The Long Utopia (13 page)

Fraser Burdon nudged Luis’s elbow. ‘Albert may be keen, but it looks like his missus is less so.’ He pointed.

Luis turned, and saw through an open doorway a young woman in a white dress, book in hand, walking through an adjoining room. She struck Luis as quite pretty, though she was short and rather plump, her blue eyes a little too large, her chin a little weak. Still young, yet – if it was
her
– she had become Queen just a month after her eighteenth birthday, and had already borne six children. She glanced through the door at Albert’s party – Luis would have sworn she looked straight into his own eyes – and then turned away, evidently disapproving, and hurried on out of his sight.

Fraser grinned. ‘She looks just like she does on the stamps.’

As the Prince and Hackett talked, as more servants arrived with trays of drinks and rather stodgy-looking snacks, Luis was aware that Radcliffe stood stock still in the middle of the room, eyeing each of the ‘Knights’ in turn, as if memorizing every freckle on their faces.

B
EN SHRIEKED
, ‘Go away!’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Ben,’ Lobsang said calmly.

Agnes, sitting with her sewing basket, suppressed a sigh, and steeled herself not to intervene.

Lobsang was standing over Ben and the cat-litter box. ‘You’ve done a good job with the litter, Ben. Shi-mi will appreciate it. But now you have to get washed because it will be time for supper soon, and I’m making mushroom soup. Look, there’s the pan on the hearth. You like mushroom soup.’

‘I hate ’shroom soup!’

‘That’s not what you said yesterday.’

‘You’re stupid.’

Lobsang laughed, as if the boy – now five years old, two years after their arrival here at New Springfield – had made a witty debating point. ‘That’s arguable.’

‘You’re also ugly. Ugly an’ stupid.’

‘
That
is a question of taste.’

‘You’re not my real Dad, you stupid!’

‘Well, now, Ben, we’ve been through that—’

‘Hate you, hate you!’ Ben tipped up the plastic box so the litter spilled over the kitchen floor. Then he ran out into the stockaded yard, banging the screen door behind him.

Lobsang stood and stared after him, arms folded. Then he turned to Agnes. ‘You could have helped.’

‘I’m helping by not helping.’

‘You’re the one with experience of these creatures.’

‘Children, Lobsang. They’re called children.’

‘Anybody who could raise Joshua Valienté to fully functioning adulthood – well, reasonably fully functioning – knows what they’re doing. So, then – if my prosthetic limb was faulty, I’d call in a prosthetics expert. My relationship with Ben is evidently faulty. You’re the expert.’

‘And you’re the one who wanted to be a father. Well, now’s your chance.’ She made shooing motions with her arms. ‘Go ahead – father!’

He shook his head and spread his hands, the way she remembered he used to when she had made him sweep the leaves in his troll reserve back in the Low Earths, and she’d said he’d done a shoddy job and made him start over. ‘But I don’t know where to begin. He hates me.’

‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘He said so!’

‘He’s five years old. He’s trying to jab at you. He barely knows
what
he’s saying.’ She sighed. ‘Look, Lobsang. Try to find out what’s really bothering him. That’s all the advice I’m going to give you.’

‘But—’

She held up a finger. ‘And if you try to drag me into this I’ll leave the room. Might even have one of my naps.’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said bitterly, ‘your
strategic
naps.’

‘This is what you wanted,’ she repeated. ‘This is why we’re here.’

Lobsang heaved a sigh. ‘Well, I’d better get a broom to pick up this litter. At least I’m good at
that
.’

‘Leave some for Ben to clean up. Just to make the point . . .’

Two years into their New Springfield experience, they were both still learning – just like, Agnes supposed, the Irwins and the Todds and the Bells and the Bambers and all the other folk who’d been here
long before they showed up. But that was the plan. Lobsang, who had been observing the pioneering of the Long Earth for years, now wanted to try it out for himself, as ‘George’.

Of course the New Springfielders had already achieved a lot. They knew about hygiene, for instance. They even made their own soap, from animal fat and potash from their charcoal burners. They had started making their own clothes as the stock they had brought from the Datum slowly wore out; they gathered hemp, flax, cotton, and wool from their own sheep and now Lobsang’s, which they were learning to card, spin and weave. They even made foul-smelling candles from the fat of the pigs that had gone wild in the forest. And they were utterly at ease with the stepwise extensions of their world, their landscape – most of the time, in fact, unless there was a barn dance or a town meeting on, much of the population was worlds away from the old core of the founders’ community. It was a way of relaxed, natural living in the Long Earth that Agnes had never witnessed before – and she imagined that the children growing up here, including Ben, would take it all utterly for granted.

