The Long Utopia

45

THE GLOBAL EXPEDITION was Captain Boss’s idea. He would select a diverse group with broad experience and opinions, load them aboard the Cowley, and take them on a brief tour of this suffering world, before coming to a final decision on what to do about the problem of the silver beetles. Joshua thought this Navy captain was either showing a democratic instinct or indecision, depending on your point of view.

So the party gathered outside New Springfield, ready to board the great craft over their heads, enduring an awkward wait for the elevator cage to descend.

Joshua looked around. Alongside himself and Sally, still newcomers to this battered world, here were the science people from the twain crew and its civilian passengers. Agnes stood between two versions of Lobsang, the sombre elderly-gentleman pioneer edition and the battered robot explorer, eerily alike yet unalike. The Irwins, colonials from New Springfield, were here as representatives of their neighbours, who were still stubbornly sitting it out in their lodges on stepwise worlds. The Irwins were very obviously trying not to stare at the ambulant units – they’d only recently learned the truth about their animatronic neighbours.

The newly arrived Lobsang, dressed in a nondescript Navy coverall, was easily distinguished from his twin, at least. For the sake of those who had to look on him, the more obvious flaws in this Lobsang’s visible skin had been roughly patched – but he was still lacking that arm, and one sleeve was neatly sewn flat. Of those present only George, Agnes, Joshua and Sally knew that the right arm wasn’t all this ambulant unit was missing. For Joshua the worst moments had come when the two ambulants had swapped data, at the beginning. They would clasp hands, or stare into each other’s eyes, and Joshua imagined streams of data pouring from their gel-based processing cores through the medium of their touching palms, or chattering in sparks of light between their eyes, as they synched their understanding.

And, to complete the group, here was a young man in a homburg hat who called himself simply Marvin, standing beside a middle-aged woman, brisk, sturdy, competent-looking, named Stella Welch. Dressed simply, plainly spoken, these were representatives of the Next, somehow summoned by Lobsang. They looked very ordinary to Joshua, but then he’d only met immature Next before, like Paul Spencer Wagoner. The sun cream, dark glasses and floppy hats they all had to wear out in the open – the extreme winds had thrown water vapour high into the stratosphere and broken down the ozone layer – did nothing to add to the authority of the Next.

‘I imagined Vulcans,’ Joshua admitted to Sally.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Look at us. What a crew. Three androids, the egghead science types, two blank-eyed brainiacs, two bewildered Mom-and-Pop homesteaders – and two lifelong misfits in me and thee, Joshua.’

Agnes said dryly, ‘It’s like a Traveling Wilburys reunion tour.’

That made ‘George’ laugh.

His one-armed twin ‘Lobsang’, though, looked puzzled. That was another difference between them. Maybe his knowledge of late-twentieth-century rock bands, always an essential around Sister Agnes, had eroded away during his decades with the Traversers. Indeed this long-lost copy of Lobsang had been staggered to meet Agnes in the first place, and even more so to discover why his successors had had her reincarnated. The Lobsangs had diverged, interestingly.

The Irwins glanced over, as if offended by the laughter, as well they might be. Agnes had told Joshua something of how it had been when ‘George’ had finally revealed his and Agnes’s true nature. All Agnes could do was apologize to the neighbours she had deceived – and who now kept their kids away from her as if she was about to turn Terminator.

And then there was Ben. As far as Joshua could see Agnes and Lobsang were putting the boy through a process of slow, gentle revelation. It was never going to be easy. Of course this day, the day of truth, had to come for their adopted son sometime. But now it was forced on them, in the middle of a wider crisis.

Yes, this twain certainly had a motley and divided crew, Joshua thought. But who else was there to do this? Who was better qualified to handle the problem?

And the reality of the problem was not in doubt. Even as they stood here, the morning sun, a mother-of-pearl disc sporadically visible in the ash-laden air, seemed to Joshua to move perceptibly, the shadows it cast shifting like an accelerated movie of a sundial. The various timers the ship’s science teams had set up confirmed that the rotation of this world had in the last few months sped up to an astounding twelve hours – half the original day. Even the two Lobsangs had given up trying to estimate the energy that was pouring down from the sky, had given up trying to predict the end point.

At last the elevator cage arrived. They gave a ragged cheer.

Joshua Valienté was no fan of enclosure, and he was certainly no friend of the US military.

But it was a relief, this day in early January of 2059, to ride up from the ground of New Springfield at last, to get out of the stinging sunlight and be enclosed in the sterile, womb-like interior of the USS Brian Cowley. Joshua breathed deeply of clean, recycled, humidified, filtered air, air that smelled of nothing but electronics, carpets, and military-issue boot polish – air that did not smell of death, of ash and sulphur and rot and the smoke of burned forests, air that did not make your lungs ache, for the world outside was even losing its oxygen to the continent-wide fires.

The twain itself was interesting to Joshua, a veteran of such vessels. The ‘gondola’ of this Armstrong-class ship, though the crew called its habitable compartment by that name, wasn’t a gondola at all but entirely contained within the body of the thousand-foot-long lift envelope, with observation galleries around the ship’s equator leading back from the bridge at the very prow.

The civilian party from Springfield were brought to one such gallery now, led by Margarita Jha, the ship’s science officer. Waiting for them here was Ken Bowring. The burly seismologist seemed to be enjoying this experience far too much, Joshua thought. A yeoman, a smart young man, passed among them with trays of coffee, soft drinks, water.

