The Long Utopia

39

‘DYSON? YOU MEAN Freeman Dyson?’ The man was asking the question even as he shook Lobsang’s hand.

‘Manners, Dr Bowring,’ Jha murmured. ‘Introductions first. Mr Abrahams—’

‘Actually I’m a doctor also.’

‘I apologize. Dr George Abrahams, meet Ken Bowring, US Geological Survey. As I said back there Dr Bowring is the team leader of our civilian science cadre.’

‘Freeman Dyson, though. That’s who you meant, isn’t it? Come, walk with me, sir, please. I’d like to show you the data we’re assembling, the interpretations we’re making.’

Margarita Jha didn’t know what to make of this man Abrahams. He was tall, slim, a little elderly for an early generation of such a new community, perhaps. But there was something about him that didn’t quite fit. His accent was basically east coast American, she thought, but not quite pitched right, as if he was forcing it. His handsome but rather unremarkable face seemed expressionless – or rather, it was as if the expressions followed the emotional trigger by a perceptible interval, as if they required some conscious impulse. Maybe this guy Abrahams was just an eccentric. Mankind, splintered across the Long Earth, had begun to diverge, culturally, religiously, even ethnically, and in all that room it seemed to her that what she would once have called ‘eccentrics’ were becoming the norm. But even so, Abrahams puzzled her.

‘So,’ said Bowring, ‘you’re a doctor of—’

‘Engineering. My doctoral research was in communication with trolls. I was sponsored by Douglas Black.’

‘Fascinating, fascinating,’ Bowring said, distracted. ‘With the collapse of the old Datum academic institutions, we must rely increasingly on the generosity of figures like Black to fund our research. Still, the work gets done. You know Black himself?’

‘I’ve met him. Before he became a recluse. Or so it’s said …’

Jha, and others of the crew, had been involved in another twain mission that had taken Black, in secret and at his own request, to a refuge much further away than either Bowring or Abrahams imagined, probably. She kept her counsel.

They came to the rough work station Bowring and his team had set up, in the shadow of the twain hovering above. Trestle tables were laden with tablets and heaps of paper, meteorological charts, maps; there were samples too of the local flora and fauna. All this was a pale imitation of the more extensive science suite up on the twain itself.

Bowring said now, ‘It’s certainly a pleasure to find you here, Dr Abrahams. Coming in cold to a situation like this, there’s only so much progress we can make in a fixed time. No offence to the people here; your neighbours seem a smart, decent, very fine bunch of people. But to have had a scientifically educated man on the spot for some years—’

‘I understand.’

‘Tell me about a “Dyson motor”.’

‘Do you have a map of the world? Or any kind of global view …’

The Navy crew had toured the continent in the twain, and had sent up sounding-rockets for a higher-altitude view. There was even a clutch of simple orbiting satellites, though they had yet to complete a full planetary survey. There were various ways of viewing the result; they had maps on paper, electronic images, photographic surveys. Jha’s favourite was a globe you could handle: a basketball borrowed from the crew on to which a projected photographic mosaic had been glued. It looked pretty much like a globe of any stepwise Earth, save for a peculiar local readjustment of the continents: that gap between South and North America, the global seaway that ran from the Atlantic coast through the Mediterranean and out through Arabia to the south. That and the ubiquitous green of forests that stretched all the way to the polar regions, north and south.

But on this globe there were also false-colour markings of anomalies. Lurid orange bands around the coasts of the continents showed tsunami damage. Peculiar fractures circled the Pacific, divided the Atlantic lengthways, and spanned the southern oceans from northeast Africa south and east towards Australasia: the planet looked like a cracked vase, Jha thought. The cracks were huge tectonic flaws, bands of volcanoes and quakes. And most striking of all were the spidery bands of silver that followed the equator, and the lines of latitude to north and south.

Abrahams picked up the basketball and traced the silver lines with a finger. ‘I have seen some of these. I took my own twain journey to the south; I saw enough for me to infer the rest. You’ll be able to look it up for yourself. Freeman Dyson was a twentieth-century engineer who thought big. He worked on Project Orion, on how to use military-specification H-bombs to drive a spacecraft. And he came up with at least one conceptual scheme of how to spin up a world.’ He pointed to the latitudinal bands. ‘You wrap the world in conducting straps, and run an electrical current through them to generate a shaped magnetic field around the planet, a field shaped like a toroid, a doughnut. You have another electric current running pole to pole through the planet, and you close the loop with an arc through the magnetosphere. That causes the auroras we’ve been seeing from the ground. And then you throw in a stream of spacecraft, starting in high orbits and spiralling down through the toroidal field.’

‘Spacecraft?’

‘They need only be simple. Massive, but simple. Lumps of moon rock, for example, wrapped in some kind of conducting blanket. On my own twain journey, we reached the equator. I saw such rocks in the sky. You must have too.’

‘Yes. We’ve also been observing the moon, from where projectiles of that type are evidently being launched.’

