To the trolls the Long Earth must appear as all one forest, a world wide and a million steps deep.’

‘I think they are rather smarter than that, Joshua.’

‘That Madison forest was mainly oak – nothing like this.’

‘The Ice Belt worlds are a lot cooler than this,’ Lobsang said. ‘Here, it’s trees from the poles to the equator.’

‘You know that for sure, do you? You’ve seen it for yourself?’

‘Well, you know that’s not true. What I described to you is our best understanding of a typical member of this particular band of worlds.’

‘OK. But this world evidently isn’t so typical after all, is it? And here we are crawling around the globe like an ant on the rind of a pumpkin. I’m not sure what you’re expecting to find.’

‘Well, think about it, Joshua.’ Lobsang looked up into a blue sky, an apparently serene sun. ‘Even Agnes’s sundials and pendulums have been enough to demonstrate that the spin of this particular Earth is speeding up. And it is just this one, by the way; I ran some checks in the stepwise neighbours, and they’re unaffected …’

‘Why do the New Springfielders stick around, then? Agnes says they go wandering stepwise anyhow. If the neighbouring worlds are still comfortable to live on – and I guess they must be getting steadily out of synch with this one as the days grow shorter …’

Lobsang smiled. ‘But this is the centre, Joshua. This is their world, where the founders ended their trek. According to the records they stopped here because of a particularly rich seam of iron ore, not shared with neighbouring worlds, and I’ve a tentative theory that that is a by-product of this world’s peculiar stepwise linkage …’

Joshua nodded. ‘I get it. A pioneer’s sheer stubbornness.’

‘A stubbornness I feel I share – despite the magnitude of the storm that’s breaking here.’

‘Magnitude?’

‘If this world really is speeding up its spin, that’s a pretty largescale effect. Already the planet’s spin kinetic energy must have been upped by ten per cent.’

‘Ten per cent? Wow. OK. So if it is these silver beetles who are somehow responsible—’

‘It seems an unlikely coincidence if they’re not.’

‘Then they must be mounting some kind of global operation.’

‘That’s my theory,’ Lobsang said. ‘I figure we’ll recognize it when we see it. Even from the perspective of an ant on a pumpkin rind.’

‘Hmm. I’ll tell you the first thing I noticed that was odd, Lobsang. The moon. On my very first night, something woke me. I looked out the window, there was the crescent moon – and I saw a flash, coming out of the dark side. Like something was being fired out. I figured I’d been disturbed by an earlier flash; this was a second one.’

‘Joshua, you sleep lightly if a silent flash in the sky was enough to wake you.’

‘I spend a lot of my time alone in the deep Long Earth, Lobsang. I’ve been living like that for decades now. Believe me, you sleep lightly, because sooner or later along will come an oddity that won’t trouble to wake you before it eats you. Anomalies on the moon: you can’t get much bigger than that, can you? But Agnes says she’s been noticing these things since you arrived here – what, three years ago? And you took no notice.’

‘I told you. I wasn’t here for that, for astronomical-scale anomalies.’

‘Even so, don’t you think you took your eye off the ball? Lobsang, the day here is too short. There’s something wrong with the moon … How much more obvious could it be?’

‘What do you want me to say? I came here for Ben and Agnes. Anyhow we’re here now, seeking answers.’

‘OK. So we’re looking for something big. Might take us a while to find it at this pace, even so.’

Lobsang dug into his pocket and held up a memory stick. ‘Fear not. We have movies.’

‘What you got?’

‘The classics. Blues Brothers. Contact. Galaxy Quest—’

‘Nothing with Julie Andrews?’

‘Let it lie, Joshua.’

The forest rolled under the prow of the Shillelagh, apparently infinite, without interruption.

‘So how about brunch?’

‘Will you do the honours, Joshua? I took the liberty of loading aboard all the ingredients for clam chowder – we trade with a couple of communities at the coast, a few worlds over. I’ve no idea what the galley is like aboard this tub of yours.’

‘I can play it like a fiddle. Happily not the way I’ve heard you play a fiddle …’

By late afternoon they were approaching the Atlantic coast. From high altitude they could already see the ocean, in the distance.

