The Long Utopia (28 page)

T
HE SHORT DAY
ended quickly.

When the dark came, Joshua skipped the cocktails and tried to nap. But everything felt wrong, out of step.

Before the dawn, still in the dark, he returned to the observation lounge. A group had gathered before the window, George and Lobsang, Agnes, and the two Next, Marvin and Stella Welch. Or perhaps they’d just stayed here.

Stella smiled at Joshua. ‘Restless, your friend Sally, isn’t she?’

‘You got that right. Always been the same. But then she grew up stepping.’

‘Yes. With a remarkable native ability.’

Joshua looked at Stella curiously. Somehow he hadn’t expected the Next to be interested in any of the individual people around them – the non-Next, the ‘dim-bulbs’, as Paul Spencer Wagoner and his buddies had always called them. Next always seemed far more interested in each other. Yet here these two were.

As if reflecting that thought, George said now, ‘It’s good of you to have come here. It was my idea to summon you.’

Joshua had been surprised about that, considering how Lobsang seemed to feel about the Next’s supposed abandonment of him. Maybe he wanted to use this situation to make some kind of contact. But his argument had been strong, as he’d explained it to Joshua. ‘What if these silver beetles do find a way to spread across the Long Earth? The Next, as inhabitants of the Long Earth, are just
as vulnerable to the consequences as the rest of us . . .’ Of course the Next had come.

But Joshua was curious. ‘How
did
you summon them, umm, George?’

‘I just spread the word. I posted news on Low Earth sites. Sent messages to locations associated with the Next – for example the naval base on Hawaii where several of the Next children were held for studying. Nelson helped with that. Oh, and I also used the prison facility where the ringleader of the rogue group who hijacked the airship
Armstrong
is still being held – David?’ He turned to Marvin and Stella. ‘I suspected I only had to raise awareness of this issue and you would notice. For, although you claim to have withdrawn to your enclave hidden somewhere in the Long Earth – and I myself was responsible for sealing off Happy Landings to help cover that trail – I never had any doubt that you would keep watch over the human worlds. How could you not?’

Stella said, ‘Of course it is in our interests too to resolve this situation safely. But, as far as I know, this issue of the silver beetles is the first time any human agency has actively asked us to intervene, to help.’

The older Lobsang grinned, and Joshua saw that his control of his facial expressions had improved drastically in the time since he and Sally had brought this unit home. He said, ‘Of course it is ironic that your first call from humans should be from an individual whose own humanity has always been in question. Whose nature has, in fact, been tested in law.’

Stella nodded. ‘I agree, that is fascinating. Your extraordinary story, Lobsang, George – your claims of reincarnation—’

George said, ‘In the end the legal verdict contained some wisdom. If an entity is
capable
of pleading for the right to exist, then it surely
has
that right. Humans may be a lot dumber than you – why, they’re a lot dumber than
me
—’

‘But they are capable of wisdom,’ Stella said. ‘Oh, yes, we know. Many of the Next owe their lives to that very fact.’

Lobsang glanced at George. ‘You must not think that we two are identical. My
brother
and I. Our experiences are quite different. With First Person Singular I have contemplated the very large, the infinite. Whereas you—’

George sighed. ‘At New Springfield I have explored the viewpoint of a single individual. A human. It’s what I wanted, what I designed myself to be. But I knew that this crisis with the beetles required a superhuman perspective. It demanded the old Lobsang. And so I called for you, fortuitously a survivor of earlier iterations.’

‘It was wise,’ Lobsang said.

Stella said, ‘We have similar philosophical divergences among our thinkers in the Grange. Some – like me – consider the grand scheme, the bigger picture. The destiny of life in the universe. Whereas others focus on the small, the infinitesimal. We have a man who has named himself Celandine—’

Marvin clapped George on the back. ‘There you go. You think the way we do. I heard you saying you were distressed when the Next cleared out of the human worlds without bringing you along. But perhaps you have some of the Next in you after all.’

And George smiled at this praise, almost shyly.

‘Oh, I can’t stand this,’ Agnes muttered, and she stalked away.

