The Long Utopia (31 page)

I
N THE NEXT
brief night Sally actually managed to sleep a little, her thin survival blanket over her body, her head on her backpack.

She was woken by her own coughing. Smoke in the air, tickling her throat. She opened her eyes. Lying on her side, under her blanket, she was facing out of the little camp, and looking at the trunk of a long-dead tree, wrapped in an equally dead strangler fig.

But there was movement inside the fig, in its shadows, dimly visible in the dawn light. A small face poked out of the lattice of wood, a long snout, big eyes. It seemed to study her, as if she might be a threat, or an opportunity. Then the creature scuttled out into the open. It wasn’t much bigger than a mouse, with smooth brown fur, but with big, powerful back legs, like a miniature kangaroo. It sniffed, looked around – froze – and then leapt into the air, clopping its jaws closed around some insect, and landed and scuttled back into the shadows.

Lobsang touched her shoulder. ‘One last dawn. One last chance for the furballs to hunt.’

Still lying under her blanket she said, ‘All coming to an end today, then.’

‘I’m afraid so—’

The ground lurched, and Sally, lying there, felt herself being
lifted up
. As if she was a child in a stepwise footprint of Wyoming, and her father had scooped her up in his arms. The rise went on for seconds, pinning her to the ground. Then, just as suddenly, it
stopped, she gasped, and the land
fell
, surely through several feet. She landed hard on her back.

‘Up you get.’ Lobsang stood over her, hand outstretched.

Feeling very elderly, Sally accepted the help. But then she pushed her feet into her boots, grabbed her pack, her multi-pocketed jacket and her hat, and was ready for action once more.

Stan was already on his feet, grinning. ‘The end credits.’

‘I think so,’ Lobsang said.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any point asking what’s for breakfast?’

Sally smiled. ‘It’s your show, Stan. Where do you want to be?’

He pointed upwards. ‘Top of Manning Hill again. We may as well get the best view we can.’

‘Good,’ said Lobsang. ‘I’ll lead the way, I know the trail. But watch out for fissures. And if there’s another tremor like that big one, throw yourself flat . . .’

The view from the top of the hill was obscured by drifting smoke. Overhead, clouds streamed like a speeded-up movie effect. From up here Sally could see that the remaining buildings of New Springfield were shattered now, heaps of splintered timber, and along the line of Soulsby Creek a deep fissure had opened, revealing the glow of lava. The spilled water hissed and boiled.

Lobsang said, ‘Look at that.
Our
place was destroyed early, by the winds at the top of this hill. Now the rest of the town has gone.’

‘Shaken to pieces,’ Sally said. ‘I’m sorry, Lobsang – George.’

He shrugged.

‘Fire,’ said Stan. He pointed. ‘There, there, there . . .’

Whole swathes of the continent-spanning forest must be alight now. Sally saw how the fire was spreading, the trunks of mature trees going up with whooshes, like splinters of kindling. In one place she thought she saw movement, heavy animals on the move. Those big birds the colonists had spoken of, presumably. They’d survived this much, then.

She pointed this out to Lobsang. ‘But there’s nowhere for them to flee.’

‘No. The fire’s spreading. Joining up. When it surrounds this hilltop we’ll be trapped—’

‘I suspect that will be academic, Lobsang.’

There was a tremendous groan from deep within the hillside, as if the rock itself was stressed beyond endurance. Again the ground lurched, dropping this time, and Sally stumbled, almost fell. Even when the drop was over the ground continued to shudder.

‘Down,’ Stan shouted. ‘Let’s sit down. That way at least we can’t be thrown over.’

They hurried to comply, sitting in their tight witches’ circle, on the shaking ground, holding hands firmly. Sally watched the clouds washing past the sun. She was convinced she could see the sun itself shift across the sky, visibly, so fast was the world’s rotation now.

‘One hour,’ Lobsang called.

‘What?’

‘When the day is reduced to a single hour. That’s when the rocks at the equator will be moving so fast they’ll effectively be in orbit, and the air will start leaking away – the final break-up will begin.’

‘But we won’t get to see that,’ Sally said. She squeezed Stan’s hand. ‘Not long now.’

‘Good,’ he said fiercely.

‘You have no regrets?’

‘I’m dying young,’ he said, his face screwed up against the dust-laden wind. ‘I didn’t get the chance to say all I needed to say. I hope that my words will do no harm, in the future. I needed more time.’ He shook his head. ‘But I also needed to be
here
. . .’

