The Long Utopia

by Terry Pratchett

  He looked inside himself. ‘After all we’ve been through together, I don’t know what I feel.’

  ‘Then stop picking the scab,’ she said sternly.

  ‘It seems like yesterday when we first met.’

  ‘When I found you.’

  ‘In our flying penis, as you called our airship. In the High Meggers. You and your pet dinosaurs basking in the sun.’

  ‘Ancient history.’

  ‘We had lunch. Fresh-caught oysters on an open fire, on that distant beach.’

  ‘I guess I’m heading for another kind of beach now, Joshua.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘Still alive, as far as I know. Made a fortune out of his patents on the beanstalk tech we brought back from Mars.’

  Joshua frowned. ‘I meant, why isn’t he here? Does he know? About this, about you? Did you try to contact him?’

  She shrugged. ‘He’ll know all about it. He always did know everything. If he wanted to be here, he would be.’

  ‘But did you try—’

  ‘Leave it, Joshua. My business. As for you, remember me to Helen. That little mouse.’

  ‘She was always wary of you, you know.’

  ‘Of course she was. To her, I was a symbol of the side of you she could never reach, and she knew it. She was good for you, Joshua. But we make our own choices.’

  ‘I guess that’s true. But I take it that right now you have no choice—’

  ‘Not with this. I never did have. Not from the first moment I heard about the problems on this world.’

  ‘And you brought Lobsang here. What did you hear? How?’

  But Sally, who had always been immersed in her own networks of information spanning the Long Earth, had never answered questions like that, and didn’t now.

  ‘Anyhow, because of that, I’m going to lose you,’ he said gently.

  She grinned. ‘Don’t go soft on me now, Valienté.’

  ‘Sally—’

  ‘Be seeing you.’

  And she disappeared, vanishing stepwise, as precociously and abruptly as she had always done, from their very first meeting on the beach with the oysters and the dinosaurs.

  52

  IN THE RUINS of New Springfield, when the Cowley and its passengers had stepped away at last, the three left behind stood alone.

  Sally took a deep breath. ‘It’s amazing how different a world feels when you’re alone in it. Refreshing.’

  Lobsang – the replicant formerly known as George Abrahams – grunted. ‘You’re turning into Joshua.’

  ‘I’ll take that as an insult.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s a relief,’ said Stan Berg. ‘That it’s done, at last. The goodbyes. Now we can get on with the job.’ His voice was flat, his face expressionless.

  Sally exchanged a glance with Lobsang. Suddenly this man, this boy – this super-intellect of the Next, this prophet, this mother’s son – seemed very young indeed. Young and scared. And he had a right to be, Sally thought. Yet, despite his youth, he had taken on this responsibility, and faced the tears of his mother, because he had seen the danger, presumably, more clearly than any of them. That was the curse of Next intelligence: you had no comforting delusions.

  She said, ‘Come on. Let’s get done what we stayed here to do. Where shall we go? I guess we could be anywhere, on this broken planet.’

  Stan looked around. ‘Top of the hill?’

  Lobsang smiled. ‘Where my home is, or was, what’s left of it. Suits me, so long as we don’t get blown off.’

  The climb up Manning Hill wasn’t steep, but difficult in a wind that hit them harder the more exposed they were. At the summit, Sally could see the foundations of the Abrahams house, the pits they had dug for sewage and storage, the lines of postholes outlining abandoned fields. But little was left of the farmstead but scattered debris, wind-smashed, the labour of years erased.

  Looking down from here, Sally could still see the basic layout of the landscape Lobsang and Agnes had lived in, the forest, the creek that had drawn the settlers to this place. But now the creek was brown, turbid with washed-down mud, and the forest was dying back, scarred by fires, battered by the wind, wrecked by the touchdown of twisters. Hundred-year-old trunks lay scattered like spilled matchsticks.

  And already the sun was setting behind the racing clouds, another of this world’s truncated days coming to an end.

