The Long Utopia

31

STAN AND ROCKY weren’t told where the home of the Next was.

When they got there, after passages through a lot of soft places, and while their travelling companions exchanged bursts of quicktalk, Rocky and Stan stood and looked around. Despite all the mystery, the Grange seemed nondescript to Rocky. They had emerged on the outskirts of a small township by a river: a few dozen houses built of wood and mud brick and what looked like prefabricated ceramic panels. Smoke rose up from chimney stacks. Just houses, Rocky thought at first glance, perhaps a few small workshops, even barns, though he saw no domesticated animals. Beyond the town a grassy plain stretched off to the horizon, where trees crowded, a misty green mass. There were more such townships, three, four, five, some blending into each other, off across the plain. The sky was blue, the day warm – very warm, given they were at the latitude of Valhalla, of Datum Chicago, so they were told.

Surely it was just another world, in the great stepwise necklace of worlds that was the Long Earth.

‘This could be anywhere,’ Rocky said.

‘No church,’ Stan murmured.

Rocky looked again; he was right. ‘What about it?’

‘Every other place you go. Every human place. There’s a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, or a temple. And no town hall either. Humans always build town halls. Americans anyhow.’

Rocky shrugged. ‘Maybe the Next just don’t like town halls.’

‘Or clothes? …’

A small group of people came by, a variety of ages; evidently they’d been down to that river, swimming, fishing maybe, and now were on their way back into town, for their skin was glistening wet. And they were showing a lot of that skin. They wore variants of moccasins on their feet, and belts hung with tools, twine and other oddments. Not much else. And no adornments, Rocky managed to notice as he stared, no jewellery or pendants; even their hair was cut neatly but with no sense of styling.

When they saw the boys staring, the group, young men and women alike, shared bursts of quicktalk, and turned away, laughing.

Marvin was grinning. ‘Put your eyes back in their sockets. You’ll get used to it.’

‘I seriously doubt that,’ Rocky said.

The little group of travellers broke up. As Roberta and Jules made off for destinations of their own, Marvin led the boys to a small house on the outskirts of the township. ‘This is a place I share with a few others. It’s not mine. You’ll get the idea, we don’t really own stuff here. I’ll go bunk down elsewhere for now. You’re going to need a private space, time alone. Time to decompress. You especially, Rocky.’

‘I can see that.’

‘But you too, Stan, you’ll have a lot to take in. There’s food in there. Dried meat, fruit, coffee. Go to the river for water, it’s clean. You can build a fire. There’s blankets, clothes that ought to fit if you need them. By which I mean, cover-up clothes like you’re used to. You’re in Rome, but you don’t need to do as the Romans do. Get some rest. I’ll come by in the morning.’ He glanced at them. ‘You won’t be disturbed. People will leave you alone.’

Rocky said, ‘Why? Good manners?’

Stan cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Not that. You don’t pat the head of a stray dog, do you?’

Marvin said tiredly, ‘Make up your own mind. See you in the morning. Oh, one thing. I wouldn’t recommend trying to step away. The only way out of here is via soft places. The worlds to either stepwise side are much less hospitable …’

The cabin turned out to be cramped, functional, neat, clean, with no decoration whatsoever. Stan dumped his bag, and went straight out ‘to explore’, he said. He didn’t pause to ask if Rocky wanted to come.

Rocky set the fire, put on some coffee, unpacked his own bag, laying out his stuff. He found the routine comforting.

He made one trip out of the cabin, to fetch water from the river in a couple of pails. He came across another group of people in the water, in the warmth of evening, a little further downstream. Laughing, playing, they could have been kids skinny-dipping anywhere. A part of him longed to join in. But when he heard the high-speed gabble of their quicktalk, he turned away.

Back in the cabin he made up a bed from a heap of blankets and turned in early. He didn’t expect to sleep well. He dug out his e-reader, a precious item brought out of the Datum by his parents when they’d first moved out to West 4, and, by candlelight, flicked through some comics.

He was surprised to find himself being shaken awake by Stan. Suddenly it was morning.