‘And have been for years – since my wife and I first arrived here. The physics is trivial. The flyby rocks come in, they are dragged by the Earth’s new magnetic field, and, thus coupled, they pull at the Earth. Each rock speeds up the planet’s spin, just by a fraction. Then, when they reach their lowest orbit, they start to push against the planet’s magnetic field to spiral back out of there again – and, again, they give the planet another minute shove. Theoretically, it’s as if the Earth has been made the armature of a huge electric motor.’ He looked at their faces, seeking understanding.

Jha said, ‘I think I get it. Metaphorically anyhow. I have a daughter. When she was little, in the park in our home town back on West 5, there was a roundabout, a simple thing, a wooden disc with hand rails spinning on a pivot. The kids liked to run by it; each one grabbed a rail and let it go, and with every tug the roundabout spun a little faster.’

‘That’s the idea.’

Bowring sucked his teeth. ‘So the world’s spinning faster. What about the conservation of momentum? Where’s the extra spin coming from?’

‘I don’t have the facilities to observe properly,’ Abrahams said. ‘Perhaps you do. It appears that the flyby objects stream off towards the sun. There they are probably deflected at closest approach by a gravitational assist – or maybe they use solar sails – and that way they harvest angular momentum from the sun, and return for another pass. It’s a slow process for an individual rock; it must take months or years to make a full orbit, from Earth to sun and back again. But with a stream of such rocks the accelerating effect becomes continuous.’

‘So let’s see if I’ve got this straight,’ Jha said. ‘The latitude bands, the magnetic field they create, are ways of coupling these flyby rocks to the Earth. But what’s really happening is that through the rock stream some of the sun’s spin is being transferred to the Earth.’

‘The sun’s angular momentum, yes. And its angular kinetic energy.’

‘Yeah. A hell of a lot of energy,’ Bowring said dubiously.

Abrahams smiled wistfully. ‘That depends on your perspective. Suppose you doubled this Earth’s spin rate – brought the day down to twelve hours. You’d need four times its original angular energy. But to top up the spin to that rate would take just thirty minutes of the sun’s total fusion-energy output. It’s a lot to us, but if you can tap a source as vast as the sun …’

Bowring said grimly, ‘Well, the damage is being done. Dr Abrahams, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of effects the spin-up is having on this world as a whole. Every Earth is essentially a ball of liquid: the iron core and the mantle. The solid crust is only a fine rind laid over that liquid interior. Under the continents the crust is maybe sixty miles thick, compared with the Earth’s radius of four thousand miles. It’s as if the Earth is a big round crème brûlée.

‘Because of its spin – I mean its regular, standard-issue twenty-four-hour spin – every Earth is deformed, flattened slightly, not quite a sphere, bulging at the equator. Normally this isn’t a problem. And the natural state of things is actually for the spin to be changing anyhow, slowing very gradually over geological time. The solid crust has the chance to adjust to the changes of deformation.

‘That’s not the case here. In the few years since the spin-up has begun, the crust’s deformation, at the equator at least, has increased by around eight miles. That might not sound much, but the ocean-floor crust is only about three miles thick. And so—’

Abrahams traced the jagged lines that spanned and circled the oceans on the basketball globe. ‘Fractures in the sea bed.’

‘I’m afraid so. There are natural faults where the sea floor is spreading, such as down the spine of the Atlantic, and where the oceanic tectonic plates butt up against the continents, such as around the coasts of the Pacific. Now these faults are cracking, opening up, and you get quakes and volcanism. If they’re underwater, you can get tremendous tsunamis that batter the coastal areas—’

‘The smell of sulphur in the air.’ Abrahams smiled sadly. ‘The aroma of Yellowstone. Wonderful sunsets. Symptoms of a world coming apart at the seams. And bad news for anybody like me, who only came here looking for a spot of quiet farming.’

Bowring looked impatient, uncomfortable. ‘I must keep stressing that this is still largely guesswork. Extrapolation. We have so little data … This is not the Datum, which is, or anyhow was before Yellowstone, saturated by survey gear of all kinds. Networks of seismometers, for instance. I myself worked at the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana, an exquisite instrument. And of course the climate was monitored by ships, planes, satellites, as well as weather stations with a global coverage. Here we have only our one observation platform in the Cowley, a few pinprick settlements like yours, Dr Abrahams – forgive me – and a handful of observations from the instruments we can emplace. We need gravimeters to measure the planetary morphological distortion, line-of-sight lasers to measure the distortion directly.’

Jha said, ‘I know you’re doing your best, Ken. As we all are.’

Bowring grunted, visibly unhappy. ‘At least we can do something. I myself was trained up properly, before Yellowstone. But the Datum science institutions have never recovered from the volcano. The next generation of scientists will be amateurs, if that. Then we’d have no hope of understanding something like this at all.’

‘So,’ said Abrahams, ‘we’ve talked about the what. Have you got any closer to understanding why this is happening?’

‘Well, we’re asking the question, at least. Come see …’

The silver beetle was, self-evidently, dead.

It lay on its back on a table, the gas pods removed from its green underbelly, its sections of silvery armour carefully detached and laid aside, its carapace of what looked like black ceramic sliced through and peeled back to expose a greenish, pulpy mass within.