In terms of their pioneering, they did cheat, as Agnes had slowly learned.

You saw few old folk, few very sick. They were lucky that one of the community, Bella Sarbrook, had some medical training, but when people got old, or seriously ill – or in one case when a couple had borne a disabled child – they tended to drift off back to the more sophisticated facilities of the Low Earths. Conversely the home-grown medicines and toiletries and stuff were supplemented by a trickle of produce from the Low Earths or Valhalla. Agnes didn’t see anything wrong with that. As long as the Low Earth cities existed, why not use them?

Lobsang meanwhile was running experiments in farming. With the help of the neighbours he’d cleared some of the old fields the first settlers had laid out, and ploughed the land with his horses and
cattle and some human labour, and had tried out his first crops: wheat in the lighter soil, oats and potatoes where the ground was heavier. The first wheat harvest, small as it was, had drawn curious volunteers, to reap with handheld sickles, to thresh and winnow. While not primarily here to farm themselves, the adults saw it all as good fun, and ‘George’s’ small farm as a welcome addition to the education of their kids.

Of course it wasn’t all newly invented. Lobsang was very impressed when Oliver Irwin showed ‘George’ a complete set of the Whole Earth Catalog, downloaded on to a wind-up e-reader. Lobsang had copied it into his own library, which was a row of mostly physic-al books kept in the gondola, including Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
, Verne’s
Mysterious Island
, Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur
, Stewart’s
When Earth Abides
, Miller’s
A Canticle for Leibowitz
, Dartnell’s
The Knowledge
, and miniaturized bound magazine sets including early volumes of
Scientific American
, a pre-electronic
Encyclopedia Britannica
, even a facsimile of the first encyclopedia ever published, by Diderot in the seventeenth century. ‘Encyclopedias are hedges against the fall of civilization,’ Lobsang had said to Agnes, only slightly pompously. He seemed to have a long-term dream of building a civilization from scratch right here in the wilderness, like Verne’s stranded travellers in
Mysterious Island
, all the way up to electricity generators and copper phone wires – and maybe going further, coming up with a kind of portable ‘civilization kit’ to give to the combers and their kind, to ensure the lessons painfully learned over ten thousand years of human progress weren’t lost as humanity scattered across the Long Earth. Lobsang couldn’t help but think big.

For now, however, he seemed content with the watermill he was planning down by the creek to grind his wheat. One step at a time.

Ben meanwhile had already started at the informal local school, hosted in the open air, or in one shelter or another, on one world
or another. There were only a dozen kids, of all ages from four or five up to fifteen or sixteen. Marina Irwin, mother of Nikos, was the nearest thing to a head teacher, and she had them work and play together as a group, the older ones helping the little ones, and she drafted in adults to teach specific classes, two or three kids at a time. A lot of the focus was on practical skills, from how to pick wild mushrooms, and using the stars to find your way home in the dark, to weapons and hunting classes for the older kids. But there was culture: Marina had a copy of a complete Shakespeare that she made good use of.

As for the adult world, Agnes had soon learned there was no formal law out here. Nobody had a desire to refer disputes to the Datum US government, which in theory still operated its ‘Aegis’ policy, enforcing the laws of the US across all the nation’s Long Earth footprints out to infinity. On the other hand there was no sign of the frontier justice you got in some remote communities. Many Corn Belt towns, for instance, had appointed sheriffs. Here, disputes were solved by mediation: by agreed compensation, with feasts that re-established friendships. None of that was as easy as it sounded, and it all required a hell of a lot of talking. But in such a small group the opposite to forgiveness and reconciliation was a long-standing feud, and nobody wanted that. People spent a
lot
of time talking through stuff out here – but then, they had the time to spare. And of course if the dispute couldn’t be resolved one or other party could just step away. There would always be room for that final solution . . .

But right now, Agnes didn’t want to leave.

Alone, she looked around, at this home they were fixing up. They’d got on with it quicker than she might have expected. This room, which Agnes called the parlour, had been done out by Lobsang like a small Buddhist temple, with a polished wooden floor, the walls coated with panels brought from the Low Earths and ornately decorated with red, gold, and splashes of green. All
this was a long way from Agnes’s own Catholic tradition, but she liked the sense of symmetry and order, the scent of incense, and the smile on the face of the statue of the Buddha – quite a contrast to the anguished expression of the crucified Christ. And little Ben liked the bright colours, which he said were ‘Christmassy’.