Stan asked, ‘You OK?’

‘I slept like a baby, I guess. You?’

‘Me too.’ Stan shrugged. ‘I think maybe they put something in the food.’

‘I didn’t eat any food.’

‘Or the coffee. Something to keep us savage apes quiet.’ He looked restless. ‘Listen, let’s get cleaned up. I bet you Roberta’s here any minute.’

Rocky was just putting his e-reader outside the cabin door, to allow it to charge up through its small solar panel, when Roberta did indeed show up. To Rocky’s relief, though she was dressed much as had been the people he’d encountered yesterday, she at least wasn’t showing much flesh, wearing a kind of shift under a loose sleeveless jacket full of pockets.

She smiled. ‘Ready? Good morning, boys. Come on, let’s walk.’

Rocky asked, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Well, I want to give you a flavour of how we live here. I thought we’d start at the school.’

Stan shrugged, indifferent, as he closed the cabin door behind him.

As they walked she went on, ‘Lesson one, by the way. We dress for practicality, not for show. This jacket I’m wearing, as you’ll see, does feature arguably the single most useful invention human beings ever came up with: pockets. Otherwise we wear only what we need, what is comfortable, generally as little as possible. You can tell we don’t go much for surface appearances.’

Stan grinned at that. ‘I think she’s telling you that the Next don’t get horny in the presence of skin.’

‘Not quite that,’ Roberta said patiently enough. ‘Sex is very important to us. It binds us together, just as it did our ancestors. We’re just not – obsessed by it. It’s the way a child’s behaviour may be controlled by mild hunger, say, which an adult can easily put aside. Besides, there is a different balance in the Next cortex, it seems, away from shallow visual stimuli towards an appreciation of the deeper content. Looking doesn’t excite us so much. There are downsides. We don’t appreciate visual art, as you do. We understand it – we just aren’t moved by it.’

That shocked Rocky, and he thought of the comics on his e-reader. ‘You have no art?’

‘Not visual art, not primarily. Nor do we appreciate fiction – story-telling. We seem to lack the capacity to immerse ourselves in the imaginary.’

Stan grinned. ‘I think she’s being polite, Rocky. She doesn’t “lack the capacity” to do anything. She means, you humans “lack the capacity” to resist the hypnotic wiles of a story-teller.’

‘If you wish. We do appreciate music – especially elegant, structured, mathematical music. But we do have bodies, you know. We dance, we sing; we need that. And you don’t play a Bach fugue at a line dance.’

Rocky said pragmatically, ‘Well, you can only get away with dressing like that if you’ve got the climate for it.’

‘That’s true, and we do have the climate here. Which is why those who live here chose it, a world of this particular band, this temperate, seasonless location.’

Rocky frowned. ‘You say, “those who live here”. Don’t you live here?’

‘Not me, sadly. I grew up in human communities. I’m drawn back there, for better or worse. And that’s where I’m valuable, where my vocation lies, as a sort of interface. A bridge.’ She smiled. ‘You’re probably too young to remember. Once I worked in the White House, as an adviser to the President. But this is home for me. The only place I’m truly safe, for one thing.’

Stan looked around. ‘I see grass. A few wildflowers. Those trees, in the distance. No animals yet.’

‘You’re thinking you could work out where you are in the Long Earth by classifying the flora and fauna? Don’t be fooled.’

Rocky said, ‘What is this, a Joker?’

Stan shook his head. ‘I think she’s saying they engineered it. This location, somehow. Imported samples of different biotas. Something like that?’

Roberta shrugged away the question. ‘That’s all irrelevant.’

They passed a party digging out what looked like a drainage ditch, down towards the river. Grimy, sweating, working hard: at first Rocky had the uncomfortable idea that these might be humans – ordinary people, like him – somehow pressed into labouring for these superhumans with their semi-nudity and their lofty taste in music. But as they passed he heard snatches of quicktalk.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Roberta said. ‘How does the work get done? In a town full of geniuses, who decides who sweeps the street or empties the cess pit?’

