The Long Utopia (8 page)

Agnes, startled, said, ‘Too short? What could that possibly mean?’

But Shi-mi would say no more.

Now the bird had passed out of sight, evidently unaware as yet of the tampering with its nest. Silently Oliver and Nikos got to their feet, lugging the net with the egg, and started to make their way back out of the forest, gesturing for Agnes and the others to follow.

Lobsang got up. Agnes had no choice but to follow him.

I
N THE SHADOW
of a half-built liquid hydrogen plant, shielded from the intense Miami sun, Stan Berg was playing poker with a few construction workers.

In the year 2056, two years after the arrival of Lobsang and Agnes at New Springfield, Stan was sixteen years old. The purpose of this community, a much transformed Miami West 4, was to construct a space elevator, a ladder to the sky. But the construction of the Linsay beanstalk had been held up for weeks now. There was pretty much nothing to do. And so, at a table full of LETC stalk jacks twice his age or more – some ostentatiously wearing their hard hats even though they hadn’t worked for days – Stan played steadily, folding when necessary, winning consistently.

Rocky Lewis, the same age as Stan and his friend, or rival, from childhood, was standing back with a few others, watching the game for lack of anything better to do. Some of the audience leaned on home-made placards that protested about the latest lay-offs and delays.

And Rocky watched uneasily as the shards of spacecraft-hull ceramic that were being used as chips piled up in front of Stan.

The other players were starting to notice. Rocky had seen it all before. Their expressions were turning from kind of patronizing about the smart kid, to resentful at getting beat out hand after hand, to suspicious about some kind of cheating. The dealer was a young, slim guy in a tipped-back homburg hat who Rocky knew only as
Marvin – not a worker here, as far as Rocky knew he was some kind of professional gambler – and he was becoming watchful too. Rocky knew that Stan wasn’t cheating. It was just that he was so damn smart. Stan said he liked games of bluff like poker, in fact, because unlike chess, say, there was no simple, logical way to get you through to victory from a given starting point; subtler qualities of the mind were needed.

But there was nothing subtle about the expression on the face of the guy sitting next to Stan, to his right, as yet again his chips were swept away to land up in front of Stan.

As Marvin cautiously began another hand, Rocky crouched down and plucked his friend’s sleeve. ‘Hey, buddy. Maybe we should get out of here.’

‘What for?’

‘Umm, you know. School stuff.’

‘School’s out today.’

That was true, the teacher had failed to turn up again, but these other characters wouldn’t necessarily know that. Stan was supremely bright but capable of making basic mistakes in situations like this. ‘Come on.’ Rocky stood up. ‘Cash in your chips.’

But the guy to the right reacted to that by grabbing Stan’s arm with a fist like a claw hammer. ‘You’re not going anywhere, you little prick. Not with my dough in your back pocket.’

The other players froze. Rocky was relieved that there were no hands reaching under the table for concealed weapons; these were space industry workers, not movie gangsters. But one or two of the spectators on the fringe of the crowd stepped away from trouble with pops of displaced air, elusive flickers at the edge of Rocky’s vision.

Rocky said, ‘Let him go. Listen, he’s one of you. He’s an apprentice, like me. His parents work for LETC – both of them.’

‘So maybe they taught him to work the cards, huh?’

The dealer, Marvin, held up his hands. ‘Folks, please. We’re just
having a friendly game here.’ He eyed Stan. ‘
I
know he’s no cheat. He’s too smart to cheat. And he’s too smart to need to cheat. Face it, Alexei, he’s just a better player than you. It happens.’

Somehow these bland words, blandly delivered, cooled the situation, Rocky saw. Marvin seemed to have a kind of natural authority, like an adult stepping into a circle of squabbling kids; you calmed down automatically. Rocky had observed that the Arbiters, local amateur peacekeepers, could be like that too.

But still the guy, Alexei, was steaming. ‘He’s a dumb punk kid is what he is.’ He was still holding Stan’s arm, and squeezing harder.

Stan, however smart, was small, dark, slim for his age, and he wouldn’t be strong enough to break away. His teeth clenched as the grip became painful. Rocky held his breath. This could still end badly for Stan. He heard muttering about calling in an Arbiter.

But then somebody shouted out, ‘Hey! They got a kobold! Over by the oh-two plant. Come see . . .’

The crowd around the table started to break up and make for the fresh morsel of entertainment. Marvin grabbed back his cards. ‘Keep your chips, folks, you can settle up between yourselves when you’re ready.’