They were happy here, Agnes decided. On balance. Life, as ever, was far from perfect. Sometimes all Agnes could see were the problems. But she had the wider perspective to see that overall, as best she could judge, the people here were getting it more right than wrong. Figuring out a new way of living, based on the long experience of mankind, and their own sturdy common sense. If this was why Sally Linsay had brought them here, it was a good choice.

The only problem was that Agnes was still having trouble sleeping.

She heard voices. Lobsang and Ben returning. She focused on her sewing.

I
N THE COLD
of Datum London, in dusty archives, in badly heated hotel rooms hunched over elderly tablets connected to an unstable web, Nelson Azikiwe continued to follow the tangled story of the Valienté family.

Followed it back more than two centuries, to 1852, and New Orleans . . .

Luis Valienté had never known a city like ‘Orlins’, as he heard the natives call it. But then, before his first entanglement with Oswald Hackett and his Knights of Discorporea four years ago, he had visited few cities away from his native London: Manchester where he had played a few shows before mobs of mill workers who made Lambeth’s costermongers look like refined gentlemen, and Paris where he had wasted one particularly lavish booking fee on a week of rather bewildered holiday-making.

Now, in the August of 1852, as he and Oswald Hackett and Fraser Burdon strolled through the city, heading for their lodgings with their bits of luggage, he had trouble sorting out his impressions. The heat and the noise, the music and the smiling faces, the stink of the river and the sheer
chaos
of it all – as a dowdy Englishman he had never felt more out of place in his life.

‘It is like Paris,’ he said at last, reaching for one of the few comparison references he had available. ‘In a way. Look at the architecture; some of it is quite elegant. Spacious and shady
– adapted to the climate, of course. And then there’s all the French you hear.’

‘To me it’s more like London,’ Burdon said. ‘Take away the nice weather and ladle on a few centuries of soot, and you might have the East End.’

‘Pah,’ said Hackett, dismissive. ‘To me the whole town is like one ongoing riot. The noise, the colour, the music that blares everywhere – if I could remember my Dante I would probably map it on to one circle of hell or another. One must always remember that none of this existed four hundred years ago. And this is slaving country, and never forget it – why, the largest slave market in America is here. A land of slave-holders and slave-hunters with their Bowie knives and their revolvers, and their bloodhounds and their scourging and their lynching.’

Burdon frowned. ‘We don’t need the piety, thank you, Hackett; we’ve had enough of that from the Prince these last four years. We’re here, aren’t we? We know the job – the mission, as ye call it. Let’s stick to our purpose.’

‘Yes,’ Hackett said somewhat coldly, ‘let’s.’

They turned on to a grand and very lively street called the Vieux Carré, crowded with bars, hotels, cafés and establishments with less obvious identities which it seemed to Luis that Hackett knew rather too well. For all his pompous lecturing, Luis remembered what Hackett had told him of his rakish exploits as a young Waltzer. Hackett certainly had the look to fit in here; he was wearing a broadcloth coat, an embroidered waistcoat, a fine shirt, and a silk neckerchief. Fraser Burdon and Luis, both shabbily dressed by comparison, looked on rather enviously.

Luis was not very surprised when the establishment to which Hackett led them for their overnight lodging, on a slight rise at the heart of this district, turned out to be a bawdy house. It was something like a town house realized in an overwrought classical style
– and it was chock full of young women, remarkably beautiful in Luis’s eyes, all elegantly dressed.

‘My word!’ said Burdon, staring around. ‘It’s like a display of exotic birds at Albert’s blessed Exhibition.’

‘But,’ Hackett murmured, ‘bawdy houses are often surprisingly sympathetic to the cause we serve today.’

He brought them into the presence of the madam of the house. Luis never learned her name. She was small, a little plump, her jet black hair streaked with grey and tied back neatly. Her complexion was dark; no doubt she was a product of the great mixing-up of peoples in this port – but aside from that, with her stature and her air of bossiness she reminded Luis uncomfortably of an older version of the Victoria he had glimpsed at Windsor.

She smiled at Hackett. ‘You’re the conductors, sir?’

‘We are. And you have our passengers, with their tickets?’

‘I do indeed. This way.’

Burdon cocked an eyebrow at this exchange. Both he and Luis by now recognized the peculiar jargon of the Underground Rail Road: a rail system that did not exist literally, but whose ‘passengers’ were escaping slaves.