Joshua checked their latitude. All their instruments were inertial, based on dead-reckoning, and kept in heavily insulated cases; Lobsang had told Joshua that the many magnetic storms on this world screwed up most electronics. They were going to cross the coast, Joshua figured, somewhere over the footprint of Portland, Maine.

And beneath the ship’s prow, Joshua thought the forest stock was changing. Perhaps there were tree species better adapted to the fresher air here, the salt breezes off the sea, a subtly different climate. It would be interesting to go down there, he thought, and sample the local wildlife, see if the populations of furball tree-dwellers and ground-burrowers, and the big birds and crocs that preyed on them, were any different from those around Lobsang’s home in the denser forest. But it wasn’t that kind of trip; they weren’t looking on that kind of scale.

And as they neared the coast, the forest started to show extensive damage. From the air Joshua saw swathes of trees laid out flat, their great trunks lying parallel on the ground, as if combed. Elsewhere there were huge blackened scars, the relics of fires presumably sparked by lightning. The mark of strong winds, of storms.

Then, at the coast itself, Joshua saw a denuded coastal strip, like a beach, marked with black parallel lines: he thought the lines were sea wrack, driftwood, seaweed maybe. But as they descended for a closer look he realized that he had entirely misjudged the scale of what he was seeing. That ‘beach’ was maybe a mile deep, and the ‘driftwood’ was made up of whole trunks, complete root systems: thousands of mature trees uprooted as a child would pluck daisies, and flung down in rows.

Joshua, using binoculars, inspected fish-like forms, long dead: a shark, and what looked something like a fat seal, with stubby back legs. It was only when he saw that the shark was lying across a smashed tree trunk that he got an idea of its size.

‘That thing’s enormous.’

Lobsang grinned ruefully. ‘This band of worlds has the largest sharks yet observed, anywhere in the Long Earth. No whales here; the sea mammals never grew so big.’

‘Lobsang, you said you were looking for large-scale events. You got ’em. It’s like the aftermath of a tsunami.’

‘The coast was uninhabited; nobody to be harmed, nobody to witness it. But you understand that all this is a side-effect, Joshua. A by-product of the spin-up, the injection of all that rotational energy. The oceans slosh and so does the air. You get freak waves, storms. Far inland we’ve had some of the storms, but we weren’t aware directly of the big waves.’

‘Directly?’

‘I have noticed earth tremors, coming more and more frequently. Others may have too, Agnes perhaps; we haven’t discussed it. Well, you’d expect that. If this Earth is spinning faster its very crust must be distorting, the equatorial bulge increasing as the planet flattens out.’

‘Do you measure the tremors? Since Yellowstone, everybody’s a geologist, right?’

‘Joshua,’ Lobsang said patiently, ‘we don’t have any seismometers. Why would we bring a seismometer? As I keep telling you, I didn’t come here to be a scientist. I came to live.’

‘We’ll need to get the scientists out here eventually, though. From the government, the Low Earth colleges.’

‘If we can.’

‘So which way now, Lobsang?’

‘Let’s stick to the coast. That’s where the visible damage will be. For now the interior is sheltered, relatively, the continental forest protecting itself.’

‘Fine. North? South?’

‘South. If you were spinning up a world, you’d work at the equator, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know. I never thought about it. South it is.’

The controls of this airship were simple: a steering handle, a joystick; it was the work of a couple of minutes to set the course. Then Joshua yawned and stretched.

‘Why don’t you hit the sack for a few hours, Joshua? I don’t need sleep, if I adjust my settings. You get some shut-eye; I’ll play Robert the robot.’

‘Who? Never mind. OK, Lobsang. Though I think I’ll fix some supper first …’

Joshua slept well, waking long after dawn.

At a glance out of his window, all he saw at first was ocean and forested land, bathed in morning sunlight. Then he realized that the airship appeared to be circling, running in wide, gentle sweeps; he could see its shadow shift across the ground.

There must be something down there. Presumably nothing urgent, or Lobsang would have woken him.

He showered, shaved and dressed. He collapsed his bed back to a sofa, and folded away the partition that divided his cabin from the rest of the gondola. Passing through the small galley area he turned on the coffee perc and drank a slug of orange juice – except that it wasn’t orange, not quite, but a compress from one of the many unfamiliar citrus types native to this band of worlds. Then, glass in hand, he joined Lobsang at the forward windows.

