The Long Utopia (14 page)

‘You may imagine my fate,’ Simon said, his eyes averted. ‘To those men it was as if a white man had been cast among them. I was beaten, stripped, robbed of all I had, in the first hours. I fought back, oh, I fought back, but I was alone.’

‘No,’ Abel said now, stirring. ‘Not ’lone. Had me, his gran’pappy. But his daddy dead. His mommy sol’. Other fam’ly kep’ away. I fought ’em. Tha’s my gran’chile, I told ’em. But I’s old, suh, old and broken . . .’

‘All of this I could have borne,’ Simon said now, eyes closed, his voice steely. ‘I would have grown stronger. I would have found my place. But then I learned that the master decided I was a troublemaker – rather than the victim of the trouble, you see – and he intended to sell me on.’ He opened his eyes and looked straight at Hackett. ‘And that I could not bear, sir. I have seen the auction block – the slaves stripped naked male and female, grease rubbed into the skin to make it shine, the coarse inspection by the potential owners – the language of the stockyard.’

‘You cun see why we’s run,’ Abel said.

Hackett grasped their hands, both of them; Luis thought he had tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, I see it, sirs, I see it. And we will see you safe in the free states – where your learning and character, Simon, will be a boon, not a curse. Now, Burdon, Valienté – a word on tactics.’

He led the two of them outside. Luis found himself swatting mosquitoes immediately.

‘Slavery!’ Hackett began. ‘What an institution. To own a human being from cradle to grave, to use as you wish – and then you own the children too, and the grandchildren off into perpetuity, like the offspring of some prize racehorse. I don’t know which is the crueller – a life of grinding work, such as has broken poor Abel, or to be given a bit of kindness, a bit of civilization, then to have it arbitrarily swept away, like poor Simon.’

Burdon grunted. ‘It’s a devilish business either way if you’re on the receiving end of it, and no wonder they will take such risks to escape it. Why, I’ve heard of fellows posting themselves to Philadelphia in boxes and crates! But let’s not be too pious, Parson Hackett. After all, we British brought the institution to these shores.’

‘Yes, but at least we’re trying to put it right now, man. You know that Albert himself encourages us to work closely with the Underground Rail Road, even while the government has to turn a blind eye for fear of offending our American cousins. The slave-hunters with their whips and guns actually have the law on their side, of course, and a strong buck like Simon there might be worth a thousand dollars or more. Odd thing for a prince to be involved in, you might think – a secret network of safe houses and transport routes, and communication by nods and winks. But Albert did take great delight when freed slaves promenaded around his Exhibition, causing a few purple faces among the exhibitors from the American South!’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Which isn’t to say that, while the assignment we’re taking on is a noble one, it won’t be difficult. You can see how we’re fixed. Poor old Abel will be a burden. Whereas Simon—’

‘Raised above his station,’ Burdon said. ‘He’s going to be too clever by half, all the damn way to Pittsburgh.’

Hackett glared at him, disgusted. ‘And is that how you think of him – even you? Well, thank God that in the free states there is a place even in America where a man like that can never be called “above his station”.’

Now Simon called over, politely enough. ‘Dr Hackett? My grandfather is asking for you. Wonders if Prince Albert has made any new speeches.’

‘At once, at once.’ And Hackett walked off to the tent.

Burdon growled to Luis, ‘Well, I’ll do my duty to Queen, country and my fellow man, and it pleases me to put one across those slave-catchers – though I’m getting deuced sick of Hackett. The man doesn’t have a monopoly on conscience, y’know. But putting that aside, Valienté – what are your plans after this jaunt is done?’

Luis shrugged. ‘Perhaps see more of America. First time I’ve travelled further than France.’

‘How do you fancy making a bit of money? More than a bit, actually.’

Luis frowned. ‘You’re not talking about anything illegal, are you?’

‘Of course not. Just listen. Even you must have heard of the Gold Rush. In the last few years half the population of this benighted young nation has scarpered for the hills of California, shovels in hand, drooling for gold.’

‘And most of them have earned nothing but a ruined back, and poverty.’

‘True enough. But a handful have become rich – very rich.’

Luis shrugged. ‘Good luck to them. What’s it to us? I’m no prospector.’