George, talking to the Next, didn’t even seem to notice she’d gone.

Joshua hurried after her.

‘Agnes? You OK?’

‘Oh, what do you think, Joshua? Look at him lapping up the praise from those creepy brain-boxes. This is what Lobsang
is
, in the end. Or what he always wanted. The machine that would be God. If he can’t rule in heaven alone, then at least he can be part of the pantheon – so he thinks. And he’s forgotten all about being human, which is what he
said
he wanted.’

‘But that’s why he brought
you
back—’

‘Bah. Oh, forget about me, Joshua. What about Ben? He’s the one who counts –
he’s
the one who will be hurt if he loses his father.’ She faced him. ‘You’re the first to know. We’re splitting up. Me and George. When this latest crisis is over.’

That dismayed him, and he let it show. ‘That’s truly sad, Agnes. I mean, it’s not George’s fault he ended up sitting on top of the biggest current crisis in the Long Earth.’ No, he reflected, if it was anybody’s fault it was Sally Linsay’s, who’d led Lobsang here. In her subtle, offhand, indirect way, maybe Sally was turning out to be central to this whole situation . . . He tried to focus on Agnes. ‘Where will you go? Back to Madison?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ll find a new place to settle, a home to build, and I’ll live my life as mother to Ben. Which is all I want now.’

‘You say I’m the first to know about this. Does George know, yet?’

‘Since I only just decided – no, not yet. Give me a chance to tell him myself.’

Joshua said, ‘I know you, Agnes. I know damn well there’s no point suggesting you think it over. Because you won’t change your mind, will you?’

‘Never found the need to before. Don’t intend to start now.’ She stood for one moment more, as if reluctant to leave Joshua’s side. Then she smiled sadly at him, and walked out of the gallery.

J
OSHUA DIDN
’
T MANAGE
to sleep any more during the remains of the brief ‘night’. He washed, shaved, forced down some breakfast. He felt oddly groggy when he arrived back at the observation gallery, in the sudden dawn.

The two Next were already here, along with the Irwins, and Agnes standing uncomfortably between Lobsang and George. Margarita Jha came to join them. Only Sally was missing, which was typical of her. Maybe she had found a way off the ship after all.

And Joshua wondered too if Agnes had broken her news to George yet. Maybe not. Clearly George was in his element here, side by side with the Next facing a major crisis; Agnes was probably kind enough to let him have his moment.

Looking down, he saw that the airship had made its appointment. The landscape below was familiar from his own visit here with Lobsang. There was the profile of Long Island, there the churning Atlantic – and there was the tremendous viaduct constructed by the beetles, just as before, striding across the land and out to sea.

Ken Bowring joined them, wearing dark glasses. ‘Quite a sight, isn’t it, Mr Valienté? George Abrahams told us about the trip you made here, showed us the records. Has much changed?’

‘If you saw our records you’ll know. Last time around, Long Island still had some forest. Now . . .’

Now the island was bare rock. Joshua imagined tremendous waves battering at coastal provinces like this, stripping them of
vegetation cover, every living thing, even the topsoil ripped off. The viaduct itself was just as it had been before. But there was something new, a circular feature directly under the viaduct, dug into the rocky ground – like a crater, perhaps. Its floor glistened, like glass.

Bowring was staring down grimly.

Joshua said, ‘You OK?’

Bowring grinned, a forced expression. ‘One too many cocktails with the Captain last night – hell, it was only a few hours ago, the damn nights aren’t long enough to sleep off a hangover. But this—’ He waved a hand at the scene below.

He didn’t need to say it: overwhelming. ‘I know,’ Joshua said. ‘But what’s that scar? The circular feature.’

‘That’s what I want to know,’ said Marina Irwin.

Ken Bowring said, ‘Marina, you asked yesterday if we’ve been doing anything about this situation. Well, we have tried. Scientifically, we’ve tried to understand the beetles, to communicate with them.’

‘In search of a weapon to use against them,’ Joshua guessed.

Bowring said bluntly, ‘Shoot a gun at one of the damn things and the round just bounces off its hide. Or it absorbs the slug and becomes that bit stronger.’