The madam led them through gaudy reception halls. Luis never glimpsed the back rooms where the true and grubby trade of the place was transacted. The madam’s own office was a kind of drawing room, not pretentiously decorated, but with a desk heaped with papers and studded with ink wells, a glass cabinet in one corner with a range of medicines – and, ominously, a rack of guns, from revolvers to hunting rifles, all looking well tended and no doubt loaded.

And a secret panel at the back of the office, opened by a catch worked by one of the madam’s polished fingernails, revealed another room, lit by a single gas lamp, entirely enclosed. The madam allowed the three of them inside, then backed out gracefully, closing the door behind them.

Luis glanced around. After the brilliance of the day the gaslight seemed dim indeed. There were no other doors, no windows, no furniture. But he could guess why they were here. This entirely sealed-up room was a gateway to the widdershins world, a place through which Waltzers could pass without fear of observers.

Hackett grinned at them both. ‘Leave your bags here; you’ll not be needing them where we’re going. I just want to make sure our precious cargo is safe, for we leave tonight, with our friends, on the
River Goddess
bound upstream for Memphis. All set? If you need a puking pill I’ve got some to spare. Widdershins we go. One, two, three—’

The site of this parallel New Orleans struck Luis as not much different from the regular version – given the absence of all the works of mankind, of course – and he wondered how dissimilar the details were of the braiding of the great river as it poured sluggishly across this flat, marshy landscape. But Luis’s feet were dry, more or less; the slight rise on which the bawdy house stood evidently persisted here, a scrap of ground marginally higher and drier than the rest.

Still, they were all sweating immediately.

And Hackett slapped his neck. ‘Got you, you swine! Further north of here, you know, there are all sorts of exotic beasts to be seen – and to run from. Giant camels, horses the size of big dogs, cave bears, lions: critters from which modern Americans have evidently been spared acquaintance by the veil of extinction. But here, nothing but mosquitoes, and they seem to persist everywhere. Oh, and alligators; don’t go near the water.’ He pointed west. ‘There are our passengers.’

Luis saw what appeared to be an old army field tent, battered, roomy, its heavy canvas held in place with ropes and pitons driven into the soggy ground. A small fire smoked near an open doorflap, and shirts and trousers and greyed underwear were laid out on the spine of the tent, drying out after a washing.

And in the shade of a kind of porch, under a spread-out mosquito net, two men were sitting. They were both black. As the three Englishmen approached, one of them whipped aside the mosquito net, stood, and faced them armed with a kind of improvised club. The other, evidently older, stayed sitting, his back against a heap of blankets.

Hackett spread his hands. ‘It’s only me, Simon. Oswald Hackett at your service. Well, who else would it be? And these two fine fellows are here to help you make your journey north, beginning tonight.’

The younger man lowered the club and smiled. ‘Mr Hackett. So good to see you again.’

Luis was surprised at the man’s accent: well spoken, even refined, at least given Luis’s limited experience of American intonation. But this man, Simon, had evidently been used brutally; one cheek bore an ugly-looking scar, badly stitched, and the opposite eye was closed by swollen flesh.

The older man, meanwhile, his hair and ragged beard streaked with grey, barely stirred.

There was a round of introductions. It turned out that Simon and the other man were grandson and grandfather respectively.

Hackett bent to speak to the old fellow, doffing his hat. ‘And you, Abel. Do you remember me? I carried you over from New Orleans.’

‘F’om tha’ cat house,’ Abel said. ‘Haw haw! Shoulda lef’ me there and the gels wudda finish’ me off.’

‘Then I came back with Simon . . . You remember?’

‘Sho I ’member, Massa Hackett.’

‘Please don’t call me massa.’

‘No, massa.’

‘Come,’ Simon said. ‘Sit in the shade with us. We have root beer and I can brew a coffee . . .’

It was a strange gathering that they made in the shade of that antiquated tent, Luis thought, three Englishmen and two runaway
slaves, drinking root beer and eating hard-tack biscuits – five men all alone in this widdershins world, he supposed, save for the cave bears and the dog-sized horses (which he wasn’t entirely sure he believed in), and any other Waltzer who might be popping back and forth for his or her own purposes.

Hackett was quick to reassure the men that the plan he had made for their escape was still in place. ‘We steam upstream as far as Memphis on the
Goddess
, and then change. At Cairo we change again and steam up the Ohio to Evansville, Louisville, Portsmouth. Then it’s overland to Pittsburgh—’

Simon smiled. ‘And across Mason and Dixon’s Line to the free states.’