Burdon rolled his eyes. ‘But I am. Studied rocks at college, remember? And besides, we don’t need to be prospectors. Think about it, man. God! – why are we Waltzers always so blind to the possibilities before us? Suppose we picked one of those prospectors, one of the more successful fellows. We investigate his claim – study his reports, his maps. Even go see the shafts, the mine workings themselves, if we can get close enough. And then—’

Luis saw it in a flash. ‘We step widdershins. And there’s the same mine, the same seam—’

‘As unworked as if America had never been peopled at all, and us with the maps in our hands. Of course there are practical difficulties, the worst being we can’t carry iron-headed spades and picks across. But we can get around that. Why, we could just pick a site where we can pan it from the streams. And we’ll have it all to ourselves, with none of the risks and uncertainties of prospecting, for all
that
will have been done for us. Now – tell me what’s unethical.’

Luis had to grin. ‘Feels like cheating, somehow.’

‘I know! But it’s not! Isn’t it grand? We’ve spent four years already following Hackett around on these humanitarian chores of his. Don’t you think, for all the risks we run on stunts like this, we deserve something more for ourselves than occasional pats on the
head from old sausage-eater Albert? Not to mention the lingering suspicion that always hangs over us . . .’

Luis knew what he meant. He thought of Radcliffe, the secretive agent who was never far from Albert’s side in their presence, and at their meetings with representatives of the government. While Albert, something of a visionary dreamer, enthused about the strange powers and benevolent deeds of ‘my Knights’, as he called them, others were evidently a good deal more suspicious of a bunch of such elusive characters, with access and influence in such high places. Maybe it was all too good to last; maybe it would end in tears for them, some day, and Luis, nearly thirty years old now, should think about his own future.

‘I’ll consider it,’ he said.

Burdon slapped his own forehead. ‘Ah, man! Don’t consider,
do
.’

But Luis would not be swayed, not on the spur of the moment.

They returned to the tent, where Hackett, reading from a bit of paper, repeated in sonorous tones a speech of Albert’s on slavery: ‘“I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertion of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings, at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe, has not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion . . .”’

On old Abel this seemed to have the effect of an incantation. He grasped Simon’s wrist with one arthritic hand. ‘Simon, you listen to dem wuds. “De des’la-shun of Afric’ . . . de blackes’ stain.” Don’ you forget dem wuds, don’t evvuh.’

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
wrong with the world.

Three years after her arrival here with Lobsang, Ben and Shi-mi, that was Agnes’s definitive view of Earth West 1,217,756.

Oh, the people were fine. And it was the people who mattered in the end; Agnes had always known that, and the rest was just a backdrop.

But the world was weird.

Take the old Poulson place. In the beginning it had been Nikos Irwin, with his dog, who had spent his waking hours in that dilapidated swap house on the far side of Manning Hill. Nikos and his buddies seemed to be growing up now and losing interest, but their place was being taken by a new generation, including Ben and Nikos’s little sister Lydia. Agnes had heard the lurid ghost stories, and dismissed them, but she could sense
something
odd every time she went down there, usually in search of Ben. Strange scents, elusive in the forest air. Once, a peculiar greenish light that had come emanating from the back of the house – only a glimpse, there and gone again. In Agnes’s last incarnation, her own fatal illness had begun with a hard lump on her skin that didn’t belong. The Poulson house was the same, she thought. It was a flaw, something wrong, something unwelcome, that didn’t belong in this world. She hadn’t yet decided to ban Ben from the place – she dreaded the battle that would follow if she tried – but she was moving towards it.

Above all, Agnes discovered, she hated not to be able to tell the time, house rules or not. Since she’d arrived she’d never felt as if she was sleeping properly here. The dawn always came
too early
, no matter what time of year it was. Sometimes she sensed that others had the same feeling, Marina Irwin for instance when she came round for morning coffee: a certain tiredness, a vagueness, muddled thinking. But without a decent watch Agnes couldn’t tell if her sleep patterns actually were drifting, or by how much.

Even the animals seemed distressed. The furballs would emerge from their burrows and their holes in the trees at the wrong time. Sometimes the big birds would charge around the forest almost randomly, screeching like eagles.

She had considered asking Lobsang for access to her internal timers, or the clocks in the gondola. She kept putting it off; she felt as if that would be the beginning of the end, the fracturing of the dream.

Lobsang meanwhile wouldn’t comment on any of this. Instead ‘George’ just kept his head down. He worked on his farm despite the vagaries of the weather, strengthened the stockade around their plot, fixed the roof of the house they were extending one room at a time, pulled weeds from his flower beds and cultivated his kitchen garden, and tended his animals and crops. He was sociable enough. He joined in the hunts. And, comically, he was trying to learn the fiddle so he could play at barn dances, filling the evening air on Manning Hill with a sound like an arthritic warthog.