Jha said, ‘I know it sounds brutal, but I think our commanders hoped we’d find some kind of bioweapon. We’ve come up with nothing so far. And besides, these are cyborgs, a fusion of life and machine; even if we attacked the biology we’re not sure if that would actually stop them.’

George said, ‘And the scar below?’

Jha said, ‘When we failed to make a dent in the bugs themselves, we tried attacking their works. These viaducts. We tried a whole series of demolition tactics—’

‘Cut to the chase,’ Oliver Irwin said. ‘You used a nuke, didn’t you?’

Jha nodded. ‘A tactical weapon. Only a few multiples of the
Hiroshima bomb, in energy. Well, we cut the viaduct! Right where you see the scar. We had a party
that
night.’

‘But,’ Bowring said, ‘within forty-eight hours the damn beetles had built the thing back again. As you can see. The bugs at ground zero must have been destroyed. But for the survivors the fall-out – the radiation – doesn’t seem to affect them. And as far as we can tell the incident made no difference to the spin-up process.’ He glared down at the viaduct. ‘You have to remember that these structures girdle the planet. We have a lot of nukes – including many that have been converted to steppable materials.’ He grimaced. ‘Just in case we ever needed to fight a Long Earth nuclear war. Maybe with some kind of concerted effort we could disrupt them, slow them down. But at what cost? This Earth turned into a nuclear wasteland, on top of its other problems? And we couldn’t eliminate all the beetles anyhow.’

Marina looked horrified. ‘We can’t stop them, then.’

Jha said evenly, ‘Not on this world, no. They’ve simply ignored everything we’ve tried to do to them, just as they ignored every contact we attempted.’

Marina said, ‘So are we just going to give up?’

Now Stella Welch, the Next woman, shared a brief exchange of quicktalk with Marvin, and stepped forward. ‘It’s time for us to be open with you. You have called on us for help, and you were wise to do so. Yes, Marina, we have to give up this world. We can’t destroy the beetles. But we
must
protect the rest of the Long Earth from these creatures. The threat of their spreading is great.’

‘All this talk,’ Marina said, anxious, angry. ‘What are we going to
do
?’

Welch faced her. ‘We think we have a way.
We must seal off this world.
Make it impossible to step into, or out of. We have been studying the phenomenon of the Long Earth. Stepping itself. We believe it may be possible to do this. There will be costs – for us, as well as for you, whose home this was.’

Marvin frowned at her. ‘Costs for us? We haven’t discussed this.
You’re thinking of Stan Berg
, aren’t you?’

Marina asked, ‘Who?’

Stella ignored her. ‘Yes, Marvin, it may be necessary to use him.
He may be the strongest of all of us
. As demonstrated by the facility in exploiting soft places that he seemed to develop simply by observing us. If he can be brought here—’

‘You want me to arrange for him to be collected?’

‘I think that would be wise.’

Joshua had no idea who this Stan Berg was, but he already felt sorry for him. ‘What “costs”? Of what kind?’

Stella looked at him gravely. ‘The world must be closed, you see—’

‘From the inside,’ Marvin said.

Ken Bowring gaped, and took off his sunglasses. ‘This is the first I’ve heard of this. From the inside? The inside of what?’

Stella and Marvin exchanged a look. ‘It is difficult to explain without the mathematics,’ Stella said.

Joshua said, ‘I think they’re saying that whoever does this, whoever saves the Long Earth, will be laying down their life.’

There was a shocked silence.

Then George stepped forward. ‘We asked you here to help us, and now we must trust you. And we will. What can we do to assist you?’

Stella glanced at Joshua. ‘First of all – could you please persuade Sally Linsay to talk to us?’

A
S IT TURNED
out, as Rocky eventually came to figure it, by the time the Next came to ‘collect’ him, Stan had started to whip up so much trouble at Miami West 4 that there were all kinds of people who would have been glad to see the back of him regardless.

On the very day the Next came for him, in fact, Stan was preaching. Then again, most days he was preaching now, since coming back from the Grange with a head full of new ideas.

