The Long Utopia

51

ON EARTH WEST 1,217,756, the end game was close, everybody said.

Joshua could sense it. If you stood out in the open on this world, under the streaming sky, you could feel the shuddering of the planet as more and more energy was poured into it by the beetles’ globe-spanning motor. And you could see the quickening spin in the almost perceptible shifting of the shadows, on the rare occasions when the sun was visible through the cloud.

As seen from orbit by the small observation satellites thrown up by the Cowley, the spinning world now looked like Jupiter or Saturn, striped with horizontal bands of cloud. Two-hundred-miles-per-hour hurricanes stalked the oceans and spilled on to the land, battering the already devastated coastal regions. Inland the cores of the once-global forests still stoutly resisted the storms, but only a handful of the furball mammals, living underground or deep in the trunks of trees, had recently been seen.

The day was reduced to less than eight hours. As estimated by Ken Bowring and Margarita Jha of the Cowley, this world’s rotational energy had increased nine-fold, gravity at the equator was down three per cent, and the planet’s flattening as it spun up was now causing crustal distortions of a couple of hundred kilometres – far more than the maximum thickness of the crust itself. Joshua couldn’t believe such numbers. And it was getting worse. Lobsang and George guessed that the beetles’ coupling of Earth to sun was being enhanced by some means more advanced than the obvious Dyson-motor latitudinal viaducts and streaming moon rocks – some means of transferring huge quantities of spin energy and momentum that human observers were not equipped to recognize … But there was no time left to learn.

Joshua, however, didn’t need science measurements to apprehend the unfolding tragedy here. And it seemed to him that the ultimate possibility was at last being taken seriously, among the scientists and military people, Lobsang and his Next allies. The possibility that the goal of the beetles was not the transformation of this world into some new form, but its destruction.

And that made the final decision, about whether to go ahead with the operation the military people had come to call the Cauterizing, an easy one to make.

Team Stan, as the boy himself had called them – Stan, George and Sally – gathered in the lee of Manning Hill, on the north-western periphery. On the summit of the hill still stood the wind-smashed remains of the home George and Agnes had lived in with their adopted son.

The townsfolk had long gone, the Irwins and the Bambers and the Todds and the Claytons and the rest, gone with their dreams, off to build a new home someplace else. Nikos Irwin, who with his dog Rio had first encountered the beetles in their mine working, had gone with his family – but Rio had died a few months back, and left her bones in the ground of this doomed Earth. It was less easy to be sure that the rest of this planet was empty of people too. Before the weather had closed in the Cowley had undertaken spiralling tours of the North American continent, broadcasting warnings, setting up automated radio stations; there was even a comsat flung into orbit, similarly blasting out instructions to step away – as if, Joshua supposed, anybody still struggling to hang on to this spinning-top of a world needed to be told. Well, if anybody stayed for the end game it was their decision, their responsibility; they must be able to guess what was coming.

Whereas Lobsang – George Abrahams, Agnes’s husband – Sally Linsay, and young Stan Berg, who were staying for the end, didn’t need to guess. They would get to see it for themselves.

The final round of goodbyes was ghastly.

Joshua watched Stan Berg, wearing robust military-specification survival gear that almost fit him, trying to deal with his mother Martha, and Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who seemed so drawn to him. Stan for his part seemed more concerned for Rocky Lewis, the boyhood friend who everybody muttered had ‘betrayed’ Stan.

‘You won’t be forgotten,’ Rocky said thickly, his guilt obvious.

Stan grinned. ‘You betcha. Have a drink on me with the stalk jacks under that freakin’ space cable.’

‘We’ll remember you. Everything you said and did – you had so little time – we’ll remember it all, and pass it on.’

‘Just clean up my jokes, will ya?’

Rocky’s face worked. ‘Stan, I—’

Stan grabbed him, hugged him close, patted his back. ‘Don’t say it. You did what you had to do. You did what was right.’

‘Not everybody sees it that way.’

‘What matters more, what I say or what they say? And I say it’s OK. You remember that.’ He released Rocky.

Now it was his mother’s turn. Unlike Rocky she did not submit to the hug Stan offered. Joshua thought she blazed with anger, a fire visible in her face, her posture. Maybe it was a way of staving off the loss. Stan’s father, Jez, wasn’t here at all; he’d never followed Stan to this place, his Golgotha.

‘Mom, I—’

‘Don’t say it. You’ve said enough. All your words. That’s what they used to take you away from me. First those losers and chancers who surrounded you in Miami. They’re already turning you into a cult, you and your foolishness. A cult and a corporation. Do you know they already registered your image rights? That’s the kind of people they are. And now this.’ She turned and glared at Roberta. ‘These people with their manipulation and their fancy theorizing.’

‘Mom, it’s not just theorizing. I’ve been through it myself, the arguments. I think they’re right about what’s going to become of this world. The Cauterizing might work.’

‘I don’t care. Nothing justifies this, for me—’ Something seemed to break in her. She turned and blundered away.

Stan pursued her. ‘Mom. Mom! …’

Now Agnes came to Joshua, arm in arm with George, the homely elderly-appearing ambulant who had been her husband here – the copy of Lobsang who was going to be left behind here, in New Springfield, with Stan. Agnes was still wearing her pioneer gear, the uniform she had adopted on coming here to build a home on this doomed planet.

Agnes took Joshua’s hand. ‘It’s going to be a long ride home, isn’t it? You, me, Martha, Rocky. The other survivors of all this. It’s Rocky I feel for the most.’

‘Well, that’s you, Agnes. Always drawn to the damaged children.’

‘Isn’t that a good instinct? Believe me, the damage that’s already been done to that boy will haunt him through his life. Even after his death he’ll probably be vilified for his betrayal. There are precedents, you know.’ She turned reluctantly to George, still clinging to his arm. ‘But you – must you stay?’