  She grabbed her companions’ hands firmly. The three of them stood close together, holding hands in a ring, face to face on this desolate hill, resisting the gusty wind. They had to shout to make themselves heard.

  Lobsang said, ‘When shall we three meet again?’

  Sally grinned. ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’

  ‘When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won . . .’ Stan blinked a squall of rain out of his eyes. ‘Don’t look at me like that. We had good schools in Miami West 4. It wasn’t all stalk jack engineering.’

  ‘Well, the quote’s apt given the weather,’ Lobsang said. ‘And it is a battle. A battle we already lost. But maybe we can win the war, the war for the Long Earth, with this single strike.’ He looked in their faces. ‘Just so we’re all on the same song sheet: the projections of the spin-up have been uncertain for a while. In the last few days the rate of energy increase has gone super-exponential. Hard to model, to predict. We told our families we might have weeks left. But that was for their comfort, yes?’

  Stan nodded. ‘I know. What’s the latest guess?’

  ‘Not weeks. Hours. A couple of local days, if we’re lucky.’

  ‘It makes no difference,’ Stan said, with an authority that belied his years. ‘But we need to get the Cauterizing done before we run out of time.’

  Sally squeezed his hand harder. ‘So how do we do it, Lobsang?’

  ‘Stella Welch and I have gone through it . . . Let’s be clear where we are. This world has become, presumably by some higher-dimensional accident, a point of intersection of our Long Earth, our chain of worlds, with another chain. Another Long world. A chain to which the world we call the Planetarium belongs.’

  Stan said, ‘Like two necklaces crossing. Tangling up.’

  ‘That’s it. Visualize that. It’s important that you visualize . . . Step along one axis, East or West, and you follow the track of the Long Earth. Step another way, North or South, and you follow the Long Planetarium, as the beetles seem to have done. So the connectivity of the Long Earth is unusual here. Broken. What we want to do now is change that connectivity, make it the way we want it. Visualize it. Imagine what you’re going to do, Stan . . .’

  Stan closed his eyes. ‘You could pinch the necklace of worlds, the Long Earth. Knot the thread so one pearl is cut out of the chain, the pearl that’s tangled up with the Planetarium necklace. Detach this world from the Long Earth necklace completely . . .’

  ‘Yes. Think about that. A simple repair job. Picture it. You too, Sally. Stepping has always been a mental faculty. Even the act of creating a Stepper box is a kind of mandala, a kind of autohypnosis, a way to unlock a potential in us that already exists. To step is a feat of the imagination – one must be able to visualize another world, in a sense, in sufficient detail, to reach it. A very fine description – so fine that the description becomes the object, just as quantum physics is essentially about information—’

  ‘Lobsang,’ Sally warned. ‘Less of the techno-babble.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I apologize. But you must see that to talk this through is an essential part of the process. For you, Sally, it is like reaching for a soft place. A different kind of flaw in our own Long Earth’s connectivity, where the loop of worlds crosses over itself. I’ve seen you search for such places. You look inwards as much as outwards. You position your body . . .’

  Sally tried to imagine that, tried to imagine reaching for a soft place now. Sometimes you could see them, see a shimmer in low sunlight, often at liminal places, places of borders – between water and land, perhaps, a shore, a r
iver bank; at dawn or sunset, the border between day and night. And now, on this world, she had reached her own ultimate border, between reality and unreality, existence and non-existence. Life and death.

  ‘We are reaching for a soft place,’ Lobsang said, steadily, hypnotically, as if reciting a prayer. ‘Or perhaps we are creating one . . . A permanent soft place, a tunnel, a bypass, that will cut out this world permanently, welding together the worlds to East and West, to either side. It is almost as if we are persuading everybody who comes after us that this flawed world is not here any more, that there is nothing between the worlds to West and East.’ He closed his eyes. ‘We are changing the linkage of the Long Earth, in this one place, for ever . . .’

  Falling.

  Sally staggered. Suddenly she felt very cold, colder even than the wind’s chill, as if she had fallen through a soft place, the longest fall she’d ever known.