In the heavy afternoon sunlight of a late spring day, in this footprint of Miami – at the foot of the space elevator, an eggshell-blue thread that connected Earth to sky – Stan sat on the roof of a low concrete bunker and looked out over his fellow stalk jacks, a hundred or so of them gathered before him. And the crowd was in turn being surveyed by uniformed state cops, company security guys, and presumably by other agencies undercover. Ready for the trouble which seemed to be attracted to Stan.

And Stan Berg said, ‘
Apprehend. Be humble in the face of the universe. Do good.
Eleven words. Three rules. There endeth the sermon for the day, unless you want to hear a few lame gags . . .’ Laughter.

Even Rocky, at the back of the group, could hear him clearly. Aged just nineteen, Stan had developed a way of projecting his voice.

Rocky stood here with three women. Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who had escorted them to the Grange. Melinda Bennett, the young Arbiter, who had revealed herself to
Rocky as a Next on his return, living quietly among ‘ordinary’ people, just as quietly intervening to help keep the peace – or, if you listened to Stan, to anaesthetize mankind into passivity. And Martha, Stan’s mother, listening to her son preaching, who quite clearly did not want to be here, and yet just as clearly could not bear to be anywhere else.

This was a meal break before the evening shift, and Stan had attracted a good crowd. Stan himself looked totally at ease as he took a bite of his sandwich, and a sip of alcohol-free beer. He said now, ‘You know, I never did like numbers much.’

That raised a chuckle from his fellow workers, who knew Stan was one of the brightest in the pool and had forever been turning down training chances in favour of staying with these people, the stalk jacks, his friends – friends who were increasingly his followers.

‘Oh, I was
good
at the numbers. Wouldn’t deny that. I could count to three before I was, well, three.’ He pulled a face. ‘Which confused me. But round about then I figured that I mostly didn’t need the numbers that go much
beyond
three. There was only one of me, two of my parents, together we made three.’ He looked down at his lunch. ‘I got three sandwiches here, three beers. I guess I’ll be needing the john three times during the shift.’ He looked around with a grin. ‘And I’ve been figuring, if I was to ask somebody smart, I mean
really
smart, what life was all about – how I was to live it – I think I’d measure that smartness, not by how many words he or she spouted, not by how many books he or she had written—’

He picked up a book now from his pile of stuff. Rocky recognized a battered old copy of Spinoza’s
Ethics
. Stan threw it out into the crowd, and people jumped to grab it.

‘No,’ Stan said, ‘I’d think they were smarter the more they boiled down their wisdom. The closer they got to the number three – to three simple rules of thumb, if you like. Who needs more than three? Such as.’ He held up his left thumb. ‘Rule of the First
Thumb.
Apprehend.
Which is a nice word if you roll it around your mouth.
Apprehend
.

‘It doesn’t just mean “understand”, although it includes that meaning, fully. It means you should face the truth of the world – not let yourself be fooled by how you’d like it to be. You should try to be fully aware of the richness of reality, of the mixed-up complexity of all the processes going right back to the birth of the stars that have produced you and the world you live in, and this very moment . . .

‘And you need to apprehend other people too, as best you can.’ He gazed out at upturned faces. ‘Even those close to you.
Especially
those close to you. “You cannot love what you do not know.” That’s from an old religious teacher, some saint or other. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’

‘I grok you!’ somebody called, to general laughter.

Stan grinned back. ‘
That’s
catchier. And here’s another way of saying this.
Be here now.
Which is the title of an Oasis album.’

One of the senior engineers, an elderly British guy, raised a solitary whoop in response. ‘Gone but not forgotten, Stan!’

‘
Be here now.
If you have a god, then consider that every moment you’re alive and aware in this glorious world is a moment of awareness of that god – and to live in that moment is the only way you
can
be aware of your god . . .’

Melinda murmured, ‘Now he almost sounds like Celandine.’

Martha said fiercely, ‘But there’s also some Spinoza in there, I think. For all you brainiacs dismiss the work of mere humans. Also the rationalist atheists who said our ethics must be drawn from human experience . . . I’ve tried to study this stuff. So I could find ways to talk to my son. Did you see who caught the book, by the way?’