‘No,’ Stan said. ‘You just do it. No mystery.’

Rocky frowned. ‘Well, it’s a mystery to me.’

Roberta said, ‘I think Stan understands this, intuitively. We just get it done. When we see a problem, such as the allocation of basic work, we see further than you; we see all the way to a solution, immediately. The work must be done – this ditch must be dug. Some are better equipped for such work. There can be no argument about that. And then that necessary solution mandates our necessary actions. The only discussion is the immediately practical: is it to be my turn today, or yours? Do you see?

‘Newcomers often ask about our governance systems. Do we have councils, leaders? Mayors, presidents, kings? We are still few enough that most of us can gather in one place to discuss significant issues. Again, the solution to a problem is usually obvious to all, the actions circumscribed by necessity. We run our affairs based on reason, you see, rather than opinion. That is, not on guesses based on too few facts. It is only loftier questions of philosophy, if you like, that divide us, where the goals are not clear, even not easily formulated.’

Rocky felt like defending his own kind – if he really was a different kind from these aloof characters. ‘People must cheat. You must have crooks.’

‘Of course they do,’ Stan said. ‘Game theory mandates it. No matter what system you have, a small proportion of cheats can always prosper.’

Roberta said, ‘We tolerate the cheats. Few succeed, actually. Remember that each of us can see the other’s moves clearly – it is as if you tried to cheat in a game open to all the players, like chess. It’s possible, but very difficult. And if an individual’s actions become excessive, social pressure is usually enough to correct the situation. We do have criminals, Rocky – only a handful, our numbers are small. We call them “ill”, and treat them accordingly.’

Stan said, ‘Maybe. But the very first Next individual most people heard of back on the Datum was called David. He was a criminal. Hijacked a military twain, killed most of the crew, got rescued by another twain, tried again. Next criminals are attracted to the human worlds, are they, Roberta?’

‘We are aware of such issues, and deal with them—’

‘Is it possible that the only Next that humans encounter out there in their own worlds are all criminals or insane?’

Rocky thought Roberta kept her temper remarkably well, after days of travelling with Stan, of goading like this. Maybe that was an authentic sign of superior intellect.

She said, ‘You should not rush to judgement. Now, the school …’

The ‘school’ was centred on a small building, but most of the teaching seemed to be done in the open air – if you could call it teaching.

Out in a yard fenced off by a rope, there were maybe thirty kids, Rocky thought, of all ages from toddlers up to fourteen or fifteen. They sat in groups talking, or they played at games, running, counting, clapping. Some laboured at what looked like actual school work, writing, assembling puzzles, working with tablets – no drawing, he noticed. All of this was laced by their usual high-speed quicktalk, a sound that merged into a kind of white noise for Rocky. The few adults here moved amongst the children, watching, listening, sometimes quietly talking among themselves, a few making notes on pads and tablets.

A child fell and scraped her knee, and started to cry, a very human sound. She was scooped up by a woman and taken indoors.

‘It’s like no classroom I was ever in,’ Rocky said.

Stan said enviously, ‘Yeah, but I wish I had been. All this freedom.’

Roberta said, ‘Most of the supervisors are family members. But our families aren’t like yours. Our numbers are still few, and our relationships are fluid as a logical consequence. We don’t have marriages so much as shifting alliances for child-rearing; we are trying to maximize the diversity of our gene pool. A kind of shifting polygamy.’

Rocky frowned. ‘“Maximize the diversity”? What about falling in love?’

Stan just laughed. ‘Ha ha. Rocky wants to fall in lo-ove.’ Classic Stan. ‘But it’s just another human illusion, my friend. Like fine art and religion. We’ve all been wasting our time for ten thousand years.’

Roberta said, ‘Stan, it’s suggested that when you join us you should spend some time working in the school.’

‘For the first time since you came to fetch me out of West 4 I feel flattered. You think I’ve got something to give as a teacher, do you?’

She smiled back. ‘You don’t understand. These people aren’t here to teach. Oh, they supervise, these are small children after all. But really they are here to listen.