  And Stan cried out. He released their hands and toppled back, stiff as a cut-down tree, landing on his back in the grass. He began to twitch, convulse, and spittle flecked his open mouth. Lobsang hurried to his side.

  As Lobsang tended to Stan, battered by the wind, Sally tried experimentally to step out of here. She couldn’t. It was as if she were confined between two walls to either side that she could not see, walls of glass. For her, a natural stepper, it was a strange, unnatural feeling.

  ‘We did it, Lobsang,’ she said, wondering. ‘The Cauterizing.’

  ‘He did it, mostly. With your help.’

  ‘What does it mean, Lobsang? For the future. If Stan here is typical, and not some kind of super-powered freak. If the Next can take apart and reconstruct the Long Earth itself – what will they do with such powers?’

  ‘That’s no longer our concern,’ he said sternly. ‘Give me a hand here.’ He’d got Stan turned over on his side, in the recovery position, but the boy was still fitting. ‘I have a med kit in my pack. Then we’re going to need to get into shelter . . .’

  She hurried down the hill, in search of the med kit.

  53

  IN THE LEE of the hill, in a sturdily constructed lean-to – a last gift of the crew of the Cowley – the three of them spent an uneasy four-hour ‘night’.

  They ate, wrapped in survival blankets. None of them slept. The air felt increasingly warm, smoky, ash-laden, like the air of the Datum just after Yellowstone, Sally thought. And the noise was continuous now, the rush of the wind, a rolling thunder, like the sound of distant artillery.

  Stan recovered quickly from his fit, especially once Lobsang/George had administered a bowl of Agnes’s chicken soup. He chose not to describe what had gone on in his head at the moment of the Cauterizing, and the others didn’t press him. Another issue, Sally thought, for a future none of them was going to see.

  The morning came with a dawn as abrupt as a thrown switch.

  That and a savage earth tremor, a drop that felt like they were on some vast elevator that had just slipped its cable a couple of feet, Sally thought.

  The Cowley crew had left a small science station. Lobsang consulted this as they drank coffee from a flask.

  ‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘“Today” will be less than six hours long, day and night. The rotational energy of this Earth has roughly doubled in the last twelve hours. You have to hand it to those beetles. It took them a long time to build this vast machine, this interplanetary motor. But now that it’s up and running, energy and momentum are just pouring down from the sky. And here’s what it’s doing.’ He opened a tablet which showed a mosaic of global images, taken from space. ‘These are coming from the small satellites the Cowley crew put into orbit, before they left . . .’

  Sally looked closer to see. Under its new latitudinal bands of cloud, the face of this Earth in outline was much as it had always been, the school-atlas shapes of the continents, the blue-grey of the oceans. But a network of jagged red lines spread over the interior of the continents, and glowed under the oceans, although thick banks of steam obscured much of the view over the water. ‘It’s like a bowl full of lava, that somebody dropped on the floor and cracked.’

  ‘That’s not a bad analogy,’ Lobsang said. His finger traced the glowing flaws scribbled across the face of North America. ‘The planet’s crust is just a fine shell around a ball of liquid rock and metal. Now that shell is breaking open. You can see the boundaries between geological provinces, faults opening up – cracks between the tectonic plates.’ He pointed to a livid blemish in the west. ‘That is the local Yellowstone; it went up at last. But soon even the continental plates themselves will start to crumble. They must. The planet’s deformation has become so severe that at the equator the mantle itself is rising to the surface now.’ He rubbed his face. ‘We may not see it all. All the crap that’s pouring into the air – why, the volcanic debris alone may block radio signals from the satellites.’

  Sally said, ‘Listen, we should eat while we’ve got the chance – and not just Agnes’s soup.’ She rummaged through their supplies, bequeathed by the Cowley.

  Stan was staring at the images. ‘They’re going to finish this. They really are going to take this Earth apart altogether, aren’t they? It seems such a waste.’

  ‘The beetles wouldn’t say that,’ Lobsang said. ‘They believe they’re improving the neighbourhood.’