Rocky had. ‘Mo Morris.’ One of the innermost group Stan called his ‘buddies’, and some of the jealous outsiders referred to as ‘superfans’ – if not by some more pejorative term – and who Martha called the ‘misfits’. Mostly young, mostly male, they were odd,
needy characters, at least in Martha’s view, for whom Stan’s sudden charisma, revealed when he got back from the Grange, filled a hole in their lives they’d barely even known existed. Now here they were, lapping up every word, recording Stan on their phones and tablets, or just slavishly writing down every word he uttered, every lame joke. Certainly none of them had hung around with Stan
before
his secret journey. They were a growing flock from which Rocky, his oldest friend, the only one around him now aside from his mother who’d really known him
before
, was increasingly excluded.

And yet Rocky couldn’t walk away, any more than Martha could. For Rocky feared for Stan’s safety.

Stan was still talking. ‘And you know what I’d expect this smart person to say to me next?’ He stuck up the thumb on his right hand now. ‘The Rule of the Second Thumb.
Be humble in the face of the universe
. Of course if they were that humble they wouldn’t be laying down the law in the first place.
Be humble.
You got to be aware of your limits, right?’ He glanced up at the space elevator. ‘We all have meaningful jobs on this thing. But you do what you can do. Unless you can solve fourth-order differential equations you ain’t going to be much help in the design office, are you?’

‘I bet you could solve them, Stan,’ called up one of the buddies.

Stan shrugged. ‘Not beyond third-order. I told you I can only count up to three.’

Laughter.

‘
Be humble.
Some of you are paramedics, first responders. The first thing they teach any medic is
do no harm.
Isn’t that right? Help if you can, but at least don’t make things worse in your ignorance. But to accept that limit you need to
know
your ignorance. Here we are building this mighty monument. We know what it’s designed to do, we’ve all seen the projections and the business models: the fruits of the sky brought down to this Earth. But none of us
knows
what effects it’s going to have, not in the short, medium or long term. We live in a reality that’s not just complicated, it’s chaotic. Unstable.
So,
be humble in the face of the universe
. Know the limits of what you can achieve, what you can know. And in a chaotic universe, at least don’t snafu stuff even more than it already is snafued . . .’ He raised an arm and mimed flicking his middle finger at the cable. ‘You know, I have this fantasy that if I touch this big guitar string just right I could set up this huge oscillation . . . That’s one small pluck for a man, one giant twang for mankind—’ Hastily he stuck his hand in his pocket. ‘Best not take the chance!’

More laughter.

Roberta tapped Melinda’s arm. ‘That’s getting a response from the agitators.’

This was Melinda’s and Roberta’s term for a wider circle of ‘friends’ of Stan’s. Mostly older than the misfits, many of them blue-collar workers, men and women, they were union leaders, organizers, campaigners – some of them even disaffected middle management. From their circle had come the leaders of the most damaging down-tools strike the beanstalk project on this world had seen so far. They seemed to want to use Stan and his gatherings as a focus for discontent with LETC, the other contractors and the government.

Melinda murmured, ‘All Stan’s talk of hubris, of overreach. That’s been a common thread in their own talk. It’s a theme they can use to challenge the position of their corporate and political masters.’

Roberta nodded. ‘Stan may also have been unwise to speak of bringing the beanstalk down. Even to raise such an idea, however playfully, will ring alarm bells with the security agencies.’

Martha glared at the agitators, who were smiling and nodding at each other as Stan spoke. ‘Look at them. Such
hard
people. Troublemakers with their own agenda. I know that. And the cops know it from the way they keep an eye on them.’ She sighed. ‘If only Stan knew it too. He’s so innocent, for all his brains.’

Rocky knew there were real tensions here in Miami West 4, and had been long before Stan had begun his self-appointed mission. The beanstalk project was falling well behind schedule, and was
eating its investors’ money. The problem had always been keeping hold of the workers. This was after all the Long Earth, and even Florida West 4 was pretty empty and wild and exotic. In the heads of the young elevator workers, old dreams were forever being subverted by the new. All of which forced the management to try to tie down their workers with restrictive contracts, or to reward them handsomely to keep them on side – which, of course, gave leverage to those who sought more.