‘We are a new kind, you see, Stan. Our intelligence is in a category above that of humanity, the old variety. Yet we know very little – not much more than humanity had discovered for itself, and even that was riddled with flaws, misconceptions and sheer dreaming. And we aren’t like humanity with its rich ancient culture stored in the fabric of a civilization outside our own heads: the books, the buildings, the sheer accumulation of inventions. We have nothing like that. Not yet.

‘And so we find we can learn from the play of even the youngest children, who arrive in this world fresh, free of the limitations and misconceptions we inherited from humanity. We may garner from their play anything from a new design of spanner to a new, intuitive approach to transfinite mathematics. Even the babies, even the toddlers, when they “learn” to speak, invent their own vocabulary, their own grammar, even their own mathematics. We don’t teach the children so much as learn from them.’

All this seemed chilling to Rocky. ‘But from what you say, they don’t draw pictures for Mom to stick on the fridge door. They don’t have stories before bedtime.’

Roberta nodded. ‘You see that as a loss. I don’t blame you; I grew up in the human world too. They are little children. They do play silly run-around games and take naps. And we have trolls, here in this world. Maybe you heard their call in the night. We bring in the trolls in the evenings. They snuggle. Help the children sleep.’

Rocky asked, ‘Why do they need help sleeping?’

Roberta glanced at him. ‘They are extremely bright children, Rocky. At a very young age they gain an awareness of the fragility of life, of their own vulnerability. Human children, I think, believe they are immortal. Whereas our children—’

‘Ah,’ said Stan. ‘No illusions. And they can’t be distracted by accounts of heaven and the afterlife, or other fairy stories.’

‘I learned this lesson myself, at a young age.’ She briefly closed her eyes.

Rocky asked, ‘Don’t you have any religion? None at all?’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Come. Let’s walk on.’

They hadn’t gone much further when a group went by, quick-talking noisily, carrying picnic lunches, towels, tablets and pads of paper, heading out of town. Some of the party nodded to Roberta as they passed, and glanced at Rocky and Stan incuriously. They were mostly young, but there were a couple of women who might have been about fifty, Rocky thought. The presence of the older people made him realize how rare they were here; there couldn’t be many folk over mid-twenties. It was a young community.

Roberta pointed at one of the older women. ‘Her name is Stella Welch. One of the brightest of the pre-emergence generation. She once worked as a relationship counsellor on the Datum, would you believe? She’d been thrown out of university – she was studying mathematics at Stanford, but the regular academic institutions of humanity couldn’t cope with her. Now, here, she’s become one of our leading thinkers on cosmological evolution. Before we found her, she worked out most of her ideas in private, on scraps of paper—’

‘Einstein in the patent office,’ Stan said. ‘Figuring out relativity in his spare time.’

‘That’s right. I told you that where we have disagreements, Stan, is at the apex of our philosophies – the levels of goals, ultimate objectives. I think we all agree that the purpose of intelligence is to apprehend the world. But how to achieve that apprehension? Some, like Stella, think big. She wants us to understand the cosmos on the largest of scales – and, perhaps, some day, participate in its evolution. But others disagree. We have a philosopher, you might call him a poet, who has styled himself “Celandine”.’

‘Like the flower,’ said Rocky.

‘That’s it. Strictly speaking the lesser celandine, a beautiful little wildflower, the spring messenger. Wordsworth admired it, yet it was treated as an invasive species in North America. Well, so it was, I suppose. Celandine, our Celandine, argues that all that is essential of our reality can be reached through the contemplation of a single flower: the mathematics of its diploid and tetraploid forms, the way its small face presses to the sunlight. Celandine says we should reach for the numinous, you see, not through the infinite but through the infinitesimal. You must meet him.’

‘Oh, we must,’ said Stan, straight-faced.

Rocky asked, ‘So where are they going, the cosmologist lady and her friends, with their swimming costumes and all?’

Roberta smiled. ‘We have a hot spring about a mile north of here. You might call the meeting they’ll have a seminar. Or you might call it a hot tub party. If you’re prissy you might call it an orgy.’