  Sally laid out food packets. ‘Well, we have beef, chicken, bread, salad stuff. I wonder if they packed any mustard?’

  Stan said, ‘But why would the beetles do this? What’s the point? I thought the theory was these beetles are colonizers.’

  ‘That’s how it looked from the world we called the Planetarium,’ Lobsang said. ‘Which they appeared to be terraforming, to their requirements. But we also saw evidence of conflict, in the sky of the star cluster. A war in heaven. Evidently their colonizing wave is being opposed. But here, by coming stepwise to this Earth, the beetles suddenly found themselves in an empty world – empty of their competitors at any rate – and under an open, empty sky. In such a situation the optimal strategy, for aggressive colonizers, must be—’

  ‘Like a dandelion,’ Sally said, seeing it suddenly. ‘Or a puffball fungus. To colonize all the empty space, as widely as possible, as fast as possible, before anybody else gets a chance. And that means sending seeds off in all directions, as many as you can.’

  ‘Ah.’ Stan closed his eyes. ‘I understand. They take apart the whole Earth. They capture the dispersed mass, turn it into—’

  ‘Copies of themselves, probably,’ Lobsang said. ‘The numbers are staggering. If they turned this whole world into a horde of beetles, each of which weighs as much as an adult human, say, then there could be as many as ten billion trillion of them, scattering in all directions. Far more beetles than there are stars in the Galaxy.’

  Stan said, ‘And each one, in principle, capable of landing on a virgin world, and replicating away until it’s achieved the same damn thing again.’

  ‘All of which is why we needed to ensure the beetles didn’t spread into the Long Earth stepwise, that we contained them here. Otherwise—’

  Sally smiled. ‘Otherwise, in a few years, the worlds of the Long Earth would be going up like a string of firecrackers, one by one.’ She mimed explosions with her fingers. ‘Poom! Poom! Poom! . . . And from each contaminated world the beetles will spread out to infect an entire Galaxy.’

  Stan shook his head. ‘You know, I told my followers that above all they should do no harm. This world was inhabited, with a freight of life of its own, unique, irreplaceable. What kind of being would do this?’

  ‘Creatures like humans,’ Sally said bluntly. ‘That’s all. I don’t imagine you ever saw much of the Datum – of the mess we made of that, in the end.’

  ‘Humans also built cathedrals,’ Stan said softly.

  Lobsang said, ‘Even with the beetles it might not be as black and white as that. There may have been a more innocent motive at the beginning, a drive for peaceful colonization. Perhaps these beetles are descended fr
om units which – mutated. Went rogue. Maybe a programmed drive to be efficient, not to be wasteful of the resources they accessed, morphed into a commandment to use up all the resources in reach. Well, the places they transform will be tidy, but it will be the tidiness of death, of sterility. After all they don’t seem to be intrinsically evil; they even seem to have played with the children of New Springfield. It’s just that they got out of control.’

  ‘Garbage,’ Sally said. ‘You’re overthinking it, Lobsang. The beetles are just like us, and that’s that.’ She held out a plastic plate heaped with sandwiches. ‘Chicken or beef?’

  Lobsang tentatively took a chicken. ‘There’s one option I need to inform you about,’ he said. ‘Before I have to use it.’

  Sally, suspicious, glared at him. ‘Even now, you’ve got a stunt to pull, Lobsang?’

  He pointed to the sky. ‘I could upload myself to one of the Cowley’s satellites. Transfer my seat of consciousness from this ambulant unit into space. Where it might survive even the final destruction of the planet—’

  ‘Do it,’ Stan said.

  ‘It would mean abandoning the two of you.’

  ‘To a last few minutes of fire and brimstone?’ Sally said. ‘So what? I agree, Lobsang. Keep observing for as long as you can. That’s why we came here.’

  ‘And if you ever get the chance,’ Stan said, ‘tell somebody.’

  Lobsang nodded. ‘I’ll make it so.’

  Stan said, ‘But if you’re leaving early, Lobsang—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I have that last chicken sandwich?’

  54

  IN 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.