Still the Shillelagh banked and turned, and land and sea wheeled beneath.

‘So,’ Joshua said.

‘I wanted you to see what’s down there. But I wanted you to get your beauty sleep too, so I kept the ship running. I figured that shutting down the engines would alert your famous hair-trigger Daniel Boone senses—’

‘All right, all right. You wanted me to see what?’

‘Take a look. We’re at the coast of New York State, or its footprint. Below us is Long Island. It’s taken a battering from the storms and waves; its vegetation cover has been pretty much flattened.’

Joshua looked down at the island. A strip of silver, running east to west, lay across the scarred landscape.

At first glance it looked like a road to Joshua, or perhaps a rail track. It arced away to the west, running inland as far as he could see until it became a fine line, still dead straight, lost in the misty morning air. To the east, towards the sun, it strode across Long Island on slim pillars, and then on across the sea.

‘Wow. That’s what you wanted to show me. What’s it for? It looks like a roadway. But I see no traffic.’ Joshua imagined some immense invasion force falling from the sky, tank brigades sweeping along that mighty viaduct …

‘Unknown, for now. I can make some guesses, but we need to see more. I do have some details. What it’s made of, for instance – well, the outer surface at least; spectroscopy told me that. Steel. Nothing terribly exotic. No doubt built with materials mined here on this Earth, just as we saw the beginnings of back in New Springfield. And as to who made it—’ Lobsang had a tablet, loaded with telescopic images. He showed this to Joshua now. ‘It took me some time to find them. Not many of them about …’

In the magnified images Joshua saw silver beetles, a small party of them – five, six, seven. They hurried along the surface of the roadway – if it was a roadway – pausing every fifty yards or so to press what looked like instrument packages to the surface. Seen from a height they were very cockroach-like.

‘So the beetles built this.’

‘Evidently.’

‘Are they testing it? Checking it out?’

‘Something like that, I imagine.’

Joshua looked east again, towards the ocean. The viaduct stretched away, heading dead straight for the rising sun. ‘I wonder what’s supporting it out there. Beyond the continental shelf you’d need pretty long pillars.’

‘Pontoons and anchors, perhaps?’ Lobsang suggested. ‘Like oil rigs. Joshua, that is one of many details to be determined.’

‘Then what do we know?’

‘That the viaduct extends at least from horizon to horizon, aligned precisely east to west – and that is east-west according to the Earth’s rotation axis, not the magnetic compass directions. Given we have come across its span here, having essentially arrived at a random point—’

‘Ah. You think it could go on for ever.’

‘All around the Earth at this latitude, yes. Why not? Spanning the ocean to Europe and beyond, crossing the continental forests on great pillars. It would be interesting to see what allowance is made for the higher ground, such as the Appalachians to the west of here. Does it follow the contours? Or is it driven at a constant height through the mountains, with bridges and tunnels?’

‘Well, we’ll have to track it to know that.’

‘And again, given we came across this so quickly, starting from our random origin, it’s hard to believe this band is unique. The only one of its kind, happening to be at this particular latitude, so close to home? It’s more likely there must be many mighty structures like this across the face of this world. I did tell you we’d find something large-scale, Joshua.’

‘You weren’t wrong.’

‘And if this viaduct does girdle the planet – and if there are more like this – then the beetles must already be consuming the resources of this world at a prodigious rate. Somewhere there must be mines the size of small nations … This is a predation far worse than humanity ever inflicted on the resources of the Datum. It is – illogical – to feel ownership. To be territorial. In what sense does this world belong to humanity? There wasn’t a soul here half a century ago, and even now only a few scattered communities at most. And yet—’

‘And yet this Earth is more ours than theirs.’

‘Yes, Joshua.’

‘OK, Lobsang, we found this viaduct. What next?’

‘We go on. See what else is out there.’

‘Fine.’ Joshua tapped a tablet to disengage the autopilot. ‘I guess the basic question is, do we follow this viaduct, or not.’

Lobsang thought briefly. ‘Not. I fully expect to find more viaducts of this kind; this one ought to be typical. We should look for them.’

‘Fine. North, or south?’

‘South. I still believe the main action must be at the equator …’

Under Joshua’s guidance the Shillelagh turned its battered nose south, and the turbines once more bit into the air.