Rocky took the chance to drag Stan’s arm out of Alexei’s grip, and pulled his friend to his feet. ‘
Now
let’s get out of here.’

Even now Stan was grinning, though he winced as he massaged his arm. ‘Not without my winnings.’ He swept his chips into a pouch he carried under his Stepper box.

Marvin winked at him. ‘Good luck with cashing them.’

Stan shrugged. ‘There’ll be other games. See you around.’

‘Oh, you will,’ Marvin said, sounding oddly enigmatic to Rocky’s ears.

It turned out the kobold, a kind of twisted-up humanoid, had got itself trapped on the other side of the beanstalk facility, in the
concrete shell of what was to be a liquid oxygen store. Following the crowd, Rocky and Stan jogged that way.

It was just after noon now, under a bright, washed-out Florida spring sky. If you didn’t look too closely, Rocky thought, all you saw was people on a dirt plain roughly drained and cleared, surrounded pretty much by emptiness. But, rising from this desolate plain and up into the Florida sky, the spine of the beanstalk was already in place, a double thread electric blue and marked with flags, anchored to the uncompromising concrete block that was its temporary ground station: perfectly straight but at a distinct slant, rising until it was lost in the glare, heading for its orbital anchor.

Most stepwise Floridas were empty, at least in Low Earths like this, there being easier places in the footprint of the North American continent to kick-start a new colony. They weren’t even particularly close to the coast, unlike Cape Canaveral on the Datum, which Rocky had visited once to see the shrunken space facility still launching comsats and weather satellites and such into a post-Yellowstone volcano-winter sky. But the geographic logic of the location was just the same on all the worlds. Florida was the lowest-latitude terrain in the footprint of the continental United States in thousands of worlds across the Long Earth, and for conventional space operations the closer to the equator you were the better, because of the boost you got from the Earth’s spin.

And that applied, too, if you were building a ladder to space: the further south the better.

It really would be one enormous elevator system, an elevator that would lift you to orbit, and a hell of a lot cheaper to run and more reliable than the big old rocket boosters that even now were still flying out of Datum Canaveral. The whole thing had been under construction since Rocky and Stan had been eight years old, and the boys had met in the improvised schools they set up here for children of the workers, the ‘stalk jacks’.

It was all ancient history to Rocky, who, like Stan, had been born
in the very year Yellowstone blew. But he knew that this place, once a decent small town, had pretty much become a refugee camp, set up in haste in the days and weeks after the eruption, when folk had come flooding out of the Datum and overwhelmed the primitive communities of the Low Earths. Many of the refugees had been Datum urban types before the eruption and were pretty helpless out in the wilds, and they had just got stuck in the camps they had been put in. The camps, becoming permanent, had turned sour. ‘Everybody became an expert at waiting in line,’ his mother would say. So, after a few more years, along had come another government initiative, to turn such camps back into decent functioning towns – and that meant providing the people with work, such as this tremendous beanstalk construction, right here. In had come federal government officials, along with the prime contractor, the Long Earth Trading Company – LETC.

But in recent months the project had slowed down, for reasons beyond Rocky’s primitive grasp of politics and economics. There had been lay-offs and slowdowns of the work schedules. For now, despite the existence of that line up to the sky, there was no flow of people and goods to and from space, as promised: nothing down here but this drained, trampled ground, with the blocky accommodation buildings, and the half-finished shells of factories and stores for materials and fuel and machinery, and the gantries for the conventional boosters that were still needed to complete the erection of the beanstalk. Today, nobody moved here save workers come to protest, or just with nowhere else to go since the latest shutdown.

The only excitement was the crowd that had gathered before the unfinished lox plant, drawn by the prospect of some spiteful fun. Rocky and Stan were closing on the plant now, and Rocky could see a knot of people, mostly men, gathered around
something
, a shambolic figure that flickered and returned, as if slightly out of focus in the bright sunlight: the kobold, trapped and frightened.

And, distracted by the commotion, Rocky had got separated from Stan. He could lay a decent bet where his friend was going to be found: where the trouble was.

Rocky ran forward more urgently, through the heat of the day.

The kobold was surrounded by a ring of men in LETC hard hats and orange coveralls. He kept trying to step away, but each time he vanished he came stumbling straight back, sometimes clutching his face or his belly. Evidently there were more workers in the neighbouring worlds to either stepwise side, ready to beat him up or steal his stuff to force him back.