He smiled, an elderly, elegant, kindly gentleman, wearing scuffed, sturdy frontier clothes, like Agnes’s. ‘Well, we’ve been through this, Agnes. I can’t take part in the Cauterizing itself. But I, with my long-lost brother, did contribute a great deal to the theory – to the mathematics. And since the operation is largely mathematical, I can lend a great deal of support to—’

‘It doesn’t have to be you. You have a spare.’ And Agnes glanced over at the second copy of Lobsang, the ambulant unit from the world of the Traversers. He, it, wore a modest coverall, that one sleeve sewn up. He stood apart from the group, utterly still, statue-like, younger in appearance than George, his face empty of expression. ‘He knows everything you do.’

‘Yet we’re not identical, and never can be.’

‘Why stay? For the science? You’ll be trapped behind the Cauterizing. You’ll never be able to report back. Never be able to synch, to download your memories into those big banks at your transEarth Institute or—’

‘There may be a way, some day. Why, Stella Welch and the Cowley science staff have seeded this world with probes and data-gathering equipment, with the same reservations in mind. You may as well measure what you can, even if you’re not sure you can retrieve the data. And besides—’ For a moment, a very human resentment twisted his artificial face. He said more thickly, ‘Agnes, this was our world. My world, my home, with you. Now it is threatened with destruction. I will be the only one of us homesteaders who can be present. I am not the man I was before I came here with you, Agnes. I have invested much of myself in this place – as did we all, the Irwins and the rest, the Poulsons before them. I must see this. I must remember. As best I can.’

Agnes took his hands in hers. ‘What about all you “invested” in Ben? You should have seen him when I left him, an eight-year-old boy alone in a cabin on a military airship, crying his heart out.’

‘There’s nothing more I could do for him. Nothing more I could say.’

Joshua said, ‘At least you’ll be out of reach of the prosecutors, after you’ve once again saved civilization as we know it.’

George grinned. ‘Even now, old-movie gags, Joshua?’

Joshua, giving in to an impulse, went over to the ambulant and hugged him. ‘In spite of everything I’ll miss you.’

‘Please, Joshua. Not in front of the Next.’

Agnes snapped, ‘Oh, you’re impossible, the pair of you.’

George glanced now at his Navy-issue watch, its presence on his wrist a symbol of a definitive break from the timeless ethos of New Springfield. ‘Please excuse me, there are final preparations …’ Gently he disengaged his arm from Agnes’s. ‘We’ll still have time before you go.’ He walked away.

Joshua put his arm around Agnes’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s typical of Lobsang that as soon as I decide I’m leaving him, he leaves me. But the truth is I lost him the day the Cowley came, and he took it on himself to speak up for the community. Or maybe when the problems with this world became too obvious to ignore. Or maybe I never had him at all – thanks to Sally Linsay, who planted us on this doomed world in the first place, and I’m damn sure she knew what she was doing.’

Joshua shrugged. ‘She may have felt she had no choice. That’s what the Next say. They can see their way through to an optimal end to the game, and so have no choice about how to play it. I sometimes think there’s something of the Next in Sally. If she glimpsed this end-game all the way back then, if she sensed something wrong here, well, she was right, wasn’t she? And if that’s true, she’s paying the price herself.’

‘Good,’ Agnes said with almost a snarl, and Joshua was taken aback. ‘There,’ she said more calmly. ‘I got that out of my system. Now I can forgive her … And here she comes, right on cue. I’ll give you some time together.’ Agnes squeezed Joshua’s hand, and walked away after George, without another glance at Sally.

Joshua and Sally faced each other. As ever she wore her travelling gear, her shapeless hat, her sleeveless jacket with all the pockets, her pack on her back, ready to move.

‘So this is it,’ Joshua said.

‘I guess.’

‘You really have to stay?’

She shrugged. ‘Stan has the raw ability, but I’m the more experienced stepper. They need me to help him.’ She seemed calm, accepting. ‘I always suspected it would finish up like this.’

He looked inside himself. ‘After all we’ve been through together, I don’t know what I feel.’

‘Then stop picking the scab,’ she said sternly.

‘It seems like yesterday when we first met.’

‘When I found you.’

‘In our flying penis, as you called our airship. In the High Meggers. You and your pet dinosaurs basking in the sun.’

‘Ancient history.’

‘We had lunch. Fresh-caught oysters on an open fire, on that distant beach.’

‘I guess I’m heading for another kind of beach now, Joshua.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Still alive, as far as I know. Made a fortune out of his patents on the beanstalk tech we brought back from Mars.’

Joshua frowned. ‘I meant, why isn’t he here? Does he know? About this, about you? Did you try to contact him?’

She shrugged. ‘He’ll know all about it. He always did know everything. If he wanted to be here, he would be.’

‘But did you try—’

‘Leave it, Joshua. My business. As for you, remember me to Helen. That little mouse.’

‘She was always wary of you, you know.’

‘Of course she was. To her, I was a symbol of the side of you she could never reach, and she knew it. She was good for you, Joshua. But we make our own choices.’

‘I guess that’s true. But I take it that right now you have no choice—’

‘Not with this. I never did have. Not from the first moment I heard about the problems on this world.’

‘And you brought Lobsang here. What did you hear? How?’

But Sally, who had always been immersed in her own networks of information spanning the Long Earth, had never answered questions like that, and didn’t now.

‘Anyhow, because of that, I’m going to lose you,’ he said gently.

She grinned. ‘Don’t go soft on me now, Valienté.’

‘Sally—’

‘Be seeing you.’

And she disappeared, vanishing stepwise, as precociously and abruptly as she had always done, from their very first meeting on the beach with the oysters and the dinosaurs.