The Long Utopia

33

IT HAD BEEN earlier that year, the early spring of 2058, when Nelson Azikiwe had called Joshua from Datum London, where, he said, the last piece of the puzzle had turned up.

So Joshua went to meet him.

It wasn’t safe to just step into London any more. You couldn’t rely on ground levels; the continuing post-volcanic winter had left the city ice-choked, and thanks to clogged drains much of it was flooded. You had to come into the Datum elsewhere, and travel across geographically. As it turned out, the nearest to London Joshua could reach by a stepwise twain ride was Madrid, eight hundred miles to the south.

The Spanish capital was prospering, relatively. The shifting climate bands had turned central Spain temperate, and Madrid was now much as northern France had once been; wheat fields flourished where olive trees had grown sparsely. Most of the world’s great cities, Joshua guessed, anywhere north of here, were worse off.

After a night in a shabby suburban hotel, Joshua made his way north by train, on the main line through Zaragoza and Barcelona, across the snow-clad Pyrenees to Toulouse, and then further north through France.

Paris was a tough stop: a Parisian spring was now like the worst of a Wisconsin winter. The city seemed to be functioning, with a few diehards going about their business, but in the Champs-Élysées, wide and deserted, the silhouettes of vanished crowds had been painted on boarded-up store windows, a wistful echo of vanished times. Joshua, in the day he spent waiting for his onward transport, found the emptiness eerie.

From here the way into London was by a twain, with engines protected against lingering Yellowstone ash – even after all this time the flight of jet aircraft was still severely curtailed. So Joshua flew over an English Channel where icebergs crowded what had once been one of the busiest stretches of water in the world.

From the air southern England looked as ice-bound as northern France, London a heap of abandoned buildings rising from snow banks and frozen flood plains. The Thames was a stripe of silver snaking through the city, long frozen solid; Joshua glimpsed what looked like skidoos skimming along the ice. As the twain passed over the city Joshua made out young pine trees growing sturdily in the parks, and whole districts that looked as if they had been burned out. The daylight was already fading, and Joshua could see the effects of power shortages, all too familiar now wherever you came from: districts blacked out, tower blocks that looked abandoned completely.

The twain at last descended over Trafalgar Square.

Joshua checked into one of the few hotels still operating, a fading, half-boarded-up pile on the Strand. Nelson had arranged this, as well as the various permits Joshua needed to move around London. There were no working elevators, and in his room door an old electronic key system had been drilled out and replaced with what looked like a Victorian-era lock and key. Inside the room was a notice about the hours when the power was most likely to be available. The central-heating radiator was lukewarm to the touch, and the wind whistled through a cracked window.

That evening, bundled in Arctic clothing, Joshua went for a walk.

The West End, what of it was still accessible above the risen river, was uneasy, shabby, the theatres and shops mostly boarded up. Joshua guessed that Datum London must, like most high-latitude cities, be mostly supported by its footprints in neighbouring stepwise Earths. But in the shop windows of Oxford Street there was some local produce: Canada geese and rabbits, hunted in the wintry Home Counties.

There wasn’t much traffic, on roads that seemed too wide: some folk on bicycles, a couple of police cars. Joshua spotted a red London bus fitted with a gasifier unit. The few people out in the streets wore facemasks to guard against lingering volcano ash. Even so the air didn’t seem as bad as it might have been before Yellowstone; at least the fumes from millions of internal combustion engines had gone, to be replaced by a sootier smog from wood-burning fires.

Joshua glimpsed one police action taking place in a side road, a tough and brutal raid in which step-equipped officers swarmed out of nowhere, hammering their suspects with overwhelming force.

Back in his hotel room Joshua spent the hours before sleep scanning TV news channels and a partially functioning web service, trying to get a sense of a world he rarely visited. Datum Earth wasn’t recovering any that he could see. The news channels, underfunded and competing for sensationalist stories, told lurid tales of wars in the Middle East, brushfire battles over water in central Asia.

There was one peculiar item about the satellites in space. Over time many of these had fallen silent, and were one by one being dragged down into the Earth’s atmosphere by friction with the air, where they burned up. The International Space Station had been the latest casualty. Long abandoned – the last crew had come back to Earth just days after Yellowstone – there had, at last, been no more propellant to sustain its orbit. The news report said that people had come stepping back to the Datum, to the track of the station, just to see it fall. Joshua saw sketchy images from handheld cameras of streaky fire in the sky.

He flicked through the channels until he found a recording of a soccer match: Liverpool versus AC Milan, a recording from a vanished, more colourful age. There was something else Step Day and Yellowstone had ruined, he thought sourly: organized sport. Still, the game was an exciting one.

Joshua dozed off with the match still unfolding on his tablet. He slept uneasily, immersed in the pressure of too many minds.

In the morning he went back to Trafalgar Square. And here Nelson Azikiwe met him, appropriately enough at the foot of Nelson’s Column.