Lobsang was staring. ‘
Chak pa!
’

Sally looked over his shoulder. She saw that as the tremors worsened, swathes of landscape at the bottom of the hill were breaking up, almost liquefying, and the surviving forest was
sinking
, square-mile chunks of it vanishing from sight in clouds of dust, as if it was
falling through wet cardboard. The noise was all around them now, the howling wind, the roar of the fires, the rush of huge masses on the move. She remembered the little furball living in the fig, and she hoped it had had time to enjoy its last meal, had got back to its young before the end.

Stan looked at Sally. He had to shout to make himself heard. ‘What did Lobsang say?’

She grinned, remembering a voyage through the Gap, long ago. ‘Tibetan swearing, I think. Is that right, Lobsang? Lobsang?’

Lobsang was sitting stock still, as if hypnotized.

Sally grabbed his chin, pulled his head to face her. His eyes, an old man’s rheumy eyes nested in wrinkles, were blank, vague, as if he had succumbed at last to Long Earth Syndrome. ‘Go,’ she yelled. ‘Go! Before you lose yourself. Now!’ She slapped his face as hard as she could.

‘Ow!’ He raised his hand to his cheek. Then he grinned at her. ‘Good luck, Sally Linsay. It’s been a privilege.’

His eyes rolled back, and he tumbled stiffly over, a puppet with its strings cut.

And the ground dropped from beneath her.

Not by a few feet this time. It dropped out of reach,
gone
. For a heartbeat she still had hold of Stan’s hand. But he was torn from her grip, and they were whirled apart.

Then she was falling in mid-air, in the smoke and the ash, as if she were a moth over a campfire. The ground below was gone altogether. Her world was three-dimensional now, with only fire under her, and gushes of steam and white-hot sprays of what must be liquid rock, and around her trees and chunks of cooler rock falling as she was, and above her clouds that boiled. She was tiny, a mote in this immensity. But she had her hat jammed on her head, her pack on her back. And she saw, in the last instant, a human figure: Stan, it must be, flying as she was, and he was waving his arms and legs,
starfishing in the air.

She thought back on her life, all that had happened to her, all she had seen, all she had done. She was Sally Linsay, pioneer of the Long Earth
and
the Long Mars, and she’d never planned to die in her bed. What a way to finish. Falling in the hot air, she yelled in exultation—

Flame licked. The moth was consumed.

O
N ANOTHER WORLD
, under a different sky – in another universe, whose distance from the Datum, the Earth of mankind, was nevertheless counted in the mundanity of human steps – Joshua Valienté lay beside his own fire.

And he gasped, suddenly feeling hollow, as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

W
HEN
L
OBSANG HAD
first met Joshua, he had downloaded a node of his consciousness into a soft drinks machine. It had been a playful gesture, a practical joke. Why not pull such stunts, if you could? But Lobsang had been young then. Comparatively.

The experience of having his mind housed in this small automated spacecraft was not unlike being stuck inside that vending machine.

The satellite, launched from the long-gone
Brian Cowley
, was no larger than a basketball, with very limited manoeuvring and self-repair capabilities. Lobsang felt tiny, diminished, crippled. But the craft was studded with sensors, its hull glistened with lenses, and small, wispy antennas were fixed to struts extended from its flanks.

And through these lenses and sensors, Lobsang was able to witness the death throes of a world.

This probe had been in synchronous orbit, more than twenty thousand miles high, and from out here Lobsang could see it all: a whole hemisphere at a glance, the planet like a dish held at arm’s length. The blanket of air was stained by smoke and steam. Immense auroral displays cupped the world at north and south poles, and Lobsang speculated about a tremendous distortion of the planetary magnetic field as it collapsed. Storms swirled, giant weather systems white and purple and sparking with lightning, lashing the turbulent oceans and pouring on to the land. Still Lobsang could make out the forms of the continents, just – he saw the Americas, North
and South, sweep across the face of the globe as the world turned through its final, desperately accelerated rotations. But increasingly there was little difference between land and sea, for rivers of molten rock ran brightly along the spreading fractures of the ocean floors, and filled the tremendous crevices that were opening up on the continents. Briefly Lobsang was reminded of spacecraft views of Io, innermost moon of Jupiter, a world tormented into unending volcanism by its primary’s mighty tides.