‘I have to emphasize we didn’t kill this thing,’ Bowring said. ‘We found this corpse—’

‘Or this inert unit,’ Jha corrected him. ‘There’s no consensus yet over whether these creatures are alive or not.’

‘Very well. We found him in the big exhausted mine working you call the Gallery. Evidently inactive. We’ve no idea what happened to him, or even how long he’s been there; we’ve no idea how processes of decay work with these creatures.’

‘Or even if he’s a he,’ Jha said dryly.

‘True enough. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. Especially when you see one standing upright, with that eerie mask-like face turned to you.’

‘You settlers call them “beetles”,’ Jha said to Abrahams. ‘I’ve heard the scientists call them “assemblers”. The marines under our Colonel Wang are calling them “bugs”.’

‘But we don’t know what they call themselves because they won’t talk to us,’ Bowring said, sounding exasperated. ‘We believe they are capable of communication, Dr Abrahams. Well, that must be true for them to be able to accomplish such complex feats of engineering as the viaducts. We believe they are individuals; they exhibit individualistic behaviour – such as the first ones discovered by the children here, who began trading rock samples for bits of beetle jewellery. You could regard that as a kind of preliminary communication, if you like. Pre-symbolic. You could even see it as a kind of play.’

‘Play?’ Abrahams mused. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Play, yes. Their assaying of this world has evidently been very extensive, and it’s hard to imagine a few random ore samples given them by uneducated kids can be of any real value. It’s a chink of hope we might somehow get through to them. And that they’re not evil. Not if they can be playful.’

‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Even the conquistadors loved their children, Dr Bowring. Even the Nazis, probably.’

‘True enough. Anyhow that’s as far as we’ve got. We have one of the SETI crowd here who’s been trying to get them to recognize prime numbers in symbols, heaps of stones. You know the kind of thing: mathematics is supposedly the universal language. The beetles just walk away.’

Abrahams laughed. ‘I’d walk away if you started counting out prime numbers to me. How boring …’

Jha leaned over the beetle on its table, a facemask over her mouth. The dissection had progressed a lot since Jha had last seen the specimen, but in the body’s interior she made out nothing but a kind of spongy mass, undifferentiated. ‘I’m just a lowly plant biologist, but even I can see we’re lacking in internal structure here. No obvious organs, no skeleton.’

Bowring shrugged. ‘We think the ceramic shell acts as a kind of exoskeleton, to support the weight. And there is a lot of weight; that spongy stuff is very high density. We’ve run various scans – MRI, sonar. There is structure in there, but it’s a kind of network with identifiable nodes, not a collection of organs like the human. The same kind of structure extends to the head, which seems to be more a sensor pod than a brain pan.’ He glanced at Abrahams. ‘Which could be significant. The human skull has grown over our evolutionary history, but even so there’s only so much room in there – and cerebral functionality has to share space with extensive areas devoted to sight processing, for instance.’

‘Hmm,’ Abrahams said. ‘Whereas if these creatures have their brains in their stomachs, so to speak—’

‘Room to grow. And if they are potentially very smart, they’re also very capable. Take a look at this.’ Bowring picked up a tablet, which showed an image of a bug’s manipulator arm. He swiped the image to magnify a section.

Jha saw that the ‘limbs’ terminated with splits, into twig-like appendages like fingers. But the ‘fingers’ bifurcated too, into still finer manipulators.

‘It goes on down to the nano scale,’ Bowring said. ‘We think these creatures could manipulate molecules.’

Abrahams said, ‘You call it a “creature”. We return to the point. Is it a creature, though? Is it biological?’

‘As Commander Jha said, opinion is divided on that. Animal or robot? My own theory, for what it’s worth, is that this is some kind of very advanced cyborg. And a very old design, to the point where the technology and the biology have merged, seamlessly. The manipulator substructures certainly look engineered. On the other hand the basic body plan looks like a throwback to some biological origin, to me. I mean, it’s not efficient. Why not have the whole body as a kind of modular robot? That way you could split off substructures, merge whole bodies to form larger structures … Certainly the capability to engineer on a molecular scale and upward gives them enormous manipulative power. Dr Abrahams, I think a beetle could make anything from almost any ingredient, given the right elemental composition.’

‘Including a copy of itself?’

‘Yes. We know these things have – reproduced.’

‘Using locally sourced materials – beetles grown from the substance of this world. I found that out myself. This is a von Neumann replicator, then. A machine capable of reproducing.’

‘Among other capabilities, yes. And when they combine they are clearly capable of tremendous feats, like their globe-spanning viaducts.’

‘But these creatures don’t come from Earth at all,’ Abrahams said. ‘I mean, from any of the worlds of the Long Earth.’

‘Right,’ Bowring said grimly. ‘And of course our best evidence for an extraterrestrial origin—’

‘Is the Planetarium.’

And to get there, to travel from the mundanity of New Springfield into the utterly unknown, the highly trained and heavily armed crew of a Navy twain had to submit to being stepped over hand in hand by local children, just as had Lobsang and Agnes from the beginning. Children who had figured out how to do this by themselves years ago.