Nelson was bundled up in furs like a bear. ‘The headquarters of the Royal Society is just a short walk from here. Carlton House Terrace.’

They set off through the frozen streets.

‘I did have to make a special request to get into this archive, and have it opened for your visit.’

‘I appreciate all this. But I hope you’re not spending too much, Nelson.’

‘Oh, good Lord, no, don’t worry about that. I have a connection in the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he has connections everywhere else. Also, ask your mentor Sister Agnes about Miss Guinevere Perch some time. Besides, some of Lobsang’s own researches gave me a good steer. And there’s always the thrill of the chase! You know me, Joshua. And wait until you see what I’ve discovered … So what do you make of London?’

‘Kind of surprised it’s still functioning at all.’

‘Well, nothing is as it was, Joshua. Most people who live here now work for the government, or one of its contractors. The main task is simply to keep the city alive, to preserve its architectural and other treasures. And then there are others who have chosen not to leave their homes, and survive as best they can. London, in fact, is slowly reverting back to a state your own ancestors might have recognized.’

‘My ancestors?’

Nelson smiled enigmatically. ‘You’ll see. Ah – here we are …’

The frontage of the Royal Society was relatively modest, Joshua thought. In a front yard enclosed by railings, a narrow track had been blasted clear, and they walked between walls of dirty snow and ice heaped feet high. A London copper in thick winter gear nodded as Nelson produced a pass of some kind, and allowed them through the door.

In the unheated reception area the tattered remnants of posters for long-ago conferences still stood on stands, and the marble floor shone, frosted over with old ice. The only light came from the windows, and from a few electric lamps connected by insulated cables to a generator that chugged in the distance.

Nelson, carrying a battery lantern, led Joshua deeper into the building, and down a broad staircase. ‘Watch your step. Supposedly they keep this clear of ice, but …’

Another doorway, another stair downward, and they reached a corridor, much more cramped, darker yet, along which Nelson strode confidently, though he studied a map he drew from his coat pocket.

‘What is this place, Nelson?’

‘Why, it’s the Royal Society’s archive. Their secret archive.’

The anonymous door at which they finally stopped was labelled obscurely: ARCHIVE ROOM 5/1/14 R.S. PARA. The door itself was sticky but opened with a push. Within, Nelson flicked a light switch to no avail, tutted, and held up his lantern. Joshua saw rows of shelves heaped with dusty documents, in file boxes, folders, even a few scrolls.

Nelson led Joshua into the room. ‘Of course the Society was always ferociously rationalist, but among the wags on the governing council this room is known as the Reliquary. Where the Catholics keep the bones of their saints, you see? This is where they kept the stuff that never quite fit the prevailing world view – and stuff that had some bearing on national security.’

They reached a table on which a file box lay open, containing a book, a single volume. Nelson looked at Joshua, evidently expecting some reaction.

‘Nelson, I asked you to find my father. All this—’

‘To understand the present, Joshua, you must learn about the past. And that’s especially true when it comes to a family history as tangled and as deep as yours. I told you that Lobsang’s work gave me a steer. Why, he’s been looking for evidence of natural steppers practically since Step Day itself.’

‘That’s Lobsang for you. He was always quick off the mark.’ Joshua rummaged through his memory. ‘He told me about some of it. Percy Blakeney. Thomas the Rhymer. Some kind of small-time thief called the Passover—’

‘His agents found traces of him in Somerset, yes. And some of the individuals Lobsang identified led me, one way or another, to the conspiracy.’

‘Conspiracy?’

‘Joshua, I found roots of all this going back to the nineteenth century. There was an incident in 1871 when the official organization, such as it was, was terminated.’

‘What organization?’

‘Steppers, Joshua. A kind of league of natural steppers. At that time they called themselves the Knights of Discorporea. They’d been operating for some decades before they were shut down. The surviving records were judged to be of scientific interest and were stuffed down here rather than being destroyed – luckily for us. But there was one more significant meeting, in 1895. And that’s where the modern world was shaped – and your own life.

‘All of that explains why your father did what he did. Doesn’t justify it, doesn’t excuse it, and there can be no forgiveness for the way he abandoned your mother. But it does explain it. I will tell you all you want to know – well, all I can – but I wanted you to see this final piece of the jigsaw for yourself.’

‘I don’t understand any of this, Nelson.’

‘Read this.’ And he tapped the volume on the table.

Joshua pulled off his gloves and, reluctantly, picked up the book. Leather-bound and with smooth, creamy paper within, it must have been expensive once. He opened the cover to reveal a page bearing an inscription in an elegant but hard-to-decipher copperplate handwriting. He read the inscription, and his breath, which had been frosting in the cold air, caught in his throat.

MY ELUSIVE LIFE

BEING A FULL ACCOUNT

BY

LUIS R. VALIENTÉ, ESQ.

FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY BELOVED FAMILY

‘Take your time,’ Nelson said. ‘We can stay here as long as you need.’