Distant turbines hummed, the great ship shuddered slightly as if coming fully awake, and they were lifted smoothly into the air.

‘Anchors aweigh, then,’ Agnes murmured, peering out of the window.

The Irwins, Oliver and Marina, went to stand together close to one of the big viewing windows, peering out into the smoky air.

Ken Bowring stepped forward. ‘I do understand how you feel,’ he said to the Irwins. ‘But look how much has changed, in the years since the bugs started their spin-up. You can see how much damage has been done, even right here.’ He pointed. ‘The basic features of the landscape are still there, of course, and they still bear the names you gave them. Manning Hill, Soulsby Creek. There’s the old Poulson house, as you call it …’ The Poulson house, the beetles’ portal, was now the centre of an intensively observed, heavily guarded military compound, where science crews kept watch day and night on this flaw in the world. ‘But look over where Waldron Wood used to be.’ The slab of dense forest beyond the creek to the north was gone now, a burned-out ruin.

The settlement was quickly lost in the greying forest as the ship lifted higher and sailed smoothly through the sky, heading north-east.

Oliver Irwin said gloomily, ‘Everything’s dying, isn’t it? And what isn’t dying is burning. Or both.’

Bowring said, ‘Pretty much. The serious die-back began, just as we predicted, when the local day dropped below twenty hours or so. This is a world of forest, and all those dead trees are very combustible.’

Margarita Jha, spruce in her Navy uniform, said now, ‘Funnily enough, you know, Ken, as the spin-up approached the current twelve hours, we saw something of a tentative recovery of the wildlife. The local critters seemed to be able to adapt somewhat, treating two half-days as a single day, if you see what I mean. The same for some of the flowering plants. We observed a similar effect at sixteen hours, though clearly the resonance wasn’t so simple.’

‘Interesting,’ Bowring said. ‘There’s probably a paper in that—’

‘You’re so damn cold.’ That was Marina Irwin, her words blurted out. ‘That’s our home out there. A world is dying. And you call it “interesting”.’

Marvin and Stella Welch, the two Next, reacted to that. They turned to each other and exchanged a short burst of their strange, incomprehensible quicktalk. Joshua was reminded of the high-speed data exchanges as the two copies of Lobsang had synched.

Lobsang, the Traverser-world version, spoke now. ‘You must not condemn the scientists for their attempts at detachment. There appears to be nothing we can do to save this world. We must try to ensure that the beetles’ activities do not spread beyond this Earth. And we can best do that by studying these phenomena, by observing, analysing, speculating.’

‘You’re right to pick us up on our tone, though,’ Bowring said to Marina. ‘I apologize. I didn’t mean any disrespect.’

‘And in fact the best way to honour this dying world is to cherish it in its mortal agony.’

Sally pulled a face at Joshua. ‘Strikes me that this Lobsang’s time in the wilderness has burned all the fun out of him, and left behind all the bits I could never stand. All that cosmic destiny stuff. Pompous ass.’

Joshua shrugged. ‘Lobsang is Lobsang.’

They rose now into a layer of murky grey air, so that their view of the fire-scarred green below was obscured. Joshua heard the engines’ tone shift, adjusting.

Bowring said, ‘We’re rising into a layer of volcanic ash. The air’s full of it now.’

Jha said, ‘There’s no need to be concerned about the ship. Since Yellowstone all Navy twain engines have been fitted with ash filters. We could fly in this crap for weeks.’

Bowring said, ‘We calculate that the bulge at the equator is now around fifty miles, which is the thickness of the crust under the continents. So now we’re seeing quakes, volcanoes, on land as well as under the sea.’ He grinned ruefully. ‘Oddly enough the local version of Yellowstone hasn’t gone up, not yet. But the San Andreas gave way on a massive scale, and the Cascades are letting rip—’

Oliver asked, ‘How far is this all going to go?’

‘Well, we can’t tell. This isn’t some natural phenomenon we’re studying. Everything we observe is a consequence of the purposeful action of these creatures, the beetles. And the end state of this world will be determined, not simply by natural processes we can predict, but by the beetles’ intentions.’

Marina snapped, ‘But what do you think those intentions are? You’re supposed to be the experts. You must have some ideas. Do we just watch as they smash everything up?’

Ken Bowring reached over and touched her arm. ‘We have tried, to do something. At New York. We’re going there; you’ll see. But you might not find it much consolation.’ He spoke more widely. ‘Folks, we’ll take our time on this trip. We’ll be monitoring, surveying as we go, but not setting down unless absolutely necessary. We expect to be over the New York City footprint in twelve hours, no earlier – that is, about this time “tomorrow”, given the truncation of this world’s day.’

Jha gave them a professional smile. ‘Which makes my announcement of a cocktail reception in the Captain’s cabin at sundown seem a little flat, because that’s just four hours away. In the meantime, please make yourselves at home. The yeoman will show you to the cabins we’ve allotted you. You may stay here, or visit the science areas, but please don’t wander around without an escort. If you need anything just ask any of the crew …’

‘Christ,’ Sally snarled. ‘A cocktail reception. What is this, the Love Boat?’

Joshua said, ‘Come on, Sally. Relax for once. Even you can’t step away from mid-air. Have a bath. Drink a cocktail.’

She glared at him. ‘Maybe I’ll make a cocktail of your face, Valienté. Hey, you, Ensign Crusher! You have a gym on this tub? I feel like pumping some iron …’