Agnes supposed that in a way his behaviour represented a victory for her. He had revived her in the first place in order to provide a balance to his own tendencies towards omniscience and omnipotence. But now, and maybe it was typical of Lobsang and his obsessiveness to go to extremes, he’d abandoned his old self entirely and had devoted himself completely to this new life as ‘George’, rooted in the soil of a remote Earth.

And he resolutely refused to think about anomalies in the world.
Even the occasional flashes they saw on the face of the moon didn’t distract him from his concentration on pioneering mundanity.

Well, that wasn’t enough for Agnes, not any more. She decided to do something about it.

Shi-mi came to see her as she struggled with her gadgetry in the yard, in the lee of the house, away from the prevailing wind on this bright spring day. She’d taken a plastic funnel from her kitchen store, hung it from a bracket, filled it with fine sand from the bank of the creek, and allowed the sand to run out into a bucket. Now she was sitting on the ground and measuring her own pulse as the sand ran down.

If this world wouldn’t allow clocks to work, she’d decided, she would damn well build her own. Never mind electronics, or even clockwork which was almost as much of a mystery to her. She’d gone back to basics.

The cat walked up somewhat stiffly, lay down beside her and inspected the rig. ‘If I may ask, Agnes – what on Earth are you doing?’

‘Can’t you tell? I’m making an hourglass. And I’m missing Joshua.
He’d
put together something for me in a couple of hours, in a polished wooden case, probably . . .’

The cat licked her paws. ‘There are a number of ways to tell the time. By a simple sundial for instance. Though that would take some weeks, at least, to calibrate.’

‘I intend to do that too. But I want some other way, independent of the sun. I want to measure the length of the day. Shi-mi, I know this sounds dumb.’

‘I travelled months on twains run by US Navy grunts. Believe me, nothing you say about mechanical matters will sound dumb to me. And I do know why you need to do this. We spoke of it before—’

‘I think there’s something wrong with time here,’ Agnes blurted.
‘The days are
too short
– or maybe too long. I don’t know. All I
do
know is I’m having trouble sleeping, and always have had. And as all our watches and clocks are either back home in Madison West 5 or out of bounds—’

‘My internal clocks are not accessible to me either.’

‘—and I don’t want to ask Lobsang because I think it would upset him if I started breaking the rules around here, I need to make some other kind of measurement. I figure that if I can measure an hour accurately, say, then I’ll stay awake for a day and a night, from dawn to dawn, and just count the hours, count how often I have to empty the bucket. It’s crude but better than nothing.’

‘Noon to noon would be better. Easier to mark accurately. A sundial would help you with that. And it may be more precise to have smaller buckets, measuring half- or quarter-hours . . . Or you could use both, to cross-check the measurements. But how can you be sure your hourglass measures a true hour in the first place?’

‘That’s my problem, all right.’ She showed the cat her wrist, her thumb pressed on a vein. ‘My resting pulse has always been pretty steady, fifty beats a minute.’

‘A strong heart.’

‘Yes. I assume Lobsang will have replicated that when he, umm, remade me.’

‘That is a very uncertain baseline.’

Agnes found it hard not to be sarcastic to a talking cat. ‘I suppose you have a better way?’

‘Yes. Build a pendulum.’

‘A what?’

‘A simple pendulum. A thread suspended from a beam, supporting a weight. The length of the thread determines the period of the swing. A length of thirty-nine inches will give you a period of two seconds, almost exactly. That’s if the pull of gravity here is the same as on the Datum, and when we arrived we measured that, among other parameters . . . A longer length would give you a longer
period, more accuracy. You could use a reliable reference like that to build from. Make sand cups to measure a minute, combine them to get five minutes, thirty—’

Impulsively Agnes leaned over, cupped Shi-mi’s face, and kissed the top of her head. ‘Cat, you’re a genius.’

But Shi-mi shrank back from her touch.

Agnes immediately forgot about her high school science experiments. Shi-mi had never reacted like that before, not ever. ‘Shi-mi? What is it?’ She picked the cat up, though Shi-mi wriggled in faint protest, and inspected her body, felt her limbs – and probed her belly, where she found hard masses. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I am old, Agnes,’ the cat said, lying in her arms. ‘Or so I have been programmed to become. My body swarms with nanotech agents, ageing me day by day. And because I am old I am ill. I suffer from a meticulously simulated arthritis, and various of my organs have problems. A remarkable feat of artifice.’

‘Does it hurt?’

The cat said nothing.