Rocky said, ‘If I went with them I don’t think I’d get much cosmology done.’

‘I told you,’ Roberta said. ‘We enjoy sex. We do use sex socially … Right now there’s a fierce debate going on over esoteric interpretations of some of the fluctuations in the radiation that’s been detected coming out of the massive black hole at the centre of the Galaxy, and that’s what Stella’s group are going to debate. Passions among us can get just as stirred up by academic arguments as amongst you, you know. But it’s a lot less easy to fall out if you’re sitting in a hot tub grooming your opponent.’

‘Grooming!’ Stan laughed. ‘Good word. Like the bonobo chimps.’

She nodded. ‘You see, you do understand. Stan, you will come here, you know. You will accept your place here.’

Rocky said hotly, ‘You can’t give him orders like that.’

‘But I’m not,’ she said gently. ‘Rocky, remember what I told you about how we lack free will, by your standards? Because often we can see what needs to be done, and have no choice but to do it. So it is with you, Stan. I’m sure you can see that your place is here, with us. It’s just a question of where you fit in.’

But Stan seemed distracted and didn’t reply.

‘Hey,’ Rocky said. ‘There’s our buddy Jules.’

Jules van Herp looked grimy, hot, but he was wearing Next clothing, as Rocky had come to recognize it: a loose waistcoat, some kind of loincloth, a belt with straps for tools. ‘Been digging that drainage ditch,’ he said to Roberta.

‘No wonder you’re sweating.’

‘I like to join in.’

Roberta said, not unkindly, ‘I’m sure everybody appreciates your contribution.’

Jules looked pathetically pleased. He spoke in a gabbling burst, and Rocky realized that he was, incredibly, attempting quicktalk, or imitating it.

Stan stared at him, as if disgusted. ‘Hey, Rocky. Remember that kobold that hangs around the plant sometimes?’

‘Bob-Bob.’

‘Yeah. Grinning and mugging, trading his bits of tat. Trying desperately to be a human, a person. Never ever going to be one.’ He stared at Jules. ‘Remind you of anyone?’

Jules seemed upset, but he didn’t reply. He looked to Roberta, as if she would make it right for him.

Rocky said, ‘Hey, that’s harsh, man—’

‘Is it?’ Stan turned on Roberta.

Something in him seemed to have snapped, Rocky thought. Roberta recoiled from his sudden anger.

Stan said, ‘So is this the outcome of your great Next experiment? Humans like Jules here, reduced to performing tricks for your approval, all their dignity gone? Your own lost children, crying without comfort in the dark?’ He glared around at the Grange, as if in disgust. ‘Is this the best you can do?’

Roberta snapped, ‘Your remarks are inappropriate. A dozen years ago the Next were scattered, stigmatized, locked up in human institutions. Now we are together, proud, growing strong, confident. You will learn, with us. Great minds think alike—’

‘Hmm,’ Stan said. ‘You ever read Tom Paine?’

‘Of course—’

‘The Rights of Man, 1792. “I do not believe that any two men, on what are called doctrinal points, think alike who think at all. It is only those who have not thought that appear to agree.” I’m with good old dim-bulb Tom Paine, not you. I humbly disagree with you – hell, no, I don’t feel humble at all.’ He looked at Rocky. ‘I’m out of here. You coming?’ He held out his hand.

Rocky was taken aback. ‘But we only got here a day ago.’

‘So what? I’m a Next, remember. A quick study. And I learned all I needed to know.’

‘You can’t leave,’ Roberta said now. ‘It’s impossible, unless one of us takes you.’

Stan grinned. ‘You know that’s not true. Not any more. And you always knew I wouldn’t stay here. Like you said, we super-minds can see all the way to the end game, right? So if you’re as smart as you say you are—’

Rocky, ever practical, asked, ‘What about our stuff?’

‘Screw it. I’ll buy you new jockey shorts. You coming or not?’

‘Hell, yes.’ And he grabbed Stan’s hand.

Roberta made to get hold of them. ‘Wait – you can’t—’

But Stan could.