The kobold was short, squat, heavily built, with triangular teeth that showed in his grins of terror. He had powerful-looking hands, and his bare feet ended in toes with claws; he looked like some kind of mole rebuilt to a human scale – and some said that was how the kobolds had once lived out in the Long Earth, ape-folk who had retreated underground. But today he wore grubby shorts and a kind of waistcoat and even a baseball cap, a dismal parody of human garb. And he had a belt slung over one shoulder like a sash, laden with knick-knacks that glistened and shone – bits of jewellery, plastic toys, sparkly gadgets. This was how the kobolds made their living, swapping stuff like this with humans, and trading it among themselves.

The kobold was a humanoid, evidently a relative of mankind whose ancestors had split off the main line about the time some uppity chimp had figured out that banging two rocks together was a good idea. Like other humanoids such as elves and trolls, the kobolds had evolved out there in the Long Earth. Unlike most of their cousins, however, the kobolds had continued to have some contact with humanity, and that had shaped them. They fed off scraps of human culture. They were more like magpies or jackdaws than human traders, it was said: more like kids swapping cards and game tokens in a playground, than like merchants working
for profit. Yet people traded with them. And some of the kobolds, at least, were brave enough to come venturing deep into the Low Earths.

But something had gone wrong for this one. Maybe he’d said the wrong thing, made a bad trade. Maybe he’d just come up against another Alexei, Rocky thought, somebody bored by the lack of work and looking for a bit of fun, a diversion.

The mood still seemed playful enough. But Rocky saw a couple of young people, a man and a woman in the green uniform of Arbiters, move forward, evidently in anticipation of trouble.

Now one guy snatched the sash with the trade goods off the kobold’s shoulder, draped it over his own, and paraded around, drawing laughs and catcalls from his buddies.

The kobold was mortified, and tried to grab the sash back. ‘Mm-mine mine mine . . . C-cruel to poor Bob-Bob-mm . . . Mm-mine . . .’

The guy who’d robbed him faced him. ‘Muh-muh-mine, Bob-Bob-Bob? Who says so?’

‘Mm-mine . . . I tr-rrade . . . You want? Look, pretty mm-mirror, pretty jewel-ss . . .’

The guy held the sash out of the kobold’s reach. ‘Ooh, look at me, I’m Bob-Bob-Bob-Bob-Bob-Bob . . . Hey, Fred, what do you think? Maybe LETC should employ this guy.’

‘Yeah, Mario, he’s smarter than Jim Russo.’

‘You’d make a damn fine CFO, Bob-Bob-Bob . . .’

And there was Stan, right in the middle of it all, just where Rocky knew he would be.

‘Give that back.’ Stan strode up to the worker, Mario, grabbed back the sash, and handed it to the kobold, who clutched it tight to his chest. Now Stan faced Mario. ‘What are you doing here?’ Stan turned to the crowd, whose noise was subsiding into a kind of confusion. ‘What the hell are you
doing
, all of you?’

‘Rocky.’ Martha Berg was at Rocky’s shoulder. Stan’s mother was about forty, prematurely greying, careworn, wearing her own LETC
coverall. ‘I heard the commotion. I just knew it was Stan, I knew it.’

‘You should have seen the poker game.’

‘What poker game?’

‘Never mind.’

‘We have to get him out of there.’

Rocky feared she was right. But he also feared the consequences if they tried. ‘Maybe it will blow over.’

‘It doesn’t look like it,’ she said wearily.

Now Mario, who was twice Stan’s size, shoved Stan’s shoulder. ‘What’s your problem, you little snot? We wasn’t hurting him. Just a slap to keep him here. A little fun, that’s all.’

‘He’s just a damn kobold,’ somebody called from the crowd.

Stan turned that way, fiery. ‘Who said that? Just a kobold? He’s not as smart as you are, so it’s OK to pick on him, right?’

‘No kobold is as smart as a human, dipstick.’

‘Sure. So suppose somebody came along who was as categorically smarter than you, as you’re smarter than Bob-Bob here. Would you say it was right for that person to humiliate you? Would you?’ He faced Mario again. ‘Here. Use me.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m evidently not as smart as you either. Otherwise I wouldn’t have walked into the middle of this, would I? So, go ahead. You’ve the right, according to you. What do you want to do, trip me up, strip me naked? Beat me to death?’ He turned to the crowd. ‘Come on – all of you, anyone. Who’s going to be the first?’