‘Well, would you like something to be done?’ After only three years here, Agnes had not yet thought hard about her own future, the years when it would start to become odd if she did not show signs of age. She did know Lobsang had brought a suite of systems to allow them to adjust their appearance – but she also knew there were other options. ‘You don’t have to go through this. We could rebuild you. Fake your death. We could even call a twain and pretend it brought us another, younger cat.’

‘No. I am myself,’ Shi-mi said firmly. ‘I have long memories. I was made by the Black Corporation as a mere technology demonstrator. But I sailed with Joshua and Lobsang on their first journey together, to the High Meggers and beyond. I travelled with Captain Maggie Kauffman to the ends of the Long Earth. In these last years I have been Ben’s cat, nothing more, nothing less. I am not willing to discard all that.’

‘You wouldn’t have to. You’d still be yourself inside.’

The cat looked up at her, her peculiar LED-green eyes somewhat dimmed. ‘I could not become some rowdy kitten and still be me. In any event there is no crisis, not yet, no decisions need be made. And I—’

But now Ben came running into the yard, and the conversation was ended.

Six years old, clothes scuffed, knees grubby, face a mud pack, hair a mess, Ben was a bundle of energy. He carried a basket of grapes. ‘Agnes! Agnes! Look!’ He held out his basket, and Agnes saw something gleam on his right arm, a kind of silver bracelet.

She put down the cat, carefully. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Grapes!’

‘I can see that. On your arm.’

Hastily he hid the arm behind his back. ‘Nothin’. Can I take the grapes in? Can I have some?’

‘Come here, young man.’ She held out her hand, palm up. ‘Right hand please.’

Agnes’s authoritative voice had been honed over two partial lifetimes dealing with children of all shapes, sizes and inner conditions, and Ben was nowhere near the most difficult she’d had to deal with. And now, clutching his grapes awkwardly, he walked up to Agnes and obediently stuck out his arm.

The bracelet was a little too big for him, and she slipped it off his wrist and over his hand easily. It was a simple loop of metal, evidently silver, evidently well made, and it was
heavy
; it had to be valuable. Price tags in dollars and cents didn’t mean much here, but such items as this, usually brought out as heirlooms or tokens of weddings and whatnot, were prized.

Shi-mi murmured to her – too softly for the boy to hear; they still hadn’t told Ben that Shi-mi was artificial. ‘I’ve seen other children wearing such things. Rings, bangles.’

‘I suppose I have too,’ Agnes whispered back. ‘I thought nothing of it.’ She held out the bracelet. ‘What do you make of it?’

Shi-mi licked it. ‘High-grade silver,’ she said. ‘Very pure. Very finely manufactured, to very precise tolerances. This is machine-made; it didn’t come out of some home workshop.’

‘There’s nothing like that here. The nearest to home-made jewellery we have are the reed brooches Bella Sarbrook makes in the fall.’

‘Also no hallmark. So it doesn’t appear to be of Datum or Low Earth origin either.’

‘Then where—’

‘Who ya talkin’ to?’

‘Nobody, honey. Just myself. Now, where did you get this, Ben? You’re not in trouble. Just tell me. Was it the old Poulson place?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Have you been down there again?’

‘Uh huh,’ he said reluctantly.

‘In that cellar again no doubt. No wonder you’re filthy. So who gave you this bracelet?’

‘No one.’

‘Then where did you get it?’

‘Swap stuff.’

And Agnes’s heart broke, just a little, for this was the first time she was aware of that Ben had deliberately lied to her. ‘No, Ben. It wasn’t in with the swap stuff. The swap stuff in that house is leaky saucepans and broken brooms and clothes people have grown out of. That’s what the swap stuff is. Nobody puts lovely things like this in the swap stuff. So who gave it to you? Was it one of the other kids? Was it Nikos?’ Her head spun briefly with ideas of theft, or some kind of cache left behind by the Poulsons, people she’d never met . . .

‘Beetle man.’

The answer, totally unexpected, stunned her. ‘What did you say?’

‘Beetle man. He gave it. Nikos said it wasn’t wrong.’

‘Beetle man. What’s the beetle man like?’

Ben grinned. ‘Funny.’

She studied him, thinking hard. ‘OK, Ben. Look, it’s getting late. You run on in and wash your face now.’ When he’d gone, she said to Shi-mi, ‘When Lobsang comes in, he and I will be having a long chat. And tomorrow I’m going to the Poulson place myself. Without Ben, with Nikos. And with Lobsang, if I have to drag him by his prosthetic nose.’ She tucked the bracelet into a pocket. Then she looked down, forcing a smile, and stroked Shi-mi’s back. ‘Now, shall we see how far we can get with this pendulum business? How long a string did you say – thirty-nine inches?’