But Earth was evolving quickly, and even that comparison was soon lost. With startling speed the continents
dissolved
, as if fifty-mile-thick granite was no more than a mere skim being burned away by the red-white heat of the interior. Now Lobsang saw raft-like fragments of landscapes rotate, tip up, even grind against each other in collisions that threw up immense mountain ranges that could survive only minutes. Surely, already, nothing could be left alive down there: nothing left of Stan and Sally.

And still the spin-up continued. He could see the growing obliquity of the world as a whole now; the planet seemed to soften, its surface stretching, accommodating. It seemed to him that a new transient geography was forming on the exposed mantle, with rivers of hotter material erupting from the interior and running across the marginally cooler surface, rivers that washed away the last scraps of solid crust. There was even a kind of weather as vast clouds of plasma broke through the surface and spread glowing tendrils across the planet’s face.

Now a new phase began. What looked like a kind of tornado opened up on the equator, directly below Lobsang’s position, a swirling mass with a darker centre – a centre that exploded with stupendous force, spraying fragments out into the dissipating atmosphere. It was a volcano, a massive outlet of mantle energies, on whose flanks even Yellowstone would have been no more than a glowing speck. Looking to the planet’s horizon Lobsang saw more such giant features in profile, blisters visibly rising about the
world’s distorted curve, all around the equator. And from this angle Lobsang could see huge bolides thrown out, masses of glowing rock rising above the horizon, for a few moments still falling back to the sea of molten silicate below. But then came one tremendous eruption, and a spray of bolides escaped from the world altogether and sailed off into space, spinning and cooling. Significant chunks of the Earth, already being lost to space.

Now he saw evidence of the beetles, for the first time. What looked like tremendous filmy butterflies, with wings of net that must be hundreds of kilometres across, came sailing down from higher orbit to drift through the gathering ring of cooling rock fragments around the equator, scooping them up. A cynical harvest was beginning.

The world’s shape seemed to deform visibly now. The poles must be sinking at hundreds of miles per hour, the equator distorting at a similar rate, and the big volcanoes became mouths that vomited material continuously into space. The surface was featureless, almost, save for the equatorial volcanic wounds. The world was a drop of liquid, with an almost abstract beauty, Lobsang thought.

Then there was a kind of pause, as if the planet was drawing breath.

And the surface seemed to lift off, all at once, like a tremendous global eruption. Vast amounts of material, a spray of shining rock and clouds of plasma, lifted high into space, some of it flowing in great currents in the sky, perhaps shaped by the remnant magnetic field. Lobsang saw a brighter, inner light – the light of the core itself, perhaps, a mass of compressed liquid iron the size of the moon – shining through the disrupted outer layers, casting straight-line shadows hundreds of miles long.

The net-ships of the beetles fed eagerly.

And as the mass of the Earth dispersed, its gravity field gently began to loose its hold on Lobsang’s vessel, a tiny, unnoticed cork bobbing on the surface of a turbulent cosmic sea, drifting away.

With the wreckage of Earth receding, Lobsang turned his mind to the future. His own future.

He took an inventory of his ship’s systems. This was a hardy little craft; as long as it didn’t get swept up by the beetles itself, it would survive the death of the world. As well as a robust inner power supply it had solar-cell wings to be unfolded, and an ion rocket for manoeuvring: a rocket that would deliver a small but persistent push that could, in time, take him anywhere.

And, he discovered, the craft had a limited but functional self-repair capability. Even a small matter printer. This was no silver beetle, but the probe could manufacture spare parts to maintain itself, even manipulate its environment. He could last indefinitely, as long as he could reach a source of raw materials. He could even build himself a new body.

Where to go, though, to find those raw materials? Off on a comet, perhaps? Or further out into the dark, where ice worlds swarmed far beyond the planets? And if he
could
get out there, he would not be helpless; there was no end of things he could do. But there was plenty of time for that.

Plenty of time, too, to reflect on what he had seen. All he had left behind.

He felt a sharp stab of loss, as if Ben’s face had materialized before him. But the choice was made, and it had been the right one. He had his memories, of Selena Jones, of Joshua – of Agnes, of Ben, of their home. And he had plenty of time to deal with a cosmos full of the silver beetles who had destroyed everything he cared about.

He fired the small rocket. The tiny ship slowly drifted away from the ruin of the Earth, away from the feeding frenzy of the beetles, towards the cool spaces beyond. He had plans to make, places to go.

And he smiled.

Just like before, Agnes. Soon, once again, I’ll be in with the Oort cloud.