‘And you’re home and dry,’ Hackett said.

‘If all goes well.’

‘Much can go wrong,’ Hackett conceded. ‘I wouldn’t hide that from you. On the steamer you’ll be huddled close to the boiler; it will be warm enough for you, and you’ll be pitched about in the dark. And you may know that the slave-catchers nowadays have a way of smoking out the holds of boats like this, to be sure there are no stowaways. We have gear for you agin that threat – oilskin hoods, and wet towels for your mouths. But to ride a steamer is still better than walking all the way to the free states through this widdershins world, which is the only alternative. And we three will be with you all the way; we can always Waltz you out of trouble, wherever we are.’

Simon said, ‘I could work in the open if you like. Pose as your servant. I can play the poor ignorant, like Grandfather. Roll my eyes and blubber for Jesus’s mercy.’

‘I’ve no doubt you can, and most convincingly. But you’re runaways, Simon. And everyone knows how the Rail Road works; they’ll be looking out for you all the way up the river. Why, given the Fugitive Slave Law the slave-catchers have the power to cross the Line itself, and the law says they’re not to be impeded in their
filthy work, even in free state territory. They even work in cities like Boston and Philadelphia, I’m told.’

‘True, is true,’ murmured the old man. ‘Tha’s why I’m a’goin’ all’a way to Canada. Queen Victoria’s Promised Land. Follow th’ drinking gourd to th’ North Star.’

Hackett nodded. ‘That’s it.’ He glanced at Luis. ‘The “drinking gourd” is the Big Dipper, which points to the pole star.’

‘I’m a’goin’ to shake the paw of th’ British Lion, yes suh.’

‘Yes, you are. But until we’re home free you just stay out of sight as much as you can.’

Luis thought Simon, meanwhile, looked as nervous at the whole prospect as he might have been himself had their roles been reversed – as he had a right to be, of course.

Burdon said, ‘Forgive me for saying this, Simon. You aren’t quite—’

‘What you expected?’ Simon grinned easily, but showed cracked teeth. ‘My background is somewhat unusual. Whether you judge that my subsequent experiences have been the worse for me because of that is up to you . . .’ He sipped his coffee. ‘As a little boy I was clever and good-looking – that’s not bragging, consider it a fair description of the merchandise. I was befriended by the younger son of the master of the house – this was a cotton plantation in the wilds of Louisiana, with a hundred or so head of slaves – when you’re children, you see, even such categories as slave and master blur into insignificance compared with the vividness of the game of the day. I was four years old.

‘Well, when Alexander – the young master – began his schooling, he was something of a restless soul, and his father, observing I was bright and a calming influence on him, brought me into the house as a companion. Even by then I was aping the masters’ speech, you see, and
they
would probably say “aping” is an appropriate term. But they dressed me up and encouraged me to speak well and mind my manners, and I became a study companion for Alexander – only
at home, of course, never at school or beyond the bounds of the house. And in the process, naturally, I learned a good deal myself. I was brighter than Alexander but not markedly so; of course I knew not to outshine him overmuch in our shared work, but to let him think he could beat me at it – as often, indeed, he could. I was a happy child, sirs, unaware of my unholy indenture. It shames me to say that I was even unperturbed when my mother and my little brothers and sisters were sold on by the master – though later I would be enraged to learn from the other slaves that it was because my mother had refused the master’s lustful designs.

‘This went on as I grew up. Past the age of twelve or so Alexander was increasingly distracted by the company of his own sort, particularly the young ladies, but I was still useful as a companion at home. And I was given work around the house – and not just serving and cleaning and so on; past sixteen I was entrusted with some routine aspects of the plantation’s accounts. It amused the master to have me wait at table for his fancier friends: a skinny slave who had the manners and the speech of an English lord, as he liked to boast, if inaccurately.’

He seemed nostalgic as he spoke of these times, though to be treated as a pet, a toy, however kindly, struck Luis as ghastly.

‘Well, all things have their time. Alexander reached the age of eighteen and was sent off to a fancy college in New York. As for me, as I grew older I had no place in the household. A slave boy of twelve with fine manners is cute, but a man of twenty seems ever on the verge of insolence.’

Hackett said, ‘And so he was turned out of the house. Just like that, after a lifetime of decent living, even if he was wholly owned. Cast down among the field hands.’