Meanwhile the Next, as represented by Roberta and Melinda, had their own concerns about Stan and his message, and as he spoke on Rocky heard Melinda and Roberta exchange short bursts of quicktalk.

‘But you see,’ Stan said now, ‘I would want to ask this hypothetical person advising me to be a bit more active.
Apprehend
.
Be humble in the face of the universe.
Well, I could sit on my butt and manage that.’ He glanced around, as if in surprise to find himself still on his concrete plinth. ‘In fact I
am
sitting on my butt, but that’s by the bye. I think they’d sum up the rest something like this, with the Rule of the Third Thumb.’ He looked down at his own two thumbs. ‘Now, you see, I haven’t really thought this through. Because I ain’t
got
a third thumb.’ He looked down at his crotch, innocently. ‘Of course I could improvise.’

One of the buddies called, ‘Not with your mom standing in front of you, you won’t!’

Rocky saw Martha’s glare at that. She hated to be referred to by any of this bunch of inadequates, as she called them.

‘OK,’ Stan said, with a grin. ‘Take the third thumb as read. What’s important is the rule, which is:
Do good.
’ He looked down at his mother now. ‘That sounds a little bland, right? Kind of Mom-and-Pop instructions for when you’re about seven years old. But the question is,
how
should you do good? After all the right path isn’t always clear – everybody knows that, you face dilemmas about that every day.

‘Well, if you’re faced with some situation, some dilemma, remember the other rules of thumb.
Apprehend.
Try to understand the problem, the people involved, as much as you can.
Be humble in the face of the universe
. Make sure you don’t screw things up further, at least.

‘But you can do more. Do the good that’s in front of you. If somebody’s hurting, or about to be hurt, try to save them. Figure out who’s vulnerable, in any situation. Who’s got no power, no choice? It’s a good bet that you won’t go wrong if you help
them.
Even so, there may be situations where that’s not clear. So there’s a much older rule I came across, which some call – or versions of it – the Golden Rule: do as you would be done by. Would you want
this
done to you? Would you want to be
saved
from this situation? If so, do it. If you’re not sure, don’t.’ He shrugged. ‘You’re not going to get it right every time. It’s
impossible
to get it right every time. We live in a chaotic universe, remember? Be humble. But I figure it’s worth
trying
to get it more right than wrong . . .’

People started asking questions now.

Melinda sighed, listening absently. ‘Hear that? Some of them call him “Master”. Others are writing it all down. I think we just heard the Sermon Under the Beanstalk, delivered by a messiah called Stan.’

Martha almost snarled, ‘He’s just a kid.’

Roberta said gently, ‘With respect, Mrs Berg, I don’t think that’s fair. His message is simple but contains great depth – a depth which I am sure will be revealed by contemplation and exegesis in the months and years to come.
Apprehend
: one could take that as a mandate to achieve full awareness, indeed full self-awareness. To master the passions, for example – not to eliminate them, but to ensure they don’t control you.
Be humble in the face of the universe
: hidden in there may be a mandate for our management of the world, of all the worlds. We should embrace diversity, for example, for we can never know the consequences of our interventions in a maximally complex system like a biosphere.’ She glanced at Martha.
‘You’ve said you are not religious. You did not raise Stan in that tradition. His sermon sounded free of religion, humanist, perhaps even atheist. Yet buried deep in its implications there was even a guide as to how to approach God – any god, or gods.
Consider that every moment you’re alive and aware in this glorious world is a moment of awareness of that god – and to live in that moment is the only way you
can
be aware of your god . . .
That’s the basis of a creed that even the Next could embrace. And all of it packed into just eleven words, delivered by a man just nineteen years old.’ With liquid-bright eyes she looked around, at the crowd, the young man on the plinth. ‘This is not a trivial moment. This is the birth of a movement. Potentially a religion. A new force in